Like many others I was saddened by the attack with what’s being described as an “improvised flamethrower” on people demonstrating peacefully in Boulder, Colorado. From Jasper Ward, Kristina Cooke and Mark Makela at Reuters:

BOULDER, Colorado, June 1 (Reuters) – Eight people were injured on Sunday when a 45-year-old man yelled “Free Palestine” and threw incendiary devices into a crowd in Boulder, Colorado where a demonstration to remember the Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza was taking place, authorities said.

Four women and four men between 52 and 88 years old were transported to hospitals, Boulder police said. Authorities had earlier put the count of the injured at six and said at least one of them was in a critical condition.

“As a result of these preliminary facts, it is clear that this is a targeted act of violence and the FBI is investigating this as an act of terrorism,” the FBI special agent in charge of the Denver Field Office, Mark Michalek, said.

Michalek named the suspect as Mohamed Soliman, who was hospitalized shortly after the attack. Reuters could not immediately locate contact information for him or his family.

Hopefully, Mr. Soliman is a “loon wolf terrorist”. If there’s more to the story than that, we have some serious questions before us. In particular we should ask ourselves whether we care to allow people to pursue their ethnic or sectarian grievances here rather than in their countries of origin?

When I first read the reports of the Ukrainian drone attack on Russian airfields, destroying dozens of Russian bombers, I had a number of reactions. Here’s Paul Adams’s and Jaroslav Lukiv’s report at the BBC:

Ukraine says it has completed its biggest long-range attack of the war with Russia on Sunday, after using smuggled drones to launch a series of major strikes on at least 40 Russian warplanes at four military bases.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said 117 drones were used in the so-called “Spider’s Web” operation by the SBU security service, striking “34% of [Russia’s] strategic cruise missile carriers”.

SBU sources told BBC News it took a year and a half to organise the strikes.

Russia confirmed Ukrainian attacks in five regions, calling them a “terrorist act”.

The attacks come as Russian and Ukrainian negotiators head to Istanbul, Turkey, for a second round of peace talks on Monday.

My main reaction was that I thought we should wait for the other shoe to drop. Another reaction was that any who thinks that the attack will bring Russia to the bargaining table are sadly mistaken. The third was that Max Boot in his Washington Post column has the right idea:

On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy rewrote the rules of warfare. Almost no one had imagined that the Japanese could sneak across an entire ocean to attack an “impregnable fortress,” as U.S. strategists had described Hawaii. Yet that is just what they did. Japanese aircraft launched from six aircraft carriers managed to destroy or damage 328 U.S. aircraft and 19 U.S. Navy ships, including eight battleships. The Pearl Harbor attack signaled the ascendance of aircraft carriers as the dominant force in naval warfare.

The Ukrainians rewrote the rules of warfare again on Sunday. The Russian high command must have been as shocked as the Americans were in 1941 when the Ukrainians carried out a surprise attack against five Russian air bases located far from the front — two of them thousands of miles away in the Russian Far North and Siberia. The Ukrainian intelligence service, known as the SBU, managed to sneak large numbers of drones deep inside Russia in wooden cabins transported by truck, then launch them by remote control.

but that he’s asking the wrong questions:

If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases?

I don’t think he recognizes the implications of this sort of asymmetric warfare. The questions he should be asking are

• What if the Houthis mount a similar drone attack against U. S. air bases?
• What if some unidentified or widely dispersed terrorist organization mounts a similar drone attack against U. S. air bases?

After all if Chinese balloons can gather intelligence from U. S. military bases, a highly destructive can be mounted against our military bases by anyone with a few thousand dollars to spend and the inclination to do so. You don’t need to be a major power or even a country for that.

The Federal Reserve of New York notes that recent college graduates with Computer Sciences major have a higher rate of unemployment than many other fields of study. There are a number of reasons for that including uncertainty, coding being done by artificial intelligence (or the expectation that it will), offshore outsourcing, and just plain saturation. Believe it or not it’s actually worse than journalism. There have been quite a number of layoffs in the last few years.

Note, too, in the graphic above that the net growth in employment in healthcare and social services very nearly exceeds that of all other sectors combined.

And we don’t even have one. Sen. John Danforth has a commentary at RealClearPolitics on the importance of a “healthy two-party system” to the United States. I recognize that Sen. Danforth may be a bit out of touch due to his advanced age and I hate to break it to him but we don’t even have one healthy political party let alone two.

I hardly need to point out the problems with the Republican Party but let me provide a little précis of the Republican Party’s issues. After he announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2015 and throughout 2016 Donald Trump proceeded to trounce the entirety of the Republican Party establishment. After he was elected president the old Republican establishment was gone and what remained was a Trump party. The political party that John Danforth remembers is gone.

President Trump was impeached twice and his re-election bid in 2020 was defeated by Joe Biden, who had been rejected as a presidential candidate twice before by the Democrats. Mr. Trump has never actually acknowledged that defeat. I won’t psychoanalyze that.

Impressive as the number of executive orders issued by President Trump in his second term may be, he cannot govern by EO alone and we don’t really know what the final tally of his diktats that stand up to judicial scrutiny will be. He is engaging in all sorts of highly questionable interminglings of public business and private personal profit. He is unlikely to receive any scrutiny of those activities by the present House of Representatives. President Trump has been issuing pardons to criminals of undisputed guilt for, apparently, no reason other than he can.

The Democrats are in no healthier a state. We aren’t even halfway through the year and already this year two high-ranking Democratic officials from two different states (Illinois and New Jersey) have been convicted of corruption in office. It may be three or higher before the end of the year.

At some time during his first term as president Joe Biden became too frail and mentally impaired to execute the job for which he was elected. This was hushed up by his staff, high-ranking members of his party, and journalists working for major media outlets. We don’t know when he stopped being able to do the job. Some say June 2024. Some say February 2024. Some say January 2020 or earlier. We just don’t know and we’ll probably never know.

Democratic states are losing population rapidly. There have been articles published noting that without illegal immigration the tally of Democratic votes in the electoral college would be considerably less favorable to a Democratic presidential candidate than it already is.

The party is, effectively, leaderless. Its two primary factions, moderates and progressives, are not on particularly friendly terms. The moderates claim that if the party is to regain control of the House, Senate, or White House it will need to moderate some of its views. The progressive wing insists that the party has not been progressive enough.

You get the idea.

So, Sen. Danforth, how do you create “two healthy parties” out of that mess?

At the Washington Post George Will urges the Congress to pass the bill imposing sanctions on Russia’s biggest trading partners:

The Senate, recently passive regarding its prerogatives and deferential regarding presidential assertiveness, might insert itself into policymaking concerning Ukraine. And the Senate — hopefully with the House concurring — might do so where presidents are most protective of their ability to act unilaterally: foreign affairs. The Senate’s contemplated action has been “coordinated” with the current president, who is a notably aggressive assertor of executive prerogatives.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has introduced legislation that, having attracted 82 supporters (counting Graham), proves two things: the possibility of bipartisanship about large questions and Congress’s relevance in making foreign policy.

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Graham writes that he has “coordinated” with the White House concerning his legislation, which he jointly introduced with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. The legislation would impose a 500 percent tariff on goods sent to the United States from “any country that buys Moscow’s energy products” (e.g., oil, gas, uranium). The countries that matter most are China and India.

A good deal of his column is devoted to wondering why the bill does not have unanimous support in the Senate (rather than the presumably 82% support it has). What I wondered about was why it only pertained to goods imports. Why not to services?

The United States goods imports from India are estimated at around $124 billion per year. Oddly, we don’t actually know how large our services trade with India is but there’s little question it dwarfs our goods trade with the country. How so? When you tally up the annual revenues of the a largest Indian consultancy companies it’s well over that figure and most of those services are performed for U. S. companies. To understand the scale of our consumption of offshore outsourcing 90% of large companies offshore their IT, HR, and/or finance departments wholly or in part and that doesn’t include call centers which is what many people think of when they refer to offshore outsourcing. And even small U. S. companies are able to outsource those services offshore. We can’t be certain what the total volume is because there is no legal reporting requirement expressly governing offshore outsourcing. The figure of $35 billion sometimes cited is obviously a tremendous understatement.

If we really want to incentivize India to stop trading with Russia, we should hit them where it really hurts and that’s services.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are delighted that the U.S. Court of International Trade enjoined Trump’s tariffs:

In a ruling heard ’round the world, the U.S. Court of International Trade on Wednesday blocked President Trump’s sweeping tariffs. This is an important moment for the rule of law as much as for the economy, proving again that America doesn’t have a king who can rule by decree.

The Trump tariffs have created enormous costs and uncertainty, but now we know they’re illegal. As the three-judge panel explains in its detailed 52-page ruling, the President exceeded his emergency powers and bypassed discrete tariff authorities delegated to him by Congress. The ruling erases his April 2 tariffs as well as those on Canada and Mexico.

but their joy was short-lived. Kevin Breuninger reports at CNBC:

A federal appeals court on Thursday granted the Trump administration’s request to temporarily pause a lower-court ruling that struck down most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The Trump administration had earlier told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that it would seek “emergency relief” from the Supreme Court as soon as Friday if the tariff ruling was not quickly put on pause.

The judgment issued Wednesday night by the U.S. Court of International Trade is “temporarily stayed until further notice while this court considers the motions papers,” the appeals court said in its order.

The pause gives the Trump administration some breathing room as it prepares to argue that the trade court’s ruling should be halted for the duration of the appeals process.

So, now what? I haven’t heard any reports yet of a case being filed with the Supreme Court.

On the dark side this presents even more uncertainty. On the bright side this is the way our process is supposed to work. I’d like to see the Congress get into this act.

Maybe it’s naive of me but I find the U. S. Court of International Trade’s ruling that President Trump’s imposition of tariffs by executive order was illegal reassuring. Lindsay Whitehurst and Josh Boak report at the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal court on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law, swiftly throwing into doubt Trump’s signature set of economic policies that have rattled global financial markets, frustrated trade partners and raised broader fears about inflation intensifying and the economy slumping.

The ruling from a three-judge panel at the New York-based U.S. Court of International Trade came after several lawsuits arguing Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs exceeded his authority and left the country’s trade policy dependent on his whims.

I doubt that’s the last we’ll hear of the matter. What I think should happen is that the Trump Administration should encourage (if that’s the right word) the Congress to enact the tariffs he’s called for or some version thereof.

I’ve said it before that although I agree with steep tariffs on Chinese imports on a host of grounds not the least being all of the officially supported Chinese hacking going on I don’t agree with the broad tariffs President Trump has called for. So, what’s the administration’s next step? I think you’d be surprised at how many Democratic votes tariffs on China would get in the Senate.

I wish I could remember where I read it but the best reaction I’ve seen to Jake Tapper’s book on the cover-up of President Biden’s decline in health, Original Sin, was that it’s All the President’s Men if it didn’t name any names and were written by H. R. Haldeman.

I think that the best one-liner of the day belongs to Matt Taibbi in his piece on who started the “culture war”:

I agree Democrats need to stop getting their political ideas from Davos and Ezra Klein, but I’m not sure the urgency is in “swinging disillusioned voters away from the authoritarian right.”

I think that by far the greater likelihood is that they’ll increasingly get their ideas from the populist left. Whether that is more or less authoritarian than the “authoritarian right” (by which he means the MAGA crowd or populist right) remains to be seen.