Pacts

guy has a trillion dollars, 0 friends, and has never landed a joke. I know a pact with the devil when I see one.

– Amy (@lolennui.bsky.social)

This week’s featured post is “What to make of Graham Platner“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Our rapidly declining empire has hit its bread-and-circuses phase. For the Mad King’s birthday yesterday, we witnessed the corrupt spectacle of a UFC cage match on the White House lawn.
  • Climate change. You don’t have to deny scientific data you never collect. So the Trump regime is dismantling our ocean sensors.
  • Iran war. An agreement was announced yesterday, but we don’t have the text, and the most contentious issues were put off until the next round. If we’re lucky, it will get us back to where we were before Trump launched his ill-fated war.
  • Ukraine. This week’s update from Phillips O’Brien focuses on Ukraine’s effort to cut Crimea off from Russia. If they succeed, Crimea becomes a drain on Russia’s war effort rather than a strategic asset.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the Iran agreement

After months of Trump claiming a deal was at hand and Iran saying no, some kind of agreement was announced yesterday and is supposed to take effect Friday. No specific text was released, so I can’t tell you exactly what is in it. We just have to go on what various leaders are saying about it.

Apparently, the Strait of Hormuz will be open again, as it was before the US and Israel attacked Iran. The US will drop its blockade of Iranian ports, so Iran will be able to sell oil as it did before the attack. The US and Iran will be negotiating about the future of Iran’s nuclear program and the fate of the Iranian assets frozen in the US-controlled banking system, as they were doing before the attack. The ceasefire will be extended 60 days and will include Israeli forces in Lebanon, which Israel may not accept.

The obvious question now is: What did we gain from launching this war? Trump and Hegseth have been claiming victory since the first day, but what did we win? Aren’t we just back where we were before we got 15 of our own people and God knows how many Iranian civilians killed, spent hundreds of billions, depleted our stockpile of missiles and other weapons, cost American consumers billions at the gas pump, and disrupted the world economy?

Michael Sellers:

The right comparison is not between today and yesterday’s worst-case scenario. The right comparison is between today and the day before the war began.

And we may not even be back to where we started. There appear to be several points of possible misunderstanding, like this one:

[Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem] Gharibabadi said those negotiations [over Iran’s nuclear program] would only begin once Iran can verify that the U.S. has complied with the current agreement, which he said included unfreezing Iranian assets and lifting the naval blockade. U.S. officials, however, said Iranian assets would not be unfrozen until Tehran had demonstrated compliance with the agreement.

Sellers lists the possible issues in the agreement, and offers practical tests for judging them. Example: “does Hormuz return to normal freedom of navigation, or does Iran emerge with a new coercive role over passage?”

Whatever the reality, Trump will spend the next several weeks claiming he got concessions that aren’t in the agreement, in order to tell his base that his claims of victory weren’t lies. Iran will not validate these claims, but we’ll see if they will be content to let Trump do what he does. That would give the world 60 days of breathing space before reality must be faced again.

My best guess: Something like this agrement will eventually take effect, but first it will have to come apart a couple more times. Maybe Israel will scuttle it, or the “memorandum of understanding” will fail to reflect a mutual understanding of its terms. And maybe Trump will just blow it up when his MAGA base starts to accuse him of weakness.

Meanwhile, the global markets seem to be taking this agreement at face value. I’ve never been a commodities trader, but if I were, I’d be tempted to buy oil futures and wait for the first glitch. If this does all come apart, a true catastrophe looms: The world has been burning through its oil reserves, and the tanks seem to be a month or two from running dry.

and about symbolic milestones

So Elon Musk’s net worth crossed $1 trillion (due to the SpaceX IPO I warned you to avoid last week). And after a bunch of legal flailing by Trump’s puppet board, his name came off the Kennedy Center. (I think.)

Trump used his power under the Defense Production Act to put $700 million of your tax dollars behind the coal industry, which is doomed for economic reasons even if you ignore the environmental damage it does. In May, for the first month ever, the US used more solar energy (12.8% of total electricity use) than coal (12.2%). Remember when Republicans wanted the market rather than the government to sort out energy use?

Musk’s trillionaire status has sparked debate about what our economic system rewards or doesn’t reward. Exemplars of vast wealth are always controversial, but it seems to me that previous ones gave their fans more to work with than Musk has. If you drove a car, you understood what Henry Ford had done. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie represented oil and steel, which anyone could appreciate.

Bill Gates exemplified the personal computer revolution (whether it would have happened without him or not). For better or worse, Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton changed the way we shopped.

But Musk? His fortune is based on dreams of a future that may never come to pass, or may be made real by a competitor rather than Musk himself: self-driving cars, humanoid robots, colonies on Mars. Tesla and Starlink are real, but so far they account for very small parts of the car or communications industries.

Paul Krugman elaborates:

But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.

We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme. … Which brings me to my final point. The immense human Ponzi scheme that is Elon Musk will eventually collapse.

In a different post, Krugman compares our era to the Gilded Age.

So, are we living in a second Gilded Age? If only. We surpassed Gilded Age levels of income and wealth inequality decades ago. We’re now in an era of oligarchy in which the power of great wealth and the abuse of that power by a tiny elite eclipse anything we saw in the late 19th and early 20th century. And the super-wealthy themselves are far more lacking in redemptive qualities than their predecessors.

If you really enjoy seeing someone dunk on Musk, follow Will Lockett’s substack. In particular, this post examines the one piece of SpaceX that is supposed to be profitable already: Starlink. But is it really profitable, or do those earnings come from an accounting game enabled by Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill?

Then there’s Musk’s most serious downside: Current Affairs interviews Nicholas Enrich, who has a book out about the destruction of USAID during Musk’s months as head of DOGE. And Musk was involved: He bragged about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”.

[USAID] was kind of the embodiment of American generosity overseas. We operated under a flag of people shaking hands that said “from the American people”, but it wasn’t just a charity organization. I think that that’s it’s really important. It was an implement of national security. It kept Americans safe from infectious diseases. You know, we had developed a global early warning system, so that countries could detect and respond to infectious diseases before they could potentially threaten us. We built partnerships over decades with countries that enhanced stability and increased American soft power around the world, that really allowed for Americans to thrive in a stable world order for over 60 years.

Enrich gives a few simple examples of threats to national security: When the Ebola outbreak started in Uganda, USAID wanted to screen passengers boarding international flights out, because “that’s how you get an international catastrophe”. The funding was denied. Clinical trials of drugs to fight currently drug-resistant tuberculosis were stopped, creating a risk of new TB strains resistant to those experimental drugs.

Enrich wasn’t prepared for the level of ignorance he encountered from the DOGE people.

There was another political appointee who told me, when I was pushing to restart lifesaving Ebola activities, he told me just that Ebola is a scam.

The first signs of the unfolding disaster were

families that had spent all day walking to a clinic in Sudan—you know, with the USAID logo on it—expecting to get food and medical supplies, seeing that clinic ends up being shuttered and were then forced to go home and then make the heart-wrenching decision of which of their children to feed. And there were pregnant women who were unable to access emergency childbirth services because the ambulance service that provided them was cut off and they ended up perishing. These were just like the initial anecdotal experiences that we started to hear that have since expanded.

Now we’re seeing conservative estimates show that 750,000 people have already died, most of those are children, and that’s within the first year. And unfortunately, what we’re learning is that really this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s what we’re going to see in the next few years, where new babies who are born are no longer getting the immunizations we used to provide, babies are being born with HIV at high rates in some clinics, where just a year ago those rates were near zero. The impacts of this are going to—we’re not going to see the full effects of them for four years. I mean, I honestly believe that when the dust settles on the Trump administration, his cuts to USAID will end up being a major part of his legacy, because of just how far-reaching those impacts really are.

The Lancet medical journal published a study anticipating the results from a global cut in official development aid (ODA).

Sudden and severe reductions in ODA funding could have catastrophic consequences, with a potential global death toll comparable to—or even exceeding—that of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even modest defunding that simply extends current downward trends is likely to lead to sharp increases in preventable adult and child mortality, potentially resulting in tens of millions of excess deaths in the coming years.

It’s important to understand the full evil of Musk’s actions. For decades, I’ve been hearing conservative rhetoric about how private aid should replace government aid. But not only does Musk (unlike Bill Gates or Warren Buffett) give essentially nothing from his vast wealth to help the world’s least fortunate. (The Musk Foundation has focused on self-dealing with his businesses, and funding schools his children attended.) But he uses his wealth to buy political power, and then uses that power to prevent any help from reaching the poor.

Trump is being as petty as possible about taking his name off the Kennedy Center. Legal challenges went to the last minute, and then a 12-hour extension was granted. After the name came off, they left the tarp up so that no one can see the place where his name was taken down. The tarp serves no purpose but to avoid giving Trump’s enemies the satisfaction of defeating him.

News articles about taking down Trump’s name quote a lot of opinions about whether he deserves such an honor. The answer seems obvious to me, but it’s an irrelevant point: Trump and his puppet board had no power to change the name of the Kennedy Center. Only Congress can do that.

This is typical of a lot of Trump’s legal controversies. Whether what he wants to do is a good idea or not — I usually think not — he gets into trouble because he exceeds his legal powers. The tariffs are a prime example. Whether the US would benefit from higher tariffs is something reasonable people can argue about. But under the law, Trump had no power to impose his tariffs. The right argument to have there isn’t against tariffs, but against dictatorship.

Consider this exchange in the court case about Trump destroying the East Wing of the White House and beginning to build his gilded ballroom. Trump’s DoJ is arguing that courts have no power to intervene.

“If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty,” asked Judge Patricia Millett, “[if] the government moved too fast…nothing can be done?”

“I think that’s right, yes,” [DoJ attorney] Roth replied, which, according to ABC News, “sparked audible gasps in the courtroom.”

Now, nothing in the Constitution commits the US government to maintaining the East Wing (or the Statue of Liberty). But under our system of government, such decisions aren’t based on the whims of one man.

Republicans would recognize this truth immediately if the one man were a Democrat. President Obama was denounced (more than once) for putting his feet up on the Resolute Desk. (“The picture of Obama with his feet on the desk in the Oval Office shows that he has never been taught manners. That desk is history and should be treated with respect.”) Imagine if he’d torn down a wing of the White House purely on his own authority.

and Graham Platner

See the featured post.

and Social Security

As if Republicans running for Congress this fall didn’t face enough problems, Speaker Johnson just gave them one more: If he’s still speaker after the elections, he has a plan for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to be “adjusted and fixed“.

We know what this means, because it’s been a staple on the Right for decades: Any government spending that benefits people creates a budget problem. But there is infinitely much money available to pursue wars, cut billionaires’ taxes, and glorify God-Emperor Trump.

In particular, a Heritage Foundation article from 2024 proposes to “fix” Social Security by raising the retirement age to 69 or 70, establishing a “more accurate” (i.e., less generous) inflation metric, and partially privatizing the program.

The ostensible reason to “fix” Social Security is that the SS trust fund will run out of money in the early 2030s. If no other funding is provided by Congress, benefits will be limited to the Social Security taxes that come in, necessitating cuts.

However, the trust fund has always been a bookkeeping device rather than anything real. As Paul Krugman explains, the real question is whether the country wants to keep funding its elders at this level, not whether it can afford to.

and a war crime

Almost since the beginning of the Iran War, Trump has been threatening to commit war crimes. Occasionally, people have debated whether something we’ve done in Iran is a war crime or not. Bombing the girls school, for example, would be a war crime if it had been done intentionally. Attacking bridges and power plants might be war crimes, if the intent was to destroy economic infrastructure rather than impede Iran’s military.

Tuesday, all doubt was removed. After Trump unleashed another round of war-crime threats on Truth Social, this happened:

On the evening of June 9, the USA, with what seems to be intent, attacked two reservoirs and a water treatment facility in southern Iran. Almost immediately afterwards, water was cut off to about 20,000 Iranian civilians who live around the southern Iranian town of Sirik.

Why was this most likely a deliberate attack? Well, there seems to have been nothing nearby of military value and the destruction was precise.

When asked about this attack and the possibility that it was a war crime, Pete Hegseth offered no defense.

Well, it’s precisely the kind of disingenuous question that I’m used to from the media, impugning the motives of the folks on our side who are incredibly professional and incredibly effective.

and Trump’s birthday

Yesterday Trump held a UFC cage match on the White House lawn. Not only was this garish and violent, it often turned partisan. Also, it was another example of Trump profiting off his office: He owns stock in the TKO Group, which sponsors UFC fights. And the White House was not the only federal property involved: Weigh-ins and other pre-match festivities took place at the Lincoln Memorial.

and you also might be interested in …

Don Moynihan raises an interesting point about the Supreme Court’s assault on Black representation in Congress. It really comes in two parts:

  • States can’t intentionally create majority-minority districts because that violates the Court’s “color-blind” interpretation of the Constitution.
  • States can gerrymander for partisan purposes, which in red states has the effect of eliminating majority-minority districts that might arise naturally, i.e., in urban areas with large minority populations.

Moynihan considers what would happen if both partisan and racial gerrymandering were unconstitutional.

By accepting partisan gerrymandering as a regrettable but inevitable part of American democracy, the courts made racial justifications, rather than broadly democratic justifications, the last basis for maintaining constraint on gerrymandering. So isolated, it became easier to eliminate this last line of defense.

Nothing about this was inevitable. Imagine an alternative scenario, where the courts decided that both racial considerations and partisan gerrymandering were unconstitutional. Commentators like Rubenfeld could still have trumpeted the end of “the racial districting game” but Black and Democratic voters would still have had a realistic chance at representation.

A new analysis at the New York Times by Nate Cohn and Eve Washington adds numbers to the debate. It makes clear how monumental the decision to accept partisan gerrymandering was to blocking a truly colorblind map.

A map that was organized more simply around the non-partisan values of natural geographic settings would preserve a similar number of Democratic and minority-leaning opportunities.

Video of a crime committed by one particular Sudanese asylum-seeker in Southhampton went viral and resulted in an anti-immigrant riot in Belfast. Wired examines the role a far-right youth group played in making the riots happen. The New Yorker has a longer, deeper article on how anti-immigrant politics is spreading in the UK and elsewhere.

Approaching the 10-year anniversary of the Brexit vote, the UK economy is clearly doing worse outside the EU than it would have done remaining inside.

One of the more controversial parts of FISA surveillance law is Section 702, which allows intelligence agencies to monitor the communications of certain foreign nationals, even when they communicate with Americans that the agencies are not supposed to spy on. Section 702 gets reauthorized from time to time, because it’s been too controversial to make permanent.

The tricky point is what the agencies can do with their databases of collected information. Maybe the NSA (say) has no justification to surveil you, but it has your conversations with foreign nationals in its database. Can it search that database for your communications without a warrant, essentially spying on you via its spying on other people?

Anyway, the appointment of Trump attack dog Bill Pulte as acting DNI raised the profile of this issue, and Congress failed to renew the authority when it lapsed last week.

Japan is depopulating.

Laurie Garrett explains:

young men aren’t eager to marry, and Japanese women are more than happy to pursue life without them. Marriage rates continue to plummet, along with birth rates. This is less about policy initiatives the government might take than it is due to a wide gender gap in hopes, dreams, aspirations, concepts of family and cultural interests.

But of course, the US is developing similar gender gaps, and a similar (if less extreme) drop in births-per-woman.

Japan is not the exception – rather, it is the avant garde, the cutting edge, the leader the rest of us ought to pay close attention to as it struggles to find the right combination of humanity, gender equity, financing and social policy to care for its elders, encourage its young adults, bridge the political and economic gaps between men and women, and grow its children.

This is an issue conservatives recognize, but their approach is 180 degrees off. The decline in White reproduction is a key part of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. The true part of the theory is that if our economy continues to create jobs and our people don’t produce children to fill them, immigration is the obvious way to keep the wheels spinning. This will inevitably shift the racial demographics.

But the MAGA approach to increasing fertility is basically to roll the clock back, so that women have fewer choices in life and are essentially forced into motherhood. Garrett suggests another path: Change male culture so that men take more responsibility for children. If men and women see equivalent costs and rewards for raising children, their expectations will begin to align.

If you’re wondering about the current legal situation around Trump’s slush fund for the January 6 criminals, the best summary is here. Two courts are still wrestling with issues related to the fund, and the regime is claiming the courts’ concerns are moot, because the fund isn’t happening. At least one judge wants a written commitment from the Justice Department that the fund really is dead and won’t be revived. We’ll see if DoJ gives that commitment.

The Trump administration is dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative,

a $386 million network of more than 900 instruments funded by the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation (NSF), which has provided real-time data on the world’s oceans for more than a decade. The sensors are distributed across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems, and ocean currents that influence the global climate.

The decision to end OOI, described by the foundation as a “descoping,” will remove nearly all in-water infrastructure located off the states of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea, an area between Iceland and Greenland. The OOI was designed as a 25-to-30-year project specifically to capture long-term climate signals, which scientists say require at least three decades of continuous data to be meaningfully detected. The network has achieved just 10 years of observations.

The simplest way to deny climate change is to refuse to gather data on it.

and let’s close with something precious

“Rare photo of a mother wrench feeding her young. Breathtaking.” – ScottH

June 15, 2026 – 11:31 am Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

What to make of Graham Platner

Can we buy a redemption story without sinking into the same moral morass Republicans have?

In spite of a variety of accusations (some of which he has admitted and apologized for), Graham Platner won the Maine Democratic primary to run for Susan Collins’ seat in the Senate.

His victory has prompted a lot of soul-searching among Democrats, including me. In a cycle when we want to spotlight the moral slime of the Trump administration and the Republican Party in general, we’d like more than ever to have squeaky-clean candidates like James Talarico in Texas. (Imagine being so blameless that when your opponents start lying about you, the best they can come up with is that you might be vegan.)

A lot of the case against Susan Collins is not so much that she is slimy herself, but that she enables slimeballs like Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and a host of others. She may be “concerned” about their conduct, but when push comes to shove her party can count on her vote. (The “believe women” campaign started with Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusation against Kavanaugh, which Collins paid lip service to, but ultimately wrote off. She also believed Kavanaugh’s assurances that Roe v Wade was safe, and believed the empty assurances Mitch McConnell gave her in exchange for her vote on the 2017 Trump tax cut. “Believe powerful men” is the actual rule Collins follows.)

So now we have another believe-women situation: a former Platner girlfriend (who happens to be a Republican political operative) says he was violently controlling (but never struck her).

he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.

During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.

I wish I didn’t have to deal with this, but I do. To what extent am I willing to support a less-than-perfect candidate for the sake of the greater good? I’m inclined to go a long way, given the perilous state our democracy is in if Congress continues to refuse to contain the authoritarian drive of the Trump regime. But I’m aware that MAGA types make similar arguments for tolerating Trump’s moral/legal failings: They grossly exaggerate the harm they think Democrats are doing or would do, and see Trump as the lesser evil.

I also resent that the public only seems to have standards for Democrats. Trump can be a convicted felon, found by a jury to have sexually assaulted a woman, found by numerous courts to have committed fraud, and so on — and none of it matters. Only Democrats have to exhibit good character and live moral lives. In particular, I have no patience for Republicans (and supposedly “liberal” media outlets like the NYT) who find fault with Platner, but have far less to say about Ken Paxton, who is by far the scummier character.

But still, it rankles to be complicit in the racheting down of moral standards in American politics. And consequently it raises the question: If we support Platner, are we just doing what they’re doing?

The most thoughtful article I’ve found on this topic is “Rupture and Repair: When Problematic Figures Ask For Our Support“, written by Jay Kuo for The Big Picture blog. Kuo compares Democrats’ treatment of Platner and Hunter Biden (who is developing something of a following online) to Republicans’ treatment of Paxton and Pete Hegseth.

Several figures from both sides of the political spectrum have raised this very question. Some seek redemption for conduct they acknowledge. Others seek power for conduct they deny. The distance between those two postures turns out to matter enormously, even when the underlying behavior looks similar on the surface.

Kuo proposes a simple test: What if the accusations are true? What does that say about the person’s future conduct, and in particular about how they would use the power they are seeking?

The contrast with Biden and Platner is not that their alleged conduct was less serious than Hegseth’s and Paxton’s, though it objectively is. The contrast is structural. Hegseth’s alleged conduct was directly relevant to the specific institution he was being asked to lead. Paxton’s alleged crimes are the exercise of the very power he is seeking more of. Rather than acknowledge the rupture of trust and seek repair and forgiveness from supporters, they have demanded to be believed over their accusers. Their party, calculating that the political stakes justified the cost, has obliged.

(Kuo’s distinction seems meaningless to Megan McArdle, who sees Platner and Paxton alike as men of low character.) For the moment, let’s put aside the whattaboutism of Hegseth and Paxton, and focus that test on Platner. He got (and later covered) a tattoo that was based on an SS symbol. He posted derogatory things online about women and minorities. He is accused of treating a girlfriend badly and possibly cheating on his current wife. He acknowledges the majority of that behavior, claims ignorance about the symbolism of the tattoo, and denies the violent aspects of the girlfriend’s charges. He casts those events in a narrative in which he was scarred by combat and took some while to work things out.

The question Kuo would have us focus on is: Does anything in Platner’s current life or political positions resonate with a pro-Nazi, anti-woman, or anti-minority past? If something does, he should lose any benefit of the doubt.

What matters most though is not the rupture [of trust] itself but the repair that follows. Character is revealed in the willingness to face the damage, attempt repair and accept that forgiveness is not guaranteed. A child who breaks something and hides it learns only fear and concealment. A child who breaks something, admits it, and works to make it right learns something far more valuable. …

Importantly, repair cannot simply be declared by the person who caused the rupture. And it cannot become a way to sweep aside serious problems, particularly around misogyny and toxic behavior. It has to be tested over time, especially by how seriously a candidate like Platner treats the objections of the people harmed and the concerns of voters still unwilling to trust him.

So the next thing to do is listen to the people most likely to be harmed if Platner has not reformed and is still not who he is claiming to be.

Shay Stewart-Bouley is a Black Mainer who writes about race issues. In her opinion, Platner is nearly unique among Maine’s White politicians in his outreach to non-White and immigrant communities.

I can’t speak to who Graham Platner was when he was posting hurtful things on the internet, but I can say that in the nine months since he launched his campaign, I have seen a white man who has done a lot more community-building across racial lines than the majority of those who judge him—particularly the left-leaning progressives and leftists who are horrified that he has a legitimate shot at becoming the U.S. senator. Most certainly more than the average politician or aspiring politician. The fact that he chooses to build behind closed doors rather than turning BIPOC people into props to redeem himself is also a choice. For those who seek the performative, there is no doubt that a few shots of him speaking with Black and Brown audiences and seeing their reactions would probably steady their nerves—but do photo ops allow for depth and true connection?

… I don’t need a perfect candidate and watching him show up consistently for Maine’s BIPOC community and not use the community to repair his battered image matters to me. In some ways, knowing for months that at any moment he could have chosen to “prove” that he has changed by taking relational moments and turning them into soundbites and photo ops—but he didn’t—reveals a level of integrity that is important to me.

If you want to understand the positive aspects of his candidacy, and why so many Mainers chose to stand by him in the primary, read Sebastian Junger’s “I Just Had Breakfast with Graham Platner“. What comes through in this article is how the constant sniping about details of his past and background serves to divert attention from his message.

The heart and soul of what Platner had to say to me – and to voters – is that American politics are deeply corrupt, and that Democrats are often as bad as Republicans. He went on to say that the true division in this country isn’t between liberals and conservatives but between economic elites and everyone else. These elites, in his opinion, have fomented political divisions to stay in power because their main goal is economic monopoly; politics simply serve that purpose.

Perhaps The New York Times and Washington Post would prefer we not have that discussion. Junger goes on to quote Platner directly:

Here is my real point of contention with the liberal pundit class. Which is that they celebrate the suffering of working people who were tricked into voting for someone that was going to fuck them over. You shouldn’t celebrate that, you should be horrified by it…you should have compassion and empathy. Those people were tricked, they were propagandized, they were lied to. We are all in many ways being exploited and manipulated by the elites. To sit around and say, Ha, ha, you get what you voted for – no, man. Those are people in pain. You don’t laugh at people in pain, you help them, for Christ’s sake.

… The Ukrainians are resisting an armed invasion, and I absolutely support [them]. But I do think it makes it hard to support them when we are also supporting the Saudi regime and the Israelis in Lebanon right now. I’m an internationalist. I believe our foreign policy should be rooted in international institutions that we respect consistently. Vietnam wasn’t good for working Americans. Fucking around in South America in the 1980s was not good for working Americans. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not good for working people. I’d like to see us invest money in the United States rather than in a bloated military apparatus. We have helped set up all these international court systems that are specifically designed to to protect corporate power and capital around the world…why don’t we do that to protect, say, labor rights around the world? [We need alliances so that] if a company flees one country to avoid taxation, other countries will impose the same tax rate.

… Establishment Democrats and normie liberal types love talking about fascism and authoritarianism. They use the words and then nobody does anything to prepare. I do believe these people [in the Trump administration] are fascists and will try to maybe interfere in the elections come November, weaponize or militarize federal law enforcement as a political tool. So, that’s why you have to fucking organize now…just saying so on MSNBC isn’t enough. Talk to the labor unions, talk to the community organizers, start building the mechanisms that we’re going to need. Resistance isn’t magic; it requires time and discipline and energy. The Trump administration is full of incompetent morons; of all the versions of this we can beat, it’s this version. What I’m very much worried about is if we don’t resist and defeat this version now, then the next version is actually competent.

All things considered, is that a point of view I want represented in the Senate? I think it is. You may make your own decision, but I encourage you to take a long look at Platner, and not just respond based on a few headlines in the corporate press.

June 15, 2026 – 9:31 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (11)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week I’m balancing personal pleasantness against depressing news from the outside world. Personally, I’m on a very lazy vacation, looking out the window of a house on an island in Casco Bay, an hour-long ferry ride from Portland, Maine. There is not a lot to do here, and I’ve been diligently not doing it.

When I raise my gaze to the larger world, though, I see that the first trillionaire is a man who has successfully scammed the public and is responsible for third-world deaths that may eventually run into the millions. Our president just staged a gladiator fight on the White House lawn to celebrate his 80th birthday. The US openly committed a war crime this week. The House Republican majority is gearing up to pay for Trump’s wars and tax cuts and personal excesses by cutting Social Security and Medicare. And the government is shutting down its ocean sensors, because who needs to know about the effects of global warming anyway? You don’t have to deny the evidence if you never collect it to begin with.

Yesterday the US and Iran announced a partial agreement to extend the ceasefire and open the Strait of Hormuz. That, I suppose, is good news, if it holds — which it may not. But at best, it gets us back to where we were before we launched our attack, and raises the question: What was that all about?

I can’t say that staring at the water in Maine has given me any special insight into the local politics, but I did some reading this week to figure out what I think of Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate to run against Senator Susan Collins. The corporate press has been full of stories about his personal life and aspects of his past that muddy the squeaky-clean image Democrats would like to project as we run against the most corrupt administration in American history. The press has also told us virtually nothing about Platner’s message or why it appeals to Mainers.

So I poked into that and found that a lot of insightful articles have been written elsewhere if you look for them. I feel much more positive about Platner now, and I don’t think Democrats are making the same kind of deal with the Devil that Republicans have made in supporting people like Ken Paxton and Donald Trump. That’s the topic of the featured post, which should be out shortly.

The rest of the news gets covered in the weekly summary, which runs a little long this week. I hope to get it out before noon, because I have to catch a ferry back to the mainland. But before I go work on those posts, I want to offer this observation: The beauty of the world is still out there. To the extent your circumstances allow, take some time now and then to appreciate it.

June 15, 2026 – 8:34 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Self and Others

A man does what’s right when no one is watching. He upholds his commitments to his family and neighbors. He doesn’t lie, cheat, & steal his way through life. Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.

– James Talarico

This week’s featured post is “All Americans Need Pride Now“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. To me the week’s most disturbing quote was from DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Testifying before a Senate committee, Mullin was asked (by Chris Murphy) whether he would commit to following court orders. Mullin could not say yes. Instead, he said he would follow orders he believed were legitimate, but not politically biased ones. In other words, he will be the judge of what the law says. That’s not how the rule of law works.
  • Climate change. El Nino continues to build, threatening record heat this summer.
  • Iran. Nothing new to report: Trump keeps saying Iran is defeated and a deal is at hand that will achieve all his goals. Iran keeps refusing to act like it’s defeated. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed and the world’s oil reserves continue to sink.
  • Ukraine. Phillips O’Brien’s biweekly updates continue to be the easiest good way to keep track of this conflict. Ukraine’s growing drone-and-missile campaign is making it increasingly difficult for Putin to claim that everything is OK.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about budgets

The Senate passed the Republicans’ reconciliation bill. It needs to go back to the House now, where there may yet be some snags. Prevailing opinion is that it will wind up on Trump’s desk by the end of the week.

If you remember, originally this was about whether Congress could stop ICE and the Border Patrol from being rogue agencies that terrorize American cities and run concentration camps. But as so often happens, once the train started rolling a lot of other controversial issues got attached to it. So it’s easy to forget that this all started when Trump’s storm troopers murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Democrats then proposed tying funding to some common-sense limits, the kinds of limits all other law-enforcement organizations already follow, like not wearing masks and going to a judge to get warrants.

Republicans refused to compromise on this, so the funding had to be dropped from the big appropriation bills that funded the rest of the government and then the rest of DHS. By going the reconciliation route, Republicans no longer needed Democratic votes, so they added a nasty kicker to the bill: It funds ICE for three years rather than the usual one. So if Democrats retake Congress in the fall, they won’t be able to defund this rogue agency. In essence, the reconciliation bill puts ICE beyond the power of the voters.

For a while the bill included money for Trump’s White House ballroom and the fund to pay off the thugs who rioted for him on January 6. But those provisions were too toxic even for Republicans, so they were removed. Acting AG Todd Blanche went so far as to say that the administration was dropping the proposed thug-fund, but he wouldn’t put it in writing, and Democrats failed to get explicit language into the reconciliation bill disallowing the fund. Trump says he still loves the idea, so we’ll see it again, either after he signs the bill or maybe after the fall elections.

But that dispute is about the current year’s budget. By October Congress will need to pass next year’s budget, where Trump wants to raise defense spending from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.

Timothy Snyder observes that this kind of increase doesn’t make sense in any conventional frame.

Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide.

It’s not like this is a Sputnik moment and we suddenly realize our potential adversaries are way ahead of us. It’s not like $1 trillion represented a whittled-down military that needs to be rebuilt. It’s also not like there’s an upswelling of public opinion demanding more defense. If you asked Americans what they want the Pentagon to spend $500 billion more on, you’d draw a blank from the vast majority of voters. And virtually nobody would volunteer to sacrifice their own benefits — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. — to pay for a bigger military.

So why then? Snyder has a theory:

The military budget proposal … makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget.

and 60 Minutes

The story so far: Skydance Media, controlled by the Trump-allied Ellison family, bought Paramount Global, giving them control of CBS. The merger raised anti-trust issues, so Paramount paid a bribe to Trump (and fired Stephen Colbert after he used the word “bribe” on the air) to let it go through.

The Ellisons then turned CBS News over to Bari Weiss, whose experience was mainly as a opinion writer for print media. So she begins her career in broadcast journalism at the top, as head of the organization made great by people like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. I don’t have to summarize Weiss’ career, because John Oliver already did.

Weiss’ career has centered on claims of “liberal media bias”. So since taking over, Weiss has shifted CBS Evening News to the right, which has been disastrous for its ratings: CBS is never going to win over Fox News viewers, so all they have done is alienate the viewers they already had.

This week, she brought her wrecking ball to 60 Minutes, the most popular news show on television. Of course, she had already messed with 60 Minutes before, in December. Hours before its scheduled airing, she pulled Sharyn Alfonsi’s outstanding report on the CECOT prison in El Salvador that Trump was deporting people to. After the episode was leaked by a Canadian broadcaster, garnering Weiss a lot of bad press, she relented and let the episode air (with a few changes) four weeks later. Stephen Miller demanded that the people responsible for the report be fired, which Weiss at the time did not do.

But a week ago Thursday, heads began to roll, beginning with Alfonsi, but also including correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. Last Monday, correspondent Scott Pelley told the executives what he thought about their moves, and was subsequently fired himself. (Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Anderson Cooper had left the show voluntarily in mid-May.)

Friday, the remaining correspondents — Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim — said they plan to stay on. But their joint statement was hardly a vote of confidence in the new leadership.

We want to express how sorry we are that these principled, fair and honest journalists were treated so shabbily, with such indecency. Tanya deserves to be celebrated, not cruelly cast off. Draggan too. It’s been heartbreaking. But, we have decided to stay on. We feared that our returning might be construed as an endorsement of the existing power structure. That is simply, categorically not the case. Here’s why we’re are staying: We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.

Pelley gave an interview to the NYT where he fleshed out some of his previous claims of political interference from Weiss.

[A]bout four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.

This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.

Jay Rosen is an insightful observer of journalism. Here’s his take: Maybe CBS looks so chaotic because no two executives are playing the same game.

If you follow the mess at CBS, don’t dismiss the possibility that Ellison thinks he’s been clear about playing nice with Trump, while Bari Weiss thinks she can get by with “Center Right,” while Nick Bilton thinks it’s Mike Wallace all over again— but super digital. All at once.

and the SpaceX scam

Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX) will become a publicly traded company on Friday. This is sketchy for a bunch of reasons.

  • If the stock trades at anything like the asking price, it will be the biggest initial public offering (IPO) ever, raising $75 billion for the company and valuing the full enterprise at $1.75 trillion. That would launch SpaceX into the top 10 corporations by market capitalization, roughly the same size as Saudi Aramco and ahead of both Facebook and SpaceX’s sister-company Tesla.
  • Elon Musk’s stake will be worth over $800 billion, making him the world’s first trillionaire.
  • The asking price wildly overvalues the stock. The company is still losing money hand-over-fist, with a $4.3 billion loss in the most recent quarter. With no profits to go by, investors might evaluate the stock by its revenues. SpaceX’s asking price clocks in at 95 times revenues, compared to 20 times for a hot tech stock like Nvidea.
  • Musk has occasionally used SpaceX as a piggy-bank for Tesla. In 2025 SpaceX bought $131 million worth of Tesla Cybertrucks, representing 6-9% of the total sales of that marketing disaster.
  • Stock exchanges have bent their rules to get SpaceX into their indexes. That means that index funds (which are considered safe investments for retirement accounts) will be forced to buy the stock, no matter how overvalued it is.
  • Due to owning higher-vote shares, Musk will control 80% of the votes in any shareholder decision, so he can do anything he wants with the company. Fine print in the SpaceX prospectus means that minority shareholders have very little recourse if he mismanages the company.

When you put it all together, Musk is essentially defrauding America’s retirees. Here’s how the fraud works: Musk has a small-but-loyal following of investors who think he can do no wrong. By only offering a small percentage of SpaceX’s shares in the IPO, he has created a situation where their opinion of SpaceX’s worth can become the market price. Then, index funds will be forced to buy some sizeable percentage of all the shares available, creating an artificial demand that will pop the stock higher — at least temporarily.

The whole scheme is self-referential: People want to get in on the over-valued IPO, because they anticipate being able to sell at an even higher price to the bigger fools in the index funds.

When the market manipulation is over and the stock collapses, your 401k will be left holding the bag.

At the moment, here’s what you need to do: Check your retirement accounts to see if you have any Nasdaq or Russell index funds. If you do, sell them and move the money to an S&P 500 index, because that index hasn’t changed its rules to let SpaceX in prematurely.

In pro-capitalism propaganda, the great entrepreneurs’ quest for wealth creates more wealth than they can capture for themselves, so all of society benefits. This may have been true at certain points in capitalism’s history, but we’re past that now. Our current oligarchs are so powerful that they not only capture all the value of their innovations, they suck wealth away from the rest of us.

It’s worth noting that Musk has profited in the past by scamming the public. Remember DOGE? Musk was going to save the taxpayers $2 trillion in a single year by finding and eliminating government waste. In reality, he saved nothing.

What did the people in America actually get as a result of DOGE? Chaos at Social Security field offices, uncertainties about veterans’ access to critical care, the end of civil rights enforcement in schools, limited staff to go after corporate billionaire tax cheats, an unstaffed consumer complaint database leaving people vulnerable to bank scams, the end of foreign aid programs that led to the death of hundreds of thousands across the globe, and so much more. And that’s only what we’ve seen so far…as time goes on, we will see the impacts of the loss of expertise and capacity across federal agencies.

But in the process Elon walked away with more government contracts and untold quantities of illegally procured government data. Not a bad return for the $290 million he spent getting Trump elected.

and you also might be interested in …

I usually minimize Trump-acting-out stories, because they happen so often and get a lot of coverage without me. But the last few minutes of his Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker stand out. Trump makes a series of unfounded claims about Democrats cheating in elections, both his 2020 loss to Joe Biden and this week’s California primary. Welker keeps insisting that he provide evidence for those claims — which he does not have because his claims are false. Trump responds by getting angry, insulting Welker, and leaving the set.

It amazes me the deductions many people never make. If you ask a guy for evidence and he starts sputtering insults, it seems obvious to me that he has no evidence. Similarly, if a detention center keeps out people who are legally entitled to inspect it, they must be up to no good in there. How can anyone deny that?

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who turned against Trump and has consequently been prosecuted, will plead guilty to retaining classified information. Bolton appears to be one of the rare Trump enemies who is actually guilty of something, unlike E. Jean Carroll, James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell, Jack Smith, and a host of other people Trump’s Department of Injustice has been investigating and/or prosecuting simply as harassment.

The cartoon points out the irony of Bolton going down for something that Trump did much worse, but got away with after he won the election and took over the government.

Another crime Trump commits himself is insider trading. This week Trump pardoned a former Republican congressman convicted of insider trading. He made hundreds of thousands by trading stocks based on his inside knowledge of upcoming mergers.

A study says that deploying the National Guard to Washington D. C. has had very little effect on crime.

This doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve been to D. C. recently. The Guard seems to be there for show. I saw some troops deployed on the National Mall in daytime. That’s a high-traffic area that has got to be one of the safest places in the city. However, one night after dinner in a restaurant, I had to walk across the Mall after dark. This actually did make me nervous, though nothing happened. But the Guard was nowhere to be seen.

I concluded that the point of the deployment is for a lot of people to see the guardsmen and think “Trump is protecting us.” If nobody is around to see them, though, they don’t need to be there.

The NYT reports on Israel’s use of white phosphorus in Lebanon. I had thought this was a war crime in itself, but apparently the substance is itself legal, and only becomes illegal when it’s used in populated areas.

The Times does its best to tip-toe around accusing Israel of war crimes, but the photos in the article show white phosphorus plumes with buildings in the background.

After the first half-dozen happened with no political consequences, the Navy’s strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs have started to seem normal. It’s easy to forget that these are murders. Now we’re up to 200 or so of them.

Fascinating article about how America’s huge national debt interacts badly with the problems Trump caused in the world economy by attacking Iran. First, Jay Martin explains why the debt is not a problem in normal times:

Countries around the world – Japan, the UK, China, South Korea, and dozens of others – hold roughly $9.4 trillion worth of these American IOUs. They bought them because Treasuries are safe, liquid, and denominated in dollars. For decades, this system worked beautifully. The U.S. borrowed cheaply. Foreign governments parked their savings in a safe asset. Everyone won.

But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created a situation where lots of our creditors need to cash out at the same time: Oil exporters like the United Arab Emirates have seen their revenues drop without any corresponding drop in expenses. Oil importers like Japan need to pay more for imported oil. They all need to sell their Treasury bonds to raise cash.

Meanwhile, the US also needs to sell Treasuries because we don’t pay enough tax to cover our spending. (The government is running about a $2 trillion deficit this year. If a Democrat were president, this would be a big deal.)

So what happens when the number of sellers go up and the number of buyers doesn’t? Prices fall. Or (saying the same thing another way) buyers are in a position to demand higher interest rates. And if the world economy seems fragile now, picture it operating with higher interest rates.

There’s tough competition to be the least qualified person in a Trump cabinet meeting, but we’re about to have a new leader: Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence.

Pulte is a third-generation real estate guy and has no experience in intelligence. (The legislation establishing the DNI position lists experience as an essential qualification.) He has been serving as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency where he pleased Trump by cooking up mortgage fraud cases against Trump enemies like Letitia James and Adam Schiff. The James case was dismissed by the judge and Schiff has not been indicted.

We can expect Pulte to do two things as acting DNI: fire a lot of people and use the awesome powers of the intelligence agencies to harass more Trump enemies. We can only imagine how happy China and Russia will be to see America’s intelligence agencies masterminded by this bozo.

Most of us have heard about the leveling off of American life expectancy. Lately it has had some negative years and positive years, but the overall trend has been flat: up only a quarter of a year in the 2010s, compared to an average of 1.75 years per decade in the previous five decades. A variety of explanations have been floated: Covid, deaths of despair, bad diet, and so on.

A recent study looks deeper than the year-by-year mortality stats. It tracks generational cohorts and how their death rates compare to previous cohorts at similar ages. They found something interesting and worrisome: The cohort born in the 1940s had the lowest death rates per year. The 1950s cohort (mine) was only slightly worse, but marked a turn-around.

Among all the findings, the most alarming concerns Americans born after 1970. At the ages these people have already reached, roughly 30 to 49 depending on the cause of death examined, they are already dying at higher rates from heart disease, cancer, and external causes than people born just before them were dying at those same ages. Colon cancer, strongly tied to obesity and diet, is a particular concern, with death rates rising at younger ages beginning with cohorts born around 1955 and worsening from there.

Because the post-1970 generations are still relatively young, they represent a small percentage of total deaths, and so their effect on the nationwide life-expectancy averages hasn’t really shown up yet. But it will. Whether anything similar is happening in similar countries isn’t part of this study, but in recent decades they have been pulling away from the US averages.

and let’s close with a stunt

In honor of the NBA Finals, Jimmy Fallon recaps recent news while using the names of all 30 NBA teams.

June 8, 2026 – 12:39 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (8)

All Americans Need Pride Now

It’s the nature of fascism to keep expanding its list of enemies. No matter who you are, they’ll get to you eventually.

“First they came for the Communists …”

Martin Niemoller’s famous poem about the Nazis has been quoted so often it’s turning into a cliche. It describes how a tyrannical regime can peel off its enemies one little group at at time, allowing the rest of society to imagine it is somehow safe — until it isn’t.

When we repeat that poem today, we often imagine that the Nazis had all this planned from the beginning, that they were always going to come for Pastor Niemoller, and were just waiting until they had disposed of all his potential allies first. But quite likely that was not true. Going after one group and then another doesn’t have to be premeditated; it is baked into the fundamental nature of fascism. The list of enemy groups will inevitably keep expanding until the regime falls. Let me explain why.

I’ve been honing my definition of fascism ever since I first applied it to Donald Trump’s movement back in 2015. I wanted to use the word fascist in a meaningful way, rather than just as an insult. So rather than just throw it around, I defined what I meant by it and argued that my definition applied to the case at hand. I decided fascism is:

a dysfunctional attempt of people who feel humiliated and powerless to restore their pride by:

  • styling themselves as the only true and faithful heirs of their nation’s glorious (and possibly mythical) past,
  • identifying with a charismatic leader whose success will become their success,
  • helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence,
  • under his leadership, purifying the nation by restoring its traditional and characteristic virtues (again, through violence if necessary),
  • reawakening and reclaiming the nation’s past glory (by war, if necessary),
  • all of which leads to the main point: humiliating the internal and external enemies they blame for their own humiliation.

Eleven years later, I think that holds up pretty well, and matches closely what we’ve seen from the MAGA movement. Today, I think I’d sum up the fundamental fascist attitude more quickly: “Our nation was great and strong when we were pure. Now we are tainted and corrupt, but if we purify ourselves we will be great and strong again.”

Fascism looking outward is a quest for dominance, while fascism looking inward is a quest for purity.

To MAGA, purity has a number of key elements: white, English-speaking, male-dominated, Christian, and espousing traditional gender roles. Not every individual has to embody all those characteristics, but those factors have to be dominant in society.

But fascism inevitably fails to achieve its goals, because greatness has nothing to do with purity. When failure happens, though, there’s always a way to explain it away: “We just didn’t go far enough.”

We’ve seen this pattern in many places already. Capitalism is not making the bulk of our population prosperous any more, so the solution is more capitalism. Tax cuts haven’t created jobs, so the solution is more tax cuts. Cutting the government’s safety-net benefits hasn’t pushed people into the workforce, so we need more benefit cuts. And so on.

The same thing happens with purity. Trump won in 2024, partly on the idea that “illegal immigrants” were creating all our problems. Across the board, they were “poisoning the blood of our country“”like vermin“.

More specifically, they were criminals, so getting rid of them would solve the crime problem. They took our jobs, so if we got rid of them jobs would be plentiful. In spite of all those stolen jobs, they also bloated our safety-net programs, so getting rid of them would save money. And they were also somehow leveraging all those welfare payments and sub-minimum-wage jobs to bid up the price of housing, so getting rid them will make houses more affordable. They bring drugs and diseases, so getting rid of them will solve those problems. And so on.

So now that Trump has shut down the border and pushed many thousands of immigrants into concentration camps, all those problems should be getting better, right? But (other than the continuation of a long-term decline in violent crime), none of them have budged. We still have crime, under-employment, people on welfare, unaffordable housing, drugs, diseases, and the whole mess. Because in reality, undocumented immigrants had very little to do with any of that.

Of course, the Trump regime isn’t going to say “Sorry, I guess we were wrong.” It will claim, and is already claiming, that the reason an increase in purity hasn’t decreased our problems is that we aren’t pure enough yet.

So we don’t just need to cut out undocumented immigration, we need to cut documented immigration also. We’ve virtually stopped admitting non-White refugees (while seeking out White refugees). On the advancing edge of MAGA, we’re already hearing about “remigration“, i.e., plans to send non-White American residents (and even citizens) back to their ancestral homelands.

And it’s not just racial purity, it’s also purity in the sense of sexual morality. At the moment, the focus of MAGA’s sexual oppression is on trans people. But what happens after they have been suppressed, and America still has problems? If you draw the conclusion that we’re still not pure enough, who do we go after next? Gays and lesbians, I suppose, and then women who have gotten abortions. And promiscuous women. And then straight men and women who don’t act masculine or feminine enough. (You can see a preview of this in the campaign to smear Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.)

What about religious purity? If you buy the bogus argument that America was founded as a “Christian nation”, then all non-Christians are suspect. They already started with Muslims, because many of our external enemies are Muslims. But atheists won’t be far behind. And what if that’s not enough to solve all our problems? Hindus? Jews? Talarico-like Christians who foolishly try to follow the teachings of Jesus rather than Trump? (The Pentagon just reduced its list of recognized religious faiths from 211 to 31, 22 of which are Christian. My faith, Unitarian Universalism, is no longer recognized.)

You see where this goes. Once you’ve committed atrocities in the name of purity, you can’t admit that purity is a bogus value that has nothing to do with America’s problems. If problems haven’t been solved, we just haven’t gone far enough yet.

So here’s the thought I want to raise during 2026’s Pride Month: You may believe that Pride has nothing to do with you. Maybe you’ve never even thought about being a different gender. Maybe you’re happily rooted in a White heterosexual Christian marriage, with 2.3 children and a picket fence. Maybe you think the wave of oppression and bigotry will wash out long before it gets to you.

But it won’t, at least not on its own. Because purity is not a solution, and the further they travel on that road, the stronger the temptation to keep doubling down, to keep finding new enemy groups to purge. If they’re not stopped, they’ll get to you eventually.

So maybe we should stop them now, while they’re mostly just coming for immigrants and Muslims and trans people. Even if we’re not immigrants or Muslims or trans.

If any group of people are classed as subhuman, as vermin or poison, then everyone’s humanity is in doubt. If anyone does not deserve human rights, or can be shipped off to a hellhole without due process, then we’re all in danger.

We need to stand together while we still have people to stand with.

June 8, 2026 – 10:21 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

Tagged , , , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

As most of you probably realize, I benefit from a long list of privileges: I’m White, native-born, male, English-speaking, cisgender, heterosexual, educated, and so on. So whenever Pride Month rolls around, I’m confronted with the question: What does any of this have to do with me?

If you’re similarly privileged, you may feel like the attempts to demonize transfolk or roll back the rights of the gay and lesbian community are happening over there somewhere. Sure, it’s a shame, but my life goes on.

This week I want to address that response with reference to the Martin Niemoller poem that begins “First they came for the Communists”. Niemoller’s creeping list of enemies-of-the-state isn’t some historical artifact. Fascist movements need an ever-expanding set of enemies; it’s in the DNA of Fascism. So the fact that they haven’t gotten to you yet doesn’t mean that they won’t. Probably they will, if their regime lasts long enough.

That’s the topic of the featured post, “All Americans Need Pride Now”. If there is any group of people who can be treated as subhuman, as undeserving of human rights, then we are all at risk. Those black holes of subhumanity tend to grow, and to keep sucking more and more of society. Thinking it’s not about you is short-sighted. I’ll try to get that post out by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: Republicans in the Senate passed their reconciliation bill, with gestures of resistance to Trump’s worst ideas, but no firm stands against them. The destruction of CBS News continued, with the new Trump-friendly management knocking down its most popular pillar, 60 Minutes. SpaceX is set to go public in a way that will funnel your money into Elon Musk’s pocket. The life-expectancy issue is a scarier than previously thought. Trump faced a number of reversals in court. And a few other things happened. I’ll try to get the summary out before 1.

June 8, 2026 – 8:42 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

No Sift Next Monday

The next new articles will appear on June 8.

May 26, 2026 – 7:08 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

Like No One Has Ever Seen Before

The president is suing himself and compensating other people for legal claims that have not been identified from people that we don’t know. We just haven’t seen anything like that.

– Adam Zimmerman

This week’s featured post is “Has Trump finally pushed Republicans too far?“

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. The fund to reward January 6 rioters for their crimes essentially makes Congress and the courts irrelevant. So bad as it is in itself, the precedent it sets is much worse.
  • Climate change. See the closing for a creative response to climate-change-related flooding in West London.
  • Iran war. Trump is always saying that he’s close to an agreement with Iran, so I ignore those claims. But this weekend, some other sources were saying the same thing and laying out some sketchy details.
  • Ukraine. This week, Phillips O’Brien’s update describes how Ukraine’s medium-range strike ability is shutting down the main supply road for Russia’s forces, while it’s long-range strikes are targeting Russia’s oil refineries.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was reacting to Trump’s “thug fund”

I talk about the political implications of this for Republicans in the featured post. But it’s important to take a step back and just see it on its own terms. Trump has found a way to get the US Treasury to pay for his private army of brownshirts.

The striking thing about this “settlement” is that nobody who isn’t answerable to Trump has anything to do with it. Trump’s Justice Department negotiated the agreement with Trump’s IRS, and avoided letting any judge oversee the result. The five commissioners who run the fund will be appointed by Trump, and can be removed by him at will. The fund has no obligation to reveal who it has given the money to.

So the upshot is that Trump, on his own, is removing $1.8 billion from the Treasury and doing whatever he wants with it.

and rumors of a deal with Iran

Maybe it’s real this time, maybe not. The devil is in the details. One thing that seems clear: The terms are nothing close to the “unconditional surrender” Trump said he was aiming for. Axios reports:

The agreement the U.S. and Iran are close to signing involves a 60-day ceasefire extension during which the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened, Iran would be able to freely sell oil, and negotiations would be held on curbing Iran’s nuclear program, according to a U.S. official.

The thing to watch for is whether Trump just gets back to the pre-war situation, if he falls short of that, or if he makes some gain. That will tell you who won the war. The Strait was open before the war started, and we were already negotiating about Iran’s nuclear program. So if that’s the deal, what did the war accomplish, beyond spending a lot of money, raising gas prices, and depleting our stock of weapons?

Jennifer Rubin:

If this deal holds, there will be no question that Trump’s war amounted to a major strategic failure. Maybe we get an agreement similar to the JCPOA, which would have been in place had Trump not exited the deal. (Getting back in war something you already had is nothing to cheer about.) The agreement would leave the regime (perhaps more radical than ever) in place, deny Israel any permanent end to the Iranian threat, reveal the limits of U.S. influence and power in the region, and, by default, afford China (as evidenced by Trump’s pathetic showing at the summit) increased stature and confidence. Preventing a restart of a war no one wanted and an end to the energy shock Trump provoked can hardly been called “wins.”

But anyway, wait for real details before getting too excited one way or the other.

I have to laugh at the Republican senators warning that we can’t trust Iran to negotiate in good faith. Why would anyone trust Trump to negotiate in good faith? The air attacks that killed most of Iran’s ruling council happened while negotiations were underway in Geneva.

and the Democratic “autopsy”

It’s common for a political party that loses an election to fund some kind of study about why it lost, in hopes that something can change before the next election.

The Democrats funded such a report after 2024, but then didn’t release the results. Recently a partial report surfaced. It’s 192 pages and I admit I have only skimmed small parts of it. It has drawn a lot of commentary, almost entirely negative. The main criticism repeated many times is that the report avoids a lot of significant issues:

  • Biden should have dropped out soon enough for there to be a real nomination process, rather than just a coronation of Harris.
  • The Israel/Gaza situation demoralized a lot of progressive voters.
  • Harris needed a response to the anti-trans message that Trump focused on in the closing weeks.

All the same, I’m not sure I would have focused on any of that if I had written a report, because it’s not likely to matter as much in 2028. I mean, Biden isn’t going to try to run again, we will have a nomination process, and the winning candidate will probably have a different message about Israel or trans rights (not that I know what it will be).

A lot of what is in the report sounds like platitudes: court rural votes better, for example. Or build up the state and local party operations. Great. Tell me how.

An interesting counterpoint to most of the chatter about the report comes from the Strength In Numbers blog, which focuses on data.

When we boot up the data, it’s obvious the main reason Harris lost — and the reason I am going to explore here, at this website, it being a data-driven website — is that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome.

The author puts together a model for predicting how an incumbent party should do based on approval of the current president and public optimism/pessimism about the economy. That model predicts Harris should have done slightly worse than she actually did.

So maybe Harris wasn’t such a bad candidate and didn’t run such a bad campaign. Maybe all our 2024 autopsies are trying to analyze factors that made no difference.

and you also might be interested in …

The Ebola outbreak in the Congo comes at a bad time. The Trump regime has cut way back on programs to track and mitigate diseases in Africa.

The only refugees the Trump regime is taking in any numbers are the white South Africans who feel oppressed by the Black-majority government. This week they announced plans for 10,000 more.

But racism is over in this country. John Roberts says so.

Wish I’d said that: Tom Tillis commented on Ken Paxton, who will probably be the Republican nominee for a senate seat in Texas now that he has Trump’s endorsement:

To call Paxton ‘ethically challenged’ is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.

RIP Barney Frank. I was in the same room with Frank once, at a fund-raiser for another congressman. He predicted 2020 would be a 1964-scale Democratic landslide, which didn’t happen. Biden’s win was convincing, but not LBJ-like.

Trump missed Don Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas Saturday. I just note the fact and refuse to speculate about the reason.

Tulsi Gabbard will resign as Director of National Intelligence at the end of June. Her stated reason is to support her husband, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. The rumor mill says that she’s out because she can’t get behind Trump’s foreign wars.

It’s tempting to be happy she’s leaving, because she never should have had this position to begin with. But she’s likely to be replaced with someone just as unqualified and less independent.

In a recent CNBC interview, Jeff Bezos said that Trump is “more mature, more disciplined” in his second term.

I have a theory about what has happened to Bezos lately: His first wife was his conscience. And now she’s gone, so he’s just another rich asshole. Meanwhile, she’s using her divorce settlement to do all kinds of good.

and let’s close with something creative

As the climate changes, London’s famous fog and drizzle is more often turning into serious rain. So West London had a flooding problems that it could try to solve with expensive public works projects. Instead, it has brought in beavers, who had been virtually extinct in Britain.

In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek’s flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.

“They effectively turned this site into a giant sponge that can take heavy rainfall and slowly release water back into the landscape, creating a lot more resilience for flooding,” explains Sean McCormack, a local veterinarian who started the Ealing Beaver Project, named for the London borough of Ealing, where it’s located.

May 25, 2026 – 12:35 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Has Trump finally pushed Republicans too far?

I hate to even ask this question, because it’s been discussed so often over the years, and the hopes raised have (up until now) always been dashed. But maybe? Maybe?

Way back in 2015, when Trump came down the escalator characterizing Mexican immigrants as rapists, and then a few weeks later denigrated John McCain’s war record, the conventional wisdom was certain that he had gone too far. Outrageousness had always been his shtick, but this was too much. Surely even his supporters would start backing away from him now.

Needless to say, it didn’t happen. It also didn’t happen after he bragged to Billy Bush that he could “grab ’em by the pussy” and get away with it. Or when two dozen women verified that he really did behave that way. Or when a jury unanimously concluded that he had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll.

It didn’t happen when he said he trusted Vladimir Putin more than American intelligence services. Or when his mismanagement of the Covid pandemic expanded the death toll by hundreds of thousands of American souls.

It didn’t happen when he withheld aid approved by Congress in an attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into launching a bogus investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. Or when he was impeached for that. Or when he incited rioters to attack the Capitol to reverse the result of the election he lost to Biden. Or when he was impeached for that. Or when he pardoned the rioters of all the crimes they had committed in his name, including hospitalizing over a hundred Capitol police.

Every time, very smart people told us this was it, he had finally gone too far. But it was never true.

So why might it be true now?

The downward slide. Hemingway once said that bankruptcies happen two ways: gradually, and then suddenly. The undermining of Trump’s popularity has been following a similar pattern.

For months, Trump supporters have been getting less and less sure of themselves. Maybe it began with the Epstein Files, which Trump had campaigned on releasing, and then did his best to hide once he got into office. (His Justice Department is still dragging its feet, and Trump keeps flirting with the idea of pardoning Epstein’s primary accomplice — the only one currently in jail for Epstein’s crimes.) Or when the prices he said when come down “on Day One” kept climbing — often due to Trump’s own policies like illegal tariffs and the effect of his war with Iran. Or when he attacked Iran for no discernible reason after running on not starting foreign wars.

That all resulted in a steadily declining approval rating from the general public, to levels unlike anything he had seen before.

That set the stage. But more recently three events have brought it into focus: the White House ballroom, his insider stock trades, and (most of all) the $1.776 billion fund he has illegally created to reward the same violent criminals he pardoned for the January 6 riot.

Primary voters. Probably the last people to leave Trump will be the MAGA faithful who show up to vote in Republican primaries where he has made an endorsement. Recent results have shown him to still be strong there — strong enough to punish Republicans in Congress who step out of line.

So Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) lost his primary on Tuesday after being targeted by Trump for (among other things) pushing to release the Epstein Files. Last week Republican Senator Bill Cassidy also lost his primary five years after voting to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial. Neither Massie nor Cassidy, though, had defined himself as anti-Trump. Both pitched themselves as loyal Trump Republicans who maintained just a smidgen of independence.

But that’s not good enough for Trump, and he clearly retains enough sway with Republican voters to punish elected officials who cross him in any way at all. Tomorrow we’ll get another test: Trump has endorsed Texas’ corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton, over Senator John Cornyn, who not long ago was in contention to be Majority Leader. Cornyn’s sins are even less tangible than Massie’s or Cassidy’s — he hasn’t been enthusiastic enough about Trump’s agenda to want to scrap the Senate filibuster. Trump also ousted Indiana legislators who refused to redraw their state’s congressional map.

Republicans in Congress. But Republicans in Congress don’t just have primaries to worry about. In spite of gerrymandering, some have to win in competitive districts, where they need votes from independents and maybe even a few Democrats. Senators, meanwhile, have to run statewide. So unless they’re from clearly red states, they also need support from more than just Trump and his most fervent followers.

That’s where you would expect to see the cracks form first — and we’re seeing them in two places: the reconciliation bill trying to move through the Senate, and the war powers resolution attempting to limit the Iran War. In both cases, Republican leaders in Congress adjourned for the Memorial Day recess rather than hold a vote that they would lose.

The reconciliation bill. Remember how this started. After Trump’s masked police (some combination of ICE and the border patrol) terrorized Minneapolis, murdering Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Democrats refused ICE and CBP any further funding without putting some common-sense restrictions on these rogue agencies.

first, federal immigration agents need to remove masks, turn on their body cameras, and wear visible, clear identification. Second, Democrats want to end the roving patrols. This is a nation of laws guided by the Constitution that everyone—including ICE—must abide by. This means that federal immigration officials must stop racial profiling and end random arrests; and agents must obtain a judicial warrant signed by a neutral judge—not an administrative warrant—to enter private property. They also cannot detain Americans for hours or use excessive force against them just for peacefully protesting in support of their neighbors and friends. Third, Democrats are demanding accountability. ICE and Border Patrol squads cannot indiscriminately smash in car windows, use tear gas on protestors, and shoot at people without any accountability.

Republicans refused any meaningful limits on ICE, and resolved to fund the mass-deportation agenda without Democratic votes (the same way they passed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” last year). That was the origin of the current reconciliation bill.

Since then, the bill has become a Christmas tree with all kinds of baubles on it. Trump wanted it to include $1 billion for his White House ballroom — which originally wasn’t supposed to cost the taxpayers anything (beyond the cost of whatever favors Trump offered donors). Senators balked at this, but then were bailed out by the Senate parliamentarian, who ruled that the ballroom funding violated the arcane rules that govern reconciliation bills. Trump then demanded that Majority Leader Thune fire the parliamentarian, which he has not done.

The reconciliation bill doesn’t fund Trump’s corrupt “anti-weaponization” fund, which the Justice Department claims it can create with money from a fund previously established to pay settlements of lawsuits against the government. But there is no settlement in this case. Settlements are overseen by courts, and probably no judge would sign off on what Trump wants.

On May 20—the same day the parties’ jurisdictional briefs had been due—[the judge] issued an order formally closing the case. In her order, she noted that the Justice Department, which has an “independent obligation to uphold the ‘public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources,’” had “neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.”

So if it’s not in the bill, why is the fund a problem for Senate Republicans? The reconciliation process allows the opposing party a chance to offer amendments. Democrats are almost certain to propose an amendment saying that no federal money can be spent on the anti-weaponization fund, or perhaps just that no money be awarded to people who have been convicted of assaulting police officers or committing sedition against the United States. Since those are precisely the people Trump wants to reward, he will demand Republican senators vote against such an amendment. And how will they explain such a vote to their constituents?

That prospect set up a tumultuous private meeting between Republican senators and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is spearheading the anti-weaponization fund effort. Mitch McConnell came out saying this:

So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick.

The upshot was that the reconciliation vote wasn’t held before senators left for the Memorial Day recess. Whether any of this can be resolved after they come back in June is still up in the air.

Iran war. We’re now three months into a war that Trump insisted was won on the first day. He has never explained the goals of the war to the American people, and has never gone to Congress for authorization. He just wanted to attack Iran, so he did. Why does anybody need to know any more than that? The reasons he gives may shift from tweet to tweet, but why does that matter?

Democrats have been proposing resolutions to limit the war since it began, but Republicans have been holding them at bay. But defections on the Republican side have been building up, and a resolution asking Trump to withdraw American forces by the end of June looked ready to pass the House Thursday, forcing Speaker Johnson to delay the vote until after the Memorial Day recess.

Of course, Trump could veto that resolution even if it passes, and there aren’t nearly enough votes to override such a veto. So the legal effect of passing the resolution would have been nil. But putting the House on record opposing Trump’s war would be a big deal.

And eventually, Congress will need to appropriate some money to pay for all the bombs and missiles and military deployments. What will happen then?

Where are we? Opposed to the now-he’s-gone-too-far conventional wisdom is the Trump-has-a-floor view that his base of support is unshakeable. What seems to be true is something in between. The process of Trump’s fall should go something like this: He’ll lose the support of independents who voted for him in 2024 (which has pretty much already happened). Then Republican senators and congresspeople will peel off one-by-one, which has been happening slowly for several months. Then the drip-drip of leaking support will become a flood. Eventually, even previously fervent supporters will go silent, or forget that they were ever MAGA.

It won’t happen all at once. There’s even a chance that a deal-on-paper with Iran will reduce the pressure on the GOP congressional majorities to assert themselves, or that some fig-leaf concessions on the ballroom or the weaponization fund will allow the reconciliation bill to pass.

But the erosion is still happening. Long-term, I don’t think it can be stopped.

May 25, 2026 – 11:04 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week, Senate Republicans left town for the Memorial Day recess without passing the reconciliation bill they’ve been drafting ever since Democrats refused to fund ICE without reforms. (Reconciliation is a process that circumvents a Senate filibuster, and so would allow Republicans to fund a number of programs on a pure party-line vote.) This bill touches on a number of controversial issues beyond ICE, but what derailed the process was Trump’s corrupt “anti-weaponization” fund to funnel taxpayer money to the violent criminals who invaded the Capitol on January 6.

At the same time, the House looks ready to pass a war-powers resolution calling for limits on the Iran War. Speaker Johnson had to take the bill off the floor to stop it.

Those two actions, together with some very public grousing about the cost of Trump’s gilded ballroom, suggests that (as the midterms approach and the regime makes ever-more-outrageous demands) Trump is losing his ability to dominate Congress.

Now, I hesitate to raise this idea, because we’ve lived through 10 years of speculation that Trump had finally gone too far, and his Republican support was about to crack. But it hasn’t. Is this time different?

That’s the subject of this week’s featured post, which should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will look at the rumors of a deal with Iran, Barney Frank, Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation, the progress of the Ukraine War, the Democratic “autopsy” of 2024, and a few other things. It should be out a little after noon.

May 25, 2026 – 8:35 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment