If he didn’t have whatever his weird fetish is, dude was whip smart and a decidedly effective politician.

Yeah, free trade, with reasonable protections for things like IP and maybe a few industries of “strategic national value” or whatever is fine. At the very least, blatantly protectionist trade policies are a one way ticket to economic obsolescence.

Lawyers for Smollett release a statement saying, “As a victim of a hate crime who has cooperated with the police investigation, Jussie Smollett is angered and devastated by recent reports that the perpetrators are individuals he is familiar with.”

Costas agreed to return as host “out of loyalty” to then-NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol, “as kind of a good soldier.” This was all it took to make Costas comfortable with feeling what he once described as stupid, apparently.

Uh, right, but clearly it wasn’t superior enough to do what most people expected them to do, which was try to engage in a PR campaign to stay.

Yeah I think, fundamentally, once it became clear how loud the activist segment of the NYC populace was going to crow about this, this became a hard pass, because it’s not that hard to find places they could settle down that have a large enough white collar work force to suit their needs.

I mean, this is all just how you want to frame the narrative.  Another possibility might be that Amazon didn’t view NYC as a superior enough location to bother fighting for.

Interspersed between rounds of DotA 2, Mass Effect 2.

I think this is likely the correct take. The only thing that gives me some pause is the fact that the President’s authority to declare a national emergency is prettay prettay broad, and there’s not exactly a boatload of court precedent around what, specifically, constitutes an emergency.

I mean, there’s also the courts, but ultimately, letting him do something they don’t have a problem with is ... kind of the prerogative of a legislature?

All of this pales in comparison to his worst crime, which is how much he dampened the once pure joy of eating a Keebler cookie.

Eh, maybe. There are plenty of times Trump has set out to do things that everyone has said “The President can’t do that!” Hell, the last several Presidents have done that.

Yeah, no.  

This sort of thing has been happening for decades though. For the most part, Presidents do it with respect to things that are a lot less highly publicized and politically charged, for example Obama did it by trying to be slick with his NLRB appoitments, but this is a part of a more fundamental shift in our government…

proprietors gripe that the margins on foie gras and caviar are frequently lower

It’s not quite time to start getting the vapors folks. There’s a lot that has to happen between a national emergency declaration and wasting money on a wall. There are a lot of logistical problems that an emergency declaration doesn’t just blow past, the types of logistical problems that the Trump administration may…

What do you do for a living?

What was overblown was the concern that Amazon was somehow going to be some sort of exponential acceleration of it.

But keep in mind that Amazon wants to focus on the actual city itself. It doesn’t intend to hire a bunch of suburban commuters, it wants to hire people who want the whole “walkable urban village” vibe.

I’m talking about Medicare.