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1 week ago | 
oldgoats.substack.com | Jonathan Alter
There’s an old saw: If you lay every economist end to end, they still won’t reach a conclusion. Not true. Every economist except for ex-con Peter Navarro, who was recently exposed as having invented an imaginary expert to bolster his research, concluded that President Trump’s now-paused tariff policy was not just wrong but idiotic.
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1 week ago | 
oldgoats.substack.com | Jonathan Alter
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2 weeks ago | 
oldgoats.substack.com | Jonathan Alter
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3 weeks ago | 
oldgoats.substack.com | Jonathan Alter
Wisconsin Watershed Will Shape MidtermsMusk is now an albatross around the neck of MAGA candidates and Trump knows it.
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3 weeks ago | 
oldgoats.substack.com | Jonathan Alter
With a tiny handful of exceptions, Republican politicians sold their souls to Donald Trump a long time ago. Now it’s the universities, the legal establishment, and the news media that are being subjected to Trump and Elon Musk’s extortion racket. The thuggery is moving so fast that even many liberal leaders are losing the moral courage they grew up thinking they possessed.
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1 month ago | 
oldgoats.substack.com | Jonathan Alter
Raise your hand if — like Donald Trump — you believe a long recession may be necessary to achieve your larger aims. I have to admit: Mine’s up. I’m cool with the bad times rolling for 19 months, right to the 2026 midterms. Or even for three and a half years, so that Trump becomes Herbert Hoover and we can elect a Democratic president to repair at least some of the damage. Of course, it’s easy for me and other comfortable Democrats to be cavalier about this.
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1 month ago | 
oldgoats.substack.com | Jonathan Alter
Stephen Colbert mocked the props Democrats brought to President Trump’s big boring speech. He joked that the paddles they raised — “Save Medicaid,” “Musk Steals” and “False”— made it seem as if they were bidding on an antique tea set. Whichever genius came up with that idea forgot to check whether the pool cameras in the chamber could pick up the words on the paddles. Most of the time they couldn’t. The pink outfits didn’t do much and even Rep.
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1 month ago | 
oldgoats.substack.com | Jonathan Alter
Stephen Colbert mocked the props Democrats brought to President Trump’s big boring speech. He joked that the paddles they raised — “Save Medicaid,” “Musk Steals” and “False”— made it seem as if they were bidding on an antique tea set. Whichever genius came up with that idea forgot to check whether the pool cameras in the chamber could pick up the words on the paddles. Most of the time they couldn’t. The pink outfits didn’t do much and even Rep.
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1 month ago | 
oldgoats.substack.com | Jonathan Alter
“Long Live the King.”Even George III and Louis XIV weren’t gauche enough to say that about themselves. Unlike Tsar Trump, they left it up to their supplicants (a French essayist, not King Louis, coined, “L’etat, c’est moi”). And even Julius Caesar refused to allow a diadem (crown) to be placed on his head, though his enemies in the Roman Senate thought he was declining it just for show.
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2 months ago | 
oldgoats.substack.com | Jonathan Alter
“The ship has weather’d every rack,” Walt Whitman wrote in “O Captain! My Captain!” his poem after the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, born 216 years ago today. Of course, we haven’t weathered every rack yet; lots more racks are on the way. There’s no safe harbor in this storm, and every Democrat is seasick. Is there anything we can take for that?