TAP

Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated assurances to Congress last week that “We never sell your data” were in a class with Bill Clinton’s insistence in the Lewinsky affair that “I did not have sex with that woman.” (She had sex with him, but he did not have sex with her, get it?) Or maybe that kind of […]

So now Trump, having bashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a wrongheaded product of the despised Barack Obama, wants to join it after all. Or maybe he doesn’t. The TPP was a lousy deal. It was mainly about helping big U.S. multinationals, and did little or nothing for labor and environmental rights. And despite the latter-day […]

…when he announced yesterday that he wouldn’t seek re-election. It wasn’t just that 40 of his Republican colleagues had already declared they weren’t running again. It wasn’t just that pollsters and prognosticators were predicting the GOP would lose the House come November, and Ryan his speakership. It wasn’t even that Ryan, lacking 60 Republican votes […]

As a developer and business mogul, Donald Trump famously stiffed contractors, college students, bankers, and partners. But he forgot the first rule of living outside the law: Never stiff your lawyer. Even the Mafia knows that. It’s not yet clear whether Trump deliberately failed to repay lawyer Michael Cohen for advancing hush money to former […]

…from the Congressional Budget Office, which projected a budget deficit of $1 trillion in 2020, Republicans were already responding to the gap they created when they passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut. Their response, of course, isn’t to revisit the cuts they showered on the rich, but to cut the domestic spending that they and […]

Donald Trump has a new toy: tariffs. He seems to be putting them in roughly the same mental category as tweets: something to use to express instant frustration and vituperation. This is not exactly a policy, much less an effective one. Trump’s shadow trade war with China is reminiscent of his “mine is bigger” contest […]

…and likely re-elect—since the opposition parties refuse to coalesce—the nation’s demagogic, neo-fascist, anti-Semitic prime minister, Viktor Orbán. In the course of his most recent term, Orbán has curtailed the independence of the judiciary and the freedom of the press, rewritten Hungary’s history books to extol the nation’s Nazi-allied fascist government of the 1930s and early […]

So let’s see: The nation’s largest retailer is trying to buy one of the biggest and most predatory insurance and hospital conglomerates, Humana. That would give the combined entity a staggering amount of market power, and reduce competition among insurance companies. Supposedly, the proposed merger increases efficiency by providing more walk-in clinics, more cut-rate drugs, […]

President Trump gets almost everything wrong. But once in a while he does something approximately right. Exhibit A: Trump and his trade team have re-aligned U.S. trade policy, from pursuit of a wishful fantasy called universal “free trade” to a realistic recognition that other nations use protectionism to their advantage. The real task is to […]