Top advisers became worried about the political fallout

I finished the book A Song Everlasting by Ha Jin. This story of Tian opens with him as the lead tenor in a Chinese cultural exchange choir on tour in New York. One of Tian’s friends who had already established himself in the US invites Tian to sing at a cultural event. At Tian’s insistence the tour director lets him stay in the US a couple extra days. But the event is culturally Taiwanese, not Chinese. So when Tian gets back to Beijing he condemned for his foolishness. He is asked to turn in his passport. Instead, he uses it to flee back to New York, leaving behind wife Shuna and teenage daughter TingTing. That’s all in the first ten percent of the book. The rest of the story is Tian trying to establish a singing career in the US, mostly among the Chinese diaspora. There are also numerous efforts by the Chinese government to get him to return to the motherland or at least stop singing songs not part of the required propaganda canon. There are attempts to discredit him when he refuses. Along the way Tian wrestles (a bit) with whether he would be better in a life of comparable ease in China singing propaganda or not singing at all or be a struggling artist in America able to sing what he wants. He laments the growing figurative distance with his wife brought on by his literal distance from her. There is even a comparison of Chinese and American health systems. The story is enjoyable, though I wondered how to characterize the writing. Plain might work. Simplistic seems too simple. It seems rather emotionally bland and at times there seems to be a lot of explaining. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported on the details of the on again, off again tariffs imposed on Mexico and Canada. Part of the reversal appears to be Mexican and Canadian leaders pushing back, part of it is reports on what tariffs will do to the auto industry and agriculture, and part of it is a big drop in the stock market. Kos of Kos wrote that one should not underestimate Canada. They may be small in population, but the nasty guy is turning on their own patriotism. What looked like a landslide for the Conservative Party in October’s election is now close to an even match with the Liberals. Canada also has some Americans on its side. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, who had disparaged Kamala Harris, calls the tariffs the “dumbest” in history. Rural Americans and their newspapers and senators are complaining about what tariffs would do to the agriculture economy of red states. In his first time in the Oval Office the nasty guy imposed tariffs and had to bail out farmers. This time there may not be enough money in the federal budget for a farmer bailout. I had written a while back that Republicans and Project 2025 called for privatizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the department that runs the National Weather Service and issues weather warnings – and giving two reasons for it. One, NOAA funds research into climate change which they want to stop and two, they wan a company to make money off what the government is giving away for free. Last week Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that Musk and DOGE have started firing workers at NOAA, aiming to cut 10% of 11,758 workers. Democrats condemned the move.

While Musk and DOGE have been unable to prove they have found any fraud or provided taxpayers with any meaningful savings, the San Francisco Chronicle points out that while the National Weather Service’s budget is around $1.4 billion, which averages to around $4 per tax payer, it is estimated to provide Americans with $102.1 billion in benefits. That's a lot of bang for the buck, according to any metric. You could even call it a model of “efficiency.”

Are you rich enough to pay for your daily weather report? Lisa Needham of Kos said a week ago we should celebrate the small wins. There are buffer zones around abortion clinics that limit how close anti-choice protesters can get, a space that is rather small. The zones are more important since the Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion. Yet, this same court declined to hear a case that would have allowed them to declare buffer zones unconstitutional. Anti-choice demonstrators hate buffer zones.

They argue they have a First Amendment right to “counsel” people who are going to abortion clinics, framing their efforts as gentle, persuasive conversations. Instead, what the record in Turco showed actually happened was that anti-choice protestors blocked access to the clinic, assaulted patient escorts, screamed directly into patients’ faces, and videotaped them. Additionally, a meager eight-foot gap doesn’t prevent clinic patients from hearing protestors or seeing their signs. So, in terms of a First Amendment right to express oneself, all the buffer zones prevent is getting in the face of a patient and making them feel physically threatened. Protestors can still scream and wave their pictures of bloody fetuses—they just have to do it a few feet away. According to Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s failure to take up these cases and throw out buffer zones entirely was an “abdication of our judicial duty.” Yes, Thomas is big mad that only he and Justice Samuel Alito would have agreed to hear the cases. As Mark Joseph Stern pointed out over at Slate, it isn’t unexpected that Thomas thought his conservative colleagues would join him in overruling Hill and ending buffer zones.

The nasty guy has no interest in stopping anti-choice protesters from being violent. He showed it by granting clemency to protesters who had blockaded clinics. Also, Republicans are working to pass a national abortion ban. So this small step by the Supremes is welcome. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic:

Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.” Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations). Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.

Way down in the comments Jesse Duquette posted a cartoon with the caption, “When standing up to fascists, it’s important to always maintain a sense of decorum - Democratic Party proverb.” The cartoon shows a landing craft approaching the D-Day beach and one soldier says, “What if we tried wearing pink and holding little signs instead?” A meme posted by exlrrp and written by Brian Tyler Cohen says:

The US military has removed photos of the B-29 bomber “Enola Gay” – which dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan – apparently because it contains the word “gay,” which violates their new anti-DEI rules.

And way down in the comments is a cartoon by Jonesy for Private Eye Magazine showing a field with a scarecrow wearing a large dress and a young man sewing frills along the bottom. His parents are watching. His mother says, “I think our son is trying to tell us his future isn’t in farming.” In the comments of a roundup from a week ago is a meme posted by Annie:

Believing a small group of billionaires are suddenly working tirelessly for the benefit of the working class requires a spectacular level of stupidity.

A cartoon by Toonerman shows this exchange:

Red hat man: I didn’t think it was MY federal job they was gonna cut. A dog: But if other folks lose their jobs that’s okay? ... you’re a selfish prick.