Why DOGE is struggling to find fraud in Social Security: Claims of massive problems by Elon Musk and President Trump are at odds with the agency’s audits and reports. - "Social Security is among the most scrutinized and audited agencies in government, with frequent probes by its 500-person Office of Inspector General. It pays outside auditors to examine its books. Congress grills agency officials. Last year, a major focus in congressional hearings led by the GOP wasn’t waste or fraud — it was about Social Security being too aggressive in clawing back accidental benefit overpayments."
Chuck Schumer Is Cautious for a Reason: Under fire from his own party, the Senate Democratic leader ponders the source of his core beliefs.
The Kennedy Center Performers Who Didn’t Cancel: When does quitting count as resistance, and when is it surrender?
Musk Comes for the ‘Third Rail of American Politics’: Donald Trump promised to protect Social Security. Elon Musk didn’t.
The Angry Canadian: How Doug Ford became Ontario’s chief enforcer - "Americans tend to think of Canadians as 'nice' and find the idea of angry Canadians funny. They are wrong on both counts. Americans are nicer than Canadians - warmer, friendlier, more gregarious. Canadians are polite. The difference is subtle but important. There is an unwritten civility contract girding every aspect of Canadian society. The Canadian equivalent of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is 'peace, order, and good government,' so enshrined in the constitution since 1867.
"Most Canadians want uncomplicated lives, a desire for calm that can be misinterpreted by louder people as meekness. This is also a mistake. The bedrock of Canada's collective tranquility is the knowledge that misbehavior will not be tolerated, and, as in hockey, violations of the code of conduct will be met with hair-trigger aggression. Try cutting a line and see what happens."
The Global Populist Right Has a MAGA Problem: In Europe, Trump looks too extreme even for many right-wing insurgents.
LeBron James and the Limits of Nepotism: It’s embarrassing for everyone involved. - "Now, by appearing to threaten Smith, LeBron has not only acted like a petty strongman; he has drawn new attention to his son's disappointing season, enlarging the very story that he sought to suppress. It's a rare misstep for someone so media-savvy, who has amassed an enormous personal fortune while staying almost entirely scandal-free across a long career that began when he was still a teenager. The mistake is, perhaps, understandable. The emotions of parenthood are gigantic. They can knock anyone off their game, even the great LeBron James."
A Battle for the Soul of the West: The assault on Enlightenment values is tearing both Europe and America apart.
The GOP’s Fears About Musk Are Growing: Some Republicans are starting to worry about what DOGE could mean for them and their constituents.
The Political Fight of the Century: For the first time in decades, America has a chance to define its next political order. Trump offers fear, retribution, and scarcity. Liberals can stand for abundance. - "As the cost of living rises in blue states, tens of thousands of families are leaving them. But the left isn't just losing people. It's losing an argument. It has become a coalition of Kindness Is Everything signs in front yards zoned for single-family homes. Liberals say they want to save the planet from climate change, but in practice, many liberal areas have shut down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protested solar-power projects, leaving it to red states such as Texas to lead the nation in renewable-energy generation. Democrats cannot afford to become the party of language over outcomes, of ever more lawn signs and ever fewer working-class families.
...
"Two political orders have defined the past 100 years. Each was forged by an internal crisis and external threat. From the 1930s until the 1960s, the New Deal reigned over American life. It enlarged the government in response to the Great Depression and provided an American reply to the global specter of communism. In the 1970s and '80s, stagflation converged with the gradual decline of the Soviet Union to make way for the rise of a second era: neoliberalism. For decades, conservatives fought to make government smaller, while progressives such as Ralph Nader found ways to make government weaker by submerging the state in lawsuits. If the New Deal birthed the age of bureaucracy, neoliberalism produced an age of vetocracy. Now we are living with the consequences of both. We have a government that is, oddly, both big and weak."
The Wild Trump Theory Making the Rounds on Wall Street: QAnon for tariffs - "To begin with, two of the principal goals are in direct conflict: Weakening the dollar would require foreign countries to sell off their large holdings of U.S. treasury bonds, but that sell-off would cause interest rates to rise, making the U.S. debt even more expensive to service. (This is where the magical 'century bonds' supposedly come in: foreign countries lining up to give America enormous heaps of free money.) Even the core premise underlying the theory—that a weaker dollar is the key to reviving American manufacturing—is shaky at best. Almost every rich country, not just America, has seen a sharp manufacturing decline in recent decades, suggesting that the trend is about much more than the relative strength or weakness of a single currency. 'It’s one thing if a plan makes sense in theory but not in practice,' Steven Kamin, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute and the former director of the Division of International Finance at the Federal Reserve, told me. 'This one doesn’t even add up in theory.'"
