Tariffs Are Hurting the GOP in Michigan – WSJ

A piece by the WSJ’s editorial board. I’m not normally a fan of WSJ opinion pieces, since they’re usually garbage, but…

«Michigan families have paid $27.2 billion in tariff-driven costs since January 2025, according to the business outfit Michigan Smart Trade Alliance. That’s roughly $6,658 per household.

The Anderson Economic Group estimated the auto tariffs on Canada and Mexico alone last year totaled approximately $1,600 for every vehicle assembled in the U.S. That doesn’t include tariffs on steel and aluminum. The border taxes are shrinking the margins of U.S. auto makers, which means smaller profit-sharing bonuses for workers.

General Motors says it expects a tariff cost hit of between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion this year. That could mean $3,500 less in bonuses for workers.»

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/mike-rogers-michigan-tariffs-canada-donald-trump-6b3d2bd8

Democrats face something worse than a DSA takeover | Opinion

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2026/09/12/democrats-dsa-midterm-elections-socialism-capitalism/91676903007/

«DSA’s successes have also been concentrated in deep-blue, urban areas, where winning the Democratic nomination is winning the seat. Most Democratic politicians and voters don’t come from those places, and they’re far less likely to fall for DSA’s pitch – as Francesca Hong’s defeat in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary suggests.

A better way to think about DSA isn’t as a hostile takeover, but as the vanguard of a radicalized professional class. It’s a continuation of a trend already reshaping the Democratic Party: professionals increasingly run it, and those same professionals have grown more radical, especially in the Trump era.

So when 66% of Democrats say they view socialism favorably, versus just 42% for capitalism, that doesn’t mean two-thirds of Democrats are about to join DSA, or that they even agree on what “socialism” means. It means professionals, radicalized by their opposition to President Donald Trump, are picking the brand that signals maximum opposition. That radicalization is fertile ground for DSA recruiting, even if most people professing a liking for socialism just mean something vague, like “be kind” or “government should do more.”

But Democrats warming to socialism isn’t shared by the country as a whole, especially the working class. Only 39% of Americans views socialism positively, according to Gallup. YouGov has the share at just 31%. In a June Economist/YouGov poll, just 29% of Americans said they’d ever consider voting for a self-identified democratic socialist. Among those without a college degree, just 23% said they’d ever consider voting for a democratic socialist; among the college-educated, 40% would consider it.

A July Washington Post/Ipsos poll found similar results: Americans rejected the idea of a democratic socialist presidential candidate by 16 percentage points. Among those with just a high school degree, the rejection widened to 28 percentage points. Once again, the college-educated were far more receptive, splitting roughly down the middle.»

CBS’ El-Sayed Scandal

https://www.status.news/p/cbs-news-el-sayed-bari-weiss-9-11

CBS and Bari Weiss (and David Ellison) working hard to stir up a tempest in a teapot, I guess.

«Hudak then reported on two now-deleted social media posts referencing 9/11 that El-Sayed had published during the pandemic. The first was from April 2020, when El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public health official, noted that the COVID-19 death toll had surpassed the 9/11 death toll. In the second, El-Sayed wrote that since more Americans had died from COVID-19 than the terrorist attacks, he hoped “that means we’ll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty … like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them.”

To most people, El-Sayed’s social media posts were likely innocuous. In fact, top politicians, including then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and mainstream news organizations, including CBS News itself, had pointed out at the time that the pandemic was killing more Americans than 9/11. But in Weiss’ eyes, the news organization had apparently uncovered a scandal worthy of attention from a national news outlet.

…

But CBS News took those old posts, stressed that El-Sayed had deleted them (even though his campaign had previously said he deleted all posts prior to 2023, not just these ones), and framed them around the upcoming anniversary of 9/11. The obvious implication was that there was something sinister about the manner in which the prominent Muslim candidate invoked 9/11, even though his posts themselves were mundane.»