“Stephen Moore is a particularly poor choice for the Federal Reserve Board,” Tim Duy, an economics professor and a Fed expert at the University of Oregon, told the Times. “He appears more devoted to pursuing a far-right economic agenda than willing to understand the complexity of economic policy.” Obviously, for President Buy and Sell, that’s all part of the charm.

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Trump cancels North Korea sanctions announced yesterday because Kim Jong Un is his friend

No, really:

President Trump undercut his own Treasury Department on Friday by announcing that he was rolling back North Korea sanctions that it imposed just a day ago. The move, announced on Twitter, was a remarkable display of dissension within the Trump administration and represented a striking case of a White House intervening to reverse a major national security decision made only hours earlier by the president’s own officials.

The Treasury Department on Thursday imposed new sanctions on two Chinese shipping companies that it says have been helping North Korea evade international sanctions. . . . Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said the decision was a favor to Mr. Kim. “President Trump likes Chairman Kim, and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary,” she said.

It’s hard to overstate how batshit insane this is. As The New York Times points out, “Treasury and State Department officials, including career staff members and political appointees, spend months carefully crafting sanctions based on intensive intelligence gathering and legal research.” Then, less than 24 hours after announcing their decision to impose sanctions, Trump comes along and cancels them. Via tweet. Without telling anyone in the administration first. Because, as he’s demonstrated on multiple occasions, his friendships with authoritarian dictators are more important to him than the U.S. being taken seriously.

To be fair, maybe we should’ve seen this coming! Last month, in the run-up to his Vietnam summit with Kim Jong Un, Trump opined that he’d known lots of people who were messed up by growing up in wealthy and powerful families, but Kim—a brutal dictator who runs a country that’s been described as “the world’s biggest open prison camp”—wasn’t one of them. Even failed talks between the two leaders couldn’t diminish Trump’s fondness for the guy, whose word he still chose to take re: Kim supposedly not knowing anything about the death of Otto Warmbier, the American student imprisoned in North Korea for more than a year who died days after being sent back to the U.S. with brain damage.

Beto likes the idea of taxing the rich, hasn’t quite decided how to do it