Month: May 2025

International Students Contributed $43.8 Billion to U.S. Economy

Buck Banks

$43.8 billion

The United States says it will begin revoking visas for some Chinese students. China is the second-largest source of international students in the US, with about 277,000 students enrolled in 2023–24, or roughly one in four foreign students. International students contributed $43.8B to the US economy last year and supported over 378,000 jobs.

The 800-Pound TACO in the Room

Pensito Editors

Pensito Illustration

From The Bullwark, Jonathan Last offers an analysis. He believes the “TACO” label — coined by a columnist at the Financial Times — has the potential to actually hurt Donald Trump:

  • It’s simple. Trump Always Chickens Out. You can put that phrase anywhere, apply it to anything, and everyone knows what it means.
  • It’s meme-able. You have the slogan. You have the word mark. And you have an universally recognizable image. Hell, there’s even a pre-built emoji for it. ?
  • It’s universal. You can apply it to any situation. Trump pulls back on tariffs? TACO. Trump gives in to Putin? TACO. Trump increases the national debt? TACO.
  • It’s organic. No Democratic strategist came up with TACO. It’s an observation that emerged from the finance world—from the very same bros who voted for Trump in the first place. You can feel the disdain of his own supporters dripping off of it.
  • It hits at something deep inside Trump. It’s about his soul. It’s about his weakness.

    • “By hitting him with TACO over and over, you (a) reveal his pull-backs as weakness and (b) dare him to go through with the stuff that will screw up the real world — and, in theory, create pain for his movement.”

    Big, Beautiful Tax Plan Now Costs $4 Trillion

    Buck Banks

    $3.94 trillion

    “House Republicans’ tax package is now expected to cost nearly $4 trillion, thanks in part to a last-minute deal to further increase a cap on state and local tax deductions,” Politico reports. “The legislation approved last week by the House is now anticipated to cost $3.94 trillion over the next decade, the official Joint Committee on Taxation said.”

    Welcome to the Next Dark Ages

    Buck Banks

    “The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. … The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.”

    — Adam Serwer

    Finally, A Good Commencement Address

    Buck Banks

    “Why attack universities? Why attack journalism? Because ignorance works for power. First, make the truth seekers live in fear. Sue the journalists. For nothing. Then send masked agents to abduct a college student, a writer of her college paper who wrote an editorial supporting Palestinian rights, and send her to a prison in Louisiana and charge her with nothing. Then, move to destroy law firms that stand up for the rights of others. … With that done, power can rewrite history. With grotesque, false narratives, they can make heroes criminals and criminals heroes. And they can change the definition of the words we use to describe reality. ‘Diversity’ is now described as ‘illegal.’ ‘Equity’ is to be shunned. ‘Inclusion’ is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends ….”

    — Scott Pelley, in a commencement address at Wake Forest.

    Our Fascist Idiocracy: May 27, 2025

    Jon Ponder
    A Black Lives Matter protest in 2020

    Justice deleted. Trump’s white supremacist Department of Justice is dropping negotiations for court-approved settlements in the murders in 2020 by police officers of both Breonna Taylor in St. Louis and George Floyd in Minneapolis. A spokseperson for the department called the consent decrees “unjustified.”

    Taylor was shot by officers in her bed, and Floyd was murdered by an officer who suffocated him on a sidewalk with his knee. The two cases led to Black Lives Matter protests nationwide. To underscore the white supremacist message it means to send, the DOJ announced its decision just days before the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, on May 25, 2020.

    As suggested in its Project 2025 manifesto, the Trump regime intends to instigate a new wave of protests this summer so that it can impose martial law on the country which could lead to delaying or canceling the midterm elections next year.

    Joder y descubrirlo. MAGA rapper and Cuban immigrant Márquez Duany, better known as El Funky, has less than 30 days to leave the U.S. or face deportation and likely imprisonment in Cuba, where his music helped fuel the largest anti-government protests in Cuba in decades. “If I could vote, I would have voted for Trump,” he said recently. “He’s the strongest president when it comes to Cuba.”

    Gonna need a bigger Sharpie. The Climate Change Denier-in-Chief has hollowed out the federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just in time for the 2025 hurricane season. NOAA’s weather forecasting and hazard-warning branch – critically understaffed ahead of the hurricane season, several scientists told the BBC. Six to 10 hurricanes are predicted for the Atlantic and Caribbean region from June to November this year.

    Trump’s deplorable speech on trophy wives. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) weighed in on Trump’s deranged commencement address at West Point on May 24.
    “I don’t think that those who have gone through West Point expected to have their commander-in-chief address them and start talking about trophy wives or start talking [about] how he has so many investigations,” Crockett said. “It is time for Republicans to start calling him out and start questioning his mental acuity, and whether or not he is equipped to serve mentally. We know when it comes down to his criminality, he is not qualified to serve, but this is just absolutely deplorable.”