Author: A.T.

On last night’s CBS Evening News, Trump said “we have hundreds of thousands of murderers in our country who were let in by Sleepy Joe Biden and ICE is trying to get them out.”

This is alarming.

And untrue.

Hundreds of mass shootings have been carried out by native born Americans.  Not one that I could find was committed by an undocumented immigrant who arrived during the Biden presidency.

The National Institute of Justice reports that undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely to commit murder than U.S. citizens.

Undocumented immigrants account for (very roughly) 5% of the U.S. population.  They are less than half as likely as the native born to be murderers.  Thus, they account for (very roughly) 500 of those 20,000 murders.  Perhaps half of which are committed against each other (if rough rules of thumb hold), so 250 against U.S. citizens.

There are about 7,000 pedestrian deaths each year.

> Should we outlaw vehicles?  Cut the urban speed limit to 10 miles an hour?  Or just do our sensible best to reduce this number without causing mass societal and economic disruption?

There are nearly 50,000 deaths from firearms each year (versus just 1 or 2 in Japan and 25 or so in Australia).

> Should we ban all firearms?  Or just do our sensible best to ban assault weapons and cop-killer bullets, bump stocks and ghost guns; require gun owners (as we do drivers) to pass a safety test, get a license, and register their purchases — running “universal background checks” to prevent criminals and the mentally ill from so easily making those purchases in the first place.

There may be 250 murders of us U.S. citizens by undocumented immigrants each year.

> Should we spend tens of billions of dollars a year to deploy a poorly trained force of masked secret police to round up “hundreds of thousands” of undocumented immigrant murderers when you’re FAR more likely to be murdered by your spouse, a family member, or someone you know?  Or should we just do our sensible best to give local law enforcement the resources they request to deal with this important, tragic, but blessedly small, extra burden?

GUESS WHERE JEFFREY EPSTEIN ALLEGEDLY SAID TRUMP AND MELANIA FIRST HAD SEX

I mean, who cares — right?  We know he’s an adjudicated rapist and that he and Epstein were best friends.  We know he has never been big into fidelity or monogamy and that he lied about the $130,000 he denied paying a porn star.  So none of this is news.  I pass it on only because MAGA has long demanded to see the Epstein files.  Trump himself signed the law Congress overwhelmingly sent to his desk requiring their release by December 19.

So where are they?

HYMC

I sold some January 2017 HYMC calls yesterday for $11.60 that give the buyer the right to “call HYMC shares away from me” at $50 each, up from the $3 or so I had paid.

But I also bought back — for a loss — an equal number of the calls I had sold with a $35 strike price.  The folks buying these calls think there’s a good chance HYMC will be a lot higher within a year, and my bet — in eating a modest loss to raise my upside from 35 to 50 — is that they’re right.

NO NEED TO CLICK: THE HEADLINES SAY IT ALL

Trump’s Smithsonian censorship agenda is escalating.

E.P.A. to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution.

‘Incomprehensibly stupid:’ How U.S. cuts in vaccine recommendations will impact Canadians.

DOJ launches criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

Trump calls for $1.5 trillion military budget — a 50% increase, none of it aimed at aiding Ukraine.

Trump is trying to change how the midterm elections are conducted.

CAROLE CADWALLADR: Peter Thiel’s New Model Army

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This newsletter is going to cover three crucial subjects today:

1. How Britain’s national security is hopelessly compromised. We’ve sold out our military to a key Trump ally in what I believe is a catastrophically naive and dangerous deal. (If you’re American, this affects you too.)
2. The global war on truth. And why sticking to the facts is now a radical act.
3. How we fight back. In which I post a whole smorgasbord of inspiring videos that I grabbed off social media that you didn’t know you needed.

I’ve never started with a bulleted list before but then I can’t remember a NATO country threatening to invade a NATO country before either. I figured you might need 3) after reading 1) and 2).

. . .

[We Brits] are now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump fascist project. We’ve sold out everyone in America who’s trying to fight back against it.

I’m not using the f-word lightly or facetiously. I’ve avoided it for a year. But what is so dangerous right now is the assault on truth, on facts, on the evidence of our own eyes. What is happening right now in America is fascism.  And we, the UK, are now up to our necks in it too.

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Former-Republican strategist Rick Wilson:

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. . . We have squandered the astounding inheritance of ten generations of Americans before us, shattered the bond of faith and trust in a system of representative government unique in the history of the world, and replaced it with a grotesque mirror image of freedom, liberty, and self-government.

What has replaced it is dark, sick, and broken. It is a government led by the most egregious criminal in American political history, a man with a dark soul, a twisted mind racked with mental disorders and pathologies, and a will to power that rivals the dictators and strongmen we once understood without a blink of doubt or question to be the antithesis of our values. He is the kind of man Americans once sent their son to fight and defeat.

He is served by a party, a movement, and a media that view him as a nearly religious figure, a man of destiny willing to smite the people and cultures they hate. . . .

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BRIDGES VERSUS BUSES

Imagine you have to get a whole lot of people across a river 40 weeks from now.  You need to begin building a bridge long before you charter the buses.

NOW is the time to support infrastructure (the bridges); next summer and fall is the time to support candidates (the buses).

If everyone followed this strategy, declining all candidate appeals until next summer, it would be a problem.  For better or worse (worse, actually), few do.

All 50 state Democratic parties rely in some measure on an adequately funded DNC, as do the 8,000 or so Democrats who will be running for various offices November 3.

> If you can, please dig deep to help fund the opposition party.

> Join Indivisible.

> Volunteer with your local Democratic party (just Google to find it).  If it’s semi-moribund, inject your energy to revitalize it!  Get friends to join you!

We alone can fix it.

Fareed Zakaria: Trump is teaching the world to fear America.  His as-always must-read piece concludes:

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[The] strategic capital built over decades is now being squandered. And in the long run, an America that behaves like an utterly self-interested predator on the world stage will not grow stronger; it will grow lonelier. Allies will hedge. Partners will search for options. Neutrals will inch away. And the balancing that history predicted all along may finally arrive — not because America became weak, but because it forgot the real source of its strength.

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Putin is winning.

Jonathan Alter:  How the Murder of Renee Good Changes the Stakes for Good

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No one can predict how the murder of Renee Good will change this country. But there’s an encouraging history of change the aftermath of certain violent and tragic events, and a poor track record for governments that shoot their own people in the streets. Even when this story is pushed out of the headlines by some new outrage, we may look back on it as the moment when Donald Trump lost his grip.

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Speaking of stories “pushed out of the headlines,” have the Epstein files that MAGA demanded been released?

The two are loosely connected because the Administration is claiming ICE agents are arresting child rapists — Tom Homan just said it repeatedly on “Meet The Press” — and that’s one of their justifications for going into Home Depot parking lots targeting non-white people and asking for proof of citizenship.

According to MAGA, it’s not just immigrants we should suspect of child rape.  MAGA want to see the Epstein files!  So does Congress!  Even if it winds up hurting some of Trump’s friends.

Carl: “The Republican view is that it’s okay to shoot and kill a woman disregarding orders AND using her car as a weapon to knock you down or kill you.”

→ The President says the agent was run over by her car and went to the hospital.  Yet you’ve seen the videos.  They show him on the side of the car shooting her in the face.  Did he get run over, then jump up and shoot her?  Or did he shoot her from the side of the car and then sprint in front of the car and get run over?

As tragic as Renee Good’s death was, there are two things that are worse.

First, that rather than do what any other administration would have done — lament the tragic miscalculation and pray for the family, pending further investigation — they just lied and lied and lied, calling this woman with her dog in the back seat and dolls brimming out of her glove compartment — a “terrorist.”

Second, that so many good people, like Carl, actually buy the lies.

THANK YOU, RFK, JR.

Georgia toddler paralyzed by rare flu complication as CDC warns of rising cases.  (If only she had gotten her kids vaccinated.)

South Carolina measles outbreak grows by nearly 100, spreads to North Carolina and Ohio

HYMC

I’ve previously explained how it could make sense to sell “covered calls” against some of your shares.  Friday, I sold for $8.60 the right to buy shares from me at $42 that were then selling for $27.50 (and that we bought two years ago for $2.30 and six months ago for $3.20) anytime until January 15 of next year. Got all that?  Read it very slowly and it could make sense.

Let’s say HYMC drops to zero.  At least I get to keep that $8.60.

Let’s say a year from now, when the calls expire, it’s still around $27.  I have my shares that can no longer be called away from me; plus that lovely extra $8.60.

Let’s say it’s $42.  The calls expire worthless to the buyer, but I have shares worth $42 and got to keep the $8.60.

Let’s say the stock zooms and my shares are called away for $42 each.  I get $42 on top of the $8.60 — $50.60.  Yes, I’ve lost whatever further zooming occurred; if the stock had hit $100, hindsight would be mocking me.  But I’d still have the shares against which I have not yet written calls.

Also, I can always buy the calls back if they haven’t been exercised.

Let’s say the stock runs up to $40.  If that happened tomorrow, the calls would jump a lot in price, so I would take a loss buying them back (though not a dollar-for-dollar-loss; the stock would have risen by $12.50 but the calls would likely have risen by somewhat less).  But if it were not tomorrow but (say) Thanksgiving, the calls — worthless until the stock rises above 42, and with only a few weeks left to run — wouldn’t cost much at all.  It could make sense to buy them back at that point and then sell some new calls, at a higher strike price, with another year or two to run.

There are a million variations of this, and what you decide to do might depend in part on whether your shares are in a taxable account or an IRA.  But you get the idea.

IN CASE YOU MISSED THIS ONE

I once asked Warren Buffett why he’s a Democrat.  He didn’t come to it without some thought, after all — his dad was a deeply conservative Republican Congressman.  But if you read John Rawls, Warren told me, how can you be anything else?

There’s much to be said for traditional Republicans — Romney was certainly right about Russia!  Nixon signed into law both the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Environmental Protection Agency, Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system and warned against the military industrial complex, George W. Bush launched the PEPFAR program that has saved an estimated 25 million lives.  But Trump’s Republican party has veered wildly off course.

Appending the term “socialist” to the term Democrat is not a slur.  If anything, it helps to define Democrats as the party of Jesus Christ and anyone else — Gandhi? Maimonides? Muhammed? you? — who cared, or cares, about the welfare of all mankind, not just their own.

In case you’re in a position to help fund the opposition, please click here.

But first . . .

OPRT

Closing at $5.32 yesterday, OPRT is selling at less than 4X its expected earnings of $1.30-$1.40/share.  The case can be made it’s worth a lot more.  These three insiders seem to agree — the chief credit officer, the chief legal officer, and the controller — having this week reported year-end purchases of $1+ million, in one case more than doubling his holdings from 28,090 shares to 73,980. 

As always: only to be bought with money you can truly afford to lose.  But gosh.

PRKR

It’s a good thing I plan to live forever because — other than BOREF, which could take even longer than that — PRKR just drags on and on.  But I’ve learned two things since Uncle Lou gave my brother and me 10 shares of General Motors 68 years ago:

(1) Sometimes, patience pays off.  I had to wait 35 years for one to finally pay off last year — for more than 50 times my money . . . which is a good thing, because . . .

(2) Often, it doesn’t. (GM went bankrupt in 2009.)

I don’t know into which category PRKR will ultimately fall.  The company director who recently bought 5 million shares must think it’s the former.  But even though its lawsuits against Qualcomm just drag on and on, jury selection in its suit against MediaTek (Case 6:22-cv-01163-ADA) is scheduled to begin March 23 — so who knows?

Even more than with OPRT:  only to be bought with money you can truly afford to lose!

MINNEAPOLIS

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“The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense.” — Trump

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You almost surely know the truth (here’s a post, from Charlie Sykes; and here’s Andrew Yang’s thoughtful take).

But whom are you going to believe?  Donald Trump, a very stable genius who alone can fix it — or your lying eyes?

The Republican view is that it’s okay to shoot and kill a woman disregarding orders from a masked ICE officer.

Similarly, it’s the Republican view that if you’re a suspected cocaine trafficker driving your boat south toward Trinidad in international waters, Pete Hegseth has the right to murder you.

Ah, cocaine.

Which brings us, finally, to . . .

LITTLE NARCO

The truth is, I don’t actually care what he was doing as a teenager.

What matters is what he’s doing today.

He’s Secretary of State!  He’s Acting National Security Advisor!  He’s Acting Archivist of the United States!  (Is that where the Epstein files will ultimately reside?)

He’s responsible for what’s left of the agency that for 65 years projected our soft power — and humanity — across the world!

Still, did you know all this?

I didn’t.  Pretty colorful.

From The American Prospect.

It begins:

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If you’re a little too online, you likely know that Marco Rubio as a teenager made extra cash working for his late brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia. The business imported and sold exotic animals as a front for moving nearly a half million pounds of cocaine and marijuana. It was later said, when kingpin Mario Tabraue became a main character on the monstrously popular documentary series Tiger King, that the cocaine was actually stuffed into the bodies of vipers and boa constrictors, though an 80-page indictment of the enterprise makes no mention of that, and Tabraue has been known to sue those who accuse him of animal cruelty.

“I dealt to support my animal habit,” Tabraue humbly told the Netflix documentarians about the drug ring that imported and distributed $79 million worth of drugs between 1976 and 1987. It was Rubio’s job, according to Manuel Roig-Franzia’s 2012 biography of the then-senator, to build the cages.

Rubio has sworn he knew nothing about the drugs. He was only 16. (Admittedly, one of Cicilia’s co-defendants had been only 16 when Tabraue had allegedly ordered him to murder his estranged wife to stop her from telling the feds what they’d done with the body of another guy they’d murdered the year earlier.) Not that it matters, of course: What politician doesn’t have a felon relative? But for Rubio in particular, the connection seems too incongruous with his long-cultivated squeaky-cleanness. As a third grader, Rubio convinced his family to convert to Mormonism to better fit in with their wholesome new neighbors during a short stint living in Las Vegas. He spent every spare hour of high school obsessing over football, and his wife attends masses at multiple churches multiple times per week.

When Univision broke the story of his ties to Cicilia’s business in 2011, Team Rubio declared war on the entire network, first dispatching surrogates like Ana Navarro to pressure executives to shelve the story, then convincing a host of other Republican politicians to boycott its debate on the nonsensical premise that the network had attempted to use the information about his brother-in-law as “blackmail” for the purposes of “extorting” an interview out of him.

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And then it gets more serious.

I don’t know enough to assess its over-arching assertion . . .

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. . . Rubio’s approval ratings are the highest in the Republican Party, even as he is the architect of what is arguably Trump’s single most cynical policy: the scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country, in the name of fighting drug cartels.

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. . . but things like Trump’s as-yet-unexplained pardon of the former Honduran President just 18 months into his 45-year prison sentence keep me from dismissing it out of hand.

And, boy, does the story ever run deep and wide, with tons of CIA involvement, to before Secretary Rubio was even born.

GREENLAND, ETC.

Could we please get back to boring old normalcy?

Where we’re by and large the good guys?

Fighting countries that invade their neighbors rather than threatening to become one?

Could we see the Epstein files?

Georgia’s lifelong Republican former Lieutenant Governor, Goeff Duncan, explains why he’s now a Democrat (38 seconds).

(Top line: “I’m guided by our family motto — that doing the right thing will never be the wrong thing — and this is the right thing to do.”)

Releasing the Epstein files is also the right thing to do — and it’s the law, passed by Congress and signed by Trump.  So where are they?

Another right thing to do would be to enact tax reforms of the kind described Tuesday that would touch only the top 1%, in whose favor — much as we love and admire them — the current system is too heavily skewed.

Carl sees it differently.  He sent me a photo of me flanked by Zohran Mamdani and Karl Marx, writing:

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Andy, there are no billionaires in Cuba.  Take Mamdani, Bernie and move there?

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“And yet,” I replied, “there are billionaires in Europe.  Sweden alone has 45 – more per capita than here.  Do you consider Europe a shithole of oppressed unhappy people?”

The truth is, I’ve shaken hands with Mayor Elect and have high hopes for him. (Not least, that he will modify his views on successful charter schools and gifted-learning programs.)

The one time I shook hands with Bernie, years before he became so famous, he struck me as grumpy — but for good reason.

(I was home sick the day Karl Marx came to my high school.)

On the spectrum from pure from-each-according-to-his-ability-to-each-according-to-his-needs communism, at the extreme left . . . to pure survival-of-the-fittest libertarianism, at the extreme right — both utopian extremes are disasters.  The former, because humans are not wired to be selfless; poverty, corruption, and tyranny inevitably follow.  The latter, because it’s wildly unfair, cruel, hard-hearted — “unChristian,” if you will — and leads to revolution.)

Most First World democracies, like the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Europe, Japan, Australia, and Israel, among others, fall pretty comfortably in the middle.

If public education, public health programs, social safety nets, and progressive tax rates make them “Democratic socialist,” they should wear the label proudly. 

In a world where artificial intelligence and robots will handle most of the routine jobs that humans now do, we’re going to have to get used to the idea of “spreading the wealth” and accepting the leisure that centuries of scientific striving and technological progress are rapidly making possible.

Should the fruits of a thousand generations’ hard work creativity be concentrated in the hands of a few trillionaires while the rest scrape to get by?  Or should we continue to modify the “Democratic socialist” construct that leaves plenty of room for wealth and incentive . . . but that affords most people life, liberty, and the likelihood of basic creature comforts and dignity in their pursuit of happiness?

You may recall that I once asked Warren Buffett why he’s a Democrat.  He didn’t come to it without some thought, after all — his dad was a deeply conservative Republican Congressman.  But if you read John Rawls, Warren told me, how can you be anything else?

There’s much to be said for traditional Republicans — Romney was certainly right about Russia!  Nixon signed into law both the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Environmental Protection Agency, Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system and warned against the military industrial complex, George W. Bush launched the PEPFAR program that has saved an estimated 25 million lives.  But Trump’s Republican party has veered wildly off course.

Appending the term “socialist” to the term Democrat is not a slur.  If anything, it helps to define Democrats as the party of Jesus Christ and anyone else — Gandhi? Maimonides? Muhammed? you? — who cared, or cares, about the welfare of all mankind, not just their own.

In case you’re in a position to help fund the opposition, please click here.

Really?

Rachel Maddow explains (12 minutes).

We knew a lot of this; but to hear it all put together — just wow.

I can’t account for the price of a Melania coin (just under 14 cents) . . . or explain what one actually is (I have no idea, really) . . . or why people paid as much as $8.48 for each less than a year ago.  Losing 98% in 10 months is impressive.

On the other hand, this article about the National Debt . . . (which fell steadily as a proportion of GDP from 1946 until Ronald Reagan went overboard cutting taxes on the rich and sent it heading back up, with subsequent giant assists from George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump) . . . may explain why the prices of gold, silver (and copper, among others) reach new highs more or less daily.

And why our shares of HYMC, now up about 12-fold, may (possibly!) have a lot further to run.

More to the point, it may help to explain why we all should favor tax hikes of the type that the Patriotic Millionaires and others have been proposing.

Not to pay off the $38 trillion debt — there’s no need to do that — but to get it again growing slower in most years than the economy as a whole, as it did from 1946 through 1981.

Things like:

> Ending the “stepped-up basis at death” and other tax loopholes that make the estate tax a joke.

> Raising the rate on estates above $100 million; higher still above $1 billion and $10 billion.

> Ending, finally, the carried interest loophole.

> Taxing income from wealth at the same rate as income from work (on income above, say, $1 million) — the Equal Tax Act — though I would keep the Qualified Small Business Stock exemption that incentivizes innovation.*

> Raising the rate to 45% (say) on personal income above $10 million.

> Raising the corporate rate from its current 21% to perhaps 26%.

> Adequately funding the IRS to collect those taxes.

> Imposing a voluntary corporate tax surcharge — like this — that would only begin to kick in if the corporation’s highest paid employee (typically, the CEO) makes more than 50 times as much as her median employee . . . and steepen gradually to 5% when top total compensation exceeded 1,000 times the median.  Voluntary, because the board of directors could avoid it by choosing to raise median pay and/or reduce CEO pay if they felt it was in the best interest of the shareholders.  If inequality has become a problem in America (and does anyone think it has not?), this would be a nice little way to lean against it.

None of this would affect 99% of taxpayers (or voters).**

Are you in?

*To make tougher capital gains treatment more palatable, we should perhaps consider netting out inflation in calculating taxable gains.  So if you had bought something for $1,000,000 40 years ago and sold it now for $2,500,000, you’d have no tax to pay, since — after inflation — you’d actually have lost money.  Now that virtually all tax preparation is computerized, the logistics of the calculations might not be difficult.

**To the 1% who are affected, the IRS should send heartfelt congratulations on their success and the nation’s sincere thanks for their badly needed tax revenue.

I don’t know how much of that is fair.  A lot of things can be true at the same time.

The bottom line, as Richard Haas expressed it to Fareed Zakaria yesterday, is that in his 5 years as president, Trump has upended 80 years of American global leadership based on alliances and “soft power.” He prefers to go it alone (he alone can fix it) surrounded by yes men and billionaires, unbridled by Congress or international law — or common civility — in a world where he controls North and South America, “our back yard,” leaving Putin to control his back yard and Xi, his.

If nothing else, it’s made him and his family much, much richer.  And, for now at least, has kept us from seeing the Epstein files.

PREVENTING ELECTION FRAUD . . .

. . . is hugely important to Republicans despite it’s being of no consequence, as it is vanishingly rare.*

But!

When laws are broken on behalf of Trump . . . even when it results in death and global condemnation . . . well, that’s different.  Witness the pardoned January 6 felons.

Or, Tuesday night, one of Trump’s final “truths” of 2025, as reported by FOX’s Denver affiliate:

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President Donald Trump is ending 2025 wishing “only the worst” for leaders in Colorado in response to the imprisonment of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who is behind bars after being convicted for her role in a 2021 election security breach.

In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, the president called the democratic Governor Jared Polis a “scumbag” and the republican District Attorney Daniel Rubenstein “disgusting” for not making efforts to release Peters.

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“May they rot in hell” Trump concluded in the spirit of the holidays.

For the indicted war criminal Putin, by contrast, who helped elect him, he had nary a bad word all year.

*I asked Copilot whether that was a fair characterization and was told, “Yes — based on the best available data, voter fraud in the United States is vanishingly rare.  Even the Heritage Foundation’s own database shows extremely low rates.  Heritage — a conservative think tank that actively looks for fraud — has compiled decades of cases. In Arizona, over 25 years, with 42.6 million ballots cast, Heritage identified 36 cases of fraud.  In Pennsylvania, over 30 years and 100+ million votes, Heritage found 39 cases.”

Even if you assume only 1 instance in 1,000 is ever reported, it’s still statistically insignificant.  Thirty-nine thousand cases out of over 100 million votes is nothing — especially when you consider that as much voter fraud crimes may be committed to favor Republicans as Democrats — if not more.  Like this one, for example.  So they likely largely cancel each other out, bringing that 39,000 back down to just a few thousand . . . out of over more than 100 million.   

When you think of how hard it is to get legitimate voters out to vote, imagine how hard it is to get ineligible people to risk deportation or prison in order to cast an illegal vote.