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on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25I think the premise that someone like Cass is working with is that Trump and Musk *aren't* on-board. This isn't a Trump/Musk explainer. Folks like Rubio have flirted with these non-orthodox ideas (they go broader than simple tariffs) but as Cass says, Politicians are lagging indicators -- they rarely lead the way. Cass mentions a few other folks on the economic side with whom I believe he has a direct line. So yeah, that's what makes some of the Stewart interview 'funny' to watch, Cass doesn't have a mission to trash Trump... so he just let's Stewart's jokes roll over him... and he's pretty clear that he thinks Trump/Musk are not competently executing whatever plan it is they think they are executing (that's the point of the article). But his audience isn't Trump/Musk/McConnel or any of the Old Republicans or MAGA cultists... he explicitly says the targets are 40-under. Post-Trump is pretty explicit in his by-line...
on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Musk seems to have flipped from Grey to Red (though who knows how long that will last). Cass is an old-schooly kind of guy and seems to be the type of Team Red that no longer has a home under the new Stupid Party Paradigm. A man out of time but 100% comfortable in the party of McCain and Romney. Team Rust?
on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Eh maybe...? I mean admittedly I am not the closest Musk follower but my take on him is that his two big political priorities, construed most charitably, are about institutional and/or economic efficiency and a pseudo libertarian set of social values. These things are both in direct conflict with at least 2 of Cass' 3 big ideas, those being balancing trade with friendlies and coordinated anti-Chinese protectionism across the democratic world. If you really wanted to give Cass a kind of push you'd say congratulations, you've re-invented the US led liberal world order, just with our allies paying their own freight on defense and being a little less touchy feely on certain questions of values. Maybe also a little more nakedly self interested in our approach to global capitalism. But that's also not really what Trump is doing, by haphazardly threatening tariffs against friend and foe alike and calling into question our ability to lead the kind of alliance Cass says we should. It also doesn't seem to be what motivates Musk.
on A Grudging Concession About Something Trump DidThe Good: 1) Tariffs on China. 2) What he's done with Israel. 3) Dismantling DEI and understanding it's like opposing someone's religion. The Neutral (or with holding judgement): 1) I'm not going to put paper straw in there because it's a nothing burger. 2) I'm also not going to include cozying up to Russia as a bad thing because it looks like that's going to blow up. 3) I'm also going to withhold judgement on damage to rule of law because that's yet to come to a head... but lots of potential on this one. The Bad: 1) Various tariffs for the sake of tariffs. 2) Mistreating our various allies (this would be a long list btw) 3) Hiring anti-vac people to head up Health. 4) General lawlessness and basically being at war with the judicial system. 5) Hiring people who are incompetent and firing the competent people below them who are needed to carry out policy. 6) General chaos and unwillingness to use governmental tools in appropriate ways. Rather than Musk's group we should have a copy of what Gore did as VP. 7) Getting rid of large amounts of gov competency without any effort to do a cost/value eval on it first (note I would have included bureaucracy reform as a good thing last time) 8) Apparently taking Russian info war stuff as legit information. 9) Going serious Tax-Cut and Spend. 10) General lack of stability. I think he's suffering from some age related dementia. Some of this is chaos of administration transfer, having very new people in their jobs, and a negative relationsh…
on Trump’s Most Insidious Scheme (So Far)That's a law enforcement agency arresting, for months or years, people who not only have not committed a crime, but no crime actually existed at all. They just _mysteriously_ looked at the person and decided they were here illegally. You don't think that's meaningful?on A Grudging Concession About Something Trump DidWhat are some good policies?
on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25The movie Brazil is not really that amusing in real life.
on A Grudging Concession About Something Trump DidReally? That's it? I'm far from his number one fan, but if you can't off the top of your head name several legitimately good policies he's put into place---among many very bad ones!---then you might have drunk too deeply of the neurotoxic waters of Portland.
- on A Grudging Concession About Something Trump DidFurther, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy is directed to prepare a national strategy to discourage the use of paper straws in non-governmental settings as well. It's weird, I thought we were on some sort of extreme cost-cutting major to reduce the size of the government, but we're building some sort of policy office to try to convince people what sort of straws they should purchase for themselves or for a business to provide to customers? And odd a Republican Administration is doing this, isn't this exactly the sort of thing conservatives don't like? Yes, I know, it's utterly pointless to point out the hypocrisy, but I feel at least someone needs to at least write it down for the record, so here my completely pro forma comment about it.
- on Trump’s Most Insidious Scheme (So Far)These reports, as well as others that include accounts of ICE arresting and detaining US citizens, also make me think that ICE is challenging ATF’s reputation as one of the most lawless and unaccountable federal law enforcement agencies. LOL. Tell me you're a conservative without telling me you're a conservative. ICE has always been completely lawless, in every possible way, since it was created. It just generally restricted itself to being lawless against brown people. Now, it feels free to move on to other people too. It also used to have to turn people over to the courts, and it doesn't have to do that anymore. But all this has been ICE, for the two decades it has existed. This is how it always has been, it didn't suddenly get worse.
- on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Oh, just be clear: This is indeed extradition in a legal sense. When we talk about extradition in the country, we usually think of the _specific_ legal process that is commonly used. But extradition, under international law, is any prisoner handoff between governments that is done via some sort of transfer agreement, whether or not that includes a court proceeding at either end.
- on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Wait, they're arguing that the prisoners in El Salvador are no longer under US control? That they are not merely holding our prisoners, but we transfer authority to them ? I assumed their defense was the exact opposite, that El Salvador was basically operating as a private prison. I feel that has very serious legal implications that they have not thought through at all. Specifically, the United Nations Convention Against Torture: Article 3 1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture. 2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights. *ahem* https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/el-salvador/ Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic and sexual violence, and femicide;…
on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Well I suppose making everyone hate us in one way to encourage world peace
on Martin Niemöller, and Who First They Came ForAnd yet Trump seems to be speaking for you quite regularly.- on Trump’s Most Insidious Scheme (So Far)Is now a good time to say we warned you?
- on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Better then nothing at this point.
- on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Idiots.
on Trump’s Most Insidious Scheme (So Far)Due process is not a cookie you have to earn through your innocence or your charisma. It is a restraint upon the exercise of government and it is the core reason the United States of America exists. If you don't believe me take a read through the Declaration of Independence and see how many of the grievances against King George III had to do with the procedural administration of justice. Due process includes the right to have a competent lawyer, of your own choosing if you've the means to choose one. Scaring lawyers out of being willing to accept cases by the free agreement between attorneyand client, deterring lawyers from accepting the cause of unpopular litigants, arguing for legally valid positions that are inconvenient to the government -- if you do that, you're opposing the bedrock of America's tradition of law and order. Don't believe me? Ask John Adams, our second President. A lawless President, a felon, a man who has his entire life shown no respect for nor understanding of the law whatsoever, is hardly behaving out of character by assaulting the rule of law itself. What is disheartening is how many people are going along with it.
- on Martin Niemöller, and Who First They Came ForI think you give the game away when you ask if I know what ‘important rights’ are, so much so that everything in your comment before and after is best interpreted as a kind of nihilism, not a real attempt to grapple with the rights or principles in play, on the merits. No, actually, I was just being sarcastic, about the incredibly limited imaginations of privileged people who cannot conceive of actual right violations, so instead they glom on to 'Someone said something and other people got angry'. Being invited to speaking at a university is not a right at all. No one has a right to be platformed by the government. At all. Ever. It's a privilege. Now, the government is indeed also forbidden from discriminating based on viewpoints in how it hands out privileges (Something to remember when we're talking about visa.), but if we are going to judge _this_ sort of viewpoint judgement on government platforms as a right violation, we need to understand that this happens near continuously, in literally every context that the government platforms a speaker. In fact, 'guest speaker at a college' is one of the few circumstances where content of their speech is not the determining factor to their platform in the first place! Usually the government explicitly platforms someone because they knew exactly what that person would say. There is something very suspicious this specific form of platforming is the violation of someone's right. Surely the fact that a person _invited to give the comme…
- on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25China, Japan, and South Korea have teamed up to respond to US tariffs. https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-03-31/china-japan-south-korea-will-jointly-respond-to-us-tariffs-chinese-state-media-says I repeat. China, Japan, and South Korea. In case people are not aware of the relationships between those three countries, none of those countries really like each other that much, mostly because of historic reasons and arguments over said history and how it is understood. All three relationships have slowly been strengthening recently, but this is, frankly, a huge and somewhat unprecedented step. Absolutely no one saw this coming. It's entirely possible we're about to lose basically all of our East Asian influence to China.
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