WEDNESDAY: Eggs are down and coffee is up!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 2025

Slowly the New York Times turns: Good news! According to The Hill, the price of eggs is down:

US egg prices fall for third straight month

The average price for a dozen eggs is now $3.77, another step down from March’s record-high carton costs.

The newest numbers mark the third straight month of declining egg prices for American consumers, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The highest price—around $6.23 in March—has steadily dipped each month, with costs landing near $5.12 in April and $4.55 in May.

Eggs are down for the third straight month. Assuming that report is accurate, that counts as good news. 

That said, here's your bad news! According to the New York Times, the price of coffee has been going up—and it may go even higher:

Tariffs on Brazil Could Leave Coffee Drinkers With a Headache

[...]

President Trump’s plan to impose a 50 percent tariff on all imports from Brazil starting next month would drive up the price of coffee, whether it was served in cafes or brewed in the kitchen.

Such a tariff would put more pressure on the coffee industry as prices have peaked globally this year. Droughts in Brazil and Vietnam, two of the biggest coffee exporters to the United States, have resulted in smaller harvests in recent seasons, driving up prices.

Consumers are already paying more at the grocery store. At the end of May, the average price of one pound of ground roast coffee in the U.S. was $7.93, up from $5.99 at the same time last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As of the end of May, the price of coffee was already substantially higher than it was last year. If President Trump decides to hold firm on that threatened tariff, things could get that much worse.

Coffee is up and eggs are down and never the twain shall meet! For the record, these price fluctuations in the past year may have had little to do with Presidents Biden and Trump:

According to the New York Times, coffee is up because of those droughts in Brazil and Vietnam. According to NewsNation, eggs are down because "cases of avian flu [are] more controlled." 

(The report also says that "egg imports [have] increased," helping drive prices down, possibly due, at least in part, to actions by the Trump administration.)

Coffee is up and eggs are down and information is hard to get! In this report from Mediaite, Bill O'Reilly keeps insisting, on a NewsNation program, that Jeffrey Epstein was “convicted under Merrick Garland’s Justice Department."

As NewsNation's host kept noting, he wasn't! As you can see in that report, O'Reilly finally relented on the facts after several on-air corrections. 

Everybody makes mistakes! As if to prove that point, here went President Trump again, speaking in the Oval Office on this very morning:

Trump Surprised ‘Terrible Fed Chair’ Jerome Powell Was Appointed—Forgetting He Appointed Him

President Donald Trump admitted Wednesday during an Oval Office press event that he was “surprised” that Jerome Powell was appointed Fed Chair, apparently forgetting that he was the individual who appointed the “terrible” appointee.

[...]

“He’s a terrible Fed chair,” he continued. “I was surprised he was appointed. I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in and extended him, but they did.”

Trump appointed Powell to lead the central bank in November 2017, selecting him to succeed Janet Yellen despite Powell being a sitting member of the Fed’s Board of Governors. 

For ourselves, we're puzzled by two word choices in that report—"admitted" and "despite." At any rate, it was President Trump who nominated the terrible Powell for his position as Fed chair. It wasn't President Biden!

People do make mistakes, especially mistakes which are helpful. On a slightly different tangent, we almost think we see the New York Times expanding the scope of its coverage of President Trump in a new report.

The report was written by Peter Baker. In this essay, the paper seems to be a bit more probing about certain aspects of the sitting president's highly unusual conduct:

WHITE HOUSE MEMO
For Trump, Domestic Adversaries Are Not Just Wrong, They Are ‘Evil’

When the Pentagon decided not to send anyone to this week’s Aspen Security Forum, an annual bipartisan gathering of national security professionals in the Colorado mountains, President Trump’s appointees explained that they would not participate in discussions with people who subscribe to the “evil of globalism.”

After all the evils that the U.S. military has fought, this may be the first time in its history that it has put globalization on its enemies list. But it is simply following the example of Mr. Trump. Last week, he denounced a reporter as a “very evil person” for asking a question he did not like. This week, he declared that Democrats are “an evil group of people.”

“Evil” is a word getting a lot of airtime in the second Trump term. It is not enough anymore to dislike a journalistic inquiry or disagree with an opposing philosophy. Anyone viewed as critical of the president or insufficiently deferential is wicked. The Trump administration’s efforts to achieve its policy goals are not just an exercise in governance but a holy mission against forces of darkness.

The characterization seeds the ground to justify all sorts of actions that would normally be considered extreme or out of bounds...

That's the way Baker begins. In our view, he ventures out of his way as he starts to soften the force of what he's describing. Still, he's examining an increasing bit of highly unusual conduct—the president's increasing assessment that those who make accurate statements he doesn't like should be stamped as "evil" or "very evil," but also as "the enemy."

That's very unusual presidential behavior. Why does President Trump behave that way? And what might a specialist say about this dangerous, unintelligent conduct?

This is dangerous behavior. In our view, it also has the feel of a human tragedy. What might a specialist say, a person with experience and specialized training?