Some economists are beginning to question the accuracy of recent U.S. inflation data after the federal government said staffing shortages hampered its ability to conduct a massive monthly survey.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the office that publishes the inflation rate, told outside economists this week that a hiring freeze at the agency was forcing the survey to cut back on the number of businesses where it checks prices. In last month’s inflation report, which examined prices in April, government statisticians had to use a less precise method for guessing price changes more extensively than they did in the past.
Economists say the staffing shortage raises questions about the quality of recent and coming inflation reports. There is no sign of an intentional effort to publish false or misleading statistics. But any problems with the data could have major implications for the economy.
To calculate the inflation rate, hundreds of government workers called enumerators fan out across cities each month to check how much businesses are charging for products such as blue jeans and services such as accounting, often by visiting bricks-and-mortar stores. Statisticians roll those figures together into the consumer-price index, a data stream that shows how the cost of living is changing for typical Americans.
If the government’s enumerators can’t track down a specific price in a given city, they try to make an educated guess based on a close substitute: say, cargo pants instead of slacks. But in April, with fewer workers on hand to check prices, statisticians had to base their guesses on less comparable products or other regions of the country—a process called different-cell imputation—much more often than usual, according to the BLS.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Sunday he would strip out government spending from the gross domestic product (GDP) report, but gave no indication how soon this change might happen, while dismissing fears of a possible recession.
“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said during an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” program.
The Reuters Tariff Watch newsletter is your daily guide to the latest global trade and tariff news. Sign up here.
“They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”
[…]
Economists cautioned against changes to the current national accounts structure as it would make GDP very volatile and difficult to get a clear view of the economy’s health, creating more uncertainty.
“I don’t think the stock market, the financial markets would like that,” said Sung Won Sohn, Finance and Economics professor at Loyola Marymount University.
It would also be impossible to compare the U.S. economy’s performance against its global peers.
Looking at the private sector alone would not give the full picture on growth, Sohn said.
“Economic growth over time would become a lot more volatile. The reason is, when the economy slows or, when we are in a recession, for example, the government spends a lot of money,” he said.
That’s this guy:
KENNEDY: If Vietnam came to you and said, 'You win. We're gonna remove all tariffs and all trade barriers. Would the US please do the same?" Would you accept that deal?
Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) worried he’s being watched from the air in Goodfellas (1990).
In her May interview with The Telegraph, psychologist Mary Trump (the estranged niece of His Strongly Lordship), remarked that even the women in the Trump family were misogynists. So are Christian nationalists of Trump’s MAGA movement. Their combined efforts to make women little more than birthing vessels now has technology for tracking down those who would escape to free states.
Earlier this month authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois, according to multiple datasets obtained by 404 Media.
The news shows in stark terms how police in one state are able to take the ALPR technology, made by a company called Flock and usually marketed to individual communities to stop carjackings or find missing people, and turn it into a tool for finding people who have had abortions. In this case, the sheriff told 404 Media the family was worried for the woman’s safety and so authorities used Flock in an attempt to locate her. But health surveillance experts said they still had issues with the nationwide search.
“You have this extraterritorial reach into other states, and Flock has decided to create a technology that breaks through the barriers, where police in one state can investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another,” Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund, who researches both ALPR systems and abortion surveillance, told 404 Media.
Flock users are required to state the reason for such searches. In this case, it was “had an abortion, search for female” per data sets reviewed by 404 Media.
Cops are able to search cameras acquired in their own district, those in their state, or those in a nationwide network of Flock cameras. That single search for the woman spread across 6,809 different Flock networks, with a total of 83,345 cameras, according to the data. The officer looked for hits over a month long period, it shows.
And immigrants think they’re the only ones being watched.
The local sheriff told 404 Media in a phone call that the woman had self-administered an abortion “and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.” The search, he said, “was about her safety.”Â
They located her two days later, but not via Flock. She was fine.
Ashley Emery, senior policy analyst in reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women & Families, told 404 Media “The risks of this intrusive government monitoring cannot be overstated: law enforcement could deploy this surveillance technology to target and try to build cases against pregnant people who travel for abortion care and those who help them. This incident is undeniably a harbinger of more AI-enabled reproductive surveillance and investigations to come. Especially for women of color who are already over-surveilled and over-policed, the stakes couldn’t be higher.”
Or for anyone else the Trump DOJ brands an enemy of the state.
Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) worried he was being pursued by government helicopters in Goodfellas (1990). Today it would be traffic cams and drones. Something for women to look forward to once Project 2025 makes pregnant women its project. It won’t top there.
“Spineless,” “yes men,” and “rubber stamps”Â
Americans have Republicans’ number.
Navigator Research’s May 15 – 18, 2025 survey finds that, never mind Democrats’ branding woes, Americans see Republicans in Congress as cuplable bystanders, Trump enablers, not leaders. Phrases like “spineless,” “yes men,” and “rubber stamp” best define their relationship to Donald Trump. Over half of Republicans think so. Independents, key voters in the 2026 midterms, have developed an increasingly negative view of Republicans since November 2018.
Respondents don’t see the GOP as merely complacent, but as willful enablers of the MAGA agenda. The survey was complete before the U.S. House passed Trump’s #MAGAMurderBudget on May 22.
A third (35 percent) of independents and 34 percent of Republicans say Republicans in Congress support Trump and largely give him unchecked authority. A third (36 percent) of Americans overall say Republicans in Congress “know better but are too spineless.” Republicans who are close to Trump are seen as “Yes men” and putting party over country.
Now, square those impressions of Republican men with the press fascination with the “manosphere.” Speaker Mike Johnson (God made him speaker, remember) is so unbothered at Elon Musk not talking his calls or calling him back that he mentions it several times in the clip below. Elon, if you’re listening?
Speaker Mike Johnson: "I called Elon Musk last night and he didn't answer."
Mike Johnson getting ghosted by Elon Musk after bending over backwards to carry water for him is chef’s kiss poetic.
You sold your spine for a retweet and now you’re out here begging for callbacks like… pic.twitter.com/8MRVBa2fGp
Maybe if the baby-faced Johnson grew a Moses-like beard?
Yes, it’s nice seeing that Republicans are in the toilet with independent voters. But it is a long way to the 2026 midterms when Democrats might regain some control in Congress (January 2027). A lot can happen between now and then. Like Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and martial law by summer’s end. This summer.
Stopping the MAGA White House cannot wait. Trump already has immigration raiders in the streets tricked out for combat and masked like an Iron Curtain secret police force. He’s weaponized his Department of Justice to exact revenge on perceived enemies and is moving with speed against individuals like Miles Taylor. He and Nazi-wannabes like Stephen Miller and Christian theocrats like Russ Vought mean to stay in power by any means necessary, no matter who gets hurt. (Talk about “unelected staffers.”)
The Trump Department of Justice is pretextually targeting state boards of election in swing states like North Carolina and Wisconsin over voter registration lists with an eye, I argue, for banning same-day registration. ALEC has not been idle either. It’s going after eliminating “grace periods for mail-in ballots.”
BREAKING: DOJ accuses Wisconsin of violating federal law and threatens to cut federal election funds to the state.This comes just after the DOJ sued North Carolina for alleged failure to maintain accurate voter lists. From: ‪@yuniorarivas.bsky.social‬ www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/…
The MAGA White House is following the authoritarian script and working at a fevered pace. Adam Bonica provided advice last week on how to fight back, but issued a warning:
The good news? Other countries haven’t just shown us the danger—they’ve shown us the best ways to fight back. The bad news? They’ve also shown us what happens when we wait too long.
Don’t be keyboard warriors. Get out there. Make noise. Raise hell. Now.
It’s pride month so naturally our new ( Culture) Warrior Prince had to take the opportunity to slap the LGBTQ community in the face:
The U.S. Navy plans to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, a fleet replenishment oiler named after the slain gay rights leader and Navy veteran, and is considering renaming multiple naval ships named after civil rights leaders and prominent American voices, CBS News has learned.
U.S. Navy documents obtained by CBS News and used to brief the secretary of the Navy and his chief of staff show proposed timelines for rolling out the name change of the USNS Harvey Milk to the public. While the documents do not say what the ship’s new name would be, the proposal comes during Pride Month, the monthlong observance of the LGBTQ+ community that also coincides with the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising of 1969.
Harvey Milk had real courage and integrity, traits that can no longer be associated with the U.S. Military now that Hegseth has turned it into a frat house. So maybe it’s for the best.
I understand he wants to change the names of other ships and installations named for racial minorities, women and the like. We don’t know yet what he plans to replace the names with but there are a whole lot of Confederate traitors to choose from.
Republicans’ sweeping policy bill aimed at advancing President Trump’s second-term agenda would increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next decade, according to a new estimate prepared by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The CBO also estimates that 10.9 million more people would be without health insurance in 2034 as the result of the House-passed legislation, mostly due to cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act under the bill.
House Republicans are aiming to cut at least $1.5 trillion in spending to offset trillions in tax cuts, while also raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. The CBO projection puts the spending cuts at about $1.2 trillion over the next decade, with the tax cuts totaling just under $3.7 trillion.
It’s the tax cuts. If they really cared about the deficit they could raise taxes on the top 10%. But that’s the devil’s work so they’re reduced to just lying. It’s all fine with them because they really don’t care about anything but destroying the government as we know it so they can recreate it in their image. Both Johnson and Vought are far right theocrats, most of the rest are mega-rich bozos on auto-pilot and MAGA clones walking over whatever cliff Dear Leader designates.
I think this is the first time we’ve seen Trump mention the Ukrainian drone attack. And it sounds like he was quite sympathetic toward Putin and gave the green light for him to unleash hell in response. (The Ukrainian attack was a response to Putin’s non-stop bombing campaign but I’m sure Trump didn’t see it that way because “they don’t have the cards.”)
Weak, weak weak. He’s selling out Ukraine and now begging Vlad to help him out with Iran. I guess it was inevitable that Trump would make Russia into an official ally. I’m sure Vlad just sees it as yet another sucker play.
How pathetic.
Update —
Why does he need leverage? He and Vlad are best buds. I thought Russia would never have invaded if he had been president. Stands to reason they’d stop now that he is, doesn’t it? What’s wrong?
I had the weird experience last evening of watching the new film“Mountainhead,” written and directed by Jerome Armstrong, the creator of the iconic HBO series “Succession”, as I was doom scrolling social media. The premise is that four horseman of the apocalypse, in the guise of four tech billionaires, gather at a 50 million dollar mountain castle to play poker while the world literally burns due to the richest one’s release of a new AI program that allows undetectable deep fakes and disinformation. (It’s not hard to figure out who his character is based on.)
As I was watching and scrolling, like the card carrying internet addict I am, imagine how startling it was to come across this headline:
Life imitating art in the creepiest way possible. Just as creepy was the movie’s dialog that sounded almost verbatim like the kind of techno-utopian, puerile sci-fi, billionaire geek speak we hear from the world’s richest man who recently told Fox News that he plans to go to Mars (and die there) because:
“Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun. The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multiplanet civilization, because Earth will be incinerated.”
I think we have more immediate planetary survival issues than the sun exploding but he’s the big billionaire genius so what do I know? Having just read the latest in-depth interview with silicon valley guru Curtis Yarvin in the New Yorker, I felt a little but off balance watching this “Mountainhead”broligarch fan-fic satire because it’s obviously not a total fantasy. These people exist in real life and they are exerting a lot of influence on our society and our politics.
They’re not, however, omnipotent and to the extent they are visionaries, it is probably more limited in scope than we might think. Musk’s SpaceX is going into space and that’s notable (despite his recent failures.) But let’s be clear, his accomplishment is doing it as a private company. It’s all been done by before by the U.S. government. He didn’t invent electric cars he just created one that has bells and whistles people like. (His cybertruck, designed wholly by him to his own tastes, is a dud.) His Neuralink company is creating implantable brain–computer interfaces, but it isn’t the only one. (His long term plan is to bring about “transhumanism” which was inspired by a series of sci-fi novels.) Musk’s Boring Company, created to build tunnels in order to relieve traffic in urban areas, has accomplished almost nothing. His satellite company Starlink has been very successful although lately they’ve been falling out of the sky. And then there’s X which Musk bought and turned into a free-for-all social media site, which clearly influenced the creation of the Musk character and his dystopian website in “Mountainhead.”
He is a very successful entrepreneur, obviously. His fortune alone attests to that. And some of his companies are truly visionary, even if his isn’t the only one to have had that particular vision. However, what we’ve seen recently with his foray into government is a good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect: a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.
It’s tempting to think that the truly perfect example is Donald Trump, but it doesn’t quite fit. Trump’s only talent lies in one domain — self-promotion. That leads him to lie about his talents in other areas. I don’t think he actually cares if he has any competence in them because he is content with simply saying it and convincing others that it’s true. Musk actually believes that he is a genius who can do anything. As we’ve seen with his experience in government and politics that he is not.
He used to be a pretty standard issue liberal from silicon valley. But he began to drift right as he became more and more red-pilled on twitter, where he quickly went down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories like “The Great Replacement.” It’s clear that he hasn’t read much about history, philosophy, or politics and developed his political worldview in an online intellectual silo, like so many other people who are temperamentally drawn to the right. He bought the platform so he could remake it in his image, thinking that would automatically make it even more successful. That was not to be. It’s still functional and has many users but it’s no longer what it was.
Musk really enjoyed holding court on his web site and it stands to reason that all the adulation he got there and elsewhere (as anyone with his kind of money always gets) gave rise to the belief that he’s a genius at everything he touches. So he got involved in politics and we’ve all watched him go from eccentric curiosity to big time donor to campaigner and then government reformer. I think we can safely say that he was unsuccessful at all but the donor part and even that eventually led to diminishing returns.
Trump gave Musk some questionable credit (“he knows those vote-counting computers”) for his win in Pennsylvania where Musk parked himself in the last month and gave away million dollar checks to voters. He came to believe he’d invented a strategy that could guarantee a win for any Republican he chose to back and a lot of people in politics agreed with him. But when he tried to replicate it in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Musk spent over a hundred million dollars and put himself out on the campaign trail only to suffer a humiliating defeat. It turns out that he doesn’t know as much about political campaigning as he thought he did. And money can’t buy you love.
And then there was DOGE, the department he talked Trump into letting him have to slash at least a trillion dollars which he promised to do without even breaking a sweat. After all, when he buys a company he immediately sets out to save money by firing massive numbers of people and dismantling entire departments and only replaces them if he later finds out it’s necessary. Naturally, he believed a genius strategy like that could easily be done in the federal government. He ended up accomplishing very little except causing chaos, creating pain and, in the case of putting USAID “into the wood-chipper” ending the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
In the process he destroyed his reputation and the reputation of his companies, losing a lot of money and prestige. Now that he’s backed off, the White House is back-stabbing him ruthlessly, passing on gossip about his drug use and personal life necessitating that he go on a sad-sack media tour to restore his image, which isn’t working. And now he seems to be going to war with the White House over the GOP budget bill which he calls “abominable” and telling anyone who voted for it they should be ashamed. That means he’s referring to all but two Republican House members.
He’s fallen a long way from the pedestal he was on as the ungodly wealthy, visionary genius who was going to save mankind with his prescient techno-utopian imagination. Now he just seems like another Republican whiner lamenting that nobody understands him anymore.
All the broligarchs like Musk think AI is going to make the world over in their image. It is to be fervently hoped that what they are creating is better than they are because they really aren’t very good at anything but technology. And technology isn’t everything.
We’re reaching back this morning to events and posts from last week. But it’s important.
The Trump 2.0 administration has been losing court challenges to its campaign of anti-democracy and police-state intimidation. But that won’t be the end of it, warns Stanford University politcal scientist, Adam Bonica.
🧵 When authoritarian leaders attack judges as "enemies," history shows us exactly where this leads. Trump's assault on "USA HATING JUDGES" isn't just inflammatory rhetoric—it's following a script written by strongmen worldwide. But other countries show us how to fight back.
The script “is frustratingly predictable,” Bonica writes (Substack). In Turkey (ErdoÄźan ), in the Philippines (Duterte), in Brazil (Bolsonaro), in Italy (Bolsonaro), in Zimbabwe (Mugabe), and in Israel (Netanyahu).
The authoritarian script:1) Court rules against leader2) Attack judges as biased/dangerous3) Delegitimize judicial system4) Create permission for threats5) IF NO MASS RESISTANCE → Purge the courts6) IF MASS RESISTANCE → Forced to retreat
We can stop it, Bonica argues, but it will take us all out of our comfort zones. It will cost us.
So how do we combat this?
– BUILD broad coalitions beyond party lines – MOBILIZE professionals, not just activists – SUSTAIN pressure through strikes and protests – FRAME it as defending democracy, not partisan politics
Massive protests stopped Netanyahu’s push to gut the courts. But when the Law and Justice party (PiS) took power in Poland in 2015, “they executed a masterclass in judicial capture” that sounds rather familiar.
The Polish people didn’t take this lying down. Tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, took to the streets repeatedly from 2017 to 2023. Protests erupted in over 100 cities and towns. International judges flew in to show solidarity. “We judges must not be afraid,” declared Judge Pawel Juszczyszyn at one protest. “Without free courts there are no free citizens.”
But, unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. By 2018, PiS had complete control over the Constitutional Tribunal and the body that appoints judges. Over eight years, they appointed 3,000 new judges through their captured institutions. Even after PiS lost power in 2023, the new government finds it nearly impossible to undo the damage. As Judge Tuleya now says, “defending the rule of law is easier than rebuilding it.”
Intensity and timing matter in stopping strongmen. Massive, single-day protests aren’t enough.
Democracy versus authoritarianism
The Path Forward
So when we hear Trump’s rhetoric about “USA HATING JUDGES” and see the escalating threats against our judiciary, the question isn’t whether this is dangerous—history has already answered that. The question is: will we mobilize in time, or will we become another Poland?
The roadmap is clear:
ACT IMMEDIATELY—don’t wait for the first purges. Poland shows us that once judges start being removed, it’s almost too late
BUILD broad coalitions—this isn’t about party politics. When lawyers, tech workers, veterans, and business leaders unite, power listens
PREPARE for economic action—protests matter, but general strikes change the game
FRAME it correctly—this isn’t left versus right; it’s democracy versus authoritarianism
None of this is easy. Protecting democratic institutions rarely is. But history shows us both paths clearly. Every authoritarian who successfully destroyed judicial independence\ did so because civil society failed to unite quickly and forcefully enough. When mass protests defended courts, because people recognized the threat early and acted decisively. they were also defending democracy.
Dig deep. I’m naturally an introvert. This will be hard.
ICE agents are posing as utility workers to gain access to homes and persons in Tucson (May 28):
TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — Southside neighbors jumped into action Wednesday morning when they believed immigration officers were attempting an arrest near Sixth Ave. and Ajo Way.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told KGUN 9 that there is an ongoing investigation, but did not provide further details.
Christine Cariño called KGUN 9 because she believed there were ICE or HSI agents in her neighborhood. Cariño described their unmarked vehicles, claimed they asked her unusual questions, and claimed that they worked with Tucson Electric Power.
She began to suspect the individuals were immigration enforcement officers during the initial interaction. She explained how they initially asked her to help them find her neighbor. That’s when she questioned if they were ICE or HSI agents, despite having been told they were with Tucson Electric Power. They eventually walked toward her neighbors’ home, she recalled.
ICE dressed up like utility workers who offer "free estimates" if invited inside. Neighbor recorded the ICE goons and intervened, just before a young boy let them into his home.Tucson Electric Power was not told ICE agents would be impersonating their utility workers as part of the ICE raid.
“My understanding is that based on you know, our precedent and what the Constitution and Fourth Amendment allows for they’re not allowed to use deception in order to question somebody.”
Masked ICE agents arrived at a local San Diego restaurant over the weekend in tactical gear, automatic weapons, and what appears to be a tear gas/grenade launcher!
And in Minneapolis on Tuesday, the same unwelcome for masked, heavily armed ICE agents (Minnesota Reformer):
Federal law enforcement officers raided a Minneapolis taco restaurant Tuesday morning, sparking protests from immigrant rights activists and neighbors.
Officers wearing the uniforms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Minneapolis Police Department, Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI, and the criminal investigation arm of the IRS surrounded Las Cuatro Milpas on East Lake Street.
Protestors gathered on the other side of the police tape, shouting at officers and questioning why Minneapolis police — whose leaders swore wouldn’t assist federal agencies in civil immigration enforcement — stood alongside ICE agents as officers searched the building.
Â
Â
View on Threads
Â
“Five years ago, this stretch of Lake Street was filled with protestors, who clashed with police following the murder of George Floyd,” The Reformer adds.
Â
View on Threads
View on Threads
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, is having none of it. Last week, he spoke out about “Gestapo-like behavior” on behalf of Trump’s masked agents.
Stable democracies, Last opines, “do not allow agents of the state to operate under cover of concealment.” But then, you know….
Neil Young has extended an invitation to President Donald Trump to attend his upcoming “Love Earth” summer tour, but with a pointed caveat: “if there is not martial law by then.”
They’re geared up like this to intimidate us. It’s what what Goldman says it is. Trump means to turn the U.S. into a police state.
Last (hesitantly) offers a quote from Suzanne Nossel at Foreign Policy. She suggests that “militant democracy” is needed at this moment. Complacency and adherence to even liberal norms will be the death of the republic:
For civic-minded Americans, the prospect of departing from liberal principles to combat illiberalism does not sit well. It is not just that we are set in our ways, but that most of us still believe that the American way—our institutions, precedents, and principles—are preferable to any alternative. But as legal judgements are skirted, judges are attacked, and accountability mechanisms dismantled, we feel growing unease.
Don’t say you weren’t warned. MAGA Republicans are using democracy to destroy democracy.
