Arms and Wisdom

Arms are of little value in the field unless there is wise counsel at home.

– Cicero

This week’s featured post is “Graham Platner’s exit, and the debate it leads to“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. He has used the new powers the Supreme Court gave him to get rid of everyone on the Election Assistance Commission, which used to be bipartisan. The EAC mostly advises states on election practices, but has no power to force them to comply.
  • Climate change. Ocean surface temperatures are now higher than they’ve ever been. And Pacific gray whales are dying out, probably because lost sea ice in Alaska is wrecking their food supply.
  • Iran. The war seems to be back on. Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz is down. Oil prices are up. It’s still not clear what objectives our air attacks are supposed to accomplish. Trump’s various stated goals — opening the Strait, ending Iran’s nuclear program, regime change, etc. — require either a negotiation that offers Iran things or a ground invasion. He doesn’t want to do either. So we’ll pointlessly destroy things again for a while.
  • Ukraine. Phillips O’Brien’s weekend update makes three points: Ukrainian missile attacks are shutting down Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov, isolating Crimea. Attacks on Russian oil refineries are still rising, creating gas shortages in Russia. Trump has begun making Ukraine-friendly noises, but his actions still support Putin.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Graham Platner

Platner leaving the race and the process for replacing him are covered in the featured post. A few points that didn’t fit in that article:

In choosing a new candidate, Maine Democrats shouldn’t forget what made Platner attractive to begin with. Sebastian Junger explains.

I had breakfast with Platner two months ago – shortly before a blizzard of lesser accusations by other women – and was impressed by his taste for economic and political reform. His view that the political and economic systems of this country are designed to benefit elites resonated with me. It’s been a long time since Democrats had a candidate who worked with his hands, has been to war and wanted to overthrow the economic elite, and that was clearly something Mainers voters were waiting for: He won the Maine Democratic primary by a landslide. … Meanwhile, it’s vitally important to continue upholding the kind of anti-war, anti-corruption, anti-corporatist platform that Platner so brilliantly articulated. His is a strain of American populism that goes back more than a century and could just as easily fit a Democratic candidate as a Republican one. A lot of things can be extracted from Platner’s painful implosion, but perhaps the most important is the realization that most Americans crave economic justice. Our society has created a small number of grotesquely wealthy people, but we are somehow all discouraged from discussing that with our political adversaries. Platner’s brilliance was that he did not see that boundary; he saw no boundary except the one between the vast majority of decent, hardworking people and the political elites.

Whoever runs against Susan Collins can’t afford to lose sight of this: Collins is the candidate of the billionaires. The Maine Monitor has identified 97 billionaires and billionaire-spouses who collectively have donated $9.8 million to re-elect Collins. So far. If polls look close as we get into the fall campaign, expect the money spigots to open wide.

An attitude that seems completely wrong-headed to me is epitomized by what Neera Tanden posted to X:

People who got us into this mess – who vouched for this candidate after 3 different scandals and kept telling us there were going to be no more – may want to take a break from Maine strategizing.

This seems like a good way to get Platner’s voters to stay home in November, sending Collins back to the Senate for another six years. Whatever you think of Platner’s behavior in his personal life, he won the primary. Maine voters endorsed his message. The ideal replacement, I think, would be somebody who can authentically carry that message into the fall campaign without also carrying Platner’s personal baggage.

One thing Platner’s withdrawal points out is that Democrats are expected to live by higher moral standards than Republicans. Kevin McCarthy tried to make the opposite claim on Fox News (in the last 15 seconds of his interview), producing a clip that I think Democrats shared far more than Republicans. Referencing when Matt Gates was nominated to be attorney general after being accused of sex with an underage girl, McCarthy said:

The one thing I know about Republicans: When we had a very bad candidate and found out, we walked away from that person.

Of course, their party is led by a guy who has been accused of sexual offenses by more than two dozen women. Two different juries in New York found it more likely than not that he was lying when he denied raping E. Jean Carroll.

Walk away from Trump, Kevin. Then we can talk.

Adam Kinzinger remembers other cases, like Roy Moore in Alabama, who Trump and the Party stuck with all the way into the November election after we found out that he repeatedly tried to pick up underage girls at the mall.

The billionaire-agenda Washington Post lends its spotlight to a “brave” Democrat who criticizes his party.

“The Party’s gaze has drifted beyond the basic needs … and has settled on a culture war that includes gender identity, racial quotas, DEI, and bathrooms,” [former South Carolina Rep. Joe Cunningham] wrote. “It has cost them swaths of voters who may never come back.”

He points out that a tiny percentage of people are transgender and asks what percentage of those want to play sports. Victory for a minuscule slice of the population may fill the virtue cup, but it’s not a win for the country.

Which party has been focusing on gender identity and bathrooms? Late in the 2024 campaign, that was virtually all Republicans talked about. You remember: “Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you.”

If Democrats want to abandon trans rights, they can’t just stop talking about it. Harris did that. To get credit on this, Democrats will have to actively target people with gender issues. It’s kind of like junior high, when you try to join the popular crowd by helping them bully somebody even less popular than you.

Do Democrats really want to go there?

and another ICE murder

As I’m writing this morning, I’m seeing reports of ICE being involved in another killing in Biddeford, Maine. I don’t do breaking news, so it’s too soon for me to say more.

Tuesday, an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had been living in the US for 35 years. He had no criminal record, ran a small construction business, and sent his three sons to college. He was driving a van at the time, so ICE claims he was trying to run over the agent — which is what they always claim when they shoot someone in a vehicle. They were lying when they said it about Renee Good and Marimar Martinez and Ruben Ray Martinez, so there’s no reason to believe them now.

Three of his workers were in the vehicle at the time. They are all in ICE custody and reportedly are being pressured to self-deport. Through their attorney, all deny the ICE account. The agents, they say, were shooting from the sides of the vehicle, and no agent was in front. None of the agents were wearing body cameras.

The Mexican government is beginning to get pissed off.

Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco said Mexico has recorded 17 deaths of Mexican nationals linked to ICE since the start of the current U.S. immigration crackdown: 14 in detention centers and three during enforcement operations, including Salgado Araujo.

Sheinbaum said her government would no longer rely solely on diplomatic protest notes. “We are going to do everything in our power,” she said, adding that Mexico could not fail to act in response to the deaths of Mexicans during ICE enforcement operations or in detention centers run by private companies contracted by ICE. She said Mexico would continue providing consular support to families and detainees, especially Mexicans “whose only crime is working honestly in the United States.”

BBC reports:

Salgado Araujo is at least the eighth person to die during the Trump administration’s immigration operations, according to the Associated Press. No immigration officers have been charged in the deaths.

Of course not. Under Trump, ICE thugs have license to kill. In the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the murder was on video. The murderers have suffered no consequences and are still at large.

ICE not only employs murderous thugs, it is also extremely thin-skinned — another characteristic of a totalitarian force like the Gestapo or the KGB.

David Streever is a US citizen from Rochester, NY. After ICE murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Streever sent a critical email to Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. The subject line was “What’s Next?” and its full content is this:

You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher.

The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.

You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.

DHS decided this email was a “threat”. (To do what?) It sent two agents to Streever’s home to deliver an official warning notice that his email may be in violation of federal law, and that he should “discontinue the aforementioned behavior”. He wasn’t there, and his wife (an Episcopal priest) arrived home to find the agents on her porch. DHS then tracked Streever and his seven-year-old daughter to a hotel in New York City, where they were staying after flying in from Finland. The hotel wouldn’t let the agents go to his room, so an agent left a card.

He is now suing DHS. The suit alleges:

Streever fears, as any objectively reasonable person would, that if he continues to engage in expression sharing his views about and to government officials, he will be subject to further coercive activity and retaliatory acts, including through issuance of further “WARNING NOTICE” demands, surveillance, unwelcome visits from federal police, and continued threat of arrest and/or prosecution.

He is asking for reimbursement of his legal fees and an injunction blocking any further harassment as he exercises his constitutional right to criticize the government.

and Mitch McConnell

Yesterday, Mitch McConnell’s office released a statement and a photo of the senator in a hospital bed.

McConnell, 84, said in a statement that he was “briefly unconscious” around the time he was first taken to the hospital and has undergone a battery of tests to try and determine what led to his fall. He said he was also treated for mild pneumonia and has been moved to a rehabilitation facility.

“My doctors have confirmed that I didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion. I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. I don’t have any tumors or hemorrhages,” McConnell said, adding that he is now “regaining my strength.”

This came in response to conflicting claims that he was alive or dead or existing in some machine-driven state in between. Many commentators seem to be assuming we have heard the last from him, and so are summing up in the way we do when someone important dies.

Here’s my contribution: When this fascist era is over in America, whether that happens soon or decades hence, historians will focus on three main villains:

  • Trump, obviously, as the personality at the center of the fascist personality cult;
  • John Roberts, who ran roughshod over the Constitution to enable Trump’s power grabs and protect him from accountability under the law;
  • Mitch McConnell, who played hardball to get Roberts a conservative majority on the Court, and who protected Trump during his two impeachments, when it was still possible to head off the decisive turn towards fascism in Trump’s second term.

While we’re on this subject of senators dying, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died unexpectedly Saturday night. He was 71.

Josh Marshall sums him up:

Graham was a natural follower. He needed a top dog, a daddy figure he could arrange himself around.

The recent Trump-following Graham had little in common with the John McCain-following Graham that preceded him. If Lindsey had any core beliefs, I never figured out what they were.

Democrats are bending over backwards to say good things about Lindsey, in accordance with the old rules that Republicans abandoned long ago. Adam Schiff, for example:

He had … a wonderful sense of humor that he used to cut through the tension.

By contrast, what I remember about Senator Graham is his snarling defense of Brett Kavanaugh. It was such a blatant expression of male privilege. If Diane Feinstein had responded with the same level of anger, she’d have been roasted as an unhinged women.

and you also might be interested in …

Remember the airliner that Qatar’s royal family bribed Trump with? Well, it’s Air Force One now, sort of.

Wednesday, though, as Trump was leaving the Ankara NATO summit, he flew in the old Air Force One because of “security concerns”. Apparently the hundreds of millions taxpayers have spent to retrofit the bribe jet wasn’t sufficient.

Like the no-bid contractors who screwed up the reflecting pool, this story pulls together the two main aspects of the Trump administration: corruption and incompetence.

West Virginia voters are getting what they voted for: 70% of them voted for Trump in 2024, and he carried every county. Now, thanks to the Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, 14,000 West Virginians have lost food assistance, and the state will have to come up with an additional $27 million to fund SNAP benefits next year.

I mean, somebody had to pay for those billionaires’ tax cuts. Sadly, though, West Virginia appears to have no billionaires. Forbes identified the richest West Virginian in 2025 as Intuit’s Brad Smith, clocking in around $900 million.

and let’s close with something derivative

What if they based a sitcom on Marco Rubio?

July 13, 2026 – 12:44 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Graham Platner’s exit, and the debate it leads to

A quick convention to replace Platner will raise some long-brewing issues.

So Graham Platner is out. Having overcome a number of past controversies, he finally faced more than he could explain away: This week new and more serious allegations surfaced, just about all his endorsers backed away from him, and he was forced to leave the race for Susan Collins’ Senate seat in Maine.

The usual caveats apply: Platner denies the new charges, and if you really, really want to believe him you can. But an election is not a court of law. Voters would be deciding whether to send him to the Senate, not to prison. So they have a right to demand positive confidence in a man they elevate to positions of power, not just reasonable doubt about his guilt. (If only Susan Collins had applied that standard to Brett Kavanaugh. A social-media meme I haven’t traced to its source says: “Graham Platner doesn’t belong in the Senate. He belongs on the Supreme Court.”)

Before talking about what can or should happen next, let me own up to this: Until this week, I was in favor of giving Platner the benefit of the doubt. He tells a good redemption story: He is basically a good man whose military service left him with PTSD. He then went through a dark period where he drank too much and behaved badly, but he came out the other side.

Like a lot of Maine Democrats (whose accounts I was quoting), I found that story plausible. I lost that gamble.

Next? But that’s not the end of the story. With Platner gone, Maine is left with the question of what happens next. Platner pulled out before the deadline that would have kept his name on the November ballot, so the Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to name a replacement. They have a convention scheduled for July 25.

One-hundred and one of [the convention delegates] will be Democratic State Committee members and the remaining 500 … [will be] chosen by Democratic county committees at special nominating meetings convened by the county chairs.

So if party insiders want to pick one of their own, they can. But it’s hard to see how a more inclusive process would work, given the time constraints. One hopes the delegates will stay aware of the 154,058 Mainers who voted for Platner in the primary. The party is at least nodding in that direction:

The first candidate deadline is July 15. Candidates will have to declare their intent to run by 5 p.m. to compete at the convention. Among the requirement is a 300-word statement explaining how the candidate will tap the “grassroots energy” in the Democratic base.

In addition to declaring their intent by next Wednesday, candidates will also have to gather at least 500 signatures from registered Democrats by July 21. Included in that requirement is that candidates must obtain 50 signatures from no fewer than eight different counties.

Mainers vs. national pundits. In the national punditry, there’s a lot of hand-wringing that Platner’s debacle has made Susan Collins a shoe-in for reelection and probably doomed Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate.

Maine voices like Neal Gabler are far more sanguine.

So the first thing I would say I have learned these last two days is that the so-called experts in the punditrocracy have no idea what they are talking about. They don’t know Maine, and they don’t know Maine politics. When they say that the selection process is a “mess,” that is just plain wrong. Given the exigencies of the need for a selection and the cramped time frame, the logistics are difficult, but I get no sense of chaos. The process, as it is being formulated and described, seems orderly to me, or as orderly as any can be under these circumstances.

… Second, the so-called experts tell us that there are deep divisions in the party here, that same old cleavage between progressives and moderates, and that schism will likely affect the selection and the prospects for a November victory. The problem with this assessment is that I sense almost no divisions here, especially now that Gov. Mills, who did rile her fellow Dems, is basically off the scene.

Unlike the national Democratic establishment, Gabler sees the state Democratic establishment as basically progressive. The major candidates to replace Platner lack his “charisma”, but are not unknown to Maine voters and are largely on the same page. He has little fear that Democrats will be bitter and divided when they face Collins in November.

The moderate/progressive debate. Even so, the Maine convention is likely to be a microcosm of the debate Democrats are having around the country: In order to control the Senate, Democrats need to pick up four seats. In theory, Maine should be the easiest Republican seat to flip, given that Kamala Harris won Maine 52%-45%. Conversely, if Susan Collins hangs on, the path to a Democratic Senate majority involves flipping some much redder state like Iowa, Texas, or Nebraska.

So delegates have two questions to balance:

  • Who do I like?
  • Who can win?

Moderate Democrats will tell you that the answer to the second question is obvious: Swing voters are in the center, so a Democrat has to shift to the right to appeal to them.

Progressives argue that this is the old politics. In these polarized times, the number of issue-oriented voters in the center has shrunk considerably. The bigger pool is the disaffected voters, the ones who have lost faith in both parties and believe that no one really cares about them. Trump won in 2016 and 2024 by convincing those voters (falsely) that he did care about them. Rather than real solutions, he offered them scapegoats — immigrants, transfolk, undeserving beneficiaries of DEI or foreign aid, lazy people on welfare, non-Christians, globalists. He would defend you by going after them.

It’s hard to deny that he has gone after them. But it’s also hard to see how that has benefited you. Struggling American families have seen inflation get worse while money gets wasted on another pointless war. Many have lost food stamps and/or health insurance. Jobs are no easier to find.

The right response, progressives argue, is to put forward a bold vision that would make a visible difference in disaffected voters’ lives: child care, guaranteed healthcare, free college. If voters need scapegoats, let’s give them the people who are truly profiting from their distress: the billionaires and their monopolistic corporations. Tinkering around the edges of programs that already exist isn’t going to convince anybody that you’re on their side.

It’s easy to find this debate on social media, or to live in an echo chamber where you hear only one side of it. So far, it doesn’t seem to be a very satisfying or healthy argument: The two sides talk past each other and shout louder rather than engaging each other’s best points.

The two axes. If you want to try to make progress on this argument, I think the first key point is to embrace the two-axis model, which Josh Marshall has been pushing (though mostly behind the TPM firewall).

[T]here are two political spectra in the Democratic party, one that is right/centrist to left and another that is accommodation to fight.

The first axis is the issue-oriented one moderates point to: shoring up ObamaCare vs. Medicare For All, providing more education assistance to needy students vs. free college, and so on.

But the second axis revolves around the question: How serious is the current crisis of democracy? Do we just need to return to the halcyon days before Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, when Congress debated issues but came up with bipartisan compromises to get things done? Or is Trumpist fascism a bigger threat than that, one that requires more drastic solutions?

Marshall illustrated the tension between the two axes by looking at his own response to the Colorado primary, where incumbent John Hickenlooper faced a challenge from the left. One the one hand, Marshall found himself mostly agreeing with Hickenlooper on policy and believing he had the best chance to hold the seat in the general election.

He seems like a very solid guy. I’m sure I’d like him. But it’s my strong impression that he is very much in the camp of Democratic senators who don’t want to do any of the big necessary things: abolish the filibuster, reform the Supreme Court, fight against encroaching autocracy as opposed to preserve decorum and regular order. In other words, he’s approaching the senate gig as though we were still in the 1990s or perhaps the W. era. To listen to my own oft-repeated arguments, he is the problem.

If you focus on the fight/accommodate axis, Harris’ loss in 2024 wasn’t a matter of being too liberal or not liberal enough. It’s that her rhetoric about Trump’s threat to democracy wasn’t matched by what she proposed to do about it. Trump’s resurgence after January 6 proved that electing a Democrat wasn’t a sufficient solution. A Harris administration wouldn’t end the threat any more than the Biden administration had.

How rank-and-file Democrats lost faith in their leaders. A deeper dive into this issue is Brian Beutler’s “The Insurgency Will Continue Until Morale Improves” which fortunately is not behind a firewall. Beutler lays out a history of missed Democratic opportunities, going back to the 2008 campaign.

What was striking to those of us on the outside was that none of these candidates, and no one else in the race, would even gesture at the most straightforward theory of change: that in a democracy, majorities should govern. In 2008 it was too early to foresee that a corrupt Republican judicial putsch would eventually necessitate farther-reaching democratic reforms. But the legislative crisis was already upon us. If Democrats won the election, and grew their congressional majorities, they should be prepared to change the Senate rules and simply legislate their plans into existence.

But the Harry Reid/Nancy Pelosi Congress colored within the traditional lines. They got ObamaCare passed, but the opportunity for real change vanished. McConnell obstructed everything, and when the Great Recession dragged on, Obama got the blame.

How much more could Obama have accomplished without the filibuster? How much more quickly would we have recovered from the Great Recession if Obama and his majorities could have scaled up stimulus as needed to hasten a return to trend? How much less receptive would progressives have been to Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in a climate of full employment? Would Sanders have even run for president?

Again during Biden’s first two years, Democrats controlled not just the White House but both houses of Congress. And again, little happened. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department delayed investigating Trump, allowing the Supreme Court to run out the clock on his most serious indictments. Voting rights bills died. DC and Puerto Rico wouldn’t become states.

Democracy protection would have to wait. There would be hearings. There would be speeches. But the architecture would not change. The official substantive Democratic response to decades of legislative nullification, the theft of the Supreme Court, and a failed coup would be nothing.

So when Harris tried to raise the alarm about autocracy in 2024, it rang false. It sounded more like political rhetoric than something she really believed.

The axes really are orthogonal. The point Marshall keeps making, and that moderate voices like Matt Yglesias refuse to take seriously, is that the two axes really are different. You can take moderate positions on immigration or healthcare or border enforcement or trans rights (if that’s what voters in your state demand), and still advocate that Democrats play the same hardball politics Republicans have been playing for years. You can stop bringing a knife to a gun fight and go all out.

Whoever Maine Democrats nominate, that’s what I really want to hear from them. The old message of “Trust us. Once we get power we’ll put the country back on track” isn’t credible any more.

The economic system is rigged towards the rich and monopoly corporations. The political system is rigged towards Republicans. The Supreme Court has made itself into a super-legislature. Those problems won’t get fixed automatically by putting Democrats into office. Once they get into office, they’ll have to do something about those problems.

Tell me what.

July 13, 2026 – 10:51 am Categories: Articles | Comments (14)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

It has been a big week for putting things behind us. That dismal 250th birthday party is over. So is Graham Platner’s candidacy, the US men’s team’s shot at the World Cup, and (apparently) the ceasefire with Iran. A well-known Republican senator died, but (apparently) not Mitch McConnell.

This week’s featured post will focus on the Maine Senate race and what happens now. I will own up for having been excited about the Platner candidacy, and I’ll try to dig deeper into the moderate/progressive debate both nationally and in Maine as Democrats come up with a new candidate to challenge Susan Collins. That post should be out a little after 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will dig into the latest murder by ICE, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who has lived in the US for 35 years, built a small business, and sent three kids to college. Also the McConnell situation, a brief Lindsey Graham retrospective, starving Pacific gray whales, and an ordinary guy the government is harassing because he criticized ICE.

It’s hard to come up with much to say about the Iran War. Our latest attacks are as pointless as the whole war has been. Eventually Trump will realize that and go back to negotiations. Then he’ll get frustrated that the Iranians have the upper hand and go back to pointless bombing. I don’t see how this ends.

Anyway, I’ll try to get the weekly summary out between noon and 1.

July 13, 2026 – 9:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Unfit

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

– the Declaration of Independence

This week’s featured post is “Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious.“

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Courts are blocking Trump’s efforts to use the postal service to cheat in the midterms. He wants to force states to turn over their voter databases, and compile a federal list of eligible voters, so that only those voters could receive mail-in ballots. This plan would shift power over elections from the states to the federal government, contradicting the Constitution.
  • Climate change. Last week’s European heat dome was answered this week by one covering the US east coast. World Weather Attribution assesses the (large) role climate change plays in these heat emergencies.
  • Iran. Is the Strait of Hormuz open? Sort of. Tanker traffic is picking up, but is nowhere near normal.
  • Ukraine. The two sides have very different strategies. Ukraine is targeting Russia’s oil industry, which undermines both the Russian war effort and civilian morale. Russia is stepping up missile attacks on civilian targets. More Russian missiles are getting through because Trump stopped sending Patriot air-defense missiles to Ukraine.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about America’s 250th birthday

50 years ago

This week has been a sad time for those of us who remember the 200th birthday in 1976. That was truly a national celebration. As Paul Krugman recalls, then we celebrated in spite of widespread pessimism about the state of the nation:

This sunniness may seem odd, given that the U.S. was troubled in many ways. We had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Our cities were a mess: New York had 1600 murders in 1976, more than 5 times the rate last year, and Times Square was an eyesore of drug addicts and porn shops. Oh, and the city had recently gone bankrupt.

But we celebrated together as a country. One reason was that President Ford — who was facing a tough reelection race in the fall — largely stayed out of the way. Whatever you thought about Ford made no difference. Have you ever watched New Years at Times Square on TV, or even gone there yourself? It’s a party, not a referendum on the Mayor of New York. That’s how the bicentennial was. Republicans and Democrats celebrated together, because we were all Americans.

But this year Trump had to be Trump: He made the 250th about himself, turned it into a grift, and screwed it all up. I’ve seldom seen the National Mall as empty as it has been during his Great American State Fair. It got so embarrassing that Fox News stopped broadcasting from the site.

Kevin Elliott posted on Bluesky:

The reason America as a whole is going to walk on by its 250th birthday with nary a thought about it is that it is profoundly embarrassed, ashamed, and angry at what we’ve allowed to happen to our country

Thinking about what we have to celebrate shines a spotlight on the whole right-wing effort to whitewash our history. Here’s an inside look from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello mansion. For years, the staff went to considerable effort to present a rounded picture of Jefferson, which included Monticello’s slaves (and particularly Sally Hemmings) in addition to all the evidence of Jefferson’s genius. I saw it myself during this period and was impressed.

Then began the right-wing denunciations of Monticello “going woke”, which resulted in the harassment of staff and ultimately turning over the museum’s leadership.

Again and again, you will hear about how woke teachers want to make students “ashamed of their country”. To me, this accusation is a confession: The people who make it are so ashamed of America that they have to cover up the nation’s true history.

I think American history invites us to embrace complexity. Yes, Jefferson was a slaver who even enslaved the children he fathered on one of his slaves. That’s just as bad as it sounds.

But Jefferson also wrote the Declaration of Independence, founded the University of Virginia, purchased the Louisiana Territory from France and sent Lewis and Clark out to explore it, started the Library of Congress, and had many other noteworthy accomplishments. He is sometimes put forward as the world’s “last Renaissance man“, who was up-to-date in all human knowledge before it began to splinter into specialties. JFK once quipped to a group of Nobel laureates he was hosting: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

You don’t have to choose between the hero-Jefferson and the villain-Jefferson, or between the Jefferson you admire and the Jefferson you despise. He was all of it.

American history is like that. We enslaved people and then fought a war that ended slavery. We saved Europe from Hitler while sending our own Japanese citizens to internment camps. We extended freedom further down the social ladder than any previous nation, but we still haven’t finished the job.

We are one of history’s great nations, not because we were founded by saints under God’s special attention, but because we have never stopped struggling to overcome our flaws.

The struggle continues.

In contrast to Trump’s ridiculous denunciation of “communism” as “the greatest threat to our country” (see the featured post), Saturday saw a march of masked White nationalists in the nation’s capital. Patriot Front is a group that formed after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the one where Trump found “good people on both sides”.

I suspect that if a similarly masked Black Power group marched, Trump would sic the National Guard on them. But White nationalists are on his side, so he will never acknowledge the threat they pose.

The Declaration of Independence seems oddly relevant today, as Trump repeats the offenses of King George. Robert Reich brings the specifics.

and birthright citizenship

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against Trump’s executive order refusing to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States whose parents are undocumented. The three liberal justices (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) were joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett in respecting the plain wording of the 14th Amendment.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The Trump regime has tried to make a loophole out of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, and three justices (Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch) were sufficiently craven to follow their master this far. But this phrase has always been interpreted as applying to children of foreign diplomats, and to Native American tribes before they were fully incorporated into the United States. There’s a simple rule of thumb: Suppose an American law enforcement agency (town, state, or federal) wants to arrest you. Do they have to deal with some foreign government first? If so, then you are not fully “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

Undocumented immigrants are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. You can’t round up people and put them in camps, and then claim they aren’t subject to your jurisdiction.

Kavanaugh tried to have it both ways: He voted against the executive order but didn’t find a constitutional right; instead, he based his judgment on immigration laws that Congress could repeal at any time.

I have a lot to say about this, but Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has already said it: In 1898, an era of widespread lynchings, the same racist Supreme Court that created the separate-but-equal loophole for Jim Crow laws affirmed the plain text of the 14th Amendment 6-2. No one has challenged that ruling since, and it was not the least bit controversial until Trump’s executive order. But now, four justices can’t find a constitutional right here. We are one vote away, not just from a Republican Congress repealing birthright citizenship, but from Trump being allowed to define the Constitution however he wants.

Neither the text of the Constitution nor more than a century of precedent have proved a match for the partisan-motivated reasoning of several supposedly impartial right-wing justices, whose views on what the Constitution says shift with the ideological currents. … Thomas observed in his dissent that “the President’s initiative generated a groundswell of new scholarship.” Indeed it did, to the extent that you can call it such. That some right-wing legal academics rushed to fabricate a justification for Trump’s goals is not to the credit of the scholarship or those scholars, nor to the justices who embraced them.

Serwer echoes what I wrote last week in “Immigration is about Race“: that the goal here is a nation by and for White people, especially conservative White Christians. The objection

is not to birthright citizenship. It is to the idea that “all men are created equal.”

He also echoes what I wrote in 2014’s “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party“: When today’s conservatives claim to be following the Founders, they are actually following slavery-advocate John Calhoun’s misappropriation of the Founders.

One measure of how Republicans have changed during my lifetime is summed up by this quote from Ronald Reagan:

Since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it’s fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

and trans athletes

Predictably, the Supreme Court sided with West Virginia and Idaho against transgender athletes. The two states have enacted bans against trans girls and women in public schools participating in female sports leagues.

At this point in our cultural evolution, trans people, especially male-to-female transitions, still seem strange to most Americans, with a high ick-factor. That’s why it’s so hard to have a rational discussion about their lives and their rights. Many people don’t want to hear about the challenges faced by actual trans people. They just get to “ick” and their brains shut down.

If you are old enough or from certain parts of the country, you may remember when gays and lesbians had a similar ick-factor. Two men holding hands or two women kissing could make large numbers of Americans feel physically nauseous. If you ever experienced that sense of nausea, it didn’t even register as bigotry. They seemed to be the aggressors. They were making us feel ill.

What changed over the decades is that more and more gays and lesbians came out, and same-sex couples became a fact of everyday life. Gay men stopped being seen as some sinister underground trying to undermine Western civilization. They lived next door and had that garden you envied. The woman who was your ally at the PTA went home to a wife, not a husband.

It may seem hard to believe at the moment, but the same evolution of attitudes will happen with transfolk. You can see it already in the national debate: The people who want to persecute transfolk are talking about abstractions, while the people who defend trans rights are talking about people they know. Outrageous claims tend to fall apart when you try to apply them to a real person. Eventually, we’ll all know somebody.

The column I wish everybody would read is “The Four Fallacies at the Heart of SCOTUS’ Decision on Trans Athletes” by George Theoharis, a Syracuse professor who has been a public school principal, teacher, and coach. His four fallacies are

  • trans youth are pretending to be trans
  • the harm of exclusion is acceptable
  • anti-trans bans protect girls
  • trans athletes create an urgent fairness crisis in school sports

Theoharis applies these fallacies to a trans athlete he actually knows, Cal. Cal is not “pretending” to be female in order to compete unfairly. Cal took drugs to avoid changes in puberty that would produce an unfair advantage. Her presence in a female locker room harms no one (beyond perhaps producing an occasional “ick” response). Athletes like her are not rewriting the record books or making it impossible for cisgender women to compete. If you ignore “ick”, it’s hard to find any harm at all that results from her participation. Conversely, it is easy to see the harm she would suffer from exclusion.

It’s also easy to see the harm female athletes in general will suffer. These bans are about putting more restrictions on women, not freeing them from unfair competition.

What I find more trying than the underlying issue is the political case many are making: Democrats shouldn’t criticize the Court’s act of bigotry, because most Americans agree with it.

Arguments like this should disturb anybody whose rights might become unpopular at some point in the future. It’s saying: “We don’t have any principles. If your rights are violated, we’ll have to take a poll before we decide whether to defend you.”

It is undeniable that an avalanche of money ($215 million, by one estimate) was spent late in the 2024 campaign to push the slogan: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” Harris never responded, and damage was done. Maybe that’s why she’s not president.

But I think never-take-an-unpopular-position is the wrong lesson to learn. It looks timid and unprincipled — because it is.

Republicans don’t behave that way. They have a long list of unpopular positions: tax cuts for billionaires, raising the retirement age, sending long-term residents with no criminal records to concentration camps, outlawing abortion, and so on. But does any Republican ever say: “We have to stop talking about abortion”?

The right lesson is to be ready to defend your positions, even if the majority disagrees with you. You have to stand by what you believe and refuse to act as if you are ashamed. 2028 hopefuls like Gavin Newsom may hedge their bets, but I think Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has it right:

I know there are transgender people right now, looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will. And we want them to thrive.

I know that amidst the ongoing assault on our democratic institutions, it’s easy for people to fall into despair about our democratic system. But I love this country too much not to fight for it.

and you also might be interested in …

My need to stay on top of the national conversation causes me to subscribe to publications I don’t necessarily recommend. I’ve been been a Washington Post subscriber for many years, but I’ve also been down on it ever since Amazon centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos started interfering directly in the paper’s editorial positions, like when he blocked its endorsement of Kamala Harris. I watched him toady to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and make the sycophantic claim that second-term Trump is a more “disciplined” and “mature” version of first-term Trump. I have occasionally noted on this blog how the WaPo editorial page has turned into the voice of the billionaire agenda.

But Saturday I finally cancelled. Their editorial criticizing the Supreme Court for one of the few good things it did this term — reading the plain text of the 14th Amendment and protecting birthright citizenship — pushed me too far. (It didn’t help that they then published a call to abolish the National Institute of Health.)

There’s a free press in this country (at least for billionaires), and Bezos can print whatever he likes. But he can spend his own money on that. I have better things to do with mine.

Wednesday, Air Force Major Jason Watson stood on the Capitol steps in full uniform and denounced President Trump, calling for his impeachment, conviction and removal. He was arrested.

To the extent that mainstream media covered this event at all, it focused on the wrong thing. Yes, what Watson did politicized the military (as Pete Hegseth does every day), and is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It is entirely appropriate that he be arrested and punished. (Hegseth is still at large.)

But this isn’t a somebody-trying-to-get-away-with-something story, it’s a civil-disobedience story. Watson knew he was breaking the rules and knew he’d pay a price for it. When officers came to arrest him, he did not run or fight.

The story is that Watson, a man who had made a career out of serving his country, is willing to pay the price of his actions. That’s how much he believes in his message.

This insight about using AI in education rings true to me:

Cognitive load theory has told us since 1988 that the productive struggle — the moment a student has to reach, fail, and reach again — is exactly where learning happens. Vygotsky called it the zone of proximal development: not too hard, not too easy, the precise difficulty that requires a human to stretch.

What the causal evidence shows is that AI, deployed as a general-purpose answer machine, collapses that zone. Students feel better. They learn less. They enjoy the session and can’t recall it the next day.

Elon Musk can’t handle the truth.

This particular episode started on June 21, when Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) called him out for gutting USAID, which “possibly sentenced to death” 4.5 million children around the world. Musk threw a fit on X — it’s easy to act out on a platform you control — saying it was “time to sue this liar”.

There is not even a single dead child! … They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof has a long history of calling attention to the plight of the desperately poor, particularly in Africa. So he began giving Musk the names he asked for.

Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly.

Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave.

Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.

“I could go on,” he wrote. And then he challenged Musk:

Come with me on a reporting trip to South Sudan or Somalia or Mozambique. Meet starving children whose lives can be easily saved. Hold them. Look into their eyes. Talk to their terrified moms.

Musk seems unlikely to accept the challenge.

Musk replied with a multi-post tantrum, calling Kristof “utterly evil” and a “piece of shit and liar” who is “lying through his teeth.” He also called another researcher, Alonso Gurmendi, “a piece of shit who loves murder” after Gurmendi mentioned a 10-year-old child in South Sudan who died after being cut off from his HIV medication.

Trump is refusing to renew the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA. The agreement, which replaced the Clinton-era NAFTA, was promoted as a diplomatic triumph of the first Trump administration. The agreement does not automatically lapse now, but has to go through annual reviews, creating uncertainty for any company looking at long-term investments.

It’s a bad time to be a Russian oil refinery.

and let’s close with something messy

Lately I’ve been looking into wedding rituals, for reasons I’ll explain in a couple months. In Hinduism there’s a haldi ceremony that is held before a wedding. Friends and family assemble to smear the bride and groom with an orange tumeric-based paste. The photos make it look like fun, but I have my doubts.

July 6, 2026 – 12:13 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (7)

Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious.

We’re not in a Manichean struggle between two monolithic systems. We’re just deciding where to draw the line between the private and public sectors of our economy.

If you believe the headlines in our corporate media or the rhetoric of our political leaders, the United States is at a fork in the road. In one direction lies continued Capitalism, which (depending on who you listen to) will either give us unparalleled prosperity or turn the US into a plantation with a few trillionaire owners and a population of serfs. In the other is Socialism, which has either made Northern Europe a 21st-century Eden or ruined resource-rich Venezuela. [1] President Trump would have you believe that the leftward fork is to Communism, “a mortal threat to American liberty”, as if there were no difference between AOC and Stalin.

The occasion for this argument is the improved outlook for Democratic Socialists within the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and AOC have been around for years, but last November they were joined by Zohran Mamdani, who was elected Mayor of New York City on a platform of rent control, child care, and free buses. In the New York primary two weeks ago, Mamdani-endorsed challengers defeated two incumbent Democratic congressmen and won the nomination for a third congressional seat. In Colorado a week later, another incumbent Democrat in Congress fell to a progressive challenger, a former senator lost the primary for governor, and sitting Senator John Hickenlooper survived a more serious challenge than anyone saw coming just a year ago.

This has evoked much hand-wringing in the political and economic establishment, particularly from the editorial pages of billionaire-agenda publications like The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

I think we would all do well to take a step back and challenge the frames we’re being given. In reality, we’re not facing a choice between two diametrically opposed futures. And we’re not about to go off a cliff into some radically new economic system.

The United States has always had a mixed economy, with both a public sector and a private sector. And we have always had an argument about where to draw the line between them. In the early-to-mid 1800s, before slavery became the center of our politics, the Whig Party believed in a bigger public sector, with a national bank and more government-funded public works like the Erie Canal. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party of that day was the low-tax party that wanted to keep the public sector as small as possible.

That’s the same debate we’re having now. Our most pro-capitalist politicians don’t propose abolishing the public sector, and our most pro-socialist ones don’t propose abolishing the private sector. No matter who gets elected, your local pizzeria will remain a private business and your fire department a public institution. We’re all just arguing about where the line should be.

For example, currently healthcare is divided between the two sectors. Most, but not all, hospitals are for-profit businesses. Health insurance comes partly through government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration, but also through big corporations like Aetna, Cigna, and United Healthcare. (My personal health insurance is split: I have basic Medicare, but my Medicare supplemental and prescription drug coverage is through private-sector companies.) ObamaCare uses government subsidies to pay for private-sector insurance.

The flagship progressive proposal, Medicare for All, would shift the line to expand the public sector’s role in health insurance. Meanwhile, conservatives want to make Medicaid more like ObamaCare — government subsidies run through private insurance companies. A recent Washington Post op-ed called for abolishing the National Institute of Health and relying almost entirely on the private sector to do our medical research.

Highways and prisons are generally considered part of the public sector. But occasionally a toll road gets leased to a private company. And about 9% of the nation’s prison population is housed in private prisons. Both of those divisions are controversial. Some Americans would like to take the whole sector back under public control. Others would privatize further.

We also argue about how much of the private sector requires government regulation. But these arguments are also about moving lines, not eliminating one side or the other. Our nuclear power plants, for example, are almost entirely owned by private-sector companies. But I can’t think of any serious politician who advocates complete deregulation. Nor does anyone doubt that industries can be stifled by over-regulation.

These are healthy debate to have. Some things are better handled within a market system while others aren’t. Regulation can be either insufficient or stiflingly onerous. It’s not always obvious which is which.

Paul Krugman posts “There Are Very Few Socialists in America“, noting that we are seeing a shift in the use of the word socialism more than an actual change in Americans’ political philosophies.

Why, then, does it look as if socialism is on the rise? Mainly because right-wing propagandists continually smear social democratic policies as socialist, trying to make popular, mainstream policy ideas sound extreme. And some Americans who are basically social democrats in effect respond by saying, “Well, if that’s socialism, I guess I’m OK with socialism.”

This corruption of our political vocabulary makes it difficult to notice real threats. If Mayor Mamdami is a “communist“, how will we sound the alarm when an actual Mao or Lenin appears? [2]

As I read the room, the recent popularity of Democratic Socialists may not even have that much to do with single-payer healthcare or any other policy. Kamala Harris lost in 2024 (and least in my judgment), not so much because of any particular issue, but because voters associated her with the status quo. Status quo Democratic centrism has essentially no answer to growing inequality, or the widespread sense that corporate power is gradually snuffing out individual choice, opportunity, and freedom. The old politics of reaching across the aisle and being willing to compromise isn’t working in an era where gerrymandered districts make representatives fearful only of the extremists in their own party.

Much of the “socialist” vote, like much of the MAGA vote on the Right, is less about ideological commitment than simply a plea to do something different.

If moderate Democrats want to retain control of the party, they need their own vision of what “something different” looks like. Joining the Republicans and the corporate media in scaremongering against Zohran Mamdami isn’t going to cut it. Whatever you think of his plans, at least he wants to do something.

[1] Arguably, Venezuela’s problem isn’t socialism so much as corruption. If you don’t want the US to go the way of Venezuela, your best course is to vote out anyone connected to the unprecedented corruption of the Trump regime.

[2] That’s why I was so careful in 2015 when I started applying the word fascist to Trump and his movement. I made sure to define the term clearly rather than just use it as an insult. I think Trump’s subsequent abuse of government force, attacks on the free press, aggrandizement of executive power, and efforts to suppress non-White voting have validated my usage.

July 6, 2026 – 10:07 am Categories: Articles | Comments (18)

Tagged , , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Friday night at Mount Rushmore, President Trump warned the country about Communism, which he portrayed as “a mortal threat to American liberty … the greatest threat to our country”. Listening to him, you might have imagined we were on the verge of a violent revolution, with a Lenin or Mao waiting in the wings to put Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg up against the wall.

This week’s featured post invites you to to back away from such extreme rhetoric and ignore the corporate-media panic about Democratic Socialists winning a few primaries. I’m calling it “Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious.” We haven’t come to a T-intersection where we have to go left or right towards one or the other of two diametrically opposed economic systems. Instead, we’re having the age-old American debate about where to draw the line between the public and private sectors of our economy. If you go back to the 1840s, the Whigs wanted more public-works projects like the Erie Canal, while the Democrats wanted low taxes and a government that made no attempt to shape the nation’s economic future.

That argument is as American as apple pie. Both sides are firmly in the center of our political traditions. Medicare for All would move the line in one direction. Privatization would move it in the other. More regulation? Less regulation? It’s a perennial American debate.

And it’s healthy. Don’t let anyone panic you about it. That post should be out maybe around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary has to cover both the end of the Supreme Court term and the 250th birthday celebrations. In particular the Court’s trans-athlete decision raises questions about how Democrats should respond. I’ll also explain how the Washington Post finally lost me as a subscriber (and why it took so long). I’ll try to get that post out by noon.

July 6, 2026 – 8:40 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Just Say No

If you don’t want to be prosecuted for crimes, don’t do crimes.

– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
responding to Republican fears of investigations by a future Democratic Congress

This week’s featured post is “Immigration is about Race“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. In Texas, people who engaged in some fairly normal protest mischief got sentenced to decades in prison because one guy shot at a cop.
  • Climate change. The European heat wave has caused 1300 excess deaths so far.
  • Iran War. It’s very hard to tell what’s going on. We have an agreement but we’re still talking. We have a ceasefire but we’re still shooting at each other.
  • Ukraine. Russian oil refineries keep burning. Russia has a fuel shortage now, in spite of being one of the biggest oil producers in the world. Maybe this war-of-choice wasn’t such a good idea.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

The Court made several important decisions this week, all 6-3 votes by the conservative majority. I discuss the two immigration-related ones in the featured post. The bloodstained gavel is a reference to sending refugees back to Haiti and Syria, which the State Department says is unsafe. A third Alito opinion the same day threw out Hawaii’s law requiring people to get permission from property owners to carry concealed weapons on their property.

The gun law had to be evaluated under that standards established in the the 2022 Bruen decision, the one requiring any gun restriction to be consistent with the history and traditions of gun laws in the US. No one really knows what that means, so in practice it turns into the Court’s conservative majority cherry-picking the historical examples that justify the conclusion it wants.

Today’s rulings just came out, so I haven’t looked at them. It appears to be a more mixed bag, with Trump winning some cases and losing others. To be honest, this worries me. Roberts likes to orchestrate the release of rulings in order to give himself cover. If he’s releasing some Trump losses today, I worry about what he has in store next.

The Texas Board of Education clearly understands that this Supreme Court will never enforce the separation of church and state against Christians. The Texas Tribune reports that an extensive list of Bible readings are now part of the K-12 curriculum. Meanwhile, the new standards cut back education about diversity and eliminate material that they think shines a negative light on US history.

They approved a lesson this week that requires students to learn about the Prophet Muhammad in the context of “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization of slavery, and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.” 

“Let me be very clear: Islam is not a religion,” state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, testified before the education board Monday. “It is a totalitarian theocracy, not unlike totalitarian systems of communism, Nazism and globalism.”

Asked if he had ever visited a Muslim-majority country, the senator responded no. 

If you live in Texas and are thinking about raising children, you might want to reconsider your choices.

and Democratic primaries in New York

The big news of Tuesday’s Democratic primaries was the defeat of incumbent congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, by challengers from the left backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani backed five candidates in the primaries, and they all won. These results were widely trumpeted as advancing the Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic Party.

Centrist Democrats (in the words of several headlines) “freaked out“. James Carville said on a podcast that he couldn’t be in the same party with some of the Mamdani candidates.

I’m done. I’m not in that fucking political party.

Conversely, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5) wrote the Mamdani candidates out of his party.

Many of us believe, as I do, that if you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat.

I’m very disappointed in these reactions. I’m a blue-no-matter-who Democrat, and I’m going to stay that way as long as the Republican Party represents fascism. For the last decade, maybe even as far back as the 2000 presidential race (where Ralph Nader’s voters could have tipped the election to Al Gore), I have argued that progressive voters should line up behind moderate Democrats who win the primaries. If you can’t win the Democratic primary, I said, you can’t win the general election. The way to get the progressive candidates you want is to win in the primaries, not to sabotage the moderate Democrats who do.

Well, now progressives are winning primaries in New York and a few other places. This is the way the game is played. The way to change the party is to win primaries.

What’s disturbing in the Carville/Gottheimer response is the attitude of entitlement. The Democratic Party belongs to them, because it just does. Democratic voters have no say in the matter. Rebecca Solnit writes:

It’s weird the way the Democratic alleged leadership (Jeffries too) think that the party is a club with rules rather than something the voters choose. It’s….undemocratic.

It would be one thing if the Democratic Party had a clear philosophical definition, the way that the Republican Party of the 1850s was the anti-slavery party. But one common complaint about the Party in the current era is that it lacks definition. I don’t see any basis for saying that socialists can’t be Democrats.

The Party establishment has made several large mistakes in the last few years. Obama let the big bankers off the hook after the Great Recession of 2008. Biden uncritically kept feeding weapons into the Israeli war machine as it committed genocide in Gaza. Maybe a few others leap to your mind.

Even at its best, the Democratic establishment drifts into nostalgia about the Obama years, as if America would be fine if we could just undo what Trump has done to the country. But Trump rose to power because a lot of Americans already felt left behind. I agree that I’d rather have Obama back than stick with Trump, but it’s not like that was some kind of golden age.

There has to be a reckoning. Leaders who backed those mistakes need to make their case to the voters and face judgment. They aren’t entitled to keep their jobs just because.

and Tulsi Gabbard

Last Sunday, WaPo published an expose about Tulsi Gabbard. In particular, it focused on the Hare Krishna group she was raised in and the influence its leader, Chris Butler, may have had on her while she was in Congress and possibly while she was Director of National Intelligence.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Tulsi Gabbard, either when she was progressive Democrat or a MAGA Republican. But I’m not inclined to pile on to this story, for a number of reasons: First, the accusations in the story are not that extreme; it always seems to be building up to something it never delivers. For many years, some anonymous emailer who seems to be Butler gave Gabbard detailed political advice, including what positions to take and how to defend them. She seems to have taken much of that advice. But WaPo has no evidence, for example, that Gabbard ever discussed classified information with Butler, or that she otherwise abused the power of her various offices for his benefit. Gabbard just had a religious leader whose guidance she took very seriously.

And that brings me to the second reason I’m playing this down: In political stories concerning religion, strangeness often gets misinterpreted as danger. When Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright became in issue in the 2008 campaign, clips of Wright’s sermons went viral. To people whose image of church came from mainline White denominations, Wright’s speaking style seemed scary, even though it was perfectly normal in Black churches.

Hare Krishna is strange to many Americans, so the Gabbard/Butler connection seems suspicious in a way that a similarly close connection between Marco Rubio and a Catholic priest would not.

Maybe there is a newsworthy scandal somewhere in the decades-long conversations Gabbard had with Butler. But I haven’t seen it yet.

and you also might be interested in …

To nobody’s surprise, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said inflation was up in May, to 4.1% year-over-year. Even excluding food and energy (i.e., the more volatile parts of the index), it was up 3.4%. The only time since the 1980s that it was higher were 2021 and 2022, when Covid interrupted supply chains.

It’s sad that Trump has made America’s 250th birthday center on himself rather than the country. He undercut the bipartisan America 250 planning committee by creating his own Freedom 250. He opened Freedom 250 with a UFC cage match on his own birthday, then kicked off his Great American State Fair by giving a political speech.

The State Fair itself has become a sad affair, with mostly red states represented and no crowds worth mentioning. The concert fell apart as artists realized they were contributing to Trump’s greater glory.

The Duckpin blog describes how the GASF devolved from something that sounded kind of fun to its current manifestation. Originally it was going to be on the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Then it was going to move from state to state, eventually reaching the National Mall like a musical arriving on Broadway. Then just the National Mall part of the idea survived.

When Trump did kick it off Wednesday night, only about 1000 people showed up, and many of them left while Trump was still speaking. So he lied about it and claimed 45000 people instead.

It didn’t have to be this way. A president with less ego, like Gerald Ford in 1976 or an alternate-timeline President Harris today, could have stayed out of the way and let the country celebrate itself. There might be a real festival happening, with a concert lineup similar to what President Obama arranged to open his presidential center in Chicago on Juneteenth.

Instead, we’re looking at each other and wondering how long the country can go on this way. How much past 250 will “freedom” survive, if it’s still surviving now?

Pete Buttigieg had to endure being separated from his children for 24 hours because someone called in a false complaint to child protective services.

and let’s close with something

One of the more whimsical YouTube channels is the musical “There I Ruined It“, which promises to “lovingly destroy your favorite songs”. In this selection, a new country-and-western song is constructed out of 50 country songs that all mention “cold beer”.

June 29, 2026 – 12:15 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (16)

Immigration is about Race

The Supreme Court signs off on Trump’s program to Make America White Again.

Other than openly professing Nazis, the anti-immigrant voices in the US get incensed at the suggestion that what they care about is race. At times they seem to care about anything other than race: disease, election security, jobs, crime, and so on. J. D. Vance has even blamed immigrants for the high cost of housing. Experts dispute the anti-immigration claims in all those areas and are ignored. But O no no, the problem couldn’t be that the vast majority of people coming into the US are black or brown.

Even if you could put all those problems aside (as a decent respect for reality does), there’s still one issue that stands out above all others: respect for the law, and particularly for the laws that control our border. The problem with these people is that they came here without permission and crossed our border without leaving a trace in our systems. We don’t know who’s here, we don’t know who they are, and so on.

Well, the second Trump administration has exposed the lie of that explanation. It has gone after people with temporary protected status (TPS), and it has found excuses to shut the door in the face of legitimate refugees, who our laws and treaties oblige us to protect. (We are accepting refugees this year, but only white ones from South Africa.)

So the shoe has moved to the other foot: It’s not immigrants who are breaking the law, it’s the Trump administration.

But wait until the courts hear about this! We are a nation of laws, and our courts protect even the weakest among us from the strongest. So Haitians and Syrians losing their TPS status sued, charging that Trump’s DHS is violating the law that established TPS. In parallel, an immigrant-rights organization sued to change DHS’s policy preventing refugees from coming to our border and applying for asylum. Lower courts offered at least temporary relief while the cases worked through the system. They did not settle the underlying issues, but ruled that the immigrants were likely to prevail, and so should not have to leave the country before winning their cases. (In the Haitian TPS case, a lower court also found it likely that the Haitians would prevail on the part of their suit that blames the Trump administration’s racial animus for their eagerness to rid the country of Haitian refugees.)

The administration appealed both cases to the Supreme Court, which announced its decision in both cases on Thursday: All the lower court actions were overturned. Hundreds of thousands of refugees will have to return to countries that the State Department says are not safe. Countless others will never get the chance to seek protection in the United States.

But OK, you might think, the Supreme Court doesn’t make policy. It just (in John Roberts’ words) “calls balls and strikes”. Maybe, when a wise court really drills down into the underlying bedrock of law, the refugees are just out of luck.

If you think that, I invite you to read the majority opinions in each case, which were both written by Sam Alito (my least favorite justice). And after you do that, read the dissents by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor.

Both of Alito’s opinions are mockeries of legal reasoning. He had a conclusion to get to, and he got there. He can’t say it in so many words, but he wants to Make America White Again. And the other five conservative justices agreed with him.

At its root, the immigration issue is about race. Nothing else.

Temporary Protected Status. The TPS case is Mullin v Doe, which concerns about 300,000 Haitians and a smaller number of Syrians. All of them are in the United States legally. Temporary protected status (TPS) is a legal designation created by Congress to provide humanitarian aid to people escaping some disaster, either natural or man-made, in their home countries. TPS recipients are allowed to live and work in the United States while they wait for conditions to resolve back home. The program includes no path to citizenship and the TPS residents do not vote. Their status is reviewed periodically by the Department of Homeland Security.

Haitians got this status in 2010 after their country was devastated by an earthquake, while Syrian TPS was a response to the repression of the Assad regime and the disruptions associated with the civil war to overthrow him. According to the Trump regime, their continued presence strains the meaning of the word “temporary”. But the law that established TPS also established a process for terminating it: The DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin currently, is supposed to consult with relevant government agencies, evaluate what they say, and make a determination about whether that particular country is a safe place to go home to. (Notice: Under the law, the relevant point isn’t whether the original emergency is over, but whether the country is now safe.) Having made an official determination that the country is safe now, the DHS secretary can revoke the TPS status.

Mullin did none of this, which becomes clear if you look at the current State Department advisories on travel. Haiti is under a Level-4 travel advisory: Do Not Travel.

Do Not Travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care.

Non-emergency US government employees and their families were ordered out of Haiti in 2023. Those who stay are not allowed to leave the US embassy “for non-essential reasons due to safety risks”.

Syria is also a Level-4 country:

Do not travel to Syria for any reason due to the risk of terrorism, unrest, kidnapping, hostage taking, crime, and armed conflict.

That’s what the Trump regime wants to send people back to.

When the government fails to follow procedures laid out by law, it violates the Administrative Procedures Act. That’s the basis for these lawsuits. The Haitians also charged that DHS’s action was at least partially motivated by race, and so violated their equal-protection rights under the 14th Amendment. District courts in New York and D.C. issued a temporary injunction blocking the revocation of TPS status, and a DC appellate court rejected the government’s motion to stay that injunction.

These rulings are not final judgments on the merits of the Haitians’ and Syrians’ claims, but reflected the courts’ judgment that the immigrants would probably win their cases, and that they should not be ejected from the US while those cases are being decided.

Wednesday, the Supreme Court reversed those judgments. While the merits are still not decided, Justice Alito and his five conservative accomplices decided that the government would probably win the cases and so nothing should prevent the government from sending the Haitians and Syrians home in the meantime. So even if the Haitians and Syrians would happen to win their cases somehow, it will be very hard to come back.

Alito’s reasoning rests on one line of the TPS statute, which explicitly bars

judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary of Homeland Security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.

Read correctly, this is a common-sense provision: DHS is the department Congress designated to make the safe-to-go-home decision, and judges should not substitute their opinions for the DHS secretary’s. But Alito expands this exemption to include the entire DHS decision-making process. Not only is DHS’ conclusion immune from review, but also DHS’ refusal to follow the decision-making process the law lays out. So Alito reads the TPS law to say: “Here’s how you decide whether to withdraw TPS status. But if you ignore what we just said and instead pull a decision out of your butt, no one can do anything about it.” [1]

Alito also slaps down a lower-court finding that the Haitian decision was at least partially based on race, because Alito does not take racism seriously unless the victims are white.

Recall the context: Trump has referred to Haiti as a “shithole country“. He and J. D. Vance explicitly and knowingly lied about precisely these Haitian TPS residents by claiming “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” in Springfield, Ohio.

Alito brushes this off:

None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications. For example, one may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race. And a person without racial bias can provide a harshly unfavorable description of living conditions in some of the countries with TPS designations.

In short, because Trump never said “I hate Black people”, because it’s possible to imagine non-racial motives for his actions if you strain hard enough, and because Haiti actually is a shithole country, the Court should ignore the possible presence of racism here. [2]

Now that it is free to do so, we can anticipate the mother of all ICE raids on Springfield, Ohio and other cities and towns with large TPS populations. The New Republic pictures Springfield becoming the next Minneapolis:

Here’s the thing: If you vote for the ticket that tells you immigrants are eating your pets—the ticket that tells you mass removals are needed to purify and revive the nation and its heartland towns—what you’re actually going to get is social turmoil, violent ethnic purges, and serious economic disruption. If you are upset at the prospect of law-abiding immigrants being violently wrenched from your communities, next time don’t vote for the guys who lied in your faces so viciously about them.

Asylum and the Border. Remember when Bill Clinton wondered what the meaning of is is? Alito’s majority opinion in Mullin v Al Otro Lado is like that, but the two-letter word in question is “in”. What does “in” mean, really?

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 requires immigration officials to inspect every person who “arrives in the United States”, and offer each of them an opportunity to ask for asylum in the United States because they are persecuted in their home country. But what does “arrive in” really mean? If border guards stand on the border and stop migrants while they are still technically in Mexico, have they “arrived in” the United States or not? Can we then ignore our legal and treaty obligations to offer asylum to victims of persecution?

After an elaborate wander through dictionaries and usages, Alito concludes that we can. When Congress tried to codify our obligations under the post-Holocaust Convention on Refugees, it really was that stupid. [3]

Now, back in April I wrote about our broken system of processing asylum claims and what might be done about it, so I understand that there are issues here. But this verbal sleight-of-hand can’t be the way we fix it.

What Alito is doing here is based on a theory of interpretation known as textualism, which is related to originalism. In the abstract it sounds great: We should interpret the words in a law according to the common usage of those words in that era. Who could argue with that?

The problem is that I have never seen this method applied in good faith, just as I have never seen originalism applied in good faith. The textualist/originalist always knows what conclusion s/he is aiming for, and cherry-picks examples of history and usage to get there.

What gets lost is the larger context: Why did Congress pass this law? What problems was it trying to solve? By breaking laws down into individual words, you can ignore all that and come to an interpretation that makes no sense. That’s what Alito has done here.

Why? When you run into such obvious examples of motivated reasoning — and especially when you run into two on the same day by the same author — you have to wonder what the motive is. When such a smokescreen of verbiage is thrown at you, you have to wonder what’s behind the smoke.

I think it’s obvious: racism.

TPS has allowed more than a million brown or black people to come to the United States legally and work here. Many more arrive at our borders and claim asylum — maybe because it takes us years to process such claims and in the meantime they also can live and work in the US.

In some people’s eyes, these programs threaten the identity of the US as a white country. To them, these immigrants “poison the blood of our country“. To get them out, Americans might make up lies about them “eating the dogs, eating the cats“. A government that represents those people might construct outside-the-law justifications to send the one group away and refuse admittance to the other.

And six racially motivated Supreme Court justices might rubber-stamp those justifications.

[1] It’s worth pointing out that during the Biden administration, the Court routinely invented new law (like the “major questions doctrine“) that allowed it to second-guess whatever decisions government agencies made. Now it is ignoring established law in order to preclude lower courts from reviewing decisions made by Republican officials. If the 48th president is a Democrat, we can expect to see the prevailing winds reverse again.

[2] Under Alito’s reasoning, neither Jim Crow nor slavery could be viewed as racial issues. We can imagine race-neutral justifications for either (like a shortage of workers capable of picking cotton, or a revenue shortfall that required a poll tax). And Southern politicians often expressed their great love for their African property. To ignore these statements as having been made in bad faith, and to claim instead that laws were passed out of racial animus — that would violate the deference that courts owe to the executive and legislative branches of the Southern state governments.

[3] If you need a refresher course on how the Holocaust led to post-war laws about refugees and asylum, read Sotomayor’s dissent.

June 29, 2026 – 10:17 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

Tagged , , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

We’re coming to the end of the Supreme Court’s term, so decisions are coming in fast. Thursday we got two particularly upsetting ones, both authored by Sam Alito. In one, people who came to the US legally under the temporary protected status program are going to lose that status and be deported, even though the countries they came from are not safe to return to. This violates the TPS law, but hey, it’s the Trump administration, it’s this Supreme Court, so who cares what the law says?

In the other, Alito twists the meaning of the word “in” to rubber-stamp a Trump policy that keeps refugees from being able to ask for asylum at our border. This also is against the law, but only if you believe the law has some abstract reality and is not whatever the Court claims it is. Those of us who lived through the Clinton impeachments remember parsing “what the meaning of is is”. It’s like that.

So anyway, the featured post will look at both of those decisions and draw the conclusion we’re not supposed to talk about: Both of these cases are really about Making America White Again. That’s the goal of Trump’s immigration policies, and that’s what six Supreme Court justices just gave their blessing to. I’ll try to get that post out by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary is left with a lot to cover: whatever the heck is going on at the Strait of Hormuz, the progressive/moderate sniping in the Democratic Party after progressives ousted two incumbent congresspeople in the New York primaries, the Tulsi Gabbard expose, the Todd Blanche nomination, Texas’ attempt to establish Christianity in its public schools, and a number of other things.

That will probably run a little late today. I’ll try to get it out by 1.

June 29, 2026 – 8:38 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Shared Values

These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share.

– Barack Obama, opening the Obama Center Friday

This week’s featured post is “Story Games“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. The attack on California’s elections as “fraud” are a preview of what we’ll see when Trump’s party gets pounded in the fall elections. The charges are a clear example of “truthiness“. No one has any evidence of fraud, but the charges just feel right to the MAGA faithful. “It’s impossible to prove, but I think everybody knows instinctively, something is wrong here,” says Speaker Johnson.
  • Climate change. The Trump regime continues to pay money to cancel wind-power projects. The total bill has reached $2.5 billion. It’s hard to imagine a more wrong-headed policy.
  • Iran War. For months commentators have been saying that Trump was losing the war. The agreement he signed to end the war proves he did. Now we get to see whether the US can control Israel and Iran can control Hezbollah, because the Lebanon front is key to maintaining the ceasefire.
  • Ukraine. The war continues to shift in Ukraine’s favor. The video below of the roof flying off of a Moscow oil refinery is striking. Putin’s war has followed him home.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s Versailles Agreement

The full text of the US/Iran memorandum of understanding finally came out. I don’t know what’s more striking: What a bad deal this is for the United States, or how many people are surprised it came out this way. What did they think was going to happen? The phrase that springs to mind is: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Pentagon simulations had consistently demonstrated two reasons for avoiding a war with Iran:

  • Air power by itself won’t topple the theocracy.
  • When Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, we have no effective answer short of a costly land invasion or nuclear war.

We’ve now had four months to watch those two obvious truths play out. Sure, we can destroy a lot of Iranian stuff and kill a lot of their people, while using up a lot of weaponry it will take years for us to replace. But no one in the Trump regime was ever able to explain how destruction and killing by itself could lead to some positive outcome for the US. Wednesday,

Trump said that “the alternative would be a worldwide depression”, arguing that if he had not struck a deal, “the strait [of Hormuz] would never have been opened.”

Of course the Strait was open before Trump attacked, so maybe he could have thought about worldwide depression then. But he didn’t, so he ended up making a number of concessions to Iran in order get it open again. Avoiding a bad outcome is an explanation for why you sign a bad deal, not something to crow about as an accomplishment.

Is the Strait of Hormuz open now? Kinda-sorta. Some ships are getting through, but the traffic is limited.

If you want to mix some laughter into your tears, watch British pseudo-journalist Jonathan Pie recount the course of the war.

For an example of the kind of military cluelessness that got us into this war, look at WaPo columnist Marc Thiessen’s reaction to the Versailles agreement. He thinks Trump had achieved a “historic victory” on the battlefield, which the peace agreement mysteriously screws up.

What victory is that? Well, we destroyed things and killed people. And if we’d just kept doing that for two more weeks we wouldn’t need an agreement at all.

I have been clear about my view from the start: Trump would be better off ending the war without a deal, with a final 10-to-14-day bombing campaign that completes the destruction of Iran’s military capabilities — and then declaring victory, ending combat operations and launching a covert effort to arm the Iranian people and help them overthrow the regime in time.

Where does that 10-14-day estimate come from? From “the target list [Admiral Cooper] was assigned at the start of Operation Epic Fury”.

Yep, that’s how war works: You make a target list before the shooting starts, and when you finish it you’ve won. Easy-peasy. Why didn’t anybody think to do that in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq?

and Obama’s new library/museum

When an ex-president who is widely respected and admired throws a party, people show up. Friday, on Juneteenth, the Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago. Every living president other than Trump was there, along with celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert, and Dwayne Wade.

The musical line-up put Trump’s Freedom 250 effort to shame: Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Common, Christina Aguilera, John Legend, Bono, and others. But the highlight was President Obama himself, who can still give a great speech:

[T]he exhibits here focus not just on policies, but on the shared values that make democracy possible, a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people, and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government and an accountability that comes with an independent judiciary and a robust, free press. A belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.

A belief in the peaceful transfer of power after the people have spoken in fair and free elections, recognizing that in a large, complicated society like ours, no group or faction gets its way 100% of the time. And a belief that qualities of character, honesty, integrity, kindness, compassion, a sense of duty and honor, those things matter in our public dealings, just as they do in our private lives.

These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share.

The word “Trump” did not appear in his text. It didn’t have to.

and masculinity

The combination of the UFC bout on the White House lawn, a match winner telling an outrageous lie about Michelle Obama (who wasn’t there and had nothing to do with the event), and neither the White House nor any of the sponsoring corporations making any statement about it afterward — it started a lot of people writing about how the MAGA movement has distorted and corrupted the notion of masculinity. Mitch Jackson comments:

Here is the product Trump and his supporters are selling. Be loud. Be cruel and a male chauvinist. Racism is fine. Mock the weak. Call people names. Shout down anyone who corrects you. Repeat whatever Fox News told you this morning as gospel, even when you know nothing about the subject. Wrap all of it in a red hat and call it manhood. …

Here is what the Trump manosphere salesmen do not want you to know. A man stands tall and tells the truth even when the truth costs him. A man keeps his word. A man protects the people who have no one else to protect them, the kid getting bullied, the worker getting cheated, the stranger getting hounded by a mob. A man stays calm when calm is hard. A man extends his hand to the person everyone else wrote off. Compassion is strength. Empathy is strength. Owning your mistakes out loud is strength. Shouting the loudest in the room has never once made anyone a man. Name calling is the move of a coward who ran out of arguments.

It especially burns me to hear the MAGA imitation of a man called a “cowboy”. I grew up watching westerns on TV, and Mitch Jackson is describing the heroes of those westerns. Ben Cartwright, Matt Dillon — they were the kind of men Jackson is describing. They were nothing at all like Donald Trump.

Here’s a question: If, as right-wing ideology insists, there are only two genders, established by God and unalterably built into our bodies — then why does masculinity require a performance like this? Can’t MAGA males just be men? Why do they have to go to great lengths to perform their masculinity?

But if, on the other hand, gender is at least partly a performance, that opens up a lot of interesting discussions and possibilities.

Another example of MAGA “masculinity”: Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a right-wing leader who had been one of Trump’s few allies in Europe. Recently there’s been some friction between them after Trump started attacking Pope Leo. (Popes tend to be popular in Italy — who knew?)

She’s also a comparatively young and good-looking female head-of-state who stands out in a graybeard meeting like the recent G-7 in France. So of course Trump had to comment to an Italian TV interviewer about how Meloni “begged” to have her picture taken with him, as (no doubt) all good-looking younger women beg when overwhelmed by his manly presence.

She’s probably happy I talked to her. I didn’t have to talk to her. She begged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so badly. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I felt sorry for her.

Meloni, and apparently all of Italy, took offense at this comment. The Italian foreign minister cancelled a trip to the US. Meloni said that Trump had “fabricated” the interaction and said “Italy and I do not beg.”

Trump make something up? Heaven forefend. Just the other day, someone said to him “Sir, you are so honest. You never invent conversations that didn’t happen.” But I think Meloni should count her blessings. At least he didn’t grab her by the pussy.

and the reflecting pool

This is the kind of trivial thing I usually ignore. The $14-or-so million Trump spent to repaint the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool isn’t significant in any fiscal way, and the resulting mess isn’t something I walk past on any regular basis. Even the fact that the job was done on a no-bid contract awarded to somebody Trump had hired at one of his clubs — it’s barely a drop in the bucket of Trump regime corruption.

But the series of incompetent moves — the huge cost overrun, not understanding the biology of algae, awarding the no-bid clean-up contract to another crony, dumping hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill the algae without realizing it might cause the new layer of paint to peel up, and then blaming all his failures on “vandals” — it’s just too typical of the whole regime. Trump ignores expert opinion, pats himself on the back for his brilliant solution, siphons taxpayers’ money off to insiders, and then blames somebody else when it all goes wrong.

Like the Iran War, in other words. Max Boot comments:

I’m sure Trump will catch the vandals desecrating the Reflecting Pool just about the time that Captain Queeg catches the thieves who absconded with his strawberries.

Sadly, though, law enforcement in the capital now serves the Mad King’s fantasies. People are being arrested for vandalizing the pool, including an ex-Olympian who stopped by in the middle of his morning bike ride. Prediction: None of these cases will go to trial. Either grand juries will refuse to indict or judges will throw the charges out for lack of evidence.

but I want you to read an essay

“Winning the Story Game” by A. R. Moxon. I discuss it in the featured post.

and you also might be interested in …

Most stunning video of the week: During a massive Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow Thursday, the city’s largest oil refinery literally flips its lid. The roof is blown off and turns over in the air. Later, it turned out that the refinery wasn’t hit by a drone, but by a misfired Russian anti-drone missile.

The anti-ICE protests outside Delaney Hall in New Jersey are continuing. The latest: video of a protester getting hit by a car.

The $400 million bribe Trump took from the Qatari royal family is now ready for service as Air Force One.

Sci-fi TV shows like “For All Mankind” sometimes feature nuclear-powered rockets. Russia has one now, but it’s “wildly expensive and very dangerous”.

Since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade, the number of abortions nationwide has nearly doubled. Nobody knows for sure why, but one possibility is that women in remote areas did not realize before that they could get abortion pills through the mail. NPR reports that even if telehealth clinics are banned from sending mifepristone through the mail, the companion drug misoprostol will work by itself, but with more discomfort.

I’ll repeat something I’ve pointed out before: Christian abortion opponents can stretch certain Bible verses to claim that the prophets would have banned surgical abortion if they’d known about it. But drugs to induce miscarriage are as old as time, and the Bible does not mention them. Mifepristone and misoprostol are just more effective modern versions of folk remedies that go back to the Egyptians.

Paul Waldman asks why Trump’s increasing mental and physical infirmity isn’t being covered the same way Biden’s was.

While there are occasional articles analyzing Trump’s aging, the mainstream media — especially the most important agenda-setting outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — treated Biden’s age as one of the most important stories in politics, a four-alarm fire that demanded every ounce of attention they could give it. … There’s no way to know for sure [how age has affected Trump’s judgment]. But the nature of Trump’s personalist presidency, in which the entire government is organized around turning his whims into reality and the barest hint of dissent is swiftly punished, makes the question of his age even more important than it was with Biden, who was surrounded by competent people who could run the government even when the president was less engaged than he ought to have been.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article in Vanity Fair is headlined: “Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House?“, but it’s also a meditation on the long-standing American conflict between democracy and human rights at home vs. empire abroad.

Gaza is not a betrayal of American democratic tradition but an expression of an American imperial tradition.

Coates describes “survivalist democracy”, when the lesser evil of a leader who protects many groups within America allows many Americans to ignore brutality against the groups left out.

So Georgia won’t be redistricting to kill its majority-Black districts. At least not this year.

Using solar panels to create needed shade always seemed like a no-brainer to me. Now California has a pilot project to cover its canals with solar panel canopies to avoid evaporation while generating electricity. Next we need to do big retail parking lots.

UCLA Professor of Medicine Robert B. Shpiner pulls together a bunch of Trump initiatives that don’t look nearly so ominous when you see them one-by-one.

  • The schedule of newborn vaccinations has been cut back from 17 to 11. One of the missing vaccines is hepatitis B, a disease which turns chronic in 9 out of 10 infants who catch it.
  • The monthly food stamp fruit-and-vegetable benefit for small children has been cut from $26 to $10.
  • About four million people are being pushed off food stamps, many of them parents.
  • Two million fewer children are covered by Medicaid or CHIP than were at the end of the Biden administration.
  • A program that bought locally-grown produce for school lunches has been cancelled.
  • Enforcement of the law guaranteeing an education to children with disabilities has been moved from the Department of Education to the Department of Justice.
  • The federal government is no longer gathering data that might show the effects of these changes.

He concludes: “I’ve never seen the US harm its children this deliberately.”

Pete Hegseth cancelled the Pentagon’s requirement for flu vaccines. Now there’s been a flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Over 220 cases have been reported so far.

The military forces people to live in close quarters that facilitate the spread of disease. Such diseases are often have military significance. The Plague of Justinian in the sixth century (an early version of the Black Death of the Middle Ages) put a stop to the Byzantine Empire’s attempt to reconquer the western territories that had been lost after the fall of Rome.

Requiring vaccines is just military good sense.

and let’s close with something twisted

Occasionally I’ve managed to glimpse a hummingbird before it flitted away. But my eye has never been sharp enough to see one’s extended tongue.

June 22, 2026 – 11:34 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (16)