Manufacturing is thriving in the South. Here’s why neither party can admit it. Both parties are afraid to confront the real story behind manufacturing losses. - "A big missing part of the story: Interstate competition. The Rust Belt’s manufacturing decline isn’t primarily about jobs going to Mexico. It’s about jobs going to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. To put it in college football terms, the traditional Big Ten has been losing out to the Southeastern Conference. In 1970, the Rust Belt was responsible for nearly half of all manufacturing exports while the South produced less than a quarter. Today, the roles are reversed, it is the Rust Belt that hosts less than one-fourth of all manufactured exports and the South that exports twice what the Rust Belt does."
Gabbard fires leaders of intelligence group that authored Venezuela assessment: The director of national intelligence fired top officials weeks after their group authored an assessment contradicting President Donald Trump’s legal rationale for deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members. - "'Anything that reduces its independence because policymakers don’t like the independent conclusions it reaches, is the definition of politicization they are decrying. Mike and Maria are unbelievable leaders and IC professionals, not political actors,' wrote Panikoff, now at the Atlantic Council think tank."
The Republican squirm is in full swing: Amid a series of extraordinary Trump gambits in recent days, Republicans are straining -- hard -- to avoid passing judgment. - "Trump and his top aides have floated suspending habeas corpus, pushed to accept a $400 million airplane from Qatar and sought to unilaterally lower prescription drug prices. All of these are legally dubious, and the first two are especially extraordinary."
‘Original Sin’ indicts the ‘cover-up’ of a steeply declining Joe Biden: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book is an investigative account of loyalists and family members who shielded the diminished president from full public view. - "The result of more than 200 interviews, the book is a damning account of an elderly, egotistical president shielded from reality by a slavish coterie of loyalists and family members united by a shared, seemingly ironclad sense of denial and a determination to smear anyone who dared to question the president’s fitness for office as a threat to the republic covertly working on behalf of Trump.
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"'No one thought that the Harris campaign had been without error,' they write. 'But for the most knowledgeable Democratic officials and donors, and for top members of the Harris campaign, there was no question about the father of this election calamity: It was Joe Biden.'"
White House eased China tariffs after warnings of harm to ‘Trump’s people’: The president has backtracked repeatedly on his tariff policies, creating a whiplash with downsides and few clear benefits so far. - "'It’s been completely insane,' Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, said of Trump’s tariff policies. 'When I step back from the euphoria over easing tariffs with China, what I see is the tariff rate is five times as high as when Trump took office. And we seem to have gotten nothing out of it at all.'"
The Debate That Will Determine How Democrats Govern Next Time: Did the party lose in 2024 despite Joe Biden’s economic approach, or because of it? - "The term neoliberalism is infamously hard to define and, on both the left and the populist right, often devolves into a catchall meme for everything bad in the world but the long-standing bipartisan consensus that it describes is real and meaningful. Starting in the late 1970s, leaders in both parties embraced free trade, disavowed large-scale public investment (sometimes called 'industrial policy'), favored market-friendly solutions to big social problems, and backed away from antitrust enforcement. Underlying those choices was a belief that free markets should largely be left to their own devices to maximize economic growth. The central economic disagreement between the parties was over tax rates and the size of the social safety net."
What the U.K. Deal Reveals About Trump’s Trade Strategy: The United States is settling for a tiny fraction of what it could have achieved through traditional free-trade agreements. - "If the U.K. deal is a model for deals yet to be struck with other nations, Trump will have little to show for the chaos and disruptions that his tariffs have unleashed - especially when compared with what America could have had instead."
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