A federal judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida has dismissed Trump v. Murdoch, tRump’s defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal.

In a 17-page order, Judge Darrin Gayles found that, even assuming everything in Trump’s complaint is true, Trump’s lawsuit “comes nowhere close” to meeting the standard for defamation. Gayles does not weigh in on whether the 2003 Trump letter was genuine, but notes that the lawsuit fails to establish that the reporters acted with “actual malice.”

Specifically, Gayles notes that the reporters reached out to Trump and others for comment, and printed Trump’s denial that he authored the letter in the piece. This showed that the reporters both investigated the letter’s authenticity and allowed readers to draw their own conclusions.

Yet another reminder that the outlets that help him, whether it’s through putting a thumb on the outlet’s editorial scales or handing over huge settlements plausibly deniable cash gifts without a murmur do it because they want to help him and think they’ve found a way to cover their bias.

There’s a link to the order up top. Most available documents are available here, for free.

People who post off-topic comments think the Opinions section of the Wall Street Journal is too liberal.

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[We can still hope for a future of renewable energy.]

I have never understood people who dislike wind turbines. They become a prominent part of any landscape once erected, that much is true. But to me, they are wondrous. They represent the possibility of a better, cleaner future, a future when we are no longer burning a dwindling supply of fossil fuels and polluting the very air we breathe. Aside from oil company executives, who wouldn’t want that?

Regrettably, turbines in Gloucester, Massachusetts, are being decommissioned well before the end of their useful lives. Gloucestrian Sarah Shemkus wrote about the loss.

Link: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/wind/my-citys-wind-turbines-shutting-down

And no matter how many bad faith arguments are constructed to explain why this doesn’t apply to the housing market, this remains true in that context as well:

After decades of explosive growth, Austin, Texas, in the 2010s was a victim of its own success. Lured by high-tech jobs and the city’s hip reputation, too many people were competing for too few homes. From 2010 to 2019, rents in Austin increased nearly 93%—more than in any other major American city. And home sale prices increased 82%, more than in any other metro area in Texas.

But starting in 2015, Austin instituted an array of policy reforms aimed at encouraging the development of new housing, especially rentals. The city changed zoning regulations to allow construction of large apartment buildings, particularly near jobs and transit. In 2018, voters approved a $250 million bond measure to build and repair affordable housing. Permitting processes were reformed to speed development and reduce costs.

The efforts worked. From 2015 to 2024, Austin added 120,000 units to its housing stock—an increase of 30%, more than three times the overall rate of growth in the United States (9%).

Rents fell. In December 2021, Austin’s median rent was $1,546, near its highest level ever and 15% higher than the U.S. median ($1,346). By January 2026, Austin’s median rent had fallen to $1,296, 4% lower than that of the U.S. overall ($1,353). This decline occurred even though the city population grew by 18,000 residents from 2022 to 2024. In apartment buildings with 50 or more units, rents fell 7% from 2023 to 2024 alone—the steepest decline recorded in any large metropolitan area. Rents declined about 11% in older non-luxury buildings that cater to lower-income renters, known as Class C buildings.

Austin’s success serves as an important example of how regulatory barriers to building more housing are often varied and interconnected. No single solution can solve a housing shortage, but Austin has taken multiple steps that have helped to unlock large amounts of housing supply in its market and reverse rent growth, including rent for tenants of lower-cost, older apartments. The city continues to take forward-looking steps—among them reforming building codes, streamlining permitting, and facilitating the construction of small apartment buildings—to reduce housing underproduction and improve affordability for existing and future residents.

It cannot be emphasized enough that NIMBYS in urban centers in blue states are enemies of civil rights however they would like to think of themselves. NIMBYism also means that what should be more broadly-shared prosperity is both attenuated and disproportionately captured by incumbent homeowners (and, in many cases, the heirs of incumbent homeowners):

But there’s just no sign of any kind of Bay Area population boom. As high tech went from an interesting sector of the American economy to a globally dominant force, the places that saw booming population growth were Phoenix, Houston, Vegas, the remote exurbs of Los Angeles, and Fort Worth.

The three largest companies in the world by market cap are all located in the Bay Area. So is number eight and number nine, and number 10 was founded there.

But it’s not the largest metro area in the world. Or the largest metro area in the country. Or even the largest metro area in California. And that’s despite the weather and basic natural amenities there being dramatically nicer than those that greeted people who moved to Chicago and Detroit and other industrial hubs during their boom times. Alongside the trillion-dollar valuations and insta-fortunes, we in some sense should have been building a Tokyo-scale megacity, with San Francisco looking like Manhattan, skyscrapers next to Caltrain stations, and Marin County featuring the apartment towers it’s depicted as having in “Star Trek: Picard.”

Of course, mega-growth would have caused lots of traffic jams and stressed infrastructure and required the construction of new bridges or tunnels across the bay and new roads and rail lines. But it is possible to do these things. America has fast-growing metro areas. It’s just that unlike in the past, the growth is not concentrated where the economic boom is happening.

Americans sometimes look with envy on the rapid economic growth achieved in China during this period. But if you look at Shenzhen or any other major Chinese city, what you see is dramatic physical transformation across the course of the 21st century. That’s precisely what American public policy has been hostile to, not just in the Bay Area but almost everywhere that isn’t an unincorporated area on the fringes of a Sunbelt metro area.

To have a broad-based economic boom, we need a boomtown.

I get, of course, that “well, just move” is not the answer to the economic problems of struggling areas. At the same time, it’s just factually the case that millions of people did move during this period.

If they had moved to Mega City San Francisco Bay instead of to the suburbs of Fort Worth, almost all of them would have higher incomes. Not because they would have been rich software developers, but because they’d have been selling shovels during the gold rush — doing whatever jobs they do now, but at ground zero for global innovation.

It’s also true that the agglomerations around the tech industry itself would have been even sharper. But then beyond that, you have economic linkages across the country. You don’t build a megacity with only local resources. All of America’s manufacturing might would have gone into building the buildings and supporting the infrastructure that make a megacity. Even a dynamic as simple as “people with bigger homes would buy more appliances” would create jobs and economic opportunities for people far away from California.

Making it legal to build housing, especially multifamily housing, is not a magic bullet that will solve anything, but it would be an enormous net benefit for both equal citizenship and economic growth.

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[If you can, you should.]

A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, has a new ad running on Times podcasts. In it, he makes a plaintive request:

I’m encouraging you to support any news organization that’s dedicated to original reporting. If that’s your local newspaper, terrific — local newspapers in particular need your support. If that’s another national newspaper, that’s great too. And if it’s the New York Times, we’ll use that money to send reporters out to find the facts and context that you’ll never get from AI. That’s it, not asking you to click on any link, just subscribe to a real news organization with real journalists doing firsthand, fact-based reporting. And if you already do, thank you.

Fact-based reporting is crucial for a democratic society. It’s in all of our interests to support it.

Link: https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/new-york-times-runs-in-house-ad-asking-listeners-to-support-any-news-organization-dedicated-to-original-reporting/

There’s no other term for it [gift link]:

Hours after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Good inside her S.U.V. on a Minneapolis street last month, a senior federal prosecutor in Minnesota sought a warrant to search the vehicle for evidence in what he expected would be a standard civil rights investigation into the agent’s use of force.

The prosecutor, Joseph H. Thompson, wrote in an email to colleagues that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that specializes in investigating police shootings, would team up with the F.B.I. to determine whether the shooting had been justified and lawful or had violated Ms. Good’s civil rights.

But later that week, as F.B.I. agents equipped with a signed warrant prepared to document blood spatter and bullet holes in Ms. Good’s S.U.V., they received orders to stop, according to several people with knowledge of the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The orders, they said, came from senior officials, including Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, several of whom worried that pursuing a civil rights investigation — by using a warrant obtained on that basis — would contradict President Trump’s claim that Ms. Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer” who fired at her as she drove her vehicle.

Over the next few days, top Department of Justice officials presented alternative approaches. First, they suggested prosecutors ask a judge to sign a new search warrant for the vehicle, predicated on a criminal investigation into whether the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot Ms. Good, Jonathan Ross, had been assaulted by her. Later, they urged the prosecutors to instead investigate Ms. Good’s partner, who had been with Ms. Good on the morning of the shooting, confronting immigration agents in their Minneapolis neighborhood.

Several of the career federal prosecutors in Minnesota, including Mr. Thompson, balked at the new approach, which they viewed as legally dubious and incendiary in a state where anger over a federal immigration crackdown was already boiling over. Mr. Thompson and five others left the office in protest, setting off a broader wave of resignations that has left Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office severely understaffed and in crisis. Officials have not said whether they ultimately obtained a new warrant to search the vehicle.

It’s easy to become desensitized when every week Trump does something far worse than anything Nixon got forced out of office for, but ending a murder investigation because it would embarrass the president is an unspeakable abuse of power.

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