Freakish Events

My worry is that this gets filed away as a freak event, when the same small river flooded 14 months earlier and nobody moved a gauge onto it. “Freak” is the word that we use for things we decided not to measure.

– Gwen, Critical Latitude
“Everything we know about Nepal’s flood“

This week’s featured post is “Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Trump’s attempt to control mail-in voting is obviously beyond his legal powers. But he has appealed to the Supreme Court, where laws have no meaning.
  • Climate change. The Nepal flood is another of those extreme events that scientists can’t 100% nail down as a consequence of climate change. But climate change makes events like this much more likely.
  • Ukraine. We’ve been around this track many times before: Trump sends his people (Kushner and Wittkoff this time) to Moscow. They have “substantive” or “productive” talks with Putin. They go to Kyiv to present Putin’s demands to Zelenskyy, who says no. “The war will continue.“

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the postal service

Under normal circumstances, the US Postal Service is not national news. It delivers mail, does it wonderfully in some ways and disappointingly in others. But during an ordinary presidency the most newsworthy thing it does is add a few cents to the basic letter rate or close a post office somewhere.

USPS used to be an independent agency. But that was in the days before the Supreme Court signed on to the unitary tyrant executive theory, which basically wipes out all independent agencies, placing them under the control of the President (at least until a Democratic president gets elected; whether s/he will have the same powers the Court has given Trump is anybody’s guess).

So Trump is trying to use his authority over the Post Office to cheat in the fall elections. Democracy Docket summarizes:

Under the new USPS rule, written to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting, states’ mail ballot envelopes must include certain design changes, such as new logos and barcodes. The rule also requires states to submit personal information on voters who’ve requested mail ballots to a federal online portal. States that fail at either requirement would not receive mail ballots from USPS.

The cheating part is the submission to the federal portal, which would check those states’ lists against a list complied by DHS of US citizens, and not deliver ballots to people it deemed ineligible. The alleged intent is to keep non-citizens from voting — which is a laudable goal, but is nearly achieved already: No study has shown any significant number of non-citizens voting in any state. But the actual intent is more sinister: to make the Trump regime the arbiter of who can legitimately vote.

According to the Constitution, managing elections is the job of the states. Congress can pass laws regulating federal elections, but the executive branch without Congress has no authority to issue new rules.

24 states are suing to block the new rule. They initially won their suits, until the Supreme Court weighed in, saying that the suit (at that time) was premature, because the rule was only proposed and had not been finalized. Then it became final and the circus started all over again.

Friday, a district court blocked the rule. The Trump regime responded by skipping the usual appellate court and going straight to the Supreme Court, asking it to stay the lower court ruling and allow USPS’ new rule to go into effect in time for the November elections.

As so often happens these days, the law is clear. But whether the Supreme Court will follow the law or make up new laws is anyone’s guess. Maybe I’m naive, but I think the Court is going to follow the law this time.

and dissent inside the Pentagon

That’s the subject of the featured post.

and Trump’s clueless midterm strategy

You may not have heard about it yet, but there’s going to be a national political convention this week.

This week in Dallas, Texas, the party will stage a midterm convention for the first time. Donald Trump will deliver a keynote address on Wednesday and closing remarks on Thursday in Dallas, Texas. Other speakers include Vice-President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. The convention has been billed as a “primetime showcase” to boost morale, nationalise congressional elections and galvanise Republican voters.

One reason I’m optimistic about Democrats taking not just the House but the Senate: Trump doesn’t seem to understand the problem. He lives in Natalie’s fantasy world where he has done all these amazing things. The only problems he sees are that his people are demoralized and the good news of his many achievements just isn’t getting out for some reason.

Everybody was wondering what he would spend his massive PAC on. But if his first ad of the season is any indication, he’s going to spend it praising himself

He is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves. When the world needs courage, vision, and inspiration, it is still turning to America. There is no challenge Americans cannot overcome, no frontier too vast for us to conquer. We will be prosperous. We will be proud. We will be strong, and we will win like never before.

So he’s not ending the war or getting gas prices down or resolving the trade war with Canada or forgetting about his unpopular ballroom and triumphal arch until after the election. And he’s not holing up in the White House and letting Republican candidates fend for themselves. He wants to be the big issue of the midterms, and Democrats want that too.

Sadly, few people will probably watch this convention. (Being on opposite the start of the NFL season is just one of its many difficulties.) I expect the low ratings for Trump’s speech to spark an epic Truth Social tirade from the Mad King. But it probably won’t move the needle in either direction, because nobody is going to watch.

Much is being written about Trump’s desire to leave a legacy of monuments to himself. He would do well to consider this: There is no Eisenhower monument, but there is an interstate highway system. There is no Johnson monument, but there is Medicare. There is no FDR monument, just Social Security.

Trump needs his arch and ballroom and coin and airport and all the rest of it because he has accomplished nothing of note. If he doesn’t use his power to construct some physical edifice (or to carve his name on something constructed by or for some other president), no one will ever think of him again after he leaves office — at least not in a positive way.

Missouri had passed a gerrymandering map with the intent of getting rid of one of its two Democratic congressional districts. But the state supreme court blocked the move. The situation is a little confusing, because primaries were already held using the gerrymandered map.

and Germany

The far-right Alternative fur Deutschland Party (AFD) got 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, one of Germany’s 16 regions. The other major parties are firmly against a coalition with AfD, so it will be interesting to see how Saxony-Anhalt forms a government.

The AfD stands for “remigration” of immigrants back to their original countries, even if they entered Germany legally. It also wants to end Germany’s support for Ukraine and improve relations with Putin’s Russia.

Here’s how far out AfD is:

France’s National Rally under Marine Le Pen kicked the AfD out of its grouping in the European Parliament two years ago, for being too “radical”.

and you also might be interested in …

Not quite two weeks ago, Nepal suffered a catastrophic flash flood.

At least 1,342 deaths and 4,886 missing persons were confirmed in Nepal with an additional 43 dead and 519 missing in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. The flood carried the bodies of some victims 240 km (150 mi) away into neighbouring India.

One reason this event was so deadly is that in the 50 minutes between detection and the water/debris sludge sweeping a town away, nobody warned them.

Early explanations blamed the flood on an earthquake in the high Himalayas. A later explanation said it was due to a glacier breaking up. But the current explanation says that unusually warm weather melted the centuries-old ice that had been mortaring the mountain rocks together. That led to an avalanche, which fooled seismic sensors into announcing an earthquake.

Is this climate change in action? It’s very hard to look at one particular disaster and definitively attach it to climate change. But it sure looks like the kind of thing you’d expect to see more often as the Earth warms.

If you have half an hour to spend on this topic, I strongly recommend this video by the Critical Latitude podcast. It explains why the various false explanations arose, how they were debunked, why warnings didn’t make it to the people in the path of the flood, and where else in the world conditions like this might occur.

It’s been decades since I’ve been to the Burning Man festival in Nevada. I remember it as a temporary Shangri-La where you could be free from people trying to dominate you or judge you or sell you something. It’s hard to appreciate an environment like that until you experience it. You might think it’s effortless to filter out all that dominance and judgement and salesmanship, but then somebody turns it off and the quiet in your mind is amazing.

One price you pay for that freedom is that you have to follow some simple rules, like you don’t take pictures or videos of people who haven’t consented. There’s good reason for that: It would be hard to feel really free in whatever you’re doing if you had to worry about your picture showing up on social media and somehow making it back to your workplace. (My late wife once briefly wound up on Nightline, presumably because she was one of the few people who was fully clothed and willing to talk on camera.)

So anyway, according to this account by Friendly Atheist, a proselytizing Christian group showed up at Burning Man, broke a bunch of those rules, and got thrown out of the event. They then started a persecution narrative on their social media accounts, claiming they were thrown out for being Christian.

Would you look at that? Another story of Christians assuming they can break the rules and get away with it because of their faith. Another violation of consent. Another example of Christian privilege followed by false accusations of persecution. … If Burning Man is all about radical inclusion, that still very much extends to people with absurd religious beliefs. But their rules don’t have exceptions for followers of Jesus. The missionaries’ dishonest attempt to turn their eviction into a story of persecution is just another reason you should always fact-check Christians’ stories whenever they claim they’re the victims of discrimination.

I admit that I do not check out every Christian-persecution story I run across. But every one set in America that I have checked into turned out to be bogus. As best I can tell, there is no actual persecution of Christians in the United States.

and let’s close with something incongruous

When you see National Gallery of Art curator Allison Williams, her 77-year-old appearance doesn’t seem to fit with her Gen Z slang. Watch her video.

September 7, 2026 – 12:48 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon

Obeying orders doesn’t mean you can’t drag your feet.

In January 2025, a few weeks before Donald Trump would be sworn in to begin his second term, the America First Policy Institute issued a warning about career government employees who might try to sabotage what the new president wanted to do.

Many career staff diligently and impartially serve whoever holds office. However, there are those who do not. Some career employees resisted the president’s agenda during the [first] Trump Administration. Interviews with former Trump Administration appointees reveal these employees used similar strategies to stymie the president’s policies. These included:

  • withholding information;
  • refusing to implement policies;
  • intentionally delaying or slow-walking priorities;
  • deliberately underperforming;
  • leaking to Congress and the media; and
  • outright insubordination.

This opposition embedded within the government constitutes the dreaded Deep State: unelected bureaucrats who have their own ideas about what they’re supposed to be doing, ideas that sometimes contradict the orders that come down from the top.

Right-wing opinion-makers excel at demonizing a word or phrase: DEI, critical race theory, socialism, open borders, fake news, illegal immigrant, and so on. Denizens of the right-wing media echo chamber can be counted on to respond according to their Pavlovian training. So no one needs to explain what woke people do or why it’s bad. Leaders just have to attach the label to someone, and the faithful know to start growling at them. The Right has been using this technique for decades. Back in the 1980s, Reaganites demonized the death tax, and before long even minimum-wage workers were outraged that the government might try to add friction to the path of generational wealth as it oozed down plutocratic family trees.

But few phrases are as thoroughly demonized as Deep State. The Deep State is supposed to be a kind of shadow government, a hidden cabal of officials who (like the Devil) can be attached to any conspiracy theory. The villainy of the Deep State explains why conservative governments consistently fail to keep their promises, and — no matter how many job-creating tax cuts the rich get — the vise around the American working class continues to tighten.

What the Deep State really is. Back in the first Trump administration, I started looking at the way Deep State was being used, and I came to a conclusion that surprised me: The Deep State really exists, but it’s nothing like its conspiracy-theory description. It’s not a conspiracy at all, it’s a culture, and it changes from one part of the government to another: The Deep IRS, for example, is nothing like the Deep FDA. What the Deep State actually consists of is government employees whose first loyalty is to the mission of their organization, rather than to the chain of command.

If you imagine making a career in the federal government, this makes perfect sense. Many young people are probably just looking for a job when they join the government, but the best candidates — the ones who become leaders and create the organizational culture — have choices. They commit themselves to the part of the government they believe in most, the one whose mission best reflects their inner values. So if you believe in public health, you join HHS or the CDC. If you want to protect society from crime, the FBI appeals. If you are inspired by the visions of science fiction, an offer from NASA sparkles in a way that no other agency can match.

If you have that kind of relationship to your organization, you are nothing like the soulless drone or petty tyrant Fox News wants its audience to imagine when its hosts say bureaucrat. You go to work with a spring in your step. You are fighting the good fight and holding back the forces of darkness.

Now what happens when a new administration wants to turn your organization against its core mission? When the EPA is asked to find or create loopholes in the laws that restrain polluters? When DoJ is directed to ignore crimes by the President’s friends and invent reasons to prosecute his enemies? When DoJ’s Civil Rights Division is tasked with protecting the privileges of Whites or Christians, rather than the rights of people who actually need protection?

Maybe you quit, like countless DoJ prosecutors have done since that department was corrupted by the likes of Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche. But maybe you have a family and a mortgage, or you only need to hang on two or three more years to qualify for your pension. “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” you tell yourself. “Maybe I can avoid the morally revolting assignments and still find parts of the job to believe in.”

Or maybe you think the mission your agency was created to pursue, the one that may still be embedded in the laws that established it, is too important to leave to the ever-changing whims of an 80-year-old simpleton and his cronies. Maybe you stay because you can imagine the know-nothings and yes-men who will be appointed if you leave.

Now you start doing the things AFPI found so threatening. You don’t get a membership card or learn the secret handshake, but you have nonetheless joined the Deep State.

The Deep Pentagon. Liberals like me aren’t used to siding with the Deep Pentagon. We remember Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex. We know about the infighting between the Army and Navy, and the Pentagon’s desire to keep a weapons program funded even if the early tests aren’t going well. Too often a plane or vehicle that should be simple and nimble becomes a camel that is supposed to do everything for everybody, and gets bloated with options and gear. Generals and admirals are too easily seduced by the prospect of high-paying jobs in defense corporations after they retire.

Is there corruption in the Pentagon? Yes. Waste? Of course.

But simultaneously, there is a sense of mission: You want to protect the country. You want to preserve the geo-political prominence of the United States. When a strutting Napoleon wannabe and his unqualified Secretary of War Defense threaten that prominence and leave the nation open to attack, you start to rebel.

That’s what we’ve been seeing lately.

Enter Hegseth. When Pete Hegseth took control of the Pentagon, he did not have the respect of the officer corps. Yes, he had been in the military, rising to the rank of major. He deployed to combat zones and was awarded two bronze stars for “meritorious service” (which is actually quite different from getting a medal for valor). Prior to his confirmation, reports of a drinking problem and sexual improprieties came out. His ability to manage people has always been questionable; in civilian life he had managed only small organizations and not terribly well.

He was nominated as SecDef for two reasons: He was a Trump loyalist, and as a former Fox News personality he looked good on TV. Neither of those virtues ranks high in the value system of a general.

It could have worked if Hegseth had played to his strengths, if he had stayed out of major policy matters (that he knows nothing about) and been the Pentagon’s front man in the White House and Congress. But instead he has acted as if he alone understands war. He has assumed that any Black or female officer must be a “DEI hire” who lacks merit, so he has refused to promote them any higher, and has pressured some to leave. He has brought the culture wars into the military, espousing a “warrior ethos” that has little to do with modern high-tech warfare. Some of his proposals have seemed like jokes, like the one that will test the testosterone levels of all the men in the military and fund testosterone replacement therapies for those who fall short. (This is gender-affirming care for cis men.) Now he seems to be running for president, which is anathema to US military traditions.

But the real problem is the Iran War, which was launched on the assumption that it would be over quickly, and with little-to-no planning for what would happen if it wasn’t. Obvious Iranian counter-moves, like closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking the bases in allied countries that are essential logistics hubs, were not foreseen or planned around. (That flaw was made obvious by the sad conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, but is a much larger story.) Having made no attempt to raise public or congressional support prior to the attack, Hegseth has left the Pentagon out on a limb now that the war has gone badly. The supplemental appropriations the military needs to keep fighting this war are stalled, because Trump and Hegseth don’t want to answer questions in Congress, while even Republicans are reluctant to authorize more money without having a chance to ask.

The result is that the rest of our defense establishment is being raided to fund the war. If you are a commander somewhere else in the world, facing your usual responsibilities without your usual resources, you’re not happy. If, say, you’re supposed to be ready if China decides to attack Taiwan or Russia invades Estonia, you know you’re not ready. When the USS George Washington finally relieved the Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf of Oman, it left the entire western Pacific without an American aircraft carrier.

Normally, the Pentagon keeps its discontents under wraps. But then, somehow, the Washington Post got its hands on reports about the classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book.

Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief.

The warnings — detailed for Hegseth by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America — appear in the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), these people said. They described the assessment to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because the document is classified.

The SDOB, typically produced twice monthly, outlines the worldwide availability of U.S. warships, aircraft, personnel and weapons systems. It reflects the president’s priorities for the force, which are carried out by the defense secretary, and includes insights from the military’s top generals and admirals that inform the directives the Pentagon issues.

Those “insights” can include a “non-concur”, where some regional commander can express his disagreement with orders s/he is nonetheless carrying out.

Then last Monday, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll resigned, after much feuding with Hegseth about Army leadership.

When Hegseth took office last year, the Army had 10 four-star generals on active duty. Today, it has five.

Nearly a year ago, when Hegseth abruptly called top officers from around the world to Washington to hear political speeches by himself and Trump, many tried to read the stony faces of the generals and admirals in their seats. We’re still trying to read their faces and interpret the clues they leave.

But if they are coming to the conclusion that the Trump/Hegseth regime is undermining the safety and security of the United States, don’t expect them to stay in line. I don’t expect a coup or an assassination, as might happen in some country with a lesser tradition of an apolitical military. But there are ways to act out, and I expect to see more of them.

September 7, 2026 – 11:03 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Pete Hegseth’s fight with his generals boiled over last week with the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. There have been many signs of discontent in the Pentagon over the last few weeks, as the ill-planned Trump/Hegseth Iran War drains resources from our military units elsewhere in the world. I’ll look into that in more detail (and explain my theory of the Deep State) in “Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon”. I’ll try to get that out between 10 and 11 EDT.

That leaves a number of stories to the weekly summary: Trump’s attempt to use the Postal Service to take over the mail-in portion of the midterm elections is going to the Supreme Court, raising once again the question of how far the Court’s partisan Republican majority is willing to go to give its party and its president unfair advantages; Trump’s desire to make the GOP midterm campaigns all about himself, which is exactly what the Democrats want; a seismic victory for the far-right in one German region; a fascinating explanation of the Nepal flood; Canada’s refusal to fold in its trade war with the US; and a few other things. Expect to see that between noon and 1.

September 7, 2026 – 8:20 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Margins of Permission

Bullies seem to have a finely tuned awareness of where the margins of permission lie as regards abuses, and choose their targets based on whose suffering will be most broadly acceptable to others.

– A. R. Moxon “Soon You Too Will Be a Commie“

This week’s featured post is “Hazards and pitfalls of moving to the center“.

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Canada

Here we see a combination of a substantive issue with one of those blood-boiling but essentially meaningless things we see over and over: We find ourselves in an all-out trade war with our nearest neighbor and closest ally. That’s important. And Trump has ordered the name of Lake Ontario changed to Lake America, which is annoying but of no real consequence. (As soon as Trump is out of office, no one will say “Lake America” or “Gulf of America” ever again.)

The Toronto Star reports:

As [Prime Minister Carney] described it, he was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.

Paul Krugman explains why the US will lose this war. The US may be the much larger economy, but

an all-out trade war would create a lot of pain in the U.S. in addition to inflicting severe damage to the Canadian economy. And all indications are that the Canadians will be much more willing to bear the pain of a trade war than Americans will – especially given that the great majority of Americans are already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management.

Former Trump official Miles Taylor sees Canada’s resistance as a harbinger of nations getting fed up with trying to appease Trump. “nothing on earth scares Donald Trump like an opponent who fights back.”

Unlike Google, MapQuest is just not having this Lake America thing.

and the fall elections

Trump’s bid to control who can cast a mail-in ballot had another set-back Thursday, when his executive order was blocked by a federal judge. A previous block had been lifted by the Supreme Court just a few days before, but on technical grounds that didn’t reach the merits of the case.

Things continue to look good for Democrats. A series of polls in Michigan have El-Sayed up slightly. Josh Marshall concludes:

I’m not saying El-Sayed has this wrapped up. I’m saying that the idea that he can’t win or that the results of the primary were some kind of decisive setback for Democrats’ chances just can’t be squared with the available evidence. At least not so far. This is very much a race and it’s one in which El-Sayed kind of has to be viewed as a favorite to at least some degree.

So-called “centrist” pundits like Jonathan Chait really need to calm down. His column is about how El-Sayed needs to denounce this guy and separate himself from that guy more strongly than just saying he disagrees with what they’re saying. Chait says virtually nothing about what El-Sayed himself says or believes or hopes to do in the Senate.

Last week, I described the Democrats’ chance of winning a Senate majority this fall. I went through the states commonly viewed as having competitive Senate races and came out with a winning scenario — far from a sure thing, but more than wishful thinking. I didn’t consider any of the true long-shot races Jay Kuo covered Thursday: Mississippi, Kansas, South Carolina, Nebraska, and Arkansas. I’d be surprised if any of these red states seats flipped, but Kuo makes a good case that it’s not impossible.

and Venezuela

Friday, Trump announced on social media “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” The deal, which AFAIK still hasn’t been confirmed by any on-the-record American government office, supposedly involves 17 oil fields with 65 billion barrels of proven reserves.

The agreement allows for the United States to partner with an unnamed private operator in Venezuela to create a new private company to take hold of the reserves, according to a U.S. official familiar with the contours of the deal. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, added that [Venezuelan President Delcy] Rodríguez granted the company 100-year rights to develop the oil fields. The deal gives the United States 55% effective output of the new private company — including an ownership stake and rights to buy oil at cost. The company would be the second largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco, according to the official.

Phillips O’Brien points out that there all kinds of problems with this arrangement. For one thing,

it is not clear what element of the US government (if any) either can or will hold the equity stake in any new company

The American stake would have to be controlled and overseen by some particular department or agency, and without any congressional action it’s not clear who could do that. And without Senate ratification, this isn’t an official treaty. Like Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, it could be cancelled by any future president.

There are also problems on the Venezuelan side, because their constitution does not allow the government to sign away the country’s natural resources. If a future Venezuelan government thought it could get away with taking the oil fields back, it would face no legal barriers.

And finally, who are we making this agreement with? When we deposed Maduro, we were supposedly bringing freedom to the Venezuelan people. But since then we’ve ignored the democratic opposition and recognized Maduro’s henchmen as the government. O’Brien sums up:

I am providing this information so that there is no mistake about what the Trump administration is, and has been doing. It got rid of Maduro to entrench even more ruthless alleged criminals, the exact kind of people with which it can and, indeed, likes to do business.

Add to the mix that the country’s oil industry is a mess and requires huge amounts of capital investment (which so far the major oil companies haven’t been willing to fund). It will take years to substantially increase production. Also, Venezuelan crude oil is heavier than most American refineries can process, so there won’t be any big increase in gasoline production any time soon. Clean Technica has a fairly technical analysis that comes to the conclusion:

Raising output materially would require something closer to $100 billion over a decade. That scale of capital must be patient, politically insulated, and confident in long term demand. Even if someone was willing to pay for it, significant increases are a decade away in a world clearly pivoting away from oil and toward renewables and electrification.

and you also might be interested in …

I hope to review Gil Duran’s “The Nerd Reich” before long. In the meantime, check out this five-minute video about J. D. Vance and his puppet-master Peter Thiel.

David Frum looks at how other countries have recovered money from their past despots, and speculates about using civil suits to claw back Trump’s “ill-gotten gains”.

For about a year Christopher Armitage was a corrections officer in a prison. It taught him something about politics and the psychology behind MAGA.

I began to see a pattern that my psychology training wouldn’t let me ignore. The same personality traits that concentrated behind bars, what psychologists call the “dark triad” of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, were appearing throughout our political system. The empathy deficits that defined prison life weren’t confined to cellblocks. They were running for office, hosting talk shows, and writing legislation. … American conservatism has become an ideology that systematically suppresses empathy. It rewards the prison mentality: dominate or be dominated, trust only your tribe, see kindness as weakness. It’s created a political movement that mirrors the psychological dynamics of incarceration, complete with gang colors in the form of red hats and protection rackets in the form of vote-for-us-or-the-criminals-will-get-you rhetoric. …

The prison mirror reflects perfectly here: just as inmates must perform toughness to maintain status, conservative politicians must perform cruelty. Expressing empathy for the wrong group, immigrants, trans kids, the poor, marks you as weak, a “RINO” who’ll get primaried

A Stanford student newspaper won its suit against the Trump administration. It claimed that international students were afraid to write articles for fear they would be deported if Trump disagreed with what they said. The judge ruled that foreign citizens on student visas have the same free-speech rights Americans do, and that they cannot be deported based on what they have written or said.

and let’s close with a look back

I’m sure you’ve had no trouble finding coverage of Dolly Parton, who died Tuesday. She was one of the few public figures — it’s hard to find a comparable one — whose appeal spanned the political divide. She was an authentic up-from-poverty success story who never forgot about the kind of people she grew up around. Late in life, her philanthropy was as famous as her music.

If you wonder what the fuss is all about, The Guardian provides a curated list of 10 of her best songs. As someone lost a spouse less than two years ago, I resonate with her final hit “If You Hadn’t Been There” about her husband Carl Dean who died in 2025 a few weeks before their 59th anniversary. “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been there.”

August 31, 2026 – 1:42 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (7)

Hazards and pitfalls of moving to the center

Labor Day is the traditional signal for Democrats — but usually not Republicans these days — to abandon their edgier positions and “move to the center”. In some situations this is common sense. In others it’s dangerous.

A classic business-school homework problem concerns where to place snack shops on a popular beach. If there are two competitors, where should they set up to get the most business? The best solution for customers — assuming the beach is evenly populated and nobody wants to walk further than necessary to get a Sno-Cone — is to put one shop 1/4 of the way from the left edge of the beach and the other 1/4 from the right edge. That way, nobody has to cross more than 1/4 of the beach to get served.

But now imagine you’re running leftmost shop. If you nudge a little to the right, you may pick up some of the other shop’s customers, while losing few of your own (i.e., only the ones at the far left end who look at the longer walk and decide they’d rather do without). Of course, the same logic motivates your competitor to shift left, and the process continues until your two shops are side-by-side in the center. Customers overall are worse off, but that’s market capitalism for you. Nobody ever said the market produces ideal solutions. (Oh, wait. I guess some people do say that. Never mind.)

For a lot of political professionals (especially Democrats, for some reason), that homework problem frames their fundamental thinking about campaigns. Politics happens on a left/right spectrum, and the ideal marketing position for your candidate is in the center. If you’re unfortunate enough to be working for a left-leaning candidate, you need to nudge him or her to the right as far as you can. Doing so puts your political shop closer to more of the electorate, so it’s just common sense.

Arguments against this way of thinking revolve around what the model leaves out. For example, it removes the moral dimension from politics. No one lives or dies because they have to walk a little further to get their Sno-Cones. But lives clearly do hang on decisions about war, healthcare, abortion, foreign aid, and many of the other issues decided by our political process.

The Right clearly understands this. Take the abortion issue for example. If you believe that every fertilized ovum has a soul that is sacred to God, then abortion is murder and is always wrong. (I critiqued this position several years ago.) Republicans know this position is far outside the American mainstream, but they never move left in any serious way. (Thought experiment: How much support could you raise on the Right for a compromise that capped the number of legal abortions in America, establishing some criteria for who gets those abortions? If a million baby-murders is unacceptable, how about 100,000? I’m guessing the answer is no support at all.) One Republican position after another is rooted in Christian nationalism, with its underlying frame of spiritual warfare between Good and Evil. Compromise with Evil is wrong, even if it could win you a few votes.

Another factor left out of the snack-shop model is authenticity. People who get to the front of the line never doubt that the shop wants to sell them the items on its menu. But when politicians say things that are popular but out of sync with their previous positions, do you believe them? If Mike Johnson announced that government spending cuts had gone too far, or if AOC promised to get tough on illegal immigrants, would you buy that? Even if you liked the new position, would you be more likely to vote for them? Or less likely, because you might doubt that they had any authentic beliefs at all?

And finally, what do “left” and “right” mean, anyway? Free trade used to be a conservative position, but now tariffs are. If I defend San Francisco’s sanctuary city policies, is that a left-wing position (because it’s globalist rather than nationalist) or right-wing (because I’m defending local control against federal intervention)? If you want to stop corruption and keep inflation low, are you liberal or conservative?

The primary “center” position is that you are willing to “work across the aisle” to “get things done”. But what things?

So here’s the point I’m trying to make: Calls for Democrats to move to the center do have a logic to them. But to evaluate the wisdom of those calls, you need to reconsider the factors the beach-snack-shop model leaves out. What particular positions are we being asked to change? Would anyone believe us if we did announce those changes? And who are we abandoning when we do?

Let me suggest a list of people to bear in mind when you ask that third question.

  • Asylum seekers. In the wake of the Holocaust, the nations of the world recognized that people who are facing dire situations in their home countries need to have somewhere to go. We signed those treaties and implemented their principles in law. Currently, our asylum system is swamped, and its delays create opportunities for immigrants to game the system. But the right solution is to fix the system, not abandon the principles embodied in our laws and agreements. We shouldn’t turn people away just so they can be killed back home.
  • Women with problem pregnancies. Laws that protect fetuses often endanger pregnant women. In some states, a pregnant woman’s life needs to be in immediate danger before she can get an abortion. Even if that danger is predictable, it can’t be acted on until it arrives. And sometimes doctors wait too long.
  • Trans people. Something I know from my own friend group (and their children) is that trans people are real. They aren’t making it all up, and they’re not looking to gain some advantage. To move to the center, do I have to pretend that they’re not real? Do I have to support laws that solve no problems, but mark them for harassment? Do I have to stop parents from using their best judgment about what medical treatments their children need?
  • The working poor. Many Americans who have jobs and work full schedules can’t afford health insurance for themselves and their families. Do I need to become OK with that?
  • Victims of ICE’s crimes. The world saw the murders of Rene Good and Alex Pretti. Nothing has been done to bring the murderers to justice or reform the organization that employed and shelters them. Seldom does a week go by without some shocking abuse of ICE’s power. Do we just ignore this, or blame it on a few bad apples (who nonetheless must be protected)?
  • People in poverty. In poor countries, the cost of saving lives is fairly small. Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID seems likely to result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. The endangered people are also real. Should we not care about them?

A final question to ask about reaching compromise in the center: Who are we compromising with? Are they offering some actual compromise, or just demanding our approval for their abusive policies?

An important article to read when thinking about this question is A. R. Moxon’s “Soon You Too Will Be a Commie“. Moxon puts a completely different frame on the Right: They’re not a rival snack shop on the other side of the beach, they’re bullies looking for people that they can abuse without consequences. He recalls his own childhood bullies accusing him of being gay, him denying it, and them beating him up anyway.

[B]ullies seem to have a finely tuned awareness of where the margins of permission lie as regards abuses, and choose their targets based on whose suffering will be most broadly acceptable to others. Seems to me bullies always seek to expand the margins of permission for their violence, and one of their standard tactics is expanding the definition of whatever group is broadly acceptable, to include more and more people. Seems to me that when you insist that you aren’t in that group, or take pains to demonstrate that you aren’t in that group, you appease the bully’s premise that a person who [is] in that group deserves abuse. Seems to me that when you get the abuse anyway, the bully has successfully completed the expansion of permission wherein that group now includes you. In a bully’s world, where gay means a beating is deserved, eventually you’ll be gay, too.

Moxon is focused on a somewhat different issue — the pressure Democrats are under to denounce “far-left” allies. (See Abdul El-Sayed and Hassan Piker, which I’ll say more about in the weekly summary.) But the same principles apply to many of the groups on my list above. One complaint I have often heard about Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign is that she shouldn’t have talked so much about trans rights. But here’s the problem with that critique: During her 2024 campaign, I don’t believe Harris talked at all about trans rights. It was the Trump campaign that relentlessly raised the trans issue: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Trump (falsely) accused a Olympic medal-winning boxer of being trans. But Harris had defended trans rights in the 2020 primaries (making up for a mixed record previously), and that was all it took. No number of speeches about kitchen-table issues could make the trans issue go away.

What would she have had to do? Come out against trans rights? Repeat some anti-trans framing, the way Rep. (and current Senate candidate) Seth Moulton did after the 2024 election? (“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”) Become a bully herself?

With regard to protecting any of the groups I listed above, what is the compromise position? (Restoring half of the money Musk took from USAID? Funding fewer ICE concentration camps?) Who would those compromises appeal to, and how many votes would they be worth?

It won’t work to just stop talking about those issues, because Republicans have a lot of money to keep raising them. That’s the lesson of the Harris campaign. And no maybe-you’re-right rhetoric will be strong enough. I don’t think you can split the difference between bullies and their victims. You can either defend the victims or join the bullies.

August 31, 2026 – 10:53 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Next weekend is Labor Day, which is the traditional let’s-get-serious moment in American election campaigns. Ad wars heat up, and people who don’t pay a lot of attention to politics begin to wonder what offices are up for grabs this time and who they might want to fill them.

The conventional wisdom says this is the time to stop trying to rally your base and start talking to the swing voters, who occupy some theoretical “center” of the political spectrum. It’s time to drop your edgier positions and focus on so-called “kitchen table issues” like the price of gas. That’s the question I address in this week’s featured post “Hazards and pitfalls of moving to the center”. In that post, I try to give move-to-the-center its due as a logical path forward, while examining what this kind of thinking leaves out.

The question I come down to is: When you get down to the nuts-and-bolts of exactly which positions you would need to change or de-emphasize, who would you be abandoning? I’ll try to get that out by 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary, I’ll continue the practice I started last week of separating substantive developments from the ones that just boil your blood, for example separating Lake America from the larger trade war with Canada. Among those substantive issues are the apparent deal to control Venezuela’s oil, the heat build-up in the oceans, the fall elections, and the continuing effort to control the worst excesses of the Trump regime through the courts. And I’ll close with a farewell to Dolly Parton.

August 31, 2026 – 9:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Best Descriptions

Here is the thing. If you tell me that you believe that race is a biological category and that it is a guide to the objective superiority and inferiority of groups of people, I am not calling you a racist to insult you, I am calling you a racist because it best describes your beliefs.

– Jamelle Bouie

This week’s featured post is “Can Democrats take the Senate?“

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about our strange foreign policy

So North Korea is good and Canada is bad. Got it?

As North Korea goes full speed ahead on building the nuclear weapons we’re spending billions to keep Iran from getting, Trump wants a summit meeting with Kim Jong Un. To make himself more attractive to Kim, Trump cut short our planned military exercises with South Korea, saying that the exercises are “inappropriate and hostile” to the North, which is in the running for the most oppressive country in the world. If you’re looking for some good behavior that Trump is rewarding, you won’t find any.

Trump has maintained that he enjoys a “great relationship” with Kim, telling reporters on Wednesday: “He likes me”.

That’s all that matters. Previous American presidents didn’t think having a “great relationship” with one of the world’s bloodiest dictators was a worthy goal, absent some concession from the North Koreans. But Trump is focused on himself, not on the interests of the United States or the free world.

Meanwhile, we have entered into a trade war with Canada. Phillips O’Brien summarizes: The dispute is

is about far more than trade, it is about Canada’s right to exist as a sovereign state. … Canada is faced with a USA that is now fundamentally dishonest and rapacious. Moreover, it is faced with a US government that denies its ultimate right to exist and speaks openly (and regularly) about how Canada should be annexed into the USA.

All through Trump’s second term, foreign leaders have been treating him like a crazy uncle: Flatter him. Don’t do anything to set him off. Don’t call him on his bad behavior. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is done with that. He described the impossibility of coming to any agree with the Trump regime.

We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.

In other words, an agreement with Trump only lasts until he decides he wants something else from you. Friday, tariffs on an estimated $20 billion of Canadian goods went into effect, and Trump is threatening 50% across-the-board tariffs on January 1.

Also, he turned up his rhetoric.

US President Donald Trump has said Canada wants “the benefits of being a state, without being one” after trade talks between the two countries collapsed late on Friday.

He has repeatedly said that Canada should be “the 51st state”. How do you negotiate with that?

and control of the Senate

That’s the subject of the featured post. Democrats’ odds are only improved by the tone-deaf candidates Republicans are running in key states. Here, North Carolina Senate candidate Michael Whatley disparages the anti-data-center movement.

You gotta remember that this opposition to data centers is not organic. This is being ginned up.

As if the big money were against data centers rather than behind them.

and some outrage stories: Harp and the USS Trump

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t know what to do with stories that grab public attention, raise people’s blood pressure, and maybe illustrate character flaws of certain important people, but have no direct impact on our lives. Lately, though, they’ve been turning up so regularly that I feel like they need their own category. Feel free to skip down to the next section.

This week we heard endlessly about Natalie Harp, Trump’s closest aide. It all started with this fairly innocuous line by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who is running for reelection in November.

While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.

[I’ve added links in case you don’t recognize the news stories Ossoff is referencing. They’re all legitimately fact-based.]

Now, the heart of Ossoff’s charge is “He doesn’t want to do the job.” We’re at war, and we appear to be losing. The economy is beginning to stall out. Working Americans are having a harder and harder time paying for basic necessities like groceries and fuel — not to mention health insurance. The annual budget deficit may exceed $2 trillion before the fiscal year ends next month. We’re continuing to do nothing — and even go backwards in a lot of ways — in the face of climate change. But our president doesn’t have a lot to say about any of that. If you retain anything from Ossoff’s quote, that’s what it should be.

But that’s not what the White House responded to. Trump and all his minions appeared to take deep offense at “He wants … to travel with Natalie.”

But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought. But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.

This is known as the “Streisand effect“: By objecting to a fairly minor story, you turn it into a major story. So anyway, Natalie Harp is a 35-year-old executive assistant who makes around $150K a year. She is with Trump constantly, prints out flattering news stories and social media posts for him to read, and helps him post his Truth Social rants. She — and not Secretary of State Rubio — was with Trump in the catering truck when he ditched Air Force One in Ankara.

She is devoted to Trump in a way that does not seem terribly healthy. “You are all that matters to me” says one of her notes to him. Some people think she does — or is trying to — look like his daughter Ivanka.

Ossoff’s flip mention of her might be interpreted as hinting that she has a romantic relationship with Trump. But he didn’t exactly say that, and most of the follow-up commentary doesn’t say that either. (Compared to the attacks Trump regularly dishes out — with Natalie’s help — what Ossoff said was fairly tame.) And even if she does, it may seem a little creepy, but it’s neither my business nor yours; consenting adults and all that. The far more damaging interpretation of her role — also probably false — is that the big bag she is always carrying contains his supply of adult diapers.

Here’s the part that does matter:

  • Trump often says stuff that makes you wonder what world he’s living in. Well, it’s Natalie’s World. Both her behavior and the relentlessly worshipful stuff she shows him communicates to Trump that he is a uniquely successful president who is widely admired and universally loved by the American people. Those ridiculous AI-generated images he posts of himself as Jesus or a great general — where do you think he gets them?
  • She worked for a year without a security clearance. Given her constant proximity to the president, you have to assume that she’s seen or heard some of the nation’s most important secrets. But she didn’t have clearance because she didn’t submit the appropriate forms.
  • She is the most egregious example of a general trend inside the Trump regime: The sole qualification for any job — attorney general, defense secretary, whatever — is abject submission and obsequious flattery.

But for the most part, I think we should all feel silly for having spent this much time on her. I know I do.

Another story that is more symbolic than consequential: According to ABC News and “three sources familiar with the matter”, the Navy is thinking about renaming an aircraft carrier under construction. The USS Doris Miller may be renamed for Donald Trump.

If true, this is outrageous in both directions: In the United States, we don’t name things after sitting presidents. Or at least we didn’t used to. Honors like these are supposed to be History’s to decide. Worse, Trump has no military record, and is widely believed to have dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by speciously claiming to have “bone spurs”. He’s also in the process of losing the Iran War.

But as in the previous note, the Navy knows that flattery is the way to get what you want from Trump. And Trump knows (I believe) that future generations will be ashamed of him and the things that happened during his presidency. If he waits for the judgment of History, there won’t be any Trump aircraft carriers or battleships or airports or performing arts centers.

The other side of this swap is to dishonor Doris Miller.

Doris “Dorie” Miller (October 12, 1919 – November 24, 1943) was a U.S. Navy sailor who was the first black recipient of the Navy Cross and a nominee for the Medal of Honor. As a mess attendant second class aboard the battleship USS West Virginia, Miller helped carry wounded sailors to safety during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He then operated an anti-aircraft gun and, despite no prior training in gunnery, officially shot down one plane (according to Navy Department records), but Miller and other eyewitnesses claimed a range of four to six.

What makes Miller’s story even more inspiring is that in 1941 Black sailors weren’t assigned significant combat duties. Without the chaos of Pearl Harbor, he might have spent the war peeling potatoes and ladling out soup.

But Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is doing everything it can to erase the contributions of anyone who isn’t or wasn’t a White man. Naming an aircraft carrier after a Black hero? Impossible!

Your life and everybody else’s will go on as before, but it’s hard to look away.

The ring tone of our quack HHS secretary is a quack.

When people tell you about how “far left” or “out of the mainstream” Democratic candidates like El-Sayid are, remind them of Victor Marx, the Republican candidate for governor of Colorado. In Marx’s book, he describes physical battles he has fought against people possessed by demons.

His detailed descriptions include claims that one man “transformed” in front of him, developing “pointy” ears and “superhuman strength.” In another episode, Marx said a “demonized” teenage girl “turned reptilian” before his eyes.

and you also might be interested in …

The Abraham Lincoln is now headed home, to be replaced by the George Washington.

The latest Trump regime effort to control the press: It fired Erik Slavin, the editor-in-chief of the military newspaper Stars & Stripes, as well as Middle East reporter Lara Korte.

Slavin said he was being fired “for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” … “I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies,” Slavin said.

Korte said on X: “Today, I was informed that the Department of Defense is firing me for insubordination after I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes — not the Pentagon, not the administration, and not any policy maker.”

As our HHS Secretary and President keep badmouthing vaccines, kindergarten vaccination rates are headed downward. The rates vary considerably from one state to the next. Idaho is the least-vaccinated state, with only 75% of kindergarten children getting the MMR vaccine, compared to Maine’s 98%.

Often this gets framed as a personal choice by parents, but it’s more than that. When vaccination rates dip below the level of herd immunity, diseases can spread widely. Some children are unable to benefit from vaccinations, so herd immunity is their only protection. Each unvaccinated child creates risks for other children.

Texas is refusing to extradict an ICE agent accused of shooting a Minneapolis man through a home’s front door and then lying about it, falsely claiming that the man had attacked him. TPM pulls together several examples of Trump or Trump allies preventing criminal ICE agents from facing justice.

and let’s close with something aspirational

Going to a dance lesson this afternoon. Think I’ll come out looking like Astaire?

August 24, 2026 – 12:46 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Can Democrats take the Senate?

A few months ago it looked like a pipe dream. But maybe …

For some while, conventional wisdom has said that the Democrats were likely to retake control of the House in 2026, but that the Senate was too much to hope for. The GOP’s current margin is 53-47, assuming independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King continue to caucus with the Democrats. A 50-50 Senate is still Republican, because VP Vance would cast the deciding vote. So Democrats need to net four additional seats to get a 51-49 majority. Given the states a Democrat would have to carry — places like Ohio and Alaska — it seemed impossible.

It seems a lot more possible now.

Let’s not underestimate the challenge. To start with, Democrats need to hang on to seats in Michigan and Georgia, neither of which are a sure thing. The most likely flip is North Carolina, and from there it gets tricky. That map above is from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. In order to prevail, Democrats would need to sweep the map’s four toss-up seats: Alaska, Michigan, Ohio, and Maine. Also, the Iowa and Texas seats may not be as secure for Republicans as the map claims.

But the polls look promising. The current RCP polling averages have Democratic Senate candidates substantially ahead in North Carolina and Georgia, and narrowly ahead in Alaska, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, and Texas. In Iowa the Democrat is narrowly behind.

Nate Silver notes that Democrats often poll well in August, only to see the race turn against them in the fall. In red states, marginal Republicans have a way of returning to their established party loyalties as the election approaches, even if they initially found the Democrat attractive. And Republican candidates will have plenty of money to hammer at Democrats, labeling them “communists”, attacking their manhood (Talerico, Ossoff), or raising bigotry against their name and religion (El-Sayed).

What makes predicting the final results tricky is that the various races probably aren’t independent. The electorate will likely focus on a few key points that all the races will hinge on. So if Democrats lose Maine, they probably can’t make up for it by taking Texas. If Maine is gone, Texas will be gone too.

But this is where I get optimistic, because I don’t see the state of the country and the world cooperating with a Republican bounce-back. Trump won’t magically pull out a win in Iran. The price of gas will still be high. And Trump shows no signs of learning election discipline, so he’ll probably keep talking about ballrooms and revenge indictments, and keep being obvious about his corruption. I doubt he’ll focus on making the economy work for the working-class voters Republicans need. So if a wave breaks on Election Day, it should break in Democrats’ favor, with frustrated working-class Whites finally giving up on Trump and his enablers.

Let’s take the key states one by one.

Alaska. The Data For Progress site finds Alaskans focused on affordability, and their Republican governor is deeply unpopular (-23 favorable-unfavorable). Trump carried the state by 13% in 2024, but his favorability has collapsed too. (He’s at -1.)

Alaska has an unusual system. Four candidates come out of its jungle primary, and the general election has ranked-choice voting. (I like this system.) A lot has been made of there being two Dan Sullivans in the race (the Republican candidate and an independent), but probably it will have no effect. If you’re confused about which Dan Sullivan is which, you’ll rank them next to each other and it will all work out. (That’s one reason I like this system. It handles various kinds of election trickery well.)

The Democrat in the race is Mary Peltola. She has won two elections to be Alaska’s only representative in the House, and lost in 2024 by only 2-3%, running well ahead of Kamala Harris in the state. So Alaskans know who she is and she’ll be hard to smear. The RCP polling average has her up 2%, and the betting markets make her the favorite.

Georgia. This is the surprise, at least to me. Jon Ossoff is running a very strong race and is ahead in the RCP average by a comfortable 7.5%. He’s emerging as a possible 2028 presidential candidate. Ossoff is one of the Democrats’ best messengers at framing Trump’s corruption.

Iowa. Seriously? Democrats are competitive in Iowa? This year, yes. This is the seat currently held by Joni Ernst. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R) is running against State Rep. Josh Turek. Turek is running on his centrist record in the legislature — which is probably the only way an Iowa Democrat breaks through — so don’t expect any progressive fireworks.

Anyway, Hinson is running slightly ahead (.7%) in the polls. And that close race is not a fluke, because the Democratic candidate for governor, Rob Sand, currently has a 5% lead. Apparently, the nation’s second-highest cancer rate and contaminated water are big local issues. Also, cheap land and Republican government have made Iowa a target for corporations building data centers.

Maine. A lot of national pundits thought Democrats blew their chance to oust Susan Collins in the Graham Platner fiasco. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Democrats united quickly around Platner’s replacement, Troy Jackson, and Collins is still dogged by the same issues: her deciding vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh (who was the deciding vote to overturn Roe v Wade), her wishywashy position on ICE’s Portland surge, and her general position as someone who expresses “concern” about the Trump regime’s outrages, but will get in line when Trump needs her vote. Maine went for Harris over Trump by 7% in 2024, and you have to wonder how Collins will win over those Harris voters when the national winds are blowing the other way.

The closer we get to November, the further in the rear-view mirror Platner is. Currently Jackson is ahead by 2.3% in the RCP average. Collins has a lot of billionaire money behind her, but that might work against her as much as for her.

Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed beat the Democratic establishment’s chosen candidate in the primary. The party establishment has since gotten behind El-Sayed, but I have to wonder how much hard feeling remains in the electorate. Republicans will spend a lot of money demonizing him as a “terrorist” and raising bigotry against his name and Muslim religion.

In his favor, El-Sayed is a strong candidate. He interviews well, in that he gives quotable answers to hostile questions without sounding abrasive. He keeps his eye on the ball. For example, in response to a question about Islamophobia, he replied:

That’s the best you’ve got? You can’t actually talk about what you want to do? My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war. My name is not the reason you can’t afford your groceries.

Polls currently are close, with El-Sayed narrowly ahead (.7%). Two factors point in opposite directions: Polls overestimated El-Sayed’s support in the primary (which often happens in cases where bigotry is an issue; people get into the voting booth and express prejudices they wouldn’t admit otherwise). But also, time helps Democrats unite, and Republican Mike Rogers won’t know what to do with debates: A smear works better when the target remains at a distance, and El-Sayed is the far more articulate candidate. But not debating looks cowardly.

El-Sayed’s challenge is to get voters to listen to him rather than react to him as a string of labels from attack ads: a far-left Muslim terrorist. I think he’s up to the job.

North Carolina. Here’s a case where the Chuck Schumer model of candidate recruitment worked well. Schumer looks for experienced candidates with name recognition who know how to raise money. In North Carolina, that describes Roy Cooper, a two-term governor who was succeeded by another Democrat when term limits wouldn’t let him run in 2025.

Trump won North Carolina by about 3% in 2024, but his recent approval-disapproval number is -18%.

RCP has Cooper up by 8%, which isn’t a lock but looks pretty good.

Ohio. Sherrod Brown is another familiar face. He won election to the Senate in 2006, 2012, and 2018 before losing to Bernie Moreno by less than 4% in 2024. Trump won Ohio by 11% in 2024. I can’t find recent Trump favorability polls from Ohio, but I think it’s safe to say he’s in negative territory.

Polls are scattered on this race. The only poll since June has Brown up 8%, but the RCP average includes polls since March, and only gives Brown a .6% edge. I might like to claim that Brown has momentum, but nobody has polled Ohio twice, so it’s hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

Texas. This is the long shot Democrats would most like to see come in. Just by his existence, James Talerico is demonstrating the hypocrisy of the Christian Nationalist movement and Evangelical Christianity’s right-wing sellout in general. Talerico is a seminary student who takes the teachings of Jesus seriously, rather than making Jesus the mascot of the home team.

Ken Paxton, on the other hand, is blatantly corrupt. In 2023, he was impeached as attorney general by a legislature heavily controlled by his own party, but escaped removal from office. He has been repeatedly investigated and/or indicted. His wife sued for divorce, accusing him of adultery. I don’t quite see how voters can square all that with Christianity, other than “He’s on our team.”

Talerico is one of the few Democrats with a fund-raising advantage. RCP has him up by 1.2%, but I will be pleasantly surprised if that holds up. I have great faith in the hypocrisy of Texas “Christians”. They’ll find a way to come home to Paxton.

Pull it together. For what it’s worth, my best guess is that Democrats hold their seats in Georgia and Michigan. They flip North Carolina, Maine, and probably Alaska. Meanwhile, Iowa and Texas seem like too much to hope for. That leaves Democrats ahead 50-49, and Ohio decides the majority. If you make me choose, I think Brown puts Democrats over the top, but its very iffy.

Friday J. D. Vance was in Ohio campaigning for a Republican ticket that includes John Husted, whose Senate race against Sherrod Brown is one of the toss-ups that may decide control. I really wonder if J. D. reads his speeches ahead of time:

I believe this November, we will face a choice: Do we demand that our government serves us rather than the fraudsters and the criminals? Do we demand that the American president fight for the American people first?

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The only comment I needed to make was to add the links.

If James Talerico’s approach to Christianity is making you rethink your rejection of that faith, you should check out the blog “Backyard Church” by Dan Foster. Like me, Foster was raised in a denomination where the most important thing was to hold “correct” beliefs. In the post “There Are Two Ways to be a Christian“, he describes that approach as simply one way.

One begins with the question: What do I need to believe? The other begins somewhere else entirely: What kind of person am I becoming? … Suddenly, spiritual growth isn’t measured primarily by how much theology I know or how certain I am about it. It’s measured by what is happening to me. Am I becoming more loving? Am I more patient than I used to be? More generous? More forgiving?

The cartoon refers to a “Christian crusader march” in Dearborn, Michigan to protest the “Islamification of America”. Police had to break it up.

August 24, 2026 – 11:07 am Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The primaries are about over, so it’s time to look to the fall election. Trump’s polls are way down, and Democrats are ahead on the generic congressional ballot polls by around 6.4%, which should easily be big enough to overcome the Republicans’ gerrymandering advantage. So let’s assume Democrats take the House.

For a long time, conventional wisdom said the Senate was a bridge too far. Democrats need to flip four seats, net, and the states that are up weren’t looking favorable. But a combination of bad national issues (affordability, the Iran War, …) and bad candidates (Ken Paxton) is overcoming that natural GOP advantage. So while there’s still a lot of work to be done, Democrats have a real shot at achieving a Senate majority. That’s the topic of the featured post, which should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

That leaves the weekly summary to discuss Trump bizarre foreign policy (North Korea good, Canada bad), ICE’s usual collection of offenses, the emergence of data centers as a surprise political issue, and a few other things. That should appear between noon and 1.

August 24, 2026 – 8:41 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Far Out

There’s a maddening tendency among elected officials and the political press to equate “far left” and “far right” candidates as occupying equally extreme, dangerous ends of the political spectrum, though those in the former camp mostly want universal healthcare and affordable housing while the latter is more likely to endorse the forced deportation of non-white people from the United States.

– Allegra Kirkland
“Whose Narrative Is It Anyway?“

This week’s featured post is “Some revolutions are too big to see.“

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. DHS’s response to ICE’s murders of Alex Preti and Renee Good was to launch investigations into local Minneapolis groups that organized protests. The murderers are still at large.
  • Climate change. The predictions of a record-setting El Nino seem to be coming true.
  • Iran. As it becomes harder to deny that his war is lost, Trump’s rhetoric has become increasingly fantastic. The two-month window for a larger deal set by June’s memorandum of understanding has now run out, but Trump says he is “in no hurry” to end the war. But if Oman gets in the way of a settlement with Iran, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them”. He has also threatened to declare the Strait of Hormuz, which remains closed, “a territory of the United States”.
  • Ukraine. Phillips O’Brien: “Russia’s allies show they are more intent on helping Russia win than Ukraine’s are in helping Ukraine win. The difference is stark.” He counts Trump as an ally of Russia.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about primary elections

For the second week in a row, a progressive Democrat’s big lead in the polls evaporated on election day. Last week, Abdul El-Sayed was supposed to have a double-digit victory in the Michigan Senate race, but instead he barely squeaked out a win. This week, progressive Francesca Hong actually lost by half a percent to David Crowley (who was supported by the current governor) in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin’s governor.

The NYT’s analysis points to three factors:

  • Undecideds went overwhelmingly for Crowley, as media focused on Hong’s more out-of-the-mainstream past statements.
  • Young voters (who overwhelmingly supported Hong) didn’t vote in the same numbers as older voters.
  • Hong’s more enthusiastic supporters were more likely to respond when pollsters called.

Pundits love to play the expectations game, and announce some “collapse” or “surge” as results come in differently from the most recent polls. But in truth there are just votes. You get more of them than the other candidates, or you don’t.

My state, Massachusetts, has its primary September 1, and the marquee race is for the Democratic Senate nomination. My congressman, Seth Moulton, is running against incumbent Senator Ed Markey, primarily on the age issue: Moulton is 47 and Markey is 79. Unlike most generational primary struggles, though, Markey is the more progressive candidate.

So far, I am unmoved by Moulton’s case. To me, the age issue has to be backed up by something more substantive: examples where the older candidate is out of touch with today’s world. Absent an argument like that, I don’t see the point.

and the Abraham Lincoln

When we go to war without adequate planning, eventually the men and women of our armed forces suffer the consequences.

You’ve probably already heard the gist of this story: Due to the Iran War, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for a long time without shore leave for the crew or the kind of maintenance that can only be done in a port. The situation has been complicated by damage Iranian missiles did to a naval base in Bahrain, which would ordinarily be the logistics hub supplying the Lincoln while it was deployed in the Middle East. So it’s being supplied through Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean over 2000 miles away. The strain of constant deployment with limited supplies is taking its toll.

MSNOW talked to families of the Lincoln crew:

The families say that their loved ones have described food shortages and standing in line for the ship’s store for an hour or more, and that the store often lacks basic supplies like toothpaste, soap and deodorant. Families said there have been times during the deployment when the Lincoln was rationing portions. Nicole Conrad’s son is serving on the Lincoln, and she hasn’t been able to see his face in seven months. Exchanging messages from the ship, he has told her about days when the showers were locked and laundry was closed, and about food shortages on board that meant his meal was half a cup of rice and two tortillas.

USA Today has published photos of meals served aboard the Lincoln and also the USS Tripoli, which is also deployed to the Middle East. The trays pictured are from the Tripoli.

When Dan F.’s daughter said hygiene products were running low on the [Tripoli], the family sent a care package with shampoo and conditioner, deodorant, toothpaste and tampons, filling every open space with candy and snacks. They filled the second box with Emergen-C vitamin C packets – Dan’s daughter said she was feeling a sore throat coming on – and clean socks. The boxes were sent nearly a month ago, yet neither has reached its destination.

It’s easy to imagine being homesick and going stir crazy after more than 260 days at sea. What civilians have a harder time appreciating is the stress level on an aircraft carrier.

The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is already one of the most dangerous places in the military. High-speed aircraft with powerful engines can burn sailors and blow them overboard. Spinning propellers can cause accidents. And the constant loading and unloading of bombs, missiles and rockets pose the risk of explosions and fires.

Trump, Hegseth, and the Navy deny everything. US Central Command posted:

The Sailors and Marines of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group remain resilient and resolved after more than 260 days at sea, 10,000 aircraft flights, and 1.5 million pounds of ordnance expended. No service members aboard the aircraft carrier have died, and the one Sailor who fell overboard Aug. 3 was quickly and safely recovered. The rampant misreporting on Abraham Lincoln’s historic deployment is a disservice to our men and women in uniform and their loved ones.

The Guardian quotes one relative’s response:

The sister of a Lincoln crew member in his late 30s said that the remarks made her want to grab Trump and Hegseth and shake them. “I grew up in a United States where you have to be very respectful of the military, as they’re making the ultimate sacrifice and protecting their country, and now you have the commander-in-chief and defense secretary dismissing their experiences and calling them liars. I’m really angry,” she said. “It’s a feeling of betrayal. These are frustrating, false and careless comments, and they are going to have a lot of consequences for my brother.”

The USS George Washington reportedly is moving from the western Pacific to replace the Lincoln. This leaves the Pacific temporarily with no carriers.

No one expects China to invade Taiwan because an American aircraft carrier has left the region. But the carrier’s absence gives the Chinese another opportunity to show its strength, said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner who is a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.

“They’re using this as part of the narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that the US is not the big dog in the western Pacific anymore,” Clark said. “They would just prefer that countries in the region decide that China is the bigger power and the US is not able to guarantee their security anymore.”

While continuing to deny that the US supply of high-tech missiles is being depleted, Trump is blaming the problem (which he insists doesn’t exist) on President Biden, who gave Patriots and other weapons to Ukraine.

I am reminded of what Donald Rumsfeld said when he was Secretary of Defense during the Iraq War:

You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Whatever you think about how Biden handled our armed forces, Trump arrived in office commanding a particular stockpile of weapons. It was up to him to use them wisely. But Trump has never in his life taken responsibility for any of his numerous mistakes.

and ignorance-based executive orders

If there was a theme of the week, it was Trump giving orders based on his disastrous combination of ignorance and confidence. Two were related to his ignorance of naval technology and ship design, and another had to do with public health.

Trump has frequently cited his admiration of steam-powered catapults for launching planes off aircraft carriers, rather than the newer electromagnetic tech. Thursday, he signed a memo instructing the War Defense Department to replace the newer systems with the older tech.

The new mandate would likely cost billions of dollars and revert the Navy’s most advanced ships to a system that takes more sailors to operate and is more difficult to maintain.

Reportedly, Trump also has the Navy looking at redesigning the Ford-class carriers still under construction to move the tower to the center of the ship, similar to the look of World War II era carriers.

The changes – including moving the multistory aircraft carrier’s command center tower to the ship’s middle – would cost billions and worsen chronic delays, sources said. Officials also told The Post that changing the command center to the middle would remove 3 key benefits: additional parking spaces, reduced launch time and lowered chances of turbulence during landing.

Neither of these examples is Trump taking a side in a previously existing dispute among experts. It’s just Trump deciding that expertise doesn’t matter.

Last Monday

US President Donald Trump has signed an order that … recommends splitting the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) shots. … The order also recommends that the number of childhood vaccines drop to 11 from the existing 18 recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

During a the signing announcement, Trump spread anti-vax nonsense, claiming at one point that

I’ve seen proof of it. Where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.

He also implied, without saying outright, that vaccines are related to autism, a well-studied and often refuted piece of anti-vax propaganda.

Trump has no real authority here, since vaccine requirements are set by the states. Mainly, this order will make parents more doubtful of vaccines and less likely to get their children vaccinated. Separating the shots would require more office visits and more expense, further motivating parents to skip some.

Meanwhile, the regime is bungling the cyclospora outbreak. The cyclospora parasite is suspected of causing over 24K illnesses so far this year, resulting in an enormous increase in the usage of the phrase “explosive diarrhea”. The center of the outbreak is in Michigan, and many cases have been traced through Taco Bell to lettuce from a plant in Mexico run by Taylor Farms.

The NYT explores how efforts to shrink the US government and loosen its regulations have made it harder to prevent outbreaks like this, and harder to track them after they arise. The Guardian points out that Congress mandated a better system for tracing outbreaks 15 years ago, but it has been repeatedly delayed and now is set for 2028.

It turns out that “big government” isn’t always a bad thing. In many ways, those much-derided “bureaucrats” are like offensive linemen in football: When they’re doing their jobs well, nobody notices them. It’s only when the quarterback gets sacked that you see a replay of the guy who was supposed to stop that from happening.

and Trump in the catering truck

I’m always torn about covering stories in which Trump does something outrageous, but it doesn’t affect most people’s lives. (That’s why I’m ignoring the fun people had making fun of Trump’s new hairpiece.) They leave me asking “Can you believe a guy like this is our president?”. But in some larger sense they’re inconsequential.

The Air Force One story that broke this week is a great example: Trump flew to the NATO summit in Turkey in the luxury jet he got as bribe from Qatar. While he was there, US intelligence heard rumors about a plot to shoot down his return flight on July 8, a plan made simpler by the fact that the Qatari jet still hasn’t gotten all of its security upgrades. Without referencing the threat, Trump moved back to the older Air Force One plane, which also carried the White House press corps and several high officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as top aides Stephen Miller and Steven Cheung.

But it turns out that flight was only a decoy. After boarding the plane, Trump was whisked away in a catering truck and taken to another plane, which went to the UK where he met up with AF-1 again as if he had never left it.

There are two possibilities here: Either the threat was not serious, in which case Trump was just being a scared little rabbit. Or it was serious, and to save himself he was content to sacrifice not just journalists, but some of his own cabinet and staff as well.

History will little note nor long remember this incident, but it says a lot about our president’s character.

and you might also be interested in …

I copied the graph above from Noah Smith’s Noahpinion blog. The original is on the Our World in Data site. I find it very striking. 36 years ago, extreme poverty was a worldwide phenomenon, mostly distributed across East Asia, South Asia, and Africa. Today it is largely a sub-Saharan Africa problem, with some contribution from the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

I don’t have any grand conclusion to draw from this graph, other than that big changes in poverty are possible. And it’s surprising that a change of this magnitude would draw so little attention.

According to TPM,

The Trump administration is planning to dramatically reshape the data the Census Bureau collects, setting the stage for an audacious effort to curtail crucial information used in voting rights complaints and revive a right-wing effort, pursued in Trump’s first term, to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count used to determine how many members of Congress represent each state in Congress.

The point would be to count fewer non-citizens in 2030 and thus lower the number of congressional seats that go to states with a lot of non-citizens, like New York and California.

The 14th Amendment is actually pretty clear about this:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

That clause superseded the famous 3/5 clause in the original Constitution that distinguished free people from slaves. The word “citizen” appears five times in the Amendment, so the authors knew how to use it. The fact that they stipulated “persons” should be taken literally.

It’s possible the Supreme Court plans to continue its piece-by-piece repeal of the 14th Amendment. Section 3 (which bans from office anyone who has taken part in an insurrection) was made meaningless in 2024. This June, four justices wanted to ignore the birthright citizenship clause. (They’ll get another shot at it this year.) But if not, the regime’s new census rules should go down quickly.

TPM’s Layla Jones examines the century-long history of right-wing attempts to gain an advantage by monkeying with the census.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving her job because “I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary”. The Contrarian is not inclined to be generous:

Karoline Leavitt’s farewell post contained no mention of a single administration accomplishment she’s proud of — just how extreme the left has become. Fitting, considering her tenure.

To be fair, she did mention “the many historic accomplishments of this Administration” without getting specific about any. The Guardian notes that her tenure started with an outrageous lie — “she claimed that the Biden administration had planned to use $50m in taxpayer dollars to send condoms to Gaza”, and did not improve from there.

A snide comment I’ve seen frequently on social media is that Leavitt is quitting in order to spend more time lying to her family.

Last Monday, ICE agents cut off the car of US citizen Caroline Molina. They then jumped out of their van, and one of the agents pointed his weapon through her driver-side window, in the manner of the agent who murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis. He was yelling at her, claiming that she tried to run them over — which was a complete lie.

Molina yelled back at them that she had a dashcam video recorder, so she could prove they were “full of shit”. They eventually left. Both the dashcam video and the video she shot out her window are here.

Unraveled has identified the agents.

Unraveled has verified the agents in Molina’s videos were far from their usual base of operations. The team has been recorded inflicting violence on immigrants, protesters, and observers in the Chicago area since last summer, including outside the region’s ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that became the epicenter of anti-deportation protests during Operation Midway Blitz last autumn. Members of the same team were also recorded intimidating and threatening drivers in the Twin Cities in mid-January—in the brief period after federal agents killed Renée Good, and before U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents killed 37-year old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti.

Will the agents be disciplined? Of course not.

ICE has been dragging its feet about its agents wearing body cameras that might capture their illegal actions. But they’re about to roll out electric-shock gloves. No doubt they’ll use them wisely.

and let’s close with something celestial

Spain got to see a full solar eclipse on Wednesday. In case you missed it, here’s a feline recreation.

August 17, 2026 – 11:54 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)