Thanks for the suggestions, Dark Matter.

1. Less broad tariffs on China could be plausibly defensible; however, I'd still be skeptical personally. Free trade is a home setting for me, left over from my youth as a conservative during the Reagan years. These tariffs are going to hurt us more than they do China, they take place simultaneously with an idiotically destructive trade war with our former USMCA partners, and a softer touch with China would be a better idea anyway given that there were already tariffs in place. (Never mind that Trump negotiated the USMCA and I'm old enough to remember when he touted that it would lead to a new golden era of American prosperity; it was, in fact, effectively a rebranding of 2010's-era NAFTA, and again, free trade is my home setting.)

2. Hamas are bad guys and I shed zero tears for them. Israel started the Gaza war with the moral high ground. Netanyahu's government has since forfeited any claim there and that moral territory is now unoccupied. There are no good guys amongst the combatants in the Gaza war. Nevertheless, an honorable peace with Israeli-advantageous terms has been available to Israel for at least half a year now; Netanyahu prefers to be at war because it helps him bolster his domestic political position which in turn helps him avoid personal legal vulnerability. Since even before taking office, Trump has encouraged re-escalation of the war rather than incentivized peace, and that's what has happened.

3. If you're going to accuse DEI advocates of being religious zealots, then I'm one of them. DEI is a good thing and there should be more of it. White people, male people, cisgendered people, heterosexual people, Christian people, and in non-academic settings conservative people face few if any material professional or academic disadvantages, particularly when compared with people from traditionally disempowered and smaller-share demographic groups. I described what the Trump administration has done with equal opportunity laws as "perverse" in the OP, and that was a calculated choice of wording. I can respect that you hold a different opinion and perhaps think what's going on in that arena is good. But I say what Trump's done is deplorable.

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.

Judge Boasberg has appeared fair to me in the handling of the Alien Enemies Act case. I realize Venezuelan gang members are not particularly popular people and I'm amenable to the idea of deporting very bad hombres.

The ask is that the government do this legally, that the government comply with orders of the court in good faith.

That this case should go before a judge who has now experienced the government offering facile, bad-faith interpretations of the law and his own orders in a transparent attempt to evade compliance with the law? Yeah, I think that's a good thing.

Don't pee on the court's leg and tell the judge that it's raining. That's what FRCP 11 is for.

I sometimes see people saying on social media, "The civil war is already upon us; the shooting and the violence have already started." This is wrong. There is violence and vandalism, and it's a bad thing, and you shouldn't contribute to it. No, that is not "submitting in advance." No, that is not "just letting them get away with it." It is not even "not fighting back." It is not giving up on the idea that we can go about our politics in a peaceful and lawful way.

JFK Assassination Mania was not the start of paranoid thinking in American politics. It was, though the milepost of that particular kind of brain rot entering mainstream discussion and even some official actions. (At least, since its submergence after the failure of the aptly-named Know-Nothing Party.)

I sometimes have the fortitude to stick to an appetizer. But, like Andrew, only rarely. Even then, there's often some sharing from other peoples' entrees. I sometimes have the fortitude to stick to an appetizer and a salad or some soup. But again, only rarely.

I AM acquiring more ability to stop halfway through the entree and say "The rest of this is lunch for tomorrow, leave it be, dude." And I'm pretty good at saying no to dessert. Most of the time.

As for P.F. Chang's: wow is that stuff salty.

Were an EO narrowly tailored to prohibit the playing of "Get Out Of My Dreams, Get Into My Car," specifically, on all Federal properties, I would wholeheartedly endorse it, even if it came from the current guy. I'd urge a successor President to leave the EO in place, and urge Congressional ratification of the EO into statutory law.

NO KINGS
NO SLAVES
NO NAZIS

Part of me wants to say bad calls are part of baseball, and this will slow things down, undoing part of the great benefit to the sport that the pitch clock has brought. Part of me -- most of me -- says the calls should be right, and limiting the number of times it happens will be worth it. As depicted it looks pretty fast.

And I'm quite certain that we'll find the strike zone once again moves around a little bit when held up to examination.

There are political forces to spend. There are political forces to oppose taxes. They’re not actually matched against each other in a way that balances the budget.

The people get what they want. Good and hard.

Oh by all the gods they are STILL not letting that go, are they.

I presume the answer is: if we don't start cutting spending now, our ability to spend on anything will eventually be swallowed up by our need to make minimum interest payments on the debt.

I recall my days as a Young Republican, when I made this argument. That was the early 1990's. My own political preferences have changed since then, but the argument has not. OP is right (elsewhere in the thread) that the key number is interest on the debt as a percentage of GDP. FRED has the numbers:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S

You can correlate the ups and downs on the chart with all sorts of things that may affirm your priors or mine, assign the deltas as a delayed response to X or Y event based on X or Y based on your priors. But if you ask me, the table says to me: deficit spending, above a certain threshold, seems to make the number go up about a year later.

Yes: high interest rates. I hope not, but I foresee another wave of depression in real property values. Hopefully it doesn't ripple out into the financial sector as badly as the last one did.

With sincerity, OP, I would like a bit of insight into something you wrote. "I am philosophically against tax increases as a general principle." Which one of these statements is the closest to what you meant by that:

A) I will never support a tax increase under any circumstances or for any reason, period full stop; or
B) I will only support a tax increase under extraordinary circumstances such that I cannot conceive of them realistically manifesting in the foreseeable future; or
C) Although some circumstances might justify a tax increase in the future, those circumstances are not present now; or
D) Even if someone were to present a strong argument that raising taxes would produce a net benefit to the economy, backed by overwhelming evidence, I would nevertheless reject the proposal because it is simply impossible that such arguments and evidence exist even if I couldn't immediately think of a critique; or
E) My default preferred policy is to not raise taxes, and even if someone were to present a strong, evidence-backed argument for why we would generally benefit by raising them, I would only go along with it if the evidence for the proposal were overwhelming, and even then I would still be pretty grumpy about it.

I'm just looking to understand better what you wrote, because it would help me understand your overall argument for why spending cuts have to happen rather than tax hikes. I do not intend to offer any sort of argument for raising taxes. In fact, as I write, I do not intend to further comment on your response beyond thanking you for making it.

That still would be cutting benefits, reaching its goal by reducing the number of recipients as opposed to by reducing the amount of money being paid.

But you are right, it's something that could be done, if there is the political will to do it.

The objective that Trump and Musk have articulated is one that can be lawfully pursued, and if it's true that the American people are really fed up, then there is the political will out there to propel pursuit of those objective through Congress. If the people really want spending cuts, they'll get them, good and hard.

It's entirely reasonable to ask that these spending cuts be pursued in a lawful way. Which means they be done by Congress. That's not an ask that puts this goal out of reach. Republicans control the White House and both Houses of Congress, and in Congress they enjoy a degree of party unity and direct control by the President that Democrats could only dream of in even their best recent political times.

If spending cuts can't make it through Congress under those political conditions, that gives lie to the postulate that there really is sufficient political will for making spending cuts -- at least, when those cuts are actually articulated rather than referred to in broad sweeping terms. And, if it's true as you suggest that the American people are fed up, this might not turn out to be true!

Whether or not that's true, doing this in the lawful way, the Constitutional way, ought not be controversial to anyone. Putting something like entitlement cuts through the political process of Congress is as small-d democratic an ask as can be made.

About 40% of Americans thought Trump dispensed reasonable medical advice when he said people should put disinfectant into their bloodstreams.

Beyond parody. Not even The Onion would have come up with this.

If there is one fixed star of Donald Trump’s second term, it is revenge on those he believes wronged him.

We shall find that this is a piss-poor ideology upon which to base the formulation of public policy.

I don't know about you, but my social media posts are full of metaphors and memes including the theme of touching hot stoves. Grabbing those stoves with both hands. Pulling off their underwear and then sitting on said hot stoves. Intentionally face-planting on the burners.

It's a change of pace from the FAFO and leopards-eating-faces memes, I guess.

As always, the people who realize that their own economic interests are being sacrificed to their own pain, and that they actually voted for this to happen to them, is quite small. There's a lot of silence where the "Wait, I didn't vote for this!" seems like it ought to be. We got some of it with people who had been promised different kinds of jobs and medical care and found those promises retracted.

Maybe we'll get more of it when red-hat-wearing parents find their special needs kids' IDEA plans disrupted. (Which I hope you all will join me in deploring should that actually happen. That's not a good place for schadenfreude to land.)

I credit it to the power of cognitive dissonance, the extend of the human mind's ability to rationalize the beneficence of one's own actions and statements.

First, when does responsibility for something shift from Biden to Trump? Is there some benchmark event that needs to occur? (Other than "the price of eggs falls below X.") Some objective amount of time? That's a serious question even if I admit that, yes, of course, making a fuss over the price of eggs is not a particularly serious indicator of Trump's performance.

Second, it's a fact that Trump said to voters, “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,” and the opposite has happened. Now, of course, you and I, being serious and judicious people, knew that was ridiculous bullshit all along. But I think you'll agree with me that there are a lot of people who are not so sophisticated as you or I, less able to separate the sober promises from the bullshit.

Or, it seems, to realize that Governor Walz was entirely correct to label Trump a "bullshit artist," because experience is proving out that one after another, the promises Trump made were either not serious, beyond his ability to deliver, or (as we are likely to soon discover with just-announced-today tariffs on our two largest trading partners) counterproductive for their intended purposes.

America has chosen poorly and that has been graphically demonstrated daily for the past ten days and I expect will be so for the next 1,541. So hopefully in the future our voters will disregard your advice, and vote Democratic.

Trump & Co. are big on show, and getting media compliance for presenting things as a big show. The big ICE raids in Chicago, Newark, and Miami got a lot of publicity. And bigger numbers, but I think a lot less than might have been hoped for:

A nationwide immigration crackdown on Sunday resulted in the arrest of 956 people, the most since Donald Trump returned to power, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A number of federal agencies with newly expanded detention powers were involved in the raids in a number of cities including Chicago, Newark and Miami.

Trump came to power after making mass deportations of undocumented immigrants a central campaign promise.

His predecessor Joe Biden carried out an average of 311 immigration deportations daily, according to ICE, mostly individuals who had committed crimes.

[¶]

The 956 reported arrests on Sunday follow 286 arrests on Saturday, 593 arrests on Friday and 538 arrests on Thursday.

During Joe Biden's four years in office he carried out 1.5 million deportations, according to figures by the Migration Policy Institute. Those numbers mirror the deportation numbers in Trump's first term.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd6434dq7p1o

I predict we're going to see roughly the same level of enforcement under Trump-47 that we saw under Biden-46, and it'll probably be about the same level of priority -- people who have committed crimes, which was already the #1 way to get ICE's attention under existing law, before this Laken Riley bill ever even got passed.

But we're going to see a big show being made of it. Because Trump is all about making a big show of things.

Hey, if we have to meet out on the tennis court, hopefully there's enough space there for everyone with a complaint to gather up and talk it through.

Consider that Donald Trump was sent to the White House to do two things:
1. Get immigration under control
2. Lower prices

I think 1. could be more accurately re-phrased in quite a few different ways of varying levels of cynicism. For instance, I don't think there's going to be a single Norwegian expat in danger of involuntary repatriation unless they commit a violent crime. But let's take that as written.

Today, Trump announced that he will expand the migrant detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to have a capacity of 30,000 detainees. We should note that there is already such a facility there and it is separate from the now-infamous very high security facility that has been used to hold prisoners captured in the war on terror. But this will still obviously require a LOT of money and staffing and maintenance, something that can't be done by executive order. I predict that this will sound pretty good to a lot of Republicans, raise loud alarm bells to those old enough to remember the phrase "concentration camp," and no one is going to stop to consider the likely multi-billion dollar cost because Republicans have proven quite willing to write checks on the public debt for stuff that they like.

On point #2, I think the salient commodity we kept talking about during the election campaign was eggs? Here's what's been happening with the price of eggs. "Oh, that's the bird flu!" Republicans will say. And yes, it sure is. And it was back when Biden was President, and y'all tried to blame the Vice President for it, so turnabout is fair play. Eggs have never been more expensive in American history than they are today, in either objective or inflation-adjusted dollars.

IIRC, I'd heard that Carson didn't vet any of Uecker's appearances on the Tonight Show. He didn't want to know the jokes beforehand so he could laugh along with everyone else.

Uecker, Vin Scully, and Harry Caray were the three biggest personalities in the announcer's booth for most of my life. There have been other famous announcers too, but those three guys were the kings. Every game, you could hear the enthusiasm, sincerity, kindness, fairness, love of the game, love of the players, and love of the fans. Baseball made them happy, and that helped us feel happy too.

Whatever the merits of contemporary announcers, I don't think anyone has quite filled their shoes just yet.