Friday Potpourri: 4 April 2025
What's got me smiling this week - SMACKS!
First, I thought the graphic above expressed how many of us feel. Let’s start…
There’s a lot to smile about this week. Yeah, yeah, I hear you…”but the tariffs”. I had been rooting for giant tariffs on Day 1 of the new regime, because their deployment is so heinous, disruptive and disastrous that had he done it on Day 1, the world blowback would have been so huge that they never would have gotten around to eviscerating the US Government.
But here we are.
The tariffs are even more horrendous than economists, the markets, foreign governments, and many of us regular people, could have imagined.
I’m chuckling over the fact that tariffs have been placed on islands with no people, islands with only penguins and seals, and other places that don’t export anything because the regime is too stupid to know how to read a map. I also am smiling, call it schadenfreude, about how the MAGA voters will be impacted more than the rest of us. A list. A map. More context. That’s jobs AND costs.
And hey! Shawn Fain, UAW president and fan of the “Liberation Day” tariffs because they’d be good for the auto industry…it took until early morning Thursday (less than 24 hours after the auto tariffs began in earnest) for Stellantis to layoff 900 US hourly employees who make powertrains and stampings at five different Midwest plants — the Warren Stamping and Sterling Stamping plants in Michigan, as well as the Indiana Transmission Plant, Kokomo Transmission Plant and Kokomo Casting Plant, all in Kokomo, Indiana.
SMACK 1: Personal Residence
Doesn’t this make you incredibly happy?
SMACK 2: The US House
Nested in a post of a different topic I wrote this last week:
As an aside, Anna Paulina Luna (FL - new mom) is fighting to get a discharge petition to the floor that would allow new parents to vote remotely. The “Family Values, we need more kids” party is opposed to this - although she actually has the votes to bring it to the floor, and likely get it passed, but the power brokers are trying to (A) get legislators to rescind their sign-ons, and (B) pass a piece of legislation that would raise the threshold from a simple majority (50% + 1) to 2/3rds.
It came to fruition this week. Luna put forth the discharge petition and House leadership got the Rules Committee to put out a piece of legislation with the 2/3rds requirement AND they added the Save Act, thinking that it was a certainty to pass, stopping Luna from being able to get a vote on Congresswoman Brittany Pettersen’s proposal to allow proxy voting for new parents for the first 12 weeks after the baby was born.
SMACK — the bill failed. Congresswoman Pettersen’s comment:
“Don’t f— with moms.” Source.
Moscow Mike shut the House floor until next week, because the process is that a discharge petition must be brought to the floor for a vote within 2 working days.
Why is this joyous? Because the discharge petition had 11 Rethuglican signers, and 8 voted against the nonsense bill. Eight Rethuglicans is a start. Every chip in the wall matters.
SMACK 3: Books Rule!
Elbert County is southeast of Denver. One of their districts is Elizabeth, and yutzs there decided to ban books from their school libraries. A Federal judge said no, the books need to be returned to the schools and available to students. Source.
SMACK 4: The US Senate
After Senator Booker’s speech, the bipartisan team of Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Rand Paul (R- historically seriously anti-tariff) put forth:
S.J.Res.37 - A joint resolution terminating the national emergency declared to impose duties on articles imported from Canada. Full text.
What this brief piece of legislation does is to remove the ability of the Orange Menace to put forth Canadian tariffs by claiming a national emergency.
Here’s the fun part: IT PASSED. In addition to Rand being a co-sponsor, Senators McConnell, Collins and Murkowski also voted aye, making the final tally 51-48 (Roger Marshall couldn’t be bothered to show up.)
Were these Rethuglicans inspired by Senator Booker’s speech1? The part about standing in opposition? Nah. BUT Mitch, Lisa and Susan actually understood the impacts on their states’ economies. The others will just have to wait and find out.
Again, it’s a start: first time any Rethuglican voted against contents of an EO. This is different from voting for nominees, this is direct policy.
Sadly, it doesn’t look like it will have a chance in the House, unless there’s a discharge petition….hhmmnn….
SMACK 5: AI
If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you know how opposed I am to AI. (Just one of my screeds.)
It turns out that tech is starting to see problems with AI. If you want to get a job in tech, you need to submit a resume, which is often evaluated by AI, and then you might have an AI interview, and after that an interview with a human. At that point, often the company wants to find out if you can actually do the job. You know, like coding. Seems that lots of applicants are on Zoom interviews, are asked to code solutions to provided problems, and they use AI to generate their responses. Interviewing managers CAN SEE THE APPLICANTS LOOKING AT ANOTHER SCREEN!!!! As a whole, tech is unsure what they can do, other than to (slap your forehead, folks) have the interviewees come to the office so they can undertake the problems in front of the manager, using only one computer, and likely unable to cheat. Not making this up.
As an aside, scammers have found multiple ways to leverage the new image part of ChatGPT. Coming soon to a receipt, job offer, or investment opportunity near you.
And Finally…Since I cannot help myself…
Have a great weekend, and remember to attend a local Hands Off! rally near you tomorrow. I’m hoping that we get 3 million people out throughout the country, plus more at sympathy rallies around the world.
I’ll be back on Monday.
When a Senator is making a long speech, he or she can entertain questions from other Senators. Senators from the speaker’s party will ask long questions to give the speaker time to rest his/her voice and breathe. Normally, Senators from the other party will ask questions to “throw off” the speaker’s train of thought, and just be disruptive. NOT ONE RETHUGLICAN asked a single question for the whole 25 hours that Senator Booker spoke. That matters.
The damage that der Fuehrer Trompf, Musk and their minions have done is irreparable, at least for a generation. But it is nice to note that some of the GOP politicos are beginning to see the near term disaster that it is likely doing to their political careers, let alone to the nation they were oath bound to protect and defend. At least we now have a glimmer of hope that there might yet be a fork in our Road to Perdition.
It was great to read that you felt as much schadenfreude as I do about the market tanking. This lets people understand what they’ve done a lot faster than they would in a normal administration. Love your pics at the end too!