However, economists said it was largely driven by an unprecedented surge in imports, as consumers and companies braced for the president to impose his controversial wave of tariffs.
That's the worst part: a significant chunk of the economic activity in the first quarter came from companies getting ready for tariffs. So now they are totally overstocked for a country bracing for the reduction of consumer spending that usually comes with a drop in consumer sentiment.
Purdue Pharma and the entire Sackler family. I've witnessed so many horrible things done by Oxycontin-addicted people; knowing that history, I want to puke my guts out.
I wholeheartedly support David Hogg's movement to primary away status quo Democrats. I have seen Chuck Schumer's "negotiating skills" with the continuing resolution, I have seen Newsom's equivocation on trans rights, I have seen Biden's handling of Gaza. Believe me, I understand how useless it is to have one party be radically authoritarian and the other wants to play nice and get along.
What I am saying is that I think it makes more sense to get rid of the status quo party now than in 2024.
You sound like one of those people who stopped caring about the child cages soon as biden was the one doing it.
That's interesting, because unlike so, so many of the people that took on the mantle of the righteous cause of the Palestinians, I've been talking about it since last century. The Palestinians have been mistreated since at least the 80s, and in an ongoing fashion for now 40 years.
Did I hear anyone on the American left complain about it until 2023? Not really. It was really lonely in that camp. It somehow feels that if it hadn't been for TikTok taking up the cause, this would have been another one of those times when Palestine is forgotten.
I am delighted that Palestine has gotten more attention, and I am very hopeful that somehow the situation can be stabilized and improved for a people that has suffered way too much. But not preventing Trump from taking power was honestly a very bad thing to happen for Palestine.
Absolutely! I had the same impression with the Gaza protests. The Biden/Harris administration handled the situation absolutely horribly, but anyone who had watched #45 knew that things were going to get a whole universe worse for Gaza if Trump got reelected. And yet, there was that strange bombardment with "I can't vote for Harris because of Gaza" that seemed astroturfed.
I think of this as an opportunity. The administration seems to be incredibly incompetent in addition to corrupt. The resulting economic calamity will probably taint everything they advanced with the stink of failure - from anti-trans policies to willy-nilly suspension of constitutional rights and declarations of phony emergencies.
It's never good to have enemies, but it's almost tolerable when they are incompetent.
The Overton window is anchored by a series of landmarks. The most effective way to lose one of them, like the Constitution, is to start discussing whether it has merit.
Right now, the country is in the sad state that the absolute minimum, adherence to a Constitution to which government official swear an oath of allegiance, is in question. You gain absolutely nothing, right now, by questioning the Constitution. You wait until the constitutional order is re-established and actors that routinely violate it are punished, and when the Overton window moves back ... it's not really to the left, it's more towards democracy itself, then you discuss the flaws of the Constitution.
Yes, it sounds bad. But there is a bright side, too! The week has 168 hours, which means if you work four full time jobs, you can make $60k a year and you still get eight hours of sleep! /s
She was released to obtain documentation about the allegedly expunged convictions and presented them to Ice officials at San Francisco airport on 21 April, after which she was again detained and sent to the facility at Tacoma, said Holladay.
She brought documentation about the expunged convictions to ICE, so presumably she had some kind of evidence they had been expunged. I am pretty sure she wouldn't have been arrested under the Biden administration, or any other American administration before that. She posed no flight risk, and a judge would have had to review the evidence before an arrest would have been made.
You know, Due Process and all. It still existed six months ago, and the Constitution was still considered binding by a lot of people in government. Very many people. Some say, the best people.
Absolutely. It's as if they had declared that life in America was much better in the 50s, and the lesson they learned was that it wasn't possibly because of the economic policies of the post-war era, but because of the bigotry and racism and xenophobia.
Of course he would. It would be a massive shift of taxation towards the middle class and especially the lower classes, and on top of that, he personally gets to decide who gets to pay and who doesn't; how much and when, and especially why or why not.
Technically it's only regular pentagons that don't tile the plane.
I know everything about planes because I am shorter than my brothers. When we were young, they called me Tattoo and if I pointed at something with my finger, they screamed in unison, "Da plane! Da plane!"
“They do not put this same effort behind, say, school shooters or people who shoot up concerts.”
I think the real question here is: how many lives were saved by insurance companies temporarily being scared into not ludicrously rejecting valid claims?
If it's more than one, then Mangione played the trolley problem in real life and decided an outcome.
I think that's exactly what David Hogg is doing with his primary challenges to moderate Democrats in safe blue seats. It makes no sense for one party to be moderately left when the other party is hard right, regardless of how toxic the political environment is going to be. If you only really have two parties, they have to both occupy the center (pre-1970) or both be somewhat ideological.
It's funny how the magic trick actually works: you force companies to affix information to a product, the consumer reads and reacts to the information, and the company has to create products that satisfy the informed demand.
Looking at you, Apple and Samsung, removing features from your products simply to force your customers into an ever more closed ecosystem.
That's the worst part: a significant chunk of the economic activity in the first quarter came from companies getting ready for tariffs. So now they are totally overstocked for a country bracing for the reduction of consumer spending that usually comes with a drop in consumer sentiment.