We begin today with Norman Eisen and Joshua Kolb of The Contrarian and their criticism of a story by The New York Times about appealite justices.
First, let’s break down the math. Taking the question the Times posed in one chart—“How often the courts have ruled in support of Trump’s policies”—the answer to that question, using the Times’ own calculations, is about 33%—meaning he’s lost 66% of the time. How do we get that number? The Times said that, out of 431 cases, Trump lost 75% of the time in district court—that equals about 323 total losses. Of those, only 156 cases were appealed, and Trump lost 49% of those rulings—that’s another 76 losses. And, out of the 24 cases the Supreme Court decided, he lost 12% of the time—another two losses. That adds up to over 400 losses out of 611 rulings.
The Times noted that Trump, especially in his first term, worked hand-in-hand with a Republican Senate to pack the courts with loyalist and often unqualified judges. Yet, even with that effort to MAGAify the judiciary, the stunning reality is that Trump is still losing the vast majority of the time.
And that still does not fully capture the scope of the defeats Trump is suffering in court. The article noted Trump appointed 54 appellate judges in his first term and six so far this term. Though that sounds like a lot, there are 179 full-time judgeships across the 13 courts of appeal throughout the country. On top of that, there are 112 judges serving on “senior status” —meaning they still hear cases and issue rulings but work a reduced schedule and don’t count toward the 179 statutorily mandated seats. So, those Trump judges who are ruling for him disproportionately make up only 60 out of more than 280 appellate judges issuing decisions—or about 20%.
Chris Brennan of USA Today writes that no one is pleased that Trump is going after the chair of the Federal Reserve.
A rational president would have waited. But Powell and the Federal Reserve resisted Trump's political pressure for a faster pace toward lower interest rates. And Trump is never rational when denied what he wants.
Powell, a Republican, first became chair in 2018, after being nominated in 2017 by Trump. President Joe Biden renominated Powell in 2021 for a four-year term that started in 2022 and ends this May.
Trump was expected to name Powell's replacement soon. He just had to wait four more months. There's little doubt that whoever Trump nominates will be far more amenable to his demands about interest rates.
But the president's replacement for Powell, and any other nominations for Federal Reserve posts, must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. And now that's no sure thing, thanks to Trump's overreach.
Paul Krugman digs deeper into why the heads of oil companies remain lukewarm to the prospects of making profits off of Venezuela’s oil.
Trump clearly pictures America in 2025 as being like East Texas in the early 20thcentury — a place where all you have to do is drill a hole in the ground, and oil gushes out. At the top of this post is a picture of the famous Spindletop gusher of 1901, which started the Texas oil boom.
But it doesn’t work like that anymore. After decades of oil extraction, gushers are a thing of the past. Today, most of the oil extracted by the U.S. petroleum industry is shale oil. To extract that oil sedimentary rocks must be fractured with pressurized liquids — “fracking.” Now, there are many environmental issues associated with fracking. But even if you ignore those concerns, drilling a new well isn’t worth doing unless the price of oil is sufficiently high.
As I pointed out a few days ago, the breakeven price for drilling in America’s major shale areas — the price at which drilling a new well is just worth doing — is around $62 a barrel. And current oil prices are slightly below that. So it makes perfect economic sense that oil companies aren’t interested in bidding on public land in Colorado. It’s simply not an investment worth making.
So if oil companies are unwilling to invest in drilling in Colorado, why would they want to sink money into Venezuela? Venezuela’s huge official oil reserves mostly consist of heavy crude, which is highly viscous. Berkeley’s David Levine says that it has roughly the consistency of cold peanut butter. This oil doesn’t come gushing out when you drill a well. Extracting it often requires injecting steam to get it hot enough to flow. Thus just getting the oil out of the ground is expensive.
Jamie Grierson of The Guardian informs us that the BBC has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed against them by the tacky shoe salesman.
The broadcaster faced criticism for airing an episode of the investigative documentary series that featured an edited clip of Trump’s address to a rally on 6 January 2021, which it is alleged gave the impression he encouraged supporters to storm the Capitol building in Washington DC. [...]
The BBC will file a motion to dismiss, claiming the Florida court lacks “personal jurisdiction” over them, the court venue is “improper” and that Trump has “failed to state a claim”, documents filed on Monday revealed.
The corporation will argue that it did not create, produce or broadcast the documentary in Florida and that Trump’s claim that the documentary was available in the US on the streaming service BritBox is untrue.
“Simply clicking on the link that plaintiff cites for this point shows it is not on BritBox,” the broadcaster’s lawyers said in court documents.
Finally today, Javier G. Cuesta of El País in English points out that Russia’s war with Ukraine has lasted just as long as Soviet hostilities against Nazi Germany.
The anniversary comes at the worst possible time for Putin. If the parallels with the Holy War were already causing concern within Russia, now the United States, the country it aspires to emulate as a superpower, has just carried out its own “special operation” in Venezuela with the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, in a matter of minutes.
The Kremlin’s biggest success in 2025 has been expelling the Ukrainian army from the Russian region of Kursk, where Kyiv’s forces staged an incursion in 2024. Along the rest of the front, advances have ranged from a few dozen miles to a few hundred meters. Putin wanted to force the surrender of all of Ukraine in 2022, but today he barely controls 99% of the territory of the Luhansk region, 80% of Donetsk — both of which Moscow had partially controlled since 2014 — and another three-quarters of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where he doesn’t hold the provincial capitals, but has created a land corridor with the annexed Crimea.
A joint investigation by the BBC and the independent Russian newspaper Mediazona has confirmed the deaths of 160,000 Russian soldiers in this war through open sources, although their analysis of obituaries, graves, and news reports only accounts for between 40% and 65% of the total, according to these media outlets. Their estimate is that between 243,000 and 352,000 Russians have died, while the number of wounded is several times higher.
Everyone try to have the best possible day that you can!
