The Economist, April 26, 2025 Edition: Trump’s first 100 days, and beyond

The president decides he must back down.
He's considering lowering tariffs on China, etc.
He won't be firing Powell after all.

Now, if he would decide he doesn't want to be president after all. Some people and institutions are not falling for his demands and lies.

U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-TN Kingsport, called U.S. Repl Al Green, D-Texas, "boy" and referred to transgender people as "fairies" on an April 18 podcast interview with "F.A.M.E. Ministries."

Harshbarger's office declined to respond on the record about her comments on the "F.A.M.E. Ministries" podcast. They also said they no longer consider WBIR to be a reputable news source and will not respond to WBIR's queries for comment.

I laughed out loud when I read she said WBIR was no longer a reputable new source. For the repubs no news source is reputable if they report the truth.

Some people really know how to use Christianity.

A reminder, today is Earth Day.

Do what you can to save and maintain our planet.
Live more sustainably.
Inspire our youth.

OpEd: Mr. Trump thinks he can bully everyone into submission, but he can’t bully Adam Smith, who deals in reality. Markets know tariffs are taxes, and taxes are anti-growth. The Trump tariffs are the biggest economic policy mistake in decades, and extending the 2017 tax reform and deregulation may not compensate for all the damage.

Author Hannah Erin Lang: Dow Headed for Worst April Since 1932 as Investors Send ‘No Confidence’ Signal

Author Gerard Baker: Is Trump a Tyrant or a Savior? Maybe Just a Bumbler. The goals of his second term are ambitious. But so far the execution has been strikingly incompetent.

Will the country survive? Will we be able to remove him from office? Will it help since there is more incompetence in line?

U.S. egg prices increased again last month to reach a new record-high of $6.23 per dozen despite President Donald Trump’s predictions, a drop in wholesale prices and no egg farms having bird flu outbreaks.

While at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Friday, April 18, the president, 78, reacted to egg prices and the current state of the economy... Giving a shoutout to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Trump said she is doing "a great job," before he claimed that egg prices "are down 87%, but nobody talks about that."

“You can have all the eggs you want. We have too many eggs. In fact, if anything, the prices are getting too low. So I just want to let you know that the prices are down,”

At Food City yesterday, the store brand eggs were on sale for $4.99, down from $5.49. Around January, 2020, eggs were priced about $1-$2. The president is good at saying things are happening when they aren't. Why would anyone believe him when the evidence is so readily available?

The 50501 movement stands for 50 States, 50 Protests, 1 Movement, and it’s a decentralized, people-powered network of resistance and resilience.

Event are scheduled across the country. So far, there are no events scheduled for Knox or Blount Counties.

UPDATE: There is an event in Blount County:
Today, Saturday, April 19, 2025
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
345 Court St
Maryville, TN 37804

The People’s Movement Stands Against:
The Billionaire Takeover – Trump, Musk, and their billionaire allies are consolidating power, buying politicians, rigging the system, and silencing the people to serve their own interests.

We’re not affiliated with any one candidate or party. We’re multi-racial, multi-generational, cross-class, and led by people who believe in nonviolence, mutual care, and democratic values.

"I really thought things would change after this administration, when we have Mr. Trump in office, things would change to the better," Atallah said. "Things actually changed to the worse."

Real estate attorney Bachir Atallah was returning from a short visit to Canada when he was detained at the border for nearly five hours. He experienced high blood pressure and needed further medical attention.

"They handcuffed me, they twisted my arm, my wrist," he said. "They walked me inside, and I was looking at my wife in the car."

We can only hope more and more people are regretting their support of the current presidential administration. Why would it have been better with T in office? Less regulation, less taxes? That does not mean better.

Rural hospital leaders are questioning whether they can continue to afford to do business with Medicare Advantage companies, and some say the only way to maintain services and protect patients is to end their contracts with the private insurers.

Medicare "Participants can enroll in traditional, government-run Medicare or in a Medicare Advantage plan run by a private insurance company."

But in recent years, average Medicare Advantage reimbursements to rural hospitals were about 90% of what traditional Medicare paid, according to a new report from the American Hospital Association. And traditional Medicare already pays hospitals much less than private plans, according to a recent study by Rand Corp., a research nonprofit.

Some rural hospitals in South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming have dropped contracts with Medicare Advantage companies.

Not a good thing if you live in a rural area and have Medicare Advantage for your health insurance.

Harvard, the nation’s richest as well as oldest university (140 years older than the U.S.) is the most prominent object of the administration’s campaign to purge “woke” ideology from America’s college campuses. The administration’s demands include sharing its hiring data with the government and bringing in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is “viewpoint diverse.”

Harvard 's response to the current presidential administration:

... It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court. The government’s terms also circumvent Harvard’s statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law. No less objectionable is the condition, first made explicit in the letter of March 31, 2025, that Harvard accede to these terms or risk the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding critical to vital research and innovation that has saved and improved lives and allowed Harvard to play a central role in making our country’s scientific, medical, and other research communities the standard-bearers for the world. These demands extend not only to Harvard but to separately incorporated and independently operated medical and research hospitals engaging in life-saving work on behalf of their patients. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle...

RFK: If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times because we have nutrition, because we have access to medicines. It’s very, very difficult for any infectious disease to kill a healthy human being.

For that to be the case, it is important to get vaccines.

In 2023, COVID-19 alone contributed to 76,446 deaths in the United States. Each year an estimated 12,000-52,000 people die from influenza in this country, depending on the severity of the flu season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even in modern times infectious disease can still take a deadly toll, and without vaccinations, those numbers would be far worse. It’s just not a risk worth taking. “Healthy people die everyday from infectious diseases,” David M. Higgins, MD, a pediatrician at the University of Colorado and Children’s Hospital Colorado, Aurora, Colorado said.

Something else to worry about... Will the CDC, etc. be reporting important data or will they be reporting false data as requested by the new administration?

During a hike in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1995, Don Barger climbed Chilhowee Mountain hoping to gaze across the valley below. All he saw was a wall of gray haze.

A 26-year-old federal regulation known as the regional haze rule has helped cut down on pollution over national parks, wilderness areas and tribal reservations, restoring some of the nation’s most spectacular natural vistas for outdoor lovers like Barger. But conservationists fear those gains may be lost after President Donald Trump’s administration announced in March the rule is among dozens of landmark environmental regulations that it plans to roll back.

Will the voters of Tennessee care? Maybe the roll back will make eggs cheaper.

In 2019, Jim Clayton and the City of Knoxville signed an agreement to build a new $100 million science museum at the site of the now defunct Knoxville Police Department on Howard Baker Jr. Avenue, near the Civic Coleseum.

Now, the Clayton Family Foundation withdrew $150 million from the project that would have built the science museum.

The Clayton Family Foundation has not commented on why they withdrew the funding. However, times certainly have changed since August, 2019.

UPDATE: Jim Clayton responded to WBIR on Saturday with his own statement....

“Mayor Kincannon’s media statement is surprising, as I have enjoyed working with the Mayor and her fine staff. This matter can be resolved amicably, and a great science museum is in our future.”

The President set tariffs that sent the stock market down.

The President got scared.

Did the President temporarily rescinded the tariffs to send the stock market back up?

There has been a "call for a congressional investigation into potential insider trading by the Trump Administration in the aftermath of the President’s abrupt reversal on the implementation of new tariffs."

Seriously, is this any way to run a country? It is different than running a business where societal norms, ethics, caring for the less fortunate are not necessary.

Numerous organizations and activists across hundreds of cities in every state are galvanizing to send a message to President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and others supporting the current administration's agenda: "Hands Off."
...

Hands Off! is described as a pro-democracy, pro-worker movement taking place "in defiance of the Trump-Musk billionaire takeover and the Republican assault on our freedoms and our communities."
...
Hands Off! is meant literally in most instances, encouraging Americans to peacefully revolt against the gutting of services, price hikes and attempts to slash programs like Medicaid and Social Security.

There are gatherings scheduled for Knoxville and Maryville today.
Check out the Hands Off! Site to find a location near you.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is planning to migrate the Social Security Administration’s computer systems from the COBOL programming language to something more modern, according to a new report from Wired. And while it’s not yet clear what Musk’s band of dipshits plans to do exactly, Wired reports they aim to do it within “a few months,” a laughably audacious timeline for such a task.

Everything from the code that issues Social Security numbers to the payment schedules are written in COBOL,... but the DOGE team seems to believe it can make a snap transition with the help of artificial intelligence...
...
More than 65 million Americans receive Social Security benefits, and any hiccups would be devastating for people who rely on the program to stay alive.

Having written code for a living, I say this is BS. You not only have to know how to code, you have to know the application, e.g. how the system works and all the if, then else's.

Sort of like the current administration's edict to end "end duty-free entry for cheap Chinese goods entering the U.S., his administration put the order on hold after more than a million packages piled up at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport."

You have to know how things work.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, has increasingly spread to mammals and infected hundreds of people, raising concerns that it may lead to human-to-human transmission and turn into a new pandemic.

Cases of the disease in mammals have mostly been detected in the Americas and Europe.

The article includes "a list of the types of mammals, other than humans, in which the virus... has been detected"...

You can go to the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service website for a daily list of detections of the bird flu in mammals. Is it surprising a government agency is still able to do their job?

Apparently domestic cats are very vulnerable. It's too bad so many people let their cats roam freely outdoors.

We can only hope the Federal government continues to keep an eye on this problem.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a Biden administration regulation on the nearly impossible-to-trace weapons called ghost guns, clearing the way for continued serial numbers, background checks and age verification requirements for buying the kits online.

It was a 7-2 opinion with only Alito and Thomas voting against.

...legal and illegal cannabis growers use about 1 percent of all American energy. That’s more than cryptocurrency mining or all other crops combined.
...
The industry’s greenhouse pollution warms the planet about as much as 10 million cars do.
...
Most of the industry’s sky-high emissions comes from indoor farms, which grow two-thirds of U.S. cannabis under artificial lights, air conditioning and irrigation. There’s an obvious solution here: Mills estimates the industry could cut three-quarters of its emissions by growing outdoors, where sunlight and rain are free.

Interesting. Something should be done. We need the energy for AI. /snark

WalletHub compared the 50 states across 40 key indicators of stress to help people determine where to live in order to achieve a more relaxing life. Our data set ranges from average hours worked per week to the personal bankruptcy rate to the share of adults getting adequate sleep.

Overall Rank* State Total Score

6 Tennessee 53.37
Work-Related Stress Rank
12
Money-Related Stress Rank
10
Family-Related Stress Rank
29
Health & Safety-Related Stress Rank
3

Tennessee ranks bad in Family-Related Stress, which includes:
Separation and Divorce Rate
Share of Single Parents
Cost of Childcare
Parental-Leave Policy
Parental Stress
Share of Parents Without Emotional Support
Share of Parents Who Changed /Quit Jobs Due to Problems with Child Care

I would have thought Tennessee would have ranked higher in money-related and health & safety related stress.