If you can read this and figure out how this cozy little arrangement doesn’t add up at this point in the proceedings to obstruction of justice, you have what is known as a legal mind: In a turn that is oh-so-meta, a brand new hush money deal is now at the center of attention in Donald Trump’s ongoing hush money trial: $750,000 that prosecutors say the business mogul is dangling above Allen Weisselberg’s head to keep him testifying against his former boss. For the first time on Friday, prosecutors disclosed the strict terms of a severance agreement that the Trump Organization used to pro ..read more

This is why upper-class tax cuts are so important. 50 K [per month] don’t get you to first base in the Big Apple, not anymore: Besieged by creditors and with his income drying up, Rudolph W. Giuliani laid out an austerity program of sorts in January for a federal bankruptcy court. He would stick to a $43,000-a-month budget, he said in court filings, roughly in line with the income he drew from his retirement accounts and Social Security. That amount would cover, among other expenses, $5,000 in alimony payments to his ex-wife Judith Giuliani, $1,050 for food and housekeeping supplies and $425 ..read more

Following up on Paul’s post earlier, the FInancial Times recently had a fascinating look into why auto-related fatalities are so much higher in the US than in peer countries. The most natural explanation is Americans driving more miles and in larger cars, but this appears to be a relatively modest factor: I have good news and bad news about America’s roads. The good news is the number of people killed in traffic collisions fell by almost 4 per cent in 2023. The bad news is the mortality rate on US roads is still 25 per cent up on a decade earlier, and three times the rate of the average devel ..read more

Five years ago I did a post on how driving had become radically safer per mile driven in America over the course of the 100 years or so when car ownership gradually became a mass phenomenon. This was no doubt due to many factors, including automobile safety technology improving, mandatory seat belt and airbag laws (a subset of the first factor), greatly improved emergency medical technology, advances in communications to optimize that factor, stricter drunk driving laws, and the breakup of Led Zeppelin after John Bonham’s death from alcohol poisoning. During the pandemic, there was a lot of s ..read more

This is the grave of Mon Wallgren. Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1891, Monrad Wallgren (I don’t know Monrad seems like an insane name, but Conrad doesn’t; in any case, one can see why he went by Mon) spent the early years of his childhood there before his Swedish immigrant family moved to Everett, Washington in 1901. Wallgren just went to the public schools, graduated high school, and went to some kind of low-level business college. He then decided he wanted to go into optometry and graduated from the Washington State School of Optometry in 1914. He used that training not only to be an eye doct ..read more

Another night of playoffs means another NBA and general sports open thread. The games tonight are not necessarily that interesting–the Celtics are going to eviscerate Cleveland again. Mavs-Thunder could be interesting, but Luka hasn’t played that well lately and isn’t that healthy. The Mavs just don’t have enough pieces if that’s the case. Good job moving on from Jalen Brunson Mavs! I do feel people are really sleeping on the Thunder, which makes sense I guess given the attention to Minnesota-Denver. But I would be feeding on this if I was OKC. I do want to go back again to talk about the whi ..read more

Excellent piece by Melissa Gira Grant about how bans an abortion act as a coercive tool for domestic abusers: Nearly two years since the Dobbs decision, it’s clear that the end of Roe didn’t end abortion; rather, it has turned the decisions we make about our intimate relationships, sex, and pregnancy into opportunities for policing and punishment. Anti-abortion activists and lawmakers claimed Dobbs wouldn’t “punish the mother” for having an abortion. But even where laws don’t expressly criminalize someone for their own abortion, that abortion is considered a cri ..read more

Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) is a social movement/Internet meme which has been gaining increasing attention over the past few years, after getting its start in the early 1990s. The idea is to save a lot of money early in life so that you can stop working, or at least stop working for income, at a young or youngish age. This NYT article explores the phenomenon in an anecdotal way, and I learned from it that FIRE, which I had heard of but never really paid attention to, comes in various flavors. Wikipedia lists the most common: LeanFIRE: LeanFIRE is about achieving financial inde ..read more

Today the Court ruled 6-3 — with a “sorry we had to eat the oysters” concurrence by Gorsuch and Thomas — that Alabama could seize and retain cars owned by two women who did not actually commit and crimes without a preliminary hearing. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent argued that he lower courts should have been given more flexibility to deal with a very serious problem: The majority’s opinion held that adequate due process to redress these systematic abuses was clearly foreclosed by prior holdings. As his his longtime habit, Kavanuagh lied: Informed by the dissent that this random and obscure pr ..read more

This is how Republicans make sure their corporate masters are taken care of. We all know the drill by now: A federal agency finalizes a rule to make people’s lives a bit better, a business gets offended because the rule might slightly eat into their record profits, and the Chamber of Commerce files a lawsuit in Texas, automatically drawing a reliably conservative judge. It looks like we’re now going to have to add a part four to this pattern: The judge holds stocks in companies with a material interest in the rule. Meet Judge J. Campbell Barker, a Donald Trump appointee who is presiding over ..read more