Paul DeOrd

Immune to job-creator Kool-Aid, engaged in economic development & guru of nothing - just checking it all out.

[Tommy Vietor @TVietor08]

We need an @NFL version of this immediately

[Western Sentinel 🌍 @PulseGeo25562]

@RadioFreeTom

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Man, Xi must have scared the hell out of him

[60 Minutes @60Minutes]

On March 23, more than $800 million was staked on the chance of oil prices dropping. Fifteen minutes later, an announcement from the president sent the price of oil plummeting by more than 10%.

It has not been determined if the trade was made with inside information or if the trader was in the U.S. https://t.co/mAiTA8WP7a

[Molly Jong-Fast @MollyJongFast]

This graphic from @FT shows trump has suddenly gotten very interested in trading stocks

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

Jim Crow's system of legalized segregation was real. It was real that Rosa Parks was ordered to move to the back of the bus because she was black. It was real that she was arrested, tried, and convicted of a crime for refusing to sit in the back of the bus. What's fake is Curtis Yarvin's mindless nattering.

[John Harwood @JohnJHarwood]

Franklin Graham is the perfect exemplar of moral decline

[Paul Farhi @farhip]

Footnote: Tillis’ vote to confirm Hegseth as defense secretary brought the tally to a 50–50 deadlock after R senators Collins, McConnell and Murkowski joined Dems in opposing him. His vote allowed VP Vance to cast the tie-breaking vote, confirming Hegseth.

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

No American president has ever sought to benefit so directly, and so immediately, from his own political decisions. Unprecedented

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

JUST IN: A Trump judicial nominee was asked point blank: is Trump eligible to run for a third term?

Their answer: “I would have to review the actual wording…”

Sen. Chris Coons then asked every nominee in the room to confirm the Constitution bars a third term.

Silence.

Every single one of them refused to say it.

Trump is appointing judges who won’t affirm the 22nd Amendment to his face.

Never stop connecting the dots.

[Mark Zandi @Markzandi]

We have a year’s worth of economic data since Liberation Day, when President Trump announced much higher tariffs on most imported goods and countries, and the data are definitive; the tariffs have done significant damage to the economy. Since that day, job growth has come to a standstill, with only the non-traded healthcare industry adding meaningfully to payrolls. Also, since that day, inflation has accelerated, with the consumer expenditure deflator increasing at a 3% year-over-year pace, up from 2.5% before the tariffs and well above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. And the trend lines don’t look good, especially as the economic fallout from the Iran War hits with full force. The higher energy and other commodity prices caused by the war threaten to do even more economic damage than the tariffs, further undermining growth and pushing inflation higher. The U.S. economy is resilient, but just how resilient is set to be tested.

[Huey K. Bridgeforth(@huey-bridgeforth.bsky.social) @hkb73]

Norman Rockwell painting "Southern Justice (Murder in Mississippi)." It depicts the final moments in the lives of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan over 50 years ago for registering people to vote.

[Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak]

SaaS company adding AI features

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Russia may attempt “Crimea 2.0” in Svalbard, Norway. At least the U.S. Atlantic Council says it is the most possible place and model —The Times.

Russia is legally mining coal on Norwegian territory, 700 miles from its nuclear submarine base in Murmansk.

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[Steven N. Durlauf @sndurlauf]

The Supreme Court decision LOUISIANA v. CALLAIS, the final stage of the Supreme Court's evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, is an example of systemic discrimination in action. The judicial *system* has acted to delimit the voting protections afforded African Americans. As such, it has rendered the judicial system less capable of rectifying the harms of past discrimination and in preventing future discriminatory actions.

Further, the opinion by Samuel Alito is breathtaking in its arrogance and lack of understanding of social science. Here are three examples.

1. "First, vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination."

While this statement may, outside of context be true, it is irrelevant and bespeaks the absence of an understanding of systems with endogenous variables. The question for the VRA here and elsewhere is whether its provisions were ensuring an equal place for African Americans in the collective decision making that produced various strides. This is the relevant question. In other words, Alito does not understand that the extent to which entrenched discrimination has declined is endogenous.

2. "On the “totality of circumstances” inquiry, the focus must be on evidence that has more than a remote bearing on what the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits: present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting. Discrimination that occurred some time ago and present-day disparities characterized as ongoing “effects of societal discrimination” are entitled to much less weight."

This assertion presumes a theory of the dynamic effects of discrimination that rules out multiple steady states, metastable states, long memory, etc. There are very good reasons to believe that such phenomena are integral to the dynamics of Black/White inequality. In addition to a lack of understanding of theory of inequality dynamics, it bespeaks ignorance of empirical work corroborating such phenomena. One extremely important recent example is

Lukas Althoff @AlthoffLukas and Hugo Reichardt @ReichardtHugo, "Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery," Quarterly Journal of Economics 2025

A second (self-serving) example is

Steven Durlauf, Gueyon Kim, Dohyeon Lee, and Xi Song @xisong, "The Evolution of Black-White Differences in Occupational Mobility Across Post-Civil War America," American Economic Journal: Applied, forthcoming

3. "To satisfy the second and third preconditions—politically cohesive voting by the minority and racial-bloc voting by the majority—the plaintiffs must provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation, showing that voters engage in racial-bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation"

This empirical requirement is incoherent since it presumes that party affiliation is not determined by political beliefs whose underrepresentation would be discriminatory. Alito's claim makes no sense in terms of empirical practice.

This type of ignorance and hubris has long been documented in terms of historical claims by Alito and other self-defined originalists. The great historian Jack Rakove @JRakove, in his book Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, refers to the "law-office history" that substitutes for real historical understanding. The same is true, albeit less important, for the Court's understanding of social science. John Roberts, in 2017, dismissed formal evidence in oral arguments on gerrymandering as "sociological gobbledygook".

https://t.co/1dR437rdlN

[Ben Rhodes @brhodes]

It's obvious that pulling out of the Iran Deal was a catastrophic decision by Trump. Yet that decision got far less media and political scrutiny than the Deal itself.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Reuters got DOJ's own records. 4,000 law enforcement jobs cut. National Security Division down 38 percent. Civil rights division down more than half. Drug prosecutions at a 20-year low. 7,000 positions unfilled.

A former DOJ employee said they have no idea who handles a major espionage case right now.

This is the tough-on-crime record. It's in their own budget documents.

[isabelle @isareksopuro]

i made a map to monitor data centers all around the world

tracks construction + nearby power plants + local AI legislation, and follows the politicians behind their bans (+ if they're getting paid to do so!)

[James Medlock @jdcmedlock]

DOGE turbocharged the deficit.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Vance says that stopping funding for Ukraine is one of his proudest achievements in this administration.

​I’m watching this stunningly cruel speech from Ukraine, as Russia continues to kills us every day. Just today, they killed 8-year-old boy in Cherkasy and five people in Dnipro. Dozens more were injured.

​The military assistance you are so proud of stopping was used to save lives in a war Russia started and continues every day by choice, in a war that only became possible after USA pressured Ukraine into disarming...

​I do not know if Vance can fully comprehend the scale of the tragedy unfolding here: a brutal, illegal war of extermination by Russia, and the slow abandonment by our allies. There is nothing to be proud of. Absolutely nothing.