Remember Obama's "Free Trade" Deal with Colombia. Like all "free trade" deals, it is accelerating the climate crisis. There are two main reasons: The primary is that free trade means much more goods are transported using filthy fossil fuels. The other reason is that lots of other countries don't enforce environmental protection laws if they even have any.

"It’s likely that Trump won a significant number of votes in these economically anxious communities with promises to create factory jobs and to stand up to a Democratic elite that had shipped those jobs overseas (and was planning to again with the Trans-Pacific Partnership). Recall how, in the 1990s, the Clintonites and their Democratic Leadership Council buddies rewarded the corporate donor class with NAFTA, leaving displaced factory workers behind.

Congratulate yourself if you never believed the Big Lie 2016 Edition.

Amazingly, Rubio gets an awful lot right here. Now, we really don't need more than tariffs because a tariff that raises the price of the imported good or service above the equilibrium price of domestic alternatives is sufficient to protect the latter. But the Florida Republican's reasoning and the values expressed in the op-ed are pretty spot on:

Why Trump won.

The [Stolper-Samuelson] theorem was set out 20 years earlier in a seminal paper, co-authored by Paul Samuelson, one of the most celebrated thinkers in the discipline. It shed new light on an old subject: the relationship between tariffs and wages. Its fame and influence were pervasive and persistent, preceding Stolper to Nigeria and outlasting his death, in 2002, at the age of 89. Even today, the theorem is shaping debates on trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between America and 11 other Pacific-rim countries.

E.J. Dionne gets it.

"[Wells] pioneered reporting techniques that remain central tenets of modern journalism. And as a former slave who stood less than five feet tall, she took on structural racism more than half a century before her strategies were repurposed, often without crediting her, during the 1960s civil rights movement."

A few essential or interesting passages from the obituary:

“Nobody in this section of the country believes the threadbare old lie that Negro men rape white women,” Wells wrote.

Why aren't Democrats standing up for future retirees?

Cooperation between Republicans and Democrats has become something of a rarity in today's polarized political environment—except when it comes to a select handful of objectives, like enriching Wall Street banks.

Think neoliberalism/corporatism is messing things up here. Try Africa.

In an earlier post, I claimed SF's is better but in retrospect that's obviously absurd. The NY Metro area is 4 X bigger and the MTA moves many many more people to many more places. That said, there are obviously lots of problems that need improvement.

This California case comes about as close to the line as any. The state judge held that the baker did not violate either the CA or US Constitutions since she had an artist's right to decline to prepare a cake for a same sex wedding. Two women requested a cake for their impending nuptials without any special adornments. Nevertheless, the judge held, the baker had the legal right to refuse because she would have known while she was preparing the cake that it would be used to celebrate an event she found for religious reasons to be abhorrent.

Neither Trump in the SOTU nor Joe Kennedy, III, in the Democratic response mentioned global warming. But Americans are still finding all sorts of creative and effective ways to fight the fossil fuels industry.