We really didn’t need further proof of Trump’s weird alliance with Putin, but here it is: Yesterday he imposed new tariffs on Ukraine — but not Russia.
The White House tried to explain it away by claiming that we have no “meaningful” trade with Russia since the sanctions were imposed. But the U.S. still trades more with Russia (worth $3.5 billion) than with countries like Mauritius or Brunei that did make Trump’s tariffs list.
Rolling Stone: “Trump announced the imposition of a significant tariff on the uninhabited Australian territory Heard and McDonald Islands — a remote outpost populated only by penguins and other Antarctic wildlife”.
Attribution: “Buy American” means “Bye America” from world by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Ontario, Canada
[Graeme MacKay born in Ontario, Canada, his worked as staff editorial cartoonist for The Hamilton Spectator since 1997, earning multiple national awards and nominations, including citations from the United Nations and the Association of Canadian Cartoonists.]
President Trump announced new tariffs which economists warn could plunge the world into a depression, Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly rejected Elon Musk’s preferred candidate for the state’s Supreme Court, and Senator Cory Booker spoke for a record-breaking 25 hours on the Senate floor in protest of Trump’s actions.
Attribution: Liberation Day by Dave Whamond, Canada, PoliticalCartoons.com
from the daily show lastnight
Michael Kosta recaps surprising wins for the Democrats, including a victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race despite Elon Musk’s financial interference, and a record-breaking 25-hour speech by Cory Booker. Plus, Trump launches his “Liberation Day” tariffs, and Republicans scramble to supply cover.
well, whaddaya know… they actually remembered who they were and did their job for once.
Senate Republicans vote to halt tariffs on Canadian imports | AP News
Capitol Records hopes you and your family enjoy these new holiday classics
Well, that was a dramatic storm front. Really active t-boomers and wind for the past hour. Still have power though so all is well. The drive to work may tell a different tale.
Liberation Day? Couldn’t call it Independence Day guess. That comes in 3 months and Dumbass didn’t want to be sued by 20th Century Fox I’d bet.
So what’s a tariff war look like? China has called for Dumbshit to immediately reverse the reciprocal tariffs imposed on China or they will retaliate against US goods. Get that?
Those storms probably pale compared to what’s about to hit the stock market
Craig – futures hit the circuit breakers almost immediately. Traders are expecting to spend the day shut down as the circuit breakers will keep being hit.
One of the biggest laugh getter are the tariffs on locations without people or inhabited by few humans who produce nothing shipped to the U.S..So instead of solem “this is a terrible action” he gets the circus clown effect. The sad thing is we can be sure krasnov had nothing to do with the list of all locations on Earth, except for russia and n. korea, he does not know what the states are and where they are located. Which WH staff created this must be just as stupid as he is.
My favorite part is when he wanders off, maybe even the wrong direction, and has to be told to go back and he looks like he is arguing about it. Yeah, the man lost the bag of peas for his brain and substituted cow pies.
In an hour or so we find out if starting a World War is market friendly.
https://thenyledger.com/markets/crypto/did-chatgpt-come-up-with-trumps-tariff-rate-formula/
Did ChatGPT come up with Trump’s tariff rate formula?
An editor at The Yale Evaluation, James Surowiecki, stated something comparable, “they simply took our [US] trade deficit with that nation and divided it by the nation’s exports to us.”
*So, the 78.% tariff on SFB’s chart for one country was NOT their tariff on US goods; that number was the trade deficit, not a tariff. Tariffs are taxes on imported goods, paid for by the country importing the merchandise…and passed on to the consumer. There will be fewer who are able to afford anything, because the illegal terminations of federal workers and crashing economy will ripple out to the wider, non-government sector. Everything tRUMPsky touches, dies. He’s killing the country. We are being terminated.
Trump
Tariffs
Tax
Termination
https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-stokes-trade-war-world-reels-tariff-shock-2025-04-03/
“Opportunities for new alliances are emerging that we should use determinedly and decisively,” said Robert Habeck, the economy minister of Germany, whose biggest trading partner is the United States.
Recent meetings showed “that what we think is what they think, too: forging an alliance, for example, with Canada and Mexico, is the order of the day,” he said, adding “we, the European Union, should pragmatically explore free trade options with other countries.”
*The jobs are not coming back. SFB has made the US the common enemy of the rest of the world (except Russia – Putin is laughing). Nobody can trust the US with Adolf in power…or any Republican.
https://tagtik.cdn.prismic.io/api/v2/documents/search?ref=Z-KsdBAAACUAdy29&q=%5B%5B%3Ad+%3D+at%28document.id%2C+%22Z-JuQhAAACUAdrr9%22%29+%5D%5D
Serbian students nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
Serbia’s Gen Z (children born after 2000) want a different future for their country: a society without corruption and bloodshed. That has brought them to the streets for months to peacefully protest against the current regime and for a free and better future for their country, so that young people do not continue to massively move abroad.
Since November, protests have been held against the Serbian government. The youth are fed up with the administration. They have had enough of all the bribery, corruption, fraud, aggression, and all the cheap macho behaviour that is reminiscent of an authoritarian regime. Tens of thousands peacefully take to the streets in Belgrade, Niš, Novi Sad and other smaller cities and were rewarded with a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
*Funny how US media isn’t coveting the protests happening in this country or around the world, unless it’s a TeSSla protest/vandalism as a warning to viewers to comply/remain silent.
APRIL 5th! Every big city in the US! Peaceful protests…with MAGAt/police/FBI agitators. Keep your peace!
If you,like me, can’t get to a protest, call some Senators and Representatives; leave a voicemail on Saturday: 202-224-3131
Back home on American dry soil. We were a little shocked there was no customs declaration or import tax and duty fees coming in from Mexico.*
*I guess I escaped a Trump tariff.
having fun getting your retirement gutted today?
nice job ya dumb fucking trumpers
just incredibly stupid, all of them
Rule of thumb
Always: He’s lying or he’s bluffing. (His idea of what bluffing is.)
And of course there’s this delight.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrtMQ3N4OyI&si=FC40tOrC3lt0BHt0
Very old saying – the broker gets paid whether buying or selling.
I wonder which of the WH and sfb staff are designated to keep telling him what a genius he is today?
Did he not think muskovite was a market genius? He was no where to be seen.
Whatever “artificial intelligence” program used to make bonehead decisions might want to change their name, and fast.
i guess that’s why they call it “the blues” (ya idiot trumpers)
testing
Linda
i’m losing so much money right now
but so are the utterly moronic trumpers! 🎉
today’s meme…
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-ulterior-motive-tariff-murphy/
“No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief,” the lawmaker wrote late Wednesday night on his social media.
He noted, “This week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won’t understand how the tariffs make economic sense. That’s because they don’t. They aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.”
The Senator added that “our founders created a President with limited and checked powers.”
“They specifically put the power of spending and taxation in the hands of the legislature. Why? Because they watched how kings and despots used spending and taxes to control their subjects,” he added. “British kings used taxation to reward loyalty and punish dissent. Our own revolution was spurred by the King’s use of heavy taxation of the colonies to punish our push for self governance. The King’s message was simple: stop protesting and I’ll stop taxing.”
*Chris Murphy gets it. That’s what Thiel, MuskRat, Curtis Yarvin (a podcaster invited to the innaguration) want. The tech bros will own everything and everyone.
*Just called my Republican Senators and asked if they had taken a loyalty pledge to tRUMPsky so they would get a taste of the money being siphoned away from our country. I also noted that the EU is going to Canada, Mexico, China, and this will not bring industry back…and reminded them a few Republicans are voting with Dems on some things, so they need to stand up for their constituents, too. Heck, on one call I even conjured the ghost of Ronald Regan, who would not have approved of tRUMPsky’s economic bulldhitting nor of tRUMPsky.
Your turn: 202-224-3121 Calling Congress is like eating potato chips. Once you start, you can’t stop.
I was thinking about a part-time job to keep busy, but I may need a full time job the way things are going. JFC!
FFS!
https://www.newsweek.com/rand-paul-trump-tariff-political-decimation-2054874
Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky predicted that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could lead to the “political decimation” of the Republican Party.
Paul was one of four GOP senators who joined Democrats who voted to oppose Trump’s tariffs on Canada on Wednesday and is one of few Republicans in Congress who are opposing his tariffs.
Paul warned that, if history is any indicator, tariffs won’t play out well for the Republican Party in remarks reported by Fox News on Wednesday.
“Tariffs have also led to political decimation,” Paul said. “When [former President William] McKinley most famously put tariffs on in 1890, they lost 50 percent of their seats in the national election. When [Smoot-Hawley] put on their tariff in the early 1930s, we lost the House and the Senate for 60 years. So they’re not only bad economically, they’re bad politically.”
*Orange Adolf is banking on being king-for-life, so he doesn’t care about political parties, nor do the billionaire tech bros who plan to run the world & ruin the world in their twisted image.
Duck and cover!!!!!
I had already repositioned my retirement account not because of Trump but because I had 2 good years of growth and didn’t expect the third year to do better than the 4.2% on a CD. So I had losses but not as bad as it could have been.
We are 15 years into a secular Bull market. Which means that any idiot can look like a stock picking genius, and I did. But we are about to enter into a secular bear market, where you’ve got to know what you are doing. All of us “geniuses ” are now sucker bait, ready for the plucking.
Now that is the basic trends we would be dealing with no matter who was president. Stock market wise it will probably be a rough 10 to 15 years. As a 70-yr old, 2 time cancer surviving diabetic the odds that I will be around in 15 years isn’t great.
What will make my next 15 years interesting is the real risk of damage a group of idiots can do to pile on to the down market trends.
It is not a time when you want idiots in charge but here we are.
I think I’m going to go to Costco and stock up on Irish whisky and tequila before they raise the price.
Jack
https://www.newsweek.com/iowa-hit-mass-layoffs-right-after-unemployment-benefits-cut-2054532
Whirlpool Corporation will lay off 651 workers at its manufacturing plant in Amana, Iowa, the company announced this week.
The job losses come just weeks after Iowa’s Republican-led Legislature reduced the duration of unemployment benefits available to workers affected by plant layoffs and closings, a move that labor leaders and Democratic lawmakers argue leaves displaced workers with fewer options during economic uncertainty.
“This is outrageous for a company that made $17 billion in sales last year,” Iowa Federation of Labor President Charlie Wishman said in a statement published by Iowa Starting Line. “Again, the working class is suffering at the hands of billionaires who don’t seem to care, let alone understand the struggles of the American people.”
*Reducing unemployment benefits and then laying off folks. The shittiest of shitshows.
this isn’t cyclical, it’s a deliberate tanking by trumputinco
SFB/Musk/Heritage are tanking the global economy, not just the US economy & that might get someone(s) pew-pewed.
From Wapo – and this pretty much sums it up.
Send the idiot VP out to “reassure” the public that they aren’t smart enough yet to understand the genius behind the plan that’s tanking their retirement plans while the Dumbass who came up with the idea heads off to the golf club to rub elbows with the golfing employees of Saudi Arabia.
.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/3/2267546/-Opus-Dei-the-Supreme-Court-and-J-D-Vance-a-speculation
…an article from the New Yorker, which further details Vance’s ties to the conservative Catholic movement. Finally, an article in the New Republic, tied Project 2025, Leonard Leo and John Roberts to the Catholic Information Center. TNR notes that the priest in charge of the CIC is a member of Opus Dei, an organization founded in 1928 by a Spanish priest…
But after I read about Vance’s conversion, as well as the connections, subtle but not completely hidden, linking Opus Dei, the CIC and two conservative Supreme Court justices, I looked up the religious affiliation of other members of the court. It turns out that five of the six conservative justices on the court are Catholic, and Gorsuch is listed as Anglican/Catholic. It was then that I recalled that long-ago meeting where Opus Dei attempted to recruit the young me. What better place than Washington DC to recruit…
The Catholic Church is not a monolith. Joe Biden and Sonia Sotomayor are both Catholic. I know priests, nuns and lay Catholics who are as liberal as anyone who posts on DK. But Opus Dei represents a conservative strain of Catholicism that longs for the illiberal past. It was organized in direct response to the Communist movements in Europe of the early twentieth century, and was granted official recognition by the conservative Pope Pius XII in 1950. It’s stature was enhanced by John Paul II, another conservative anti-communist, who in 1982 allowed Opus Dei to hold governance over matters of religion and discipline for its members without requiring local diocesan approval.
The Supreme Court was traditionally white and Protestant, with a scattering of Jews. But the Roberts court that has overturned Roe v. Wade and greatly extended Presidential power is almost exclusively conservative and Catholic.
As other undemocratic leaders have found, Trump is easily influenced by flattery and bribes. Perhaps Trump really has been chosen by God, or at least Opus Dei’s vision of the Deity, to bring about what was impossible before now, a conservative Catholic government, in which the levers of power are controlled in all branches by the teachings of an anticommunist cleric from nearly a century ago. The Constitution guarantees the official separation of church and state. But such separation means little if those who run that government are believers in a medieval strain of religion that has little in common with what most US citizens believe or would care to be governed by.
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/01/elon-musk-doge-drug-testing-bill-democrat?utm_source=microsoft
A House Democrat is introducing long-shot legislation that would force billionaire Trump lieutenant Elon Musk and his staffers at DOGE to undergo routine drug testing, Axios has learned.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) cited a Wall Street Journal report from 2024 that alleged Musk has used illegal drugs including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine as the impetus for her bill.
Sherrill’s bill, a copy of which was first obtained by Axios, would require special government employees to undergo a drug test before they begin work and enter into a random drug testing program.
*Cough (bullsh/t) cough
https://www.newsweek.com/tesla-tariffs-elon-musk-win-elon-musk-2055014
Elon Musk Has Key Advantage To Deal With Donald Trump Tariffs
Tesla, which produces its vehicles in factories in California and Texas, may have an advantage over some of its competitors in the automobile industry in grappling with the new tariffs because of its domestic production. Bernstein analyst Daniel Roeska wrote in a note to clients last week that “Tesla wins” while “Detroit bleeds” because of the tariffs, Forbes reported.
*Mmmm, except that nobody wants an F-ing swastiCar.
A lot of the components that go into those cars—things like headlamps, brakes and glass—come from abroad,” he said. “If those inputs get hit with import tariffs, the cost goes up. And eventually, that cost makes its way to the end consumer. It’s Economics 101, higher input prices, higher cost for consumer.”
It’s hard to land back after a relaxing time of no trump bullshit into more trump bullshit, just like when we came home from a relaxing time in Costa Rica into the middle of covid bullshit, aka more trump bullshit, and all the bullshit that followed. Seems like we’re headed straight into even more senseless trump bullshit.
Bumper Sticker seen today: if Trump is the answer, it must be a stupid question.
There were two cyber trash trucks in the front row of the airport parking garage. I never realized how stupid its wheels look.
https://www.kut.org/transportation/2025-03-21/austin-bergstrom-international-airport-federal-aviation-officials-faa-ground-stop-flights-aus-abia
FAA temporarily halts flights arriving at Austin’s airport from Houston and Dallas
“They know we have a national shortage on staffing, and they can do something about it, and they have not prioritized it,” she said. “They are certainly not acting with the urgency that we need.”
*This wasn’t reported on TV last month, as far as I know. Did anyone else hear a peep? Ivy, Did they check your phones on re-entry?
BID, they didn’t do squat. That’s what surprised us.
They said “the system” recognized us so we were “good to go.”
Trump’s America is third world. Maybe there will come a lower order.
Crash the economy, drain savings and 401(k) accounts so nobody can retire, fewer jobs to depress wages, buy distressed companies, land, water and mineral rights for cheap, ruin & privatize SS with some phony-baloney crypto scam.
This screws up the entire world, so billionaires everywhere can take advantage of the fire sale of the century.
https://www.wired.com/story/judge-approves-doge-usip-office-building/
Federal Judge Allows DOGE to Take Over $500 Million Office Building for Free
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-fires-mike-waltz-staffers-after-laura-loomers-white-house-visit-2054940
Trump Firing Mike Waltz Staffers After Laura Loomer’s White House Visit
President Donald Trump has dismissed several officials from the White House National Security Council (NSC), acting shortly after far-right activist Laura Loomer urged him to remove staffers she claimed were not sufficiently loyal to his “Make America Great Again” agenda, multiple sources familiar with the matter told the Associated Press.
Loomer met with Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday to present information advocating for the firings. Vice President JD Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Serio Gor, Director of the Presidential Personnel Office, also attended the meeting, the sources said.
*So, Mike Walz is going to escape this time, and Looney Loomer is making decisions?
“The Mar-a-Lago Accord is a proposed economic strategy aimed at addressing the U.S. current account and fiscal deficits by potentially weakening the dollar and encouraging foreign countries to appreciate their currencies. It draws parallels to the 1985 Plaza Accord and involves various controversial measures, including tariffs and changes to U.S. Treasury bonds.”
*Where in the F is Congress? How can they allow him to do whatever he wants? This is criminal!