The Economist, April 26, 2025 Edition: Trump’s first 100 days, and beyond

Veteran reporter Marvin Kalb sheds light on battles underway at CBS where Bill Owens, executive producer of 60 Minutes, just quit/was fired, saying, “It’s clear the company is done with me.”

“Bill was under increasing pressure to go puffy on Trump,” Lesley Stahl told Kalb.

Kalb, Murrow professor emeritus at Harvard, said Shari Redstone, the majority owner of Paramount (the parent corporation of CBS News), is negotiating to sell her interest to the son of Larry Ellison, the immensely wealthy owner of Oracle, a multinational computer technology company and friend of Donald Trump.

“Under Ellison, CBS will purr like a Fox,” Kalb said.

Full column was published 4/24/25 by The Contrarian (link...)

Nick McBride is running for Knox County trustee. He announced on 4/23/25, one day after incumbent Trustee Justin Biggs hosted an underwhelming reelection kickoff in the clubroom of the new baseball stadium downtown.

Biggs’ office is under investigation by the state comptroller’s office which has already brought down two (Mike Lowe and John Duncan III) of Knox County’s last three trustees. Ed Shouse served two terms without scandal.

The Trump administration has quietly transformed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, forcing out a majority of career managers and implementing new priorities that current and former officials say abandon a decadeslong mission of enforcing laws that prohibit discrimination in hiring, housing and voting rights.

Trump upends DOJ's Civil Rights Division, sparking 'bloodbath' in senior ranks

The president decides he must back down.
He's considering lowering tariffs on China, etc.
He won't be firing Powell after all.

Now, if he would decide he doesn't want to be president after all. Some people and institutions are not falling for his demands and lies.

U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-TN Kingsport, called U.S. Repl Al Green, D-Texas, "boy" and referred to transgender people as "fairies" on an April 18 podcast interview with "F.A.M.E. Ministries."

Harshbarger's office declined to respond on the record about her comments on the "F.A.M.E. Ministries" podcast. They also said they no longer consider WBIR to be a reputable news source and will not respond to WBIR's queries for comment.

I laughed out loud when I read she said WBIR was no longer a reputable new source. For the repubs no news source is reputable if they report the truth.

Some people really know how to use Christianity.

A reminder, today is Earth Day.

Do what you can to save and maintain our planet.
Live more sustainably.
Inspire our youth.

OpEd: Mr. Trump thinks he can bully everyone into submission, but he can’t bully Adam Smith, who deals in reality. Markets know tariffs are taxes, and taxes are anti-growth. The Trump tariffs are the biggest economic policy mistake in decades, and extending the 2017 tax reform and deregulation may not compensate for all the damage.

Author Hannah Erin Lang: Dow Headed for Worst April Since 1932 as Investors Send ‘No Confidence’ Signal

Author Gerard Baker: Is Trump a Tyrant or a Savior? Maybe Just a Bumbler. The goals of his second term are ambitious. But so far the execution has been strikingly incompetent.

Will the country survive? Will we be able to remove him from office? Will it help since there is more incompetence in line?

A groundbreaking microscope at Harvard Medical School could lead to breakthroughs in cancer detection and research into longevity. But the scientist who developed computer scripts to read its images and unlock its full potential has been in an immigration detention center for two months — putting crucial scientific advancements at risk.

New images could change cancer diagnostics, but ICE detained the Harvard scientist who analyzes them

Three cities in the Volunteer State have made their way to the bottom of a new study that names the cities with the most affordable rent.

According to the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Price Index, the cost of rent has risen by more than 50% over the past 10 years, but wages haven’t increased.

These Tennessee cities rank at the bottom for most affordable rent in the U.S., study says

Among 182 cities,
Memphis ranked 153
Knoxville coming in at 152
Nashville at 102
Chattanooga at 82

U.S. egg prices increased again last month to reach a new record-high of $6.23 per dozen despite President Donald Trump’s predictions, a drop in wholesale prices and no egg farms having bird flu outbreaks.

While at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Friday, April 18, the president, 78, reacted to egg prices and the current state of the economy... Giving a shoutout to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Trump said she is doing "a great job," before he claimed that egg prices "are down 87%, but nobody talks about that."

“You can have all the eggs you want. We have too many eggs. In fact, if anything, the prices are getting too low. So I just want to let you know that the prices are down,”

At Food City yesterday, the store brand eggs were on sale for $4.99, down from $5.49. Around January, 2020, eggs were priced about $1-$2. The president is good at saying things are happening when they aren't. Why would anyone believe him when the evidence is so readily available?

Gabris said different clients have different motivations for opening an account. Many want to diversify away from the dollar, which they believe will weaken even further under the weight of the soaring U.S. debt. Switzerland’s neutral politics, stable economy, strong currency and reliable legal system are all a draw.

More rich Americans are opening Swiss bank accounts fearing U.S. risks

The Supreme Court on Monday is set to hear arguments in a case challenging a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires private insurers to cover health care screenings, tests and checkups for free.

Who in the world would be against preventative care?

Supreme Court to hear challenge to Obamacare rule on free preventive care

The 50501 movement stands for 50 States, 50 Protests, 1 Movement, and it’s a decentralized, people-powered network of resistance and resilience.

Event are scheduled across the country. So far, there are no events scheduled for Knox or Blount Counties.

UPDATE: There is an event in Blount County:
Today, Saturday, April 19, 2025
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
345 Court St
Maryville, TN 37804

The People’s Movement Stands Against:
The Billionaire Takeover – Trump, Musk, and their billionaire allies are consolidating power, buying politicians, rigging the system, and silencing the people to serve their own interests.

We’re not affiliated with any one candidate or party. We’re multi-racial, multi-generational, cross-class, and led by people who believe in nonviolence, mutual care, and democratic values.

"I really thought things would change after this administration, when we have Mr. Trump in office, things would change to the better," Atallah said. "Things actually changed to the worse."

Real estate attorney Bachir Atallah was returning from a short visit to Canada when he was detained at the border for nearly five hours. He experienced high blood pressure and needed further medical attention.

"They handcuffed me, they twisted my arm, my wrist," he said. "They walked me inside, and I was looking at my wife in the car."

We can only hope more and more people are regretting their support of the current presidential administration. Why would it have been better with T in office? Less regulation, less taxes? That does not mean better.

Rural hospital leaders are questioning whether they can continue to afford to do business with Medicare Advantage companies, and some say the only way to maintain services and protect patients is to end their contracts with the private insurers.

Medicare "Participants can enroll in traditional, government-run Medicare or in a Medicare Advantage plan run by a private insurance company."

But in recent years, average Medicare Advantage reimbursements to rural hospitals were about 90% of what traditional Medicare paid, according to a new report from the American Hospital Association. And traditional Medicare already pays hospitals much less than private plans, according to a recent study by Rand Corp., a research nonprofit.

Some rural hospitals in South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming have dropped contracts with Medicare Advantage companies.

Not a good thing if you live in a rural area and have Medicare Advantage for your health insurance.

He added that after DOGE gained access to the labor board’s systems, there was an increase in attempted logins from locations outside the United States including from a user with an internet protocol (IP) address in Russia. He wrote that the person with the Russian IP address appeared to have a correct username and password, created minutes earlier by DOGE engineers, and was blocked from logging in only because of their location.

Federal employee alleges DOGE activity resulted in data breach at labor board

Whistleblower claims DOGE may have sensitive agency data

Harvard, the nation’s richest as well as oldest university (140 years older than the U.S.) is the most prominent object of the administration’s campaign to purge “woke” ideology from America’s college campuses. The administration’s demands include sharing its hiring data with the government and bringing in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is “viewpoint diverse.”

Harvard 's response to the current presidential administration:

... It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court. The government’s terms also circumvent Harvard’s statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law. No less objectionable is the condition, first made explicit in the letter of March 31, 2025, that Harvard accede to these terms or risk the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding critical to vital research and innovation that has saved and improved lives and allowed Harvard to play a central role in making our country’s scientific, medical, and other research communities the standard-bearers for the world. These demands extend not only to Harvard but to separately incorporated and independently operated medical and research hospitals engaging in life-saving work on behalf of their patients. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle...

RFK: If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times because we have nutrition, because we have access to medicines. It’s very, very difficult for any infectious disease to kill a healthy human being.

For that to be the case, it is important to get vaccines.

In 2023, COVID-19 alone contributed to 76,446 deaths in the United States. Each year an estimated 12,000-52,000 people die from influenza in this country, depending on the severity of the flu season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even in modern times infectious disease can still take a deadly toll, and without vaccinations, those numbers would be far worse. It’s just not a risk worth taking. “Healthy people die everyday from infectious diseases,” David M. Higgins, MD, a pediatrician at the University of Colorado and Children’s Hospital Colorado, Aurora, Colorado said.

Something else to worry about... Will the CDC, etc. be reporting important data or will they be reporting false data as requested by the new administration?

During a hike in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1995, Don Barger climbed Chilhowee Mountain hoping to gaze across the valley below. All he saw was a wall of gray haze.

A 26-year-old federal regulation known as the regional haze rule has helped cut down on pollution over national parks, wilderness areas and tribal reservations, restoring some of the nation’s most spectacular natural vistas for outdoor lovers like Barger. But conservationists fear those gains may be lost after President Donald Trump’s administration announced in March the rule is among dozens of landmark environmental regulations that it plans to roll back.

Will the voters of Tennessee care? Maybe the roll back will make eggs cheaper.