Bullies seem to have a finely tuned awareness of where the margins of permission lie as regards abuses, and choose their targets based on whose suffering will be most broadly acceptable to others.
Here we see a combination of a substantive issue with one of those blood-boiling but essentially meaningless things we see over and over: We find ourselves in an all-out trade war with our nearest neighbor and closest ally. That’s important. And Trump has ordered the name of Lake Ontario changed to Lake America, which is annoying but of no real consequence. (As soon as Trump is out of office, no one will say “Lake America” or “Gulf of America” ever again.)
As [Prime Minister Carney] described it, he was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.
an all-out trade war would create a lot of pain in the U.S. in addition to inflicting severe damage to the Canadian economy. And all indications are that the Canadians will be much more willing to bear the pain of a trade war than Americans will – especially given that the great majority of Americans are already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management.
Former Trump official Miles Taylor sees Canada’s resistance as a harbinger of nations getting fed up with trying to appease Trump. “nothing on earth scares Donald Trump like an opponent who fights back.”
Trump’s bid to control who can cast a mail-in ballot had another set-back Thursday, when his executive order was blocked by a federal judge. A previous block had been lifted by the Supreme Court just a few days before, but on technical grounds that didn’t reach the merits of the case.
Things continue to look good for Democrats. A series of polls in Michigan have El-Sayed up slightly. Josh Marshall concludes:
I’m not saying El-Sayed has this wrapped up. I’m saying that the idea that he can’t win or that the results of the primary were some kind of decisive setback for Democrats’ chances just can’t be squared with the available evidence. At least not so far. This is very much a race and it’s one in which El-Sayed kind of has to be viewed as a favorite to at least some degree.
So-called “centrist” pundits like Jonathan Chait really need to calm down. His column is about how El-Sayed needs to denounce this guy and separate himself from that guy more strongly than just saying he disagrees with what they’re saying. Chait says virtually nothing about what El-Sayed himself says or believes or hopes to do in the Senate.
Last week, I described the Democrats’ chance of winning a Senate majority this fall. I went through the states commonly viewed as having competitive Senate races and came out with a winning scenario — far from a sure thing, but more than wishful thinking. I didn’t consider any of the true long-shot races Jay Kuo covered Thursday: Mississippi, Kansas, South Carolina, Nebraska, and Arkansas. I’d be surprised if any of these red states seats flipped, but Kuo makes a good case that it’s not impossible.
and Venezuela
Friday, Trump announced on social media “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” The deal, which AFAIK still hasn’t been confirmed by any on-the-record American government office, supposedly involves 17 oil fields with 65 billion barrels of proven reserves.
The agreement allows for the United States to partner with an unnamed private operator in Venezuela to create a new private company to take hold of the reserves, according to a U.S. official familiar with the contours of the deal. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, added that [Venezuelan President Delcy] Rodríguez granted the company 100-year rights to develop the oil fields. The deal gives the United States 55% effective output of the new private company — including an ownership stake and rights to buy oil at cost. The company would be the second largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco, according to the official.
Phillips O’Brien points out that there all kinds of problems with this arrangement. For one thing,
it is not clear what element of the US government (if any) either can or will hold the equity stake in any new company
The American stake would have to be controlled and overseen by some particular department or agency, and without any congressional action it’s not clear who could do that. And without Senate ratification, this isn’t an official treaty. Like Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, it could be cancelled by any future president.
There are also problems on the Venezuelan side, because their constitution does not allow the government to sign away the country’s natural resources. If a future Venezuelan government thought it could get away with taking the oil fields back, it would face no legal barriers.
And finally, who are we making this agreement with? When we deposed Maduro, we were supposedly bringing freedom to the Venezuelan people. But since then we’ve ignored the democratic opposition and recognized Maduro’s henchmen as the government. O’Brien sums up:
I am providing this information so that there is no mistake about what the Trump administration is, and has been doing. It got rid of Maduro to entrench even more ruthless alleged criminals, the exact kind of people with which it can and, indeed, likes to do business.
Add to the mix that the country’s oil industry is a mess and requires huge amounts of capital investment (which so far the major oil companies haven’t been willing to fund). It will take years to substantially increase production. Also, Venezuelan crude oil is heavier than most American refineries can process, so there won’t be any big increase in gasoline production any time soon. Clean Technica has a fairly technical analysis that comes to the conclusion:
Raising output materially would require something closer to $100 billion over a decade. That scale of capital must be patient, politically insulated, and confident in long term demand. Even if someone was willing to pay for it, significant increases are a decade away in a world clearly pivoting away from oil and toward renewables and electrification.
and you also might be interested in …
I hope to review Gil Duran’s “The Nerd Reich” before long. In the meantime, check out this five-minute video about J. D. Vance and his puppet-master Peter Thiel.
David Frum looks at how other countries have recovered money from their past despots, and speculates about using civil suits to claw back Trump’s “ill-gotten gains”.
For about a year Christopher Armitage was a corrections officer in a prison. It taught him something about politics and the psychology behind MAGA.
I began to see a pattern that my psychology training wouldn’t let me ignore. The same personality traits that concentrated behind bars, what psychologists call the “dark triad” of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, were appearing throughout our political system. The empathy deficits that defined prison life weren’t confined to cellblocks. They were running for office, hosting talk shows, and writing legislation. … American conservatism has become an ideology that systematically suppresses empathy. It rewards the prison mentality: dominate or be dominated, trust only your tribe, see kindness as weakness. It’s created a political movement that mirrors the psychological dynamics of incarceration, complete with gang colors in the form of red hats and protection rackets in the form of vote-for-us-or-the-criminals-will-get-you rhetoric. …
The prison mirror reflects perfectly here: just as inmates must perform toughness to maintain status, conservative politicians must perform cruelty. Expressing empathy for the wrong group, immigrants, trans kids, the poor, marks you as weak, a “RINO” who’ll get primaried
A Stanford student newspaper won its suit against the Trump administration. It claimed that international students were afraid to write articles for fear they would be deported if Trump disagreed with what they said. The judge ruled that foreign citizens on student visas have the same free-speech rights Americans do, and that they cannot be deported based on what they have written or said.
and let’s close with a look back
I’m sure you’ve had no trouble finding coverage of Dolly Parton, who died Tuesday. She was one of the few public figures — it’s hard to find a comparable one — whose appeal spanned the political divide. She was an authentic up-from-poverty success story who never forgot about the kind of people she grew up around. Late in life, her philanthropy was as famous as her music.
If you wonder what the fuss is all about, The Guardian provides a curated list of 10 of her best songs. As someone lost a spouse less than two years ago, I resonate with her final hit “If You Hadn’t Been There” about her husband Carl Dean who died in 2025 a few weeks before their 59th anniversary. “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been there.”
Here is the thing. If you tell me that you believe that race is a biological category and that it is a guide to the objective superiority and inferiority of groups of people, I am not calling you a racist to insult you, I am calling you a racist because it best describes your beliefs.
Iran. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. We’re still running out of precision missiles. Trump still has no plan.
Ukraine. Ukraine continues to hammer Russia’s oil industry, which is the foundation of its economy. They’re not targeting oil as much as Phillips O’Brien wants them to, but attacks are ramping up. Meanwhile, Russia is trying to knock out Ukraine’s power grid for the winter, and is doing it much better now that US air-defense aid is completely exhausted.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about our strange foreign policy
So North Korea is good and Canada is bad. Got it?
As North Korea goes full speed ahead on building the nuclear weapons we’re spending billions to keep Iran from getting, Trump wants a summit meeting with Kim Jong Un. To make himself more attractive to Kim, Trump cut short our planned military exercises with South Korea, saying that the exercises are “inappropriate and hostile” to the North, which is in the running for the most oppressive country in the world. If you’re looking for some good behavior that Trump is rewarding, you won’t find any.
Trump has maintained that he enjoys a “great relationship” with Kim, telling reporters on Wednesday: “He likes me”.
That’s all that matters. Previous American presidents didn’t think having a “great relationship” with one of the world’s bloodiest dictators was a worthy goal, absent some concession from the North Koreans. But Trump is focused on himself, not on the interests of the United States or the free world.
Meanwhile, we have entered into a trade war with Canada. Phillips O’Brien summarizes: The dispute is
is about far more than trade, it is about Canada’s right to exist as a sovereign state. … Canada is faced with a USA that is now fundamentally dishonest and rapacious. Moreover, it is faced with a US government that denies its ultimate right to exist and speaks openly (and regularly) about how Canada should be annexed into the USA.
All through Trump’s second term, foreign leaders have been treating him like a crazy uncle: Flatter him. Don’t do anything to set him off. Don’t call him on his bad behavior. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is done with that. He described the impossibility of coming to any agree with the Trump regime.
We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.
In other words, an agreement with Trump only lasts until he decides he wants something else from you. Friday, tariffs on an estimated $20 billion of Canadian goods went into effect, and Trump is threatening 50% across-the-board tariffs on January 1.
US President Donald Trump has said Canada wants “the benefits of being a state, without being one” after trade talks between the two countries collapsed late on Friday.
He has repeatedly said that Canada should be “the 51st state”. How do you negotiate with that?
and control of the Senate
That’s the subject of the featured post. Democrats’ odds are only improved by the tone-deaf candidates Republicans are running in key states. Here, North Carolina Senate candidate Michael Whatley disparages the anti-data-center movement.
You gotta remember that this opposition to data centers is not organic. This is being ginned up.
As if the big money were against data centers rather than behind them.
and some outrage stories: Harp and the USS Trump
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t know what to do with stories that grab public attention, raise people’s blood pressure, and maybe illustrate character flaws of certain important people, but have no direct impact on our lives. Lately, though, they’ve been turning up so regularly that I feel like they need their own category. Feel free to skip down to the next section.
This week we heard endlessly about Natalie Harp, Trump’s closest aide. It all started with this fairly innocuous line by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who is running for reelection in November.
[I’ve added links in case you don’t recognize the news stories Ossoff is referencing. They’re all legitimately fact-based.]
Now, the heart of Ossoff’s charge is “He doesn’t want to do the job.” We’re at war, and we appear to be losing. The economy is beginning to stall out. Working Americans are having a harder and harder time paying for basic necessities like groceries and fuel — not to mention health insurance. The annual budget deficit may exceed $2 trillion before the fiscal year ends next month. We’re continuing to do nothing — and even go backwards in a lot of ways — in the face of climate change. But our president doesn’t have a lot to say about any of that. If you retain anything from Ossoff’s quote, that’s what it should be.
But that’s not what the White House responded to. Trump and all his minions appeared to take deep offense at “He wants … to travel with Natalie.”
But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought. But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.
This is known as the “Streisand effect“: By objecting to a fairly minor story, you turn it into a major story. So anyway, Natalie Harp is a 35-year-old executive assistant who makes around $150K a year. She is with Trump constantly, prints out flattering news stories and social media posts for him to read, and helps him post his Truth Social rants. She — and not Secretary of State Rubio — was with Trump in the catering truck when he ditched Air Force One in Ankara.
Ossoff’s flip mention of her might be interpreted as hinting that she has a romantic relationship with Trump. But he didn’t exactly say that, and most of the follow-up commentary doesn’t say that either. (Compared to the attacks Trump regularly dishes out — with Natalie’s help — what Ossoff said was fairly tame.) And even if she does, it may seem a little creepy, but it’s neither my business nor yours; consenting adults and all that. The far more damaging interpretation of her role — also probably false — is that the big bag she is always carrying contains his supply of adult diapers.
Here’s the part that does matter:
Trump often says stuff that makes you wonder what world he’s living in. Well, it’s Natalie’s World. Both her behavior and the relentlessly worshipful stuff she shows him communicates to Trump that he is a uniquely successful president who is widely admired and universally loved by the American people. Those ridiculous AI-generated images he posts of himself as Jesus or a great general — where do you think he gets them?
She worked for a year without a security clearance. Given her constant proximity to the president, you have to assume that she’s seen or heard some of the nation’s most important secrets. But she didn’t have clearance because she didn’t submit the appropriate forms.
She is the most egregious example of a general trend inside the Trump regime: The sole qualification for any job — attorney general, defense secretary, whatever — is abject submission and obsequious flattery.
But for the most part, I think we should all feel silly for having spent this much time on her. I know I do.
Another story that is more symbolic than consequential: According to ABC News and “three sources familiar with the matter”, the Navy is thinking about renaming an aircraft carrier under construction. The USS Doris Miller may be renamed for Donald Trump.
If true, this is outrageous in both directions: In the United States, we don’t name things after sitting presidents. Or at least we didn’t used to. Honors like these are supposed to be History’s to decide. Worse, Trump has no military record, and is widely believed to have dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by speciously claiming to have “bone spurs”. He’s also in the process of losing the Iran War.
But as in the previous note, the Navy knows that flattery is the way to get what you want from Trump. And Trump knows (I believe) that future generations will be ashamed of him and the things that happened during his presidency. If he waits for the judgment of History, there won’t be any Trump aircraft carriers or battleships or airports or performing arts centers.
The other side of this swap is to dishonor Doris Miller.
Doris “Dorie” Miller (October 12, 1919 – November 24, 1943) was a U.S. Navy sailor who was the first black recipient of the Navy Cross and a nominee for the Medal of Honor. As a mess attendant second class aboard the battleship USS West Virginia, Miller helped carry wounded sailors to safety during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He then operated an anti-aircraft gun and, despite no prior training in gunnery, officially shot down one plane (according to Navy Department records), but Miller and other eyewitnesses claimed a range of four to six.
What makes Miller’s story even more inspiring is that in 1941 Black sailors weren’t assigned significant combat duties. Without the chaos of Pearl Harbor, he might have spent the war peeling potatoes and ladling out soup.
But Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is doing everything it can to erase the contributions of anyone who isn’t or wasn’t a White man. Naming an aircraft carrier after a Black hero? Impossible!
Your life and everybody else’s will go on as before, but it’s hard to look away.
When people tell you about how “far left” or “out of the mainstream” Democratic candidates like El-Sayid are, remind them of Victor Marx, the Republican candidate for governor of Colorado. In Marx’s book, he describes physical battles he has fought against people possessed by demons.
His detailed descriptions include claims that one man “transformed” in front of him, developing “pointy” ears and “superhuman strength.” In another episode, Marx said a “demonized” teenage girl “turned reptilian” before his eyes.
and you also might be interested in …
The Abraham Lincoln is now headed home, to be replaced by the George Washington.
Slavin said he was being fired “for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” … “I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies,” Slavin said.
Korte said on X: “Today, I was informed that the Department of Defense is firing me for insubordination after I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes — not the Pentagon, not the administration, and not any policy maker.”
As our HHS Secretary and President keep badmouthing vaccines, kindergarten vaccination rates are headed downward. The rates vary considerably from one state to the next. Idaho is the least-vaccinated state, with only 75% of kindergarten children getting the MMR vaccine, compared to Maine’s 98%.
Often this gets framed as a personal choice by parents, but it’s more than that. When vaccination rates dip below the level of herd immunity, diseases can spread widely. Some children are unable to benefit from vaccinations, so herd immunity is their only protection. Each unvaccinated child creates risks for other children.
Texas is refusing to extradict an ICE agent accused of shooting a Minneapolis man through a home’s front door and then lying about it, falsely claiming that the man had attacked him. TPM pulls together several examples of Trump or Trump allies preventing criminal ICE agents from facing justice.
and let’s close with something aspirational
Going to a dance lesson this afternoon. Think I’ll come out looking like Astaire?
There’s a maddening tendency among elected officials and the political press to equate “far left” and “far right” candidates as occupying equally extreme, dangerous ends of the political spectrum, though those in the former camp mostly want universal healthcare and affordable housing while the latter is more likely to endorse the forced deportation of non-white people from the United States.
Iran. As it becomes harder to deny that his war is lost, Trump’s rhetoric has become increasingly fantastic. The two-month window for a larger deal set by June’s memorandum of understanding has now run out, but Trump says he is “in no hurry” to end the war. But if Oman gets in the way of a settlement with Iran, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them”. He has also threatened to declare the Strait of Hormuz, which remains closed, “a territory of the United States”.
Ukraine.Phillips O’Brien: “Russia’s allies show they are more intent on helping Russia win than Ukraine’s are in helping Ukraine win. The difference is stark.” He counts Trump as an ally of Russia.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about primary elections
For the second week in a row, a progressive Democrat’s big lead in the polls evaporated on election day. Last week, Abdul El-Sayed was supposed to have a double-digit victory in the Michigan Senate race, but instead he barely squeaked out a win. This week, progressive Francesca Hong actually lost by half a percent to David Crowley (who was supported by the current governor) in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin’s governor.
Undecideds went overwhelmingly for Crowley, as media focused on Hong’s more out-of-the-mainstream past statements.
Young voters (who overwhelmingly supported Hong) didn’t vote in the same numbers as older voters.
Hong’s more enthusiastic supporters were more likely to respond when pollsters called.
Pundits love to play the expectations game, and announce some “collapse” or “surge” as results come in differently from the most recent polls. But in truth there are just votes. You get more of them than the other candidates, or you don’t.
My state, Massachusetts, has its primary September 1, and the marquee race is for the Democratic Senate nomination. My congressman, Seth Moulton, is running against incumbent Senator Ed Markey, primarily on the age issue: Moulton is 47 and Markey is 79. Unlike most generational primary struggles, though, Markey is the more progressive candidate.
So far, I am unmoved by Moulton’s case. To me, the age issue has to be backed up by something more substantive: examples where the older candidate is out of touch with today’s world. Absent an argument like that, I don’t see the point.
and the Abraham Lincoln
When we go to war without adequate planning, eventually the men and women of our armed forces suffer the consequences.
You’ve probably already heard the gist of this story: Due to the Iran War, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for a long time without shore leave for the crew or the kind of maintenance that can only be done in a port. The situation has been complicated by damage Iranian missiles did to a naval base in Bahrain, which would ordinarily be the logistics hub supplying the Lincoln while it was deployed in the Middle East. So it’s being supplied through Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean over 2000 miles away. The strain of constant deployment with limited supplies is taking its toll.
The families say that their loved ones have described food shortages and standing in line for the ship’s store for an hour or more, and that the store often lacks basic supplies like toothpaste, soap and deodorant. Families said there have been times during the deployment when the Lincoln was rationing portions. Nicole Conrad’s son is serving on the Lincoln, and she hasn’t been able to see his face in seven months. Exchanging messages from the ship, he has told her about days when the showers were locked and laundry was closed, and about food shortages on board that meant his meal was half a cup of rice and two tortillas.
USA Today has published photos of meals served aboard the Lincoln and also the USS Tripoli, which is also deployed to the Middle East. The trays pictured are from the Tripoli.
When Dan F.’s daughter said hygiene products were running low on the [Tripoli], the family sent a care package with shampoo and conditioner, deodorant, toothpaste and tampons, filling every open space with candy and snacks. They filled the second box with Emergen-C vitamin C packets – Dan’s daughter said she was feeling a sore throat coming on – and clean socks. The boxes were sent nearly a month ago, yet neither has reached its destination.
It’s easy to imagine being homesick and going stir crazy after more than 260 days at sea. What civilians have a harder time appreciating is the stress level on an aircraft carrier.
The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is already one of the most dangerous places in the military. High-speed aircraft with powerful engines can burn sailors and blow them overboard. Spinning propellers can cause accidents. And the constant loading and unloading of bombs, missiles and rockets pose the risk of explosions and fires.
The Sailors and Marines of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group remain resilient and resolved after more than 260 days at sea, 10,000 aircraft flights, and 1.5 million pounds of ordnance expended. No service members aboard the aircraft carrier have died, and the one Sailor who fell overboard Aug. 3 was quickly and safely recovered. The rampant misreporting on Abraham Lincoln’s historic deployment is a disservice to our men and women in uniform and their loved ones.
The sister of a Lincoln crew member in his late 30s said that the remarks made her want to grab Trump and Hegseth and shake them. “I grew up in a United States where you have to be very respectful of the military, as they’re making the ultimate sacrifice and protecting their country, and now you have the commander-in-chief and defense secretary dismissing their experiences and calling them liars. I’m really angry,” she said. “It’s a feeling of betrayal. These are frustrating, false and careless comments, and they are going to have a lot of consequences for my brother.”
No one expects China to invade Taiwan because an American aircraft carrier has left the region. But the carrier’s absence gives the Chinese another opportunity to show its strength, said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner who is a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.
“They’re using this as part of the narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that the US is not the big dog in the western Pacific anymore,” Clark said. “They would just prefer that countries in the region decide that China is the bigger power and the US is not able to guarantee their security anymore.”
While continuing to deny that the US supply of high-tech missiles is being depleted, Trump is blaming the problem (which he insists doesn’t exist) on President Biden, who gave Patriots and other weapons to Ukraine.
I am reminded of what Donald Rumsfeld said when he was Secretary of Defense during the Iraq War:
You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Whatever you think about how Biden handled our armed forces, Trump arrived in office commanding a particular stockpile of weapons. It was up to him to use them wisely. But Trump has never in his life taken responsibility for any of his numerous mistakes.
and ignorance-based executive orders
If there was a theme of the week, it was Trump giving orders based on his disastrous combination of ignorance and confidence. Two were related to his ignorance of naval technology and ship design, and another had to do with public health.
Trump has frequently cited his admiration of steam-powered catapults for launching planes off aircraft carriers, rather than the newer electromagnetic tech. Thursday, he signed a memo instructing the War Defense Department to replace the newer systems with the older tech.
The new mandate would likely cost billions of dollars and revert the Navy’s most advanced ships to a system that takes more sailors to operate and is more difficult to maintain.
Reportedly, Trump also has the Navy looking at redesigning the Ford-class carriers still under construction to move the tower to the center of the ship, similar to the look of World War II era carriers.
The changes – including moving the multistory aircraft carrier’s command center tower to the ship’s middle – would cost billions and worsen chronic delays, sources said. Officials also told The Post that changing the command center to the middle would remove 3 key benefits: additional parking spaces, reduced launch time and lowered chances of turbulence during landing.
Neither of these examples is Trump taking a side in a previously existing dispute among experts. It’s just Trump deciding that expertise doesn’t matter.
US President Donald Trump has signed an order that … recommends splitting the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) shots. … The order also recommends that the number of childhood vaccines drop to 11 from the existing 18 recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
During a the signing announcement, Trump spread anti-vax nonsense, claiming at one point that
I’ve seen proof of it. Where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.
He also implied, without saying outright, that vaccines are related to autism, a well-studied and often refuted piece of anti-vax propaganda.
Trump has no real authority here, since vaccine requirements are set by the states. Mainly, this order will make parents more doubtful of vaccines and less likely to get their children vaccinated. Separating the shots would require more office visits and more expense, further motivating parents to skip some.
Meanwhile, the regime is bungling the cyclospora outbreak. The cyclospora parasite is suspected of causing over 24K illnesses so far this year, resulting in an enormous increase in the usage of the phrase “explosive diarrhea”. The center of the outbreak is in Michigan, and many cases have been traced through Taco Bell to lettuce from a plant in Mexico run by Taylor Farms.
The NYT explores how efforts to shrink the US government and loosen its regulations have made it harder to prevent outbreaks like this, and harder to track them after they arise. The Guardian points out that Congress mandated a better system for tracing outbreaks 15 years ago, but it has been repeatedly delayed and now is set for 2028.
It turns out that “big government” isn’t always a bad thing. In many ways, those much-derided “bureaucrats” are like offensive linemen in football: When they’re doing their jobs well, nobody notices them. It’s only when the quarterback gets sacked that you see a replay of the guy who was supposed to stop that from happening.
and Trump in the catering truck
I’m always torn about covering stories in which Trump does something outrageous, but it doesn’t affect most people’s lives. (That’s why I’m ignoring the fun people had making fun of Trump’s new hairpiece.) They leave me asking “Can you believe a guy like this is our president?”. But in some larger sense they’re inconsequential.
The Air Force One story that broke this week is a great example: Trump flew to the NATO summit in Turkey in the luxury jet he got as bribe from Qatar. While he was there, US intelligence heard rumors about a plot to shoot down his return flight on July 8, a plan made simpler by the fact that the Qatari jet still hasn’t gotten all of its security upgrades. Without referencing the threat, Trump moved back to the older Air Force One plane, which also carried the White House press corps and several high officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as top aides Stephen Miller and Steven Cheung.
But it turns out that flight was only a decoy. After boarding the plane, Trump was whisked away in a catering truck and taken to another plane, which went to the UK where he met up with AF-1 again as if he had never left it.
There are two possibilities here: Either the threat was not serious, in which case Trump was just being a scared little rabbit. Or it was serious, and to save himself he was content to sacrifice not just journalists, but some of his own cabinet and staff as well.
History will little note nor long remember this incident, but it says a lot about our president’s character.
and you might also be interested in …
I copied the graph above from Noah Smith’s Noahpinion blog. The original is on the Our World in Data site. I find it very striking. 36 years ago, extreme poverty was a worldwide phenomenon, mostly distributed across East Asia, South Asia, and Africa. Today it is largely a sub-Saharan Africa problem, with some contribution from the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
I don’t have any grand conclusion to draw from this graph, other than that big changes in poverty are possible. And it’s surprising that a change of this magnitude would draw so little attention.
The Trump administration is planning to dramatically reshape the data the Census Bureau collects, setting the stage for an audacious effort to curtail crucial information used in voting rights complaints and revive a right-wing effort, pursued in Trump’s first term, to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count used to determine how many members of Congress represent each state in Congress.
The point would be to count fewer non-citizens in 2030 and thus lower the number of congressional seats that go to states with a lot of non-citizens, like New York and California.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
That clause superseded the famous 3/5 clause in the original Constitution that distinguished free people from slaves. The word “citizen” appears five times in the Amendment, so the authors knew how to use it. The fact that they stipulated “persons” should be taken literally.
It’s possible the Supreme Court plans to continue its piece-by-piece repeal of the 14th Amendment. Section 3 (which bans from office anyone who has taken part in an insurrection) was made meaningless in 2024. This June, four justices wanted to ignore the birthright citizenship clause. (They’ll get another shot at it this year.) But if not, the regime’s new census rules should go down quickly.
TPM’s Layla Jones examines the century-long history of right-wing attempts to gain an advantage by monkeying with the census.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving her job because “I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary”. The Contrarian is not inclined to be generous:
Karoline Leavitt’s farewell post contained no mention of a single administration accomplishment she’s proud of — just how extreme the left has become. Fitting, considering her tenure.
To be fair, she did mention “the many historic accomplishments of this Administration” without getting specific about any. The Guardian notes that her tenure started with an outrageous lie — “she claimed that the Biden administration had planned to use $50m in taxpayer dollars to send condoms to Gaza”, and did not improve from there.
A snide comment I’ve seen frequently on social media is that Leavitt is quitting in order to spend more time lying to her family.
Last Monday, ICE agents cut off the car of US citizen Caroline Molina. They then jumped out of their van, and one of the agents pointed his weapon through her driver-side window, in the manner of the agent who murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis. He was yelling at her, claiming that she tried to run them over — which was a complete lie.
Molina yelled back at them that she had a dashcam video recorder, so she could prove they were “full of shit”. They eventually left. Both the dashcam video and the video she shot out her window are here.
Unraveled has verified the agents in Molina’s videos were far from their usual base of operations. The team has been recorded inflicting violence on immigrants, protesters, and observers in the Chicago area since last summer, including outside the region’s ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that became the epicenter of anti-deportation protests during Operation Midway Blitz last autumn. Members of the same team were also recorded intimidating and threatening drivers in the Twin Cities in mid-January—in the brief period after federal agents killed Renée Good, and before U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents killed 37-year old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti.
Will the agents be disciplined? Of course not.
ICE has been dragging its feet about its agents wearing body cameras that might capture their illegal actions. But they’re about to roll out electric-shock gloves. No doubt they’ll use them wisely.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Blanche is fully installed as AG. Money for the rest of this calendar year has been voted. So there’s nothing restraining Trump from doing his worst between now and the fall elections.
Iran.Phillips O’Brien: “A quick lesson on winning and losing a war. If you start a war of choice, blow through masses of your weapons stocks so that you cannot escalate effectively, and find the country you attacked dictating negotiating terms while in a stronger strategic position … You lost.”
Ukraine. Trump has seemed to waver between favoring Russia and favoring Ukraine. But in fact it’s always been Russia.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the economy
Wednesday, Donald Trump told a crowd in Las Vegas that this is “the greatest economy we’ve ever had by far“. Friday, the Labor Department released its July jobs report: The US lost 23,000 jobs in July, and the more robust hiring reported in May was revised downward by 66,000 jobs. The unemployment rate ticked downward to 4.1%, but for the wrong reason: The people who stopped looking for work outnumbered the people who lost jobs. More technically, the labor participation rate declined to 61.4% of the working-age population. Other than the Covid era, that’s the lowest rate in 50 years. Wage growth was at an annual rate of 3.2%, which doesn’t quite keep pace with inflation.
That doesn’t sound like such a great economy.
And here’s something that nobody talks about any more: Remember, back when Joe Biden was president, how the growing national debt was an existential threat to the United States? In March 2025, when the second Trump administration was young and all problems could still be blamed on Biden, the Republican-led House Budget Committee reported:
If Congress does not act swiftly to confront the structural disconnect between reckless federal spending and incoming revenues, our nation will experience either slow and painful economic demise through sustained stagnation or a swift and catastrophic sovereign debt crisis whereby our creditors lose confidence in our ability to service and repay our debt. This distrust will jeopardize the dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency and result in massive tax hikes and austere spending cuts. Both scenarios would imperil our Republic and our nation’s future.
Well, since then Trump and congressional Republicans have cut taxes for the rich again, started an unnecessary war, and massively boosted military spending. They tried to cover that with cuts to food programs and health care, but the numbers didn’t balance. So the federal deficit for the first nine months of FY2026 has been $1.4 trillion. It’s still an open question whether the year’s final total will top $2 trillion or not. The deficit has broken $2 trillion only once before: in FY2021, a combined Trump/Biden year (running from October 2020 to September 2021), when the government was trying to keep the economy functioning during the Covid shutdown.
The striking thing about the current deficit is that no external emergency requires it. The economy does not need stimulus to get out of a massive recession. No one has attacked us. No plague, famine, or natural disaster demands government intervention. No, Trump is running this deficit by choice. He has chosen to fight an unnecessary war and to cut rich people’s taxes. And the House Budget Committee doesn’t seem terribly alarmed about it.
Here’s what worries me: We’re running this massive deficit while the big tech companies are borrowing unprecedented amounts of money to spend on their AI infrastructure. Yet somehow, this combination of public and private spending isn’t causing a boom. GDP growth is limping along somewhere in the 2-3% range that it’s been in since around 2011 (except for the Covid collapse and recovery, which were lower and higher).
I’m no economist, but it looks to me like we’re masking a major recession with borrowed money.
Overall, the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July: Women lost 32,000 jobs, while men gained 9,000. Many of the jobs lost were in local government and leisure and hospitality—real jobs that real women, who are already dealing with slowed wages and rising inflation, work. Meanwhile, a whopping 165,000 women exited the work force last month, meaning they were neither working nor looking for a new job. The number of men in the labor force remained steady. … In fact, more than double the number of women have left the labor force than men since the start of the year. A total of 845,000 women have left the workforce since January, while 406,000 men have left.
The theory that fewer immigrants means more jobs for native-born Americans … it’s just not panning out.
and Todd Blanche
Well, a few Republican senators managed to get media attention with their public hand-wringing, but in the end all but Collins and Murkowski knuckled under, so Blanche was confirmed as attorney general 50-49. Fifty Republican senators have now signaled their approval of vindictive prosecutions, winking at obvious corruption, and continuing the Epstein cover-up.
I don’t know how fair this point is, but I have seen it fairly often: As soon as Susan Collins came out against Blanche, we knew Trump had the votes to confirm him. She only strays off the MAGA reservation when they don’t need her vote.
I know: You can talk about an 85-year-old who holds no government office and is making no decisions that affect Americans’ lives. So Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky published Anthony Fauci’s diary, and then pulled Fauci in for questioning before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Consider the context of this appearance: Before he left office, President Biden gave Fauci a sweeping pardon so that the incoming administration wouldn’t be able to harass him with vindictive prosecutions. We’ve just seen James Comey vindictively prosecuted for lying to Congress, when he actually did no such thing. Career prosecutors recommended against pressing charges, but the prosecutor Trump illegally appointed went ahead with them. The illegal appointment caused the charges to be thrown out by the judge.
So Fauci’s pardon covers everything he did while he was actually in government, but testifying before Congress put him in danger of being prosecuted for lying to Congress, whether he told the truth or not. So Fauci took the Fifth Amendment 111 times.
You might think that would insulate him from prosecution, but guess again. Paul introduced a motion to find him in contempt of Congress. The committee approved that motion. Ordinarily it would go to the floor of the Senate, where it probably would not pass. So Paul wants DoJ to act on the referral of his committee, without the full Senate.
With all this smoke, you might be wondering if there’s a fire somewhere. I don’t think there is. There is legitimate scientific debate about whether Covid-19 leapt from animals to humans spontaneously in China or whether the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. But that debate has gotten swallowed up by a conspiracy theory that the virus was created in that lab, perhaps intentionally, perhaps with NIH funding that Fauci had some oversight over. There seems to be nothing to that theory.
Looking back, it’s hard to remember just how scary Covid was and how little anybody understood about it. Over a million Americans died of the virus, and perhaps millions more would have died without the vaccines. We all did things (I recall my household wiping down our groceries) that look silly in hindsight.
During this time, Fauci gave the best advice he could, which was always based on incomplete information. On the whole, though, his advice wasn’t that bad. And besides, he never had the power to impose his views. That had to be done by governors, school boards, and other elected officials at various levels.
Thankfully, I have never had to make decisions based on incomplete information while people were dying around me.
an El-Sayed’s win in Michigan
This is the subject of the featured post. But I have a few things to say that weren’t in that article.
Robert Reich had this comment on the idea that the Democratic Party is the subject of a hostile takeover:
The Democratic party isn’t being taken over by “the left” or by democratic socialists. There’s no civil war between progressives and moderates. We aren’t witnessing an ideological battle between the “left” and the “center”.
We’re seeing the US wake up to the tyranny that’s engulfed us, and to a crisis of affordability that’s causing most Americans to struggle financially while fueling the biggest stock market rally in history.
Trump’s tyranny and America’s affordability crisis are related. … When corporate America and Wall Street are unleashed – when the president of the United States has made an implicit deal with the moneyed interests to back him and his authoritarian regime in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, monopolization and pay-to-play corruption – of course prices soar and wages stagnate.
One thing I don’t like about special-interest ads is that the interests usually don’t own their message. I wouldn’t care how much Elon Musk had spent in Wisconsin if he had appeared in ads himself and said, “I’m Elon Musk, and I want you to elect Brad Schimel to your state supreme court.” Ditto if AIPAC ads had said, “We’re AIPAC, and we want you to vote for Haley Stevens because she supports continuing US military aid to Israel, while her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, does not.”
If all political ads were that straight-shooting, the Supreme Court’s otherwise bizarre notion that money is speech would almost make sense. But AIPAC-supported ads about El-Sayed being “disrespectful to women” aren’t just deceptive about El-Sayed, they mask why AIPAC doesn’t like him.
According to Politico a big reason Rep Andy Ogles, one of the slimiest and terrible members of the GOP House caucus, went down to defeat is that he was targeted with $2 million by a SuperPAC funded by solar industry execs. They didn’t hit him on renewables or environment policy. They used garden variety attacks about Ogles’ missed votes while playing up the conservative credentials of his primary challenger.
PACs do that because the honest message — “We’re solar executives and Andy Ogles has been working against our industry.” — wouldn’t persuade enough voters.
A hilarious attack ad against El-Sayed’s opponent Mike Rogers is framed like a drug ad. The drug is called “Endless War”, and Rogers is pitching for it.
Trump seems to think this meme works in his favor. (Note the misplaced apostrophe.)
Yeah, he’s right. One [America] in which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other but join in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you, or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family, and know that that family is going to have the good things.”
So yes, you’ve got two different visions of America. Donald Trump’s vision is the one you’re living in right now. Can you afford your gas? Can you afford your groceries? Do you believe, when you look your kids in the eye, that they’re going to have a better future than you did?
and you also might be interested in …
They two parties really do have different standards. Unlike Democrat Graham Platner, Republican Rep. Max Miller has not withdrawn from his race and will be on the November ballot.
The WaPo claims Trump is upset with WarDefenseSecretary Pete Hegseth for hiding the munitions shortage from him, and that Hegseth in turn blamed his Deputy Secretary Stephen Feinberg. (The White House claims the whole story is “fake news”. The Pentagon says: “Secretary Hegseth did not mislead anyone about our munitions posture, and he did not blame Deputy Secretary Feinberg. These claims about depleted stockpiles, internal disagreements, the Secretary’s position on Iran … are equally fictional.” Those quotes are also in the WaPo, because that’s what journalists do.)
A couple of observations here:
Any idiot knows that you don’t just go down to Home Depot and get yourself more Patriots and THAADs and Tomahawks. The Pentagon stockpile is the only one, and these missiles take years to manufacture in any quantity. So the whole idea that Trump would buy Hegseth’s claim that the munitions problem had been “fixed” points to Corporal Bonespurs’ ignorance about war.
The old adage that “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics” needs third classification for Hegseth: Complete doofuses talk testosterone and worry about the race and gender of their officers.
Paul Krugman used the previous story as one of many examples of administration officials lying to each other, which is one reason why they are governing so badly across the board.
The fact is that it isn’t possible for an administration to be completely dishonest with the courts and the general public while being honest with itself. Do you believe that when Trump boasts about $18 trillion in foreign investment, Kevin Hassett, the administration’s top economist, quietly tells him, “Just between you and me, Mr. President, that number comes out of nowhere, and even the investment promises we have received are vaporware”? Of course not. … So the Iran War is just the most visible of many ongoing, self-inflicted disasters perpetrated by this administration.
A few weeks ago I reviewed Cory Doctorow’s bookEnshittification, which focuses on the software platforms that are increasingly making life miserable. But the trend is larger than that. There’s a broad trend for big conglomerates to buy famous brands and then cut quality. There are big short-term profits to be made before the brand’s reputation is used up. One article focused on how this trend has affected cookware.
Yesterday, Phillips O’Brien’s weekend update on the Ukraine war veered into media criticism. He needed to explain why the latest Trump regime nonsense about “helping” Ukraine — Trump is and always has been on Putin’s side in this war — had gotten so much serious coverage. O’Brien originally thought he was writing a niche blog for military strategists, but suddenly has seen his substack vault into popularity (with people like me).
[W]hat I have discovered, which is not enlightening, is that the actual reporting of war and politics these days in most media outlets can be incredibly weak. The system often seems broken—reporting White House inspired narratives that have no basis in fact as actual events, and replacing rigor with herd behavior.
He started trying to figure out why that was.
Doing what I have done over the last few years has been learning experience (and not it a good way) about how much of the media (and much of the think-tank community) works. The key thing in both worlds is not being accurate or truthful as much as it is gaining access to power and being seen to be smart. Access and perceived intelligence—usually drastically greater than real intelligence—is the currency of these worlds.
Thus to maintain access, some reporters and commentators will say exactly what the White House wants, time and again, even after the White House narrative has been shown to be nonsense (many times). When it comes to think tanks, many are not interested in attempting even-handed or rigorous research; instead, they want to impress funders and also maintain access, and thus they publish crap to appeal to power and maintain their perceived viability (in most cases they have none). This means that much of what is produced in think-tanks is of laughable quality, meant to signal access and support, not to actually analyze a problem or policy.
When I started this blog, nearly all of my sources were mainstream media: CNN, NYT, WaPo, with occasional deeper articles from The Atlantic and a few similar outlets. And I still quote those sources selectively: When they publish a checkable fact, the fact usually checks out.
Increasingly, though, I am relying on blogs written by people like O’Brien, Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall, Jess Piper, Jay Kuo, Marc Elias, and so on. Why? Because they aren’t chasing access to sources in the Trump regime, so they can maintain higher standards.
So it’s none of my business, or yours, whether or not Ariana Grande has an eating disorder. The public response to recent photos is probably counter-productive. But if it leads to an intelligent discussion of celebrity culture and eating disorders in general, some good may come of it.
[Grande’s] body has also become a proxy on to which wider cultural anxieties are projected. In a moment of GLP-1 drugs reinstating the aspiration of thinness, body positivity in retreat, bonesmashing still on the up, and Maga tradwives once again moralizing fatness, fears about the return of aughts-era anorexia have settled on to Grande herself. Whether or not those fears belong to her alone is almost beside the point. Her body has become the site through which the culture argues with itself.
That can’t be a comfortable position to be in, no matter what her actual health situation is. Send a few good vibes her way, however that works in your religious tradition.
Trump is already preparing his response for when Republicans lose big in the fall: Voters are “not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.” Nothing in the history of the world has ever been his fault.
But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. At the moment, Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back. The president himself might still be a dangerous figure, there might be darker forces waiting in the wings — but I don’t think that justifies making anti-populism the measure of all things.
But look at what he has implicitly admitted there: If Trump doesn’t have a Democratic successor willing and able to roll this back, American democracy is in real trouble.
We have masked federal police who obey Trump rather than the law, and who get away with murdering people in the streets if they protest against Trump’s policies. We have a massive concentration camp system under construction and partially operational. We have a “unitary executive” who has obliterated all the boundaries that used to wall off certain key areas of government power from the whims of the president. That executive is immune from prosecution after he leaves office for all “official acts”, which might include having political rivals jailed.
The whole point of Trump’s effort to control elections is that he doesn’t have to be popular. The point of encroaching on the power of Congress is that he doesn’t need legislative capacity. Give him two more years of a supine Congress and it might be too late.
Expect to hear a lot of it’s-not-so-bad between now and the midterm elections. Everyone who isn’t dyed-in-the-wool MAGA needs to respond to the fall elections like a four-alarm fire. But what if your candidate lost in the Democratic primaries? What if the Democratic nominee makes you feel uneasy for reasons that may or may not have something to do with your subliminal biases against color or religion or gender? What if you have a lot to do and getting out to vote feels like a hassle?
But if it’s not really so bad, then you can stay home or vote for the White guy or teach the politicians a lesson by voting for a third party. I mean, what’s the harm?
and let’s close with something mythic
It’s hard to tell if it’s too soon to joke about Mitch McConnell’s situation, since we don’t really know what that situation is. But The Wizard of Was is pretty darn funny.
So, how did we get here? Not because one party discovered a winning campaign slogan, a charismatic leader, or because of one presidential election. We arrived here because one political movement developed a deep understanding of how power operates within the American constitutional system.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Trump’s social media company is proposing to formalize insider trading: For $100K, a bank can get early access to his Truth Social posts which often move markets.
Ukraine. With the US providing no aid, Ukraine is unable to stop Russia ballistic missiles. Russia is targeting grain shipments from Odessa, essentially treating the world food supply the same way Iran is treating the world oil supply. Meanwhile, Russia is losing about 40,000 soldiers a month.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the Iran War
Early on, critics of the war in Iran pointed to the Trump regime’s lack of any definition of victory or plan to get there. The prevailing strategy (if you can call it that) seemed to be that if we just killed enough people and blew up enough stuff, good things would happen. Most media talking heads found this unconvincing. But even those who couldn’t see how we were going to win rarely raised the possibility that we might lose, or perhaps even were in the process of losing. Inside the MAGA echo chamber, that judgment is still viewed as heretical and perhaps even absurd. (How could we be losing? We’re still the stronger power. We can hurt them much more than they can hurt us.)
Little by little, though, the idea that the US was losing began to break through. Center-left pundits breathed a sigh of relief when the memorandum of understanding was signed: Perhaps it would provide a face-saving way for Trump to end hostilities while quietly accepting an outcome placing the US and its allies in a somewhat worse position than before the war started — which is what defeat really means.
But the vagueness in the MOU could not be resolved to both parties satisfaction, so once again missiles started flying and oil stopped flowing.
This time around, though, observers are being bolder in their assessments. Lately I’ve begun seeing not just admissions that Trump’s war is lost, but analyses of why and how it was lost. Military thinkers like Phillips O’Brien have been saying this for a while. But that boldness has now begun to filter out to closer-to-the-mainstream pundits like Paul Krugman.
Krugman starts with a simple point: The US has lost wars before: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq. But this loss seems different: The main problem isn’t that the public is losing the will to keep fighting (though it is). This time there’s a real military reason to sue for peace: We’re running out of munitions — so much so that our ability to fulfill our other military commitments is in doubt.
He points to this chart from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which estimates that (even if we stop the war immediately) we won’t fully replenish our supply of Patriot missiles until 2029.
Imagine how you would look at that graph if you were Taiwan counting on the US to protect it from China, or our NATO ally Estonia evaluating a threat from Russia. Protect us with what? you might wonder.
The regime’s response to this observation is to divert attention from it.
The administration’s response to such reports, exemplified by recent remarks by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, is that
· Munitions aren’t depleted
· Anyone leaking the fact that they are depleted should go to jail
· It’s Joe Biden’s fault
Given the nature of Trump-speak, Waltz’s statement is in effect an admission that the U.S. military is now in deep trouble.
Krugman goes on to wonder how that happened, and locates the problem in Trump’s fundamental unwillingness to face unpleasant facts, and his kill-the-messenger attitude when someone tries to make him do so: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doesn’t want to tell Trump the bad news, the survivors of Hegseth’s purge of the top generals and admirals are unwilling to tell Hegseth the bad news, and so on down the line.
In nutshell, this is the same problem that Vladimir Putin has faced in Ukraine. He keeps making mistakes because he doesn’t get accurate information. And he keeps getting inaccurate information because he punishes people who try to make him recognize his past mistakes.
And there’s another resemblance between the Trump Pentagon and Putin’s military:
Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win. Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone. … [T]he fixed belief that “lethality” is how you win surely led to basic inability to anticipate the blindingly obvious: that we have a limited supply of sophisticated weapons and that the Iranians would close the Straits of Hormuz.
and Todd Blanche
Apparently Blanche has made a deal with Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis to save his nomination.
Acting US attorney general Todd Blanche issued a formal order late on Sunday terminating Donald Trump’s $1.8bn “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate his political allies, a move that follows weeks of negotiations with two Republican senators who were blocking his nomination to become attorney general.
Blanche has been claiming under oath that the fund was dead, but had refused until now to issue a formal order terminating it. President Trump still strongly supports the idea, so no one believed the fund wouldn’t revive again as soon as Blanche was approved.
The document released by Blanche on Sunday night also limits the scope of another provision of the settlement that provided broad immunity for Trump and members of his family from tax audits. It clarifies that the tax audit immunity agreement “applies only retroactively” to claims open at the time of the settlement and does not protect the president from examination of future tax filings.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, where Cornyn and Tillis both are members, will vote on Blanche’s nomination tomorrow.
The slush fund, which would reward Trump loyalists for beating up police officers on his behalf, was wildly unpopular and hasn’t been implemented. But Trump continues to insist that the slush fund is a great idea. He describes the violent January 6 thugs as
the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration. … Perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history. They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them. … I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure
So look for them to get taxpayer money somehow, and don’t be surprised when Blanche cooperates.
But I will be surprised if Blanche cooperates with anybody trying to bring Epstein conspirators to justice. New Mexico is investigating what happened at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch near Santa Fe. But DoJ has not responded to state investigators’ request for documents. Probably they’ll have to sue.
and the climate
Alexander Hurst sees the French and Spanish wildfires as the result to environmental warfare by the United States, which is doing its worst to undermine the fight against climate change. The EU, he says, should retaliate economically.
there is something additional of consequence that we can do: use the power of the single market to make the world’s worst ecological actor change course, or at least make it pay to fund the global effort to adapt to the climate crisis. … Let’s extend the EU’s emissions trading system (ETS) carbon market to all sectors, beef up the “carbon border tax” to protect against retaliation, slap tariffs on finished goods and services from the US that have easy substitutes and place export taxes on materials and intermediate components used in US-located production. All that cash could then be pooled, shared and earmarked for decarbonisation and adaptation.
and the Michigan Senate race
Abdul El-Sayed appears to have a commanding lead going into tomorrow’s primary. He’s supposed to be one of the “socialist” candidates (though he denies the label), while competitor Haley Stevens is the candidate of the Democratic establishment. So the usual “centrist” or “moderate” voices in the party are freaking out.
I’m not seeing it. Like any candidate, El-Sayed’s statements can be cherry-picked for something that sounds radical, but when I listen to longer clips I don’t get that vibe from him. El-Sayed is a Muslim, a child of immigrants from Egypt, and a critic of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza, while Stevens is backed by AIPAC, so some combination of Islamophobia and antisemitism is in the air, though the candidates haven’t explicitly invoked it.
If El-Sayed does win, especially if he wins by a large margin, look for pundits to go wild about the socialist takeover of the Democratic Party. But I think Vox’ Astead Herndon has the better frame: It’s not the left rising. It’s the center falling.
If you ask people what people like Bernie Sanders stand for, they’ll tell you about Medicare for All and free college and all sorts of things. But mainstream Democrats seem (as Herndon says) “rudderless”. They’re not Trump, but what are they?
I don’t think the Democratic base agrees with every position articulated by successful left-wing candidates — like “all deportations are wrong” (as NYC’s Darializa Avila Chevalier told me) — or have suddenly become committed democratic socialists. But I do think the left is on the right side of the gateway issues the base is currently prioritizing: a working-class-led affordability agenda, a skepticism of artificial intelligence, and a moral opposition to President Donald Trump’s war against Iran and to Israel’s campaigns of violence in Lebanon and Gaza. Those issues, more than any others, have defined the Democratic Party’s internal battles since 2024. …
Stevens, [Rep. James] Clyburn, and the party’s leadership would prefer to make this a referendum on the left — on the acceptability of its candidates and its media figures. But the base is communicating something else: a lack of confidence in the center, and in a version of establishment politics that prizes seniority and loyalty over voters’ values. Establishment collapse also explains the Democratic results that don’t fit neatly on the moderate vs. progressive binary: like Attorney General Phil Weiser’s victory in Colorado or whatever is happening in the Wisconsin governor’s race.
As I explained a few weeks ago, we’re not talking about adopting a whole new economic system. We’re just arguing about where to draw the line between the public and private sectors.
Critics of the Democratic Party keep telling us that nobody cares about democracy issues, and that instead the party’s focus needs to be on affordability and other kitchen-table issues. Here, Pete Buttigieg shows how you make the connection:
Gerrymandering lets politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around. Until we end that, it will remain difficult to achieve the things most Americans already agree on: higher wages, lower household expenses, and better services that become possible when billionaires start paying their fair share in taxes.
Back in 2000, John McCain came from nowhere (polling below the margin of error) to be George W. Bush’s main challenger in the Republican primaries. He did it by framing his central issue — campaign finance reform — exactly like that: No matter what you want out of our government, you won’t be able to get it if we lose democracy.
Review: Trump’s made a sweetheart deal with a contractor to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The contractor screwed up, resulting in the pool lining peeling. Because Trump can’t take responsibility for even the smallest mistake, he needed to blame someone else. So he announced that the pool had been vandalized. Under intense pressure to find a vandal, US Attorney Janet Pirro indicted Hearn.
Friday, Pirro dropped the case, citing new information that she got from the Interior Department about — wait for it — “flawed installation by the contractor”. Pirro, a former Fox News host, is one of the most subservient US attorneys out there, but even she realized she could not go to court with the case she had.
To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!
Luis Andrade was brought to the US when he was three, and became valedictorian of his 2024 high school class before entering TCU. He has now been deported to El Salvador.
Forcing medical procedures on detained hunger strikers is seen as torture by many human rights groups and medical organizations. According to medical ethicist Dr Matthew Wynia, the director of the center for bioethics and humanities at the University of Colorado, medical staff follow a code of ethics that respects patients’ bodily autonomy. … “The idea of health professionals serving as agents of the state, rather than protectors of our patients, has a notorious history. And for the medical profession, we really don’t want to go down that path again,” Wynia added.
Back in March, ICE released a Haitian immigrant with mental-health issues. She was wearing summer clothes in Pittsburgh with temperatures in the 20s. She froze to death at a bus stop. Her family is now suing.
This is because organic free-range models need more chickens for the same number of eggs produced, as birds living in cages tend to be more efficient.
The frame here is that we’re looking at living beings purely as factors of production. So this living being is less efficient than that living being. That attitude seems to me to be a big part of the problem. I can imagine a similar study pointing out the virtues of using slaves for farm labor.
The article goes on to note that the organic eggs might be better for the environment in other ways, like pesticide toxicity and biodiversity. Also, the study was based on data from 2009-2010, so it would not account for more recent changes in organic chicken-raising.
Steve Benen on Maddowblog examines a White House claim that Trump “does not bluff” and finds the exact opposite to be true.
The bottom line is unsettling but simple: The incumbent president often just … says stuff. Maybe he intends to do what he says, maybe he just enjoys making declarations that sound good in his mind, or maybe he tries to follow through but can’t find lawyers willing to go along with his weird schemes.
Given this context, I’m amazed how often Trump gets quoted in the media, and even moves markets with his meaningless words. I am reminded of a Shakespearian insult I recent heard repeated:
I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick, nobody marks you.
and let’s close with something astronomical
So we’ve all seen sunrise and moonrise, and you’ve probably seen video astronauts have made of the Earth rising over the Moon. Well, this is like that, but rarer: Here’s a video of Saturn rising over the Moon, taken through a ground-based telescope.
People [are] calling us the “far left” and we are literally just out here talking about funding public schools and keeping hospitals open and paving roads.
Iran. Are we entering a new round of escalation or a new round of peace talks? Signals are mixed. But nothing we’re seeing indicates that the conflict will be resolved soon.
Ukraine. Ukraine has begun attacking Wildberries warehouses in Russia. Wildberries is said to be “Russia’s Amazon”, a big online shopping site. There may be military equipment passing through its warehouses, but mainly this looks like a way to bring the war home to Russian consumers.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the war with no end in sight
We’ve been getting signals in both directions recently. On the one hand, there are anonymous-source reports that Trump is getting increasingly frustrated with Iranian leadership and going into “revenge mode”.
he has told people that he thinks he can break the Iranians’ will through an aggressive bombing campaign, according to a person familiar with his views.
I find Josh Marshall’s take insightful. Trump’s frustration, according to the WSJ link above, is that he “keeps making deals with them that they simply break”.
But this whole set of claims is a fantasy. Trump has never had any agreements or deals with the Iranians. What he’s had is a series of notional ceasefires in which nothing of substance or consequence is actually agreed to … But since these ceasefires are only “deals” to begin negotiations the actual war aims and demands of each side eventually seep through. Then they go back to fighting.
The underlying problem is that
Trump lost this conflict in its first days. Everything since then has been his struggle to deny that reality, either with bogus “deals,” more bombing or various threats. … Effective war diplomacy can get you the best and most creative agreement that the circumstances warrant. But that last part is key. Kickass diplomacy is never going to get the side that won the conflict to agree to a deal in which they lost.
Of course it is hard for Trump or his cult followers to fathom how anyone can say he “lost this conflict”, because the US can destroy things and kill people at much higher rates than the Iranians can. (That’s been true since the first days of the war, and it’s still true.) But the victory conditions here are asymmetric. The US wants concessions from Iran: that they stop supporting regional terrorism, developing nuclear weapons, and threatening shipping in the Persian Gulf. But all the destruction we’ve been able to rain down on them has not forced them to give in, and there is little prospect that it ever will. If the war ends without those concessions, the US has lost — even if we’ve knocked down every structure in Iran and killed 10,000 Iranians for every American death.
An analogy might help: Imagine you’re a parent who is trying to force a child to eat the vegetables you’ve put on his plate. You have it in your power to yell at him, send him to bed hungry, take away his favorite toy, or even beat him in ways that would put you in jail if anybody found out. The child can do none of this to you. But as long as he’s not eating the vegetables, you’re losing.
The worse the Iranian conflict is going, the less the Trump regime wants the American people to know. CNN lays out Pete Hegseth’s efforts to “control information, limit access and avoid difficult questions about the war”.
The Pentagon hasn’t held a press briefing in two and a half months. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hasn’t explained the military strategy behind the renewed air strikes. His department hasn’t revealed the circumstances that led to the recent deaths of US service members. … In response to CNN’s request for comment about the press briefing drought, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman Sean Parnell said the U.S. government “has consistently provided comprehensive, real-time updates” on the strikes in Iran.
But “updates” are simply releases stating what the Pentagon wants the public to know. They avoid any interaction where the official accounts might be questioned. Without any official comments on key issues, reporters have been seeking out anonymous sources, which Hegseth is also trying to shut down.
So far, though, Hegseth has not figured out a way to avoid facing questions in Congress, as he did Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee. (At least for now, Congress still controls the money he needs to fight his war. The regime is asking for $87 billion in supplemental spending over and above this year’s budget. $67 billion is related to the war.) But while he can’t avoid facing questions, he doesn’t have to answer them. In this interaction with Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, he just shouts over Ossoff and keeps repeating the same unresponsive talking points.
Somehow, the “historic military victory” Hegseth described four months ago, which will leave the Iranian military “combat-ineffective for years to come”, hasn’t stopped the Iranians from continuing to kill American soldiers, intimidate ships from using the Strait of Hormuz, and terrorize our allies in the region. Hegseth refused to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance there.
When the war started, many economists predicted oil prices would soar much higher than they did. Paul Krugman explains one reason they didn’t: Ukraine’s missile campaign against Russia’s refineries has noticeably lowered the world’s oil-refining capacity. Why buy oil, Krugman asks, when you can’t refine it?
But the shortage appears on the other side of the refineries: the market for gasoline, diesel and so on. The “crack spread” is the difference between the price of a barrel of oil and the price of the various products refined from that barrel. That spread has risen from $25 to $65.
From the point of view of end users, this is the same as if crude prices had risen an extra $40 per barrel. In effect, the world is coping with the equivalent of $140 oil even though the headline price is “only” around $100.
Meanwhile, who knows what’s going on with Saudi Arabia? Wednesday, the Trump regime announced a deal that would give the Saudis the kind of pre-nuclear-weapon capabilities we’re trying to destroy in Iran. It’s the kind of historically dumb idea that only a man deeply in the pocket of the kingdom could love.
Then after the deal was signed, Trump added a condition: The Saudis have to join the Abraham Accords that normalize relationships between Israel and other Arabian countries. That’s probably a deal-breaker for the Saudis. Stay tuned.
The El Niño climate pattern that is strengthening in the Pacific Ocean is on track to be the largest one in at least 150 years, researchers said today during a press briefing. If the monster forecasts they presented pan out, the surge of heat that the El Niño will unleash from the ocean, combined with warming from human-caused climate change, will probably make next year the hottest on record — and cue up extreme weather in many parts of the world.
Another distinguished journal, Science, has stopped pulling its punches.
When I talk to people about [science funding] (and that includes some journalists as well) and say what I’m about to at the end of this paragraph I am sometimes met with disbelief. But I mean what I say and I am trying my best to say what I mean: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.
That’s it. That’s the story. They are naturally not putting it in those words, but instead talking about “gold standard science” and the “reproducibility crisis” and funding “bold inquiry” for “transformational breakthroughs”. This is all bullshit, and it’s important to realize that. Shameless hand-waving bullshit, delivered in a how-dare-you-think-otherwise manner is the defining style of the entire Trump administration. You can see it in every appointee, in every part of the executive branch, and in the pronouncements of all of Trump’s supporters. I realize that this is a simple heuristic to apply, and a very unambiguous and unflattering one, but I find it to be all too useful and all too accurate. Give it a try.
According to the Gironde fire service, the blaze generated a rare “pyrocumulonimbus” cloud, creating its own winds and whirlwinds and making it “erratic and unmanageable”, firefighter Captain Nicolas Braz told AFP.
Trump is back to his absurd fantasy that forests can or should be “managed” by clearing away leaves and other debris. Canada’s wildfires are in inaccessible boreal forests that cover nearly half the country’s land. They’re burning because of the global warming that Trump denies, and not because Canadians should be out there with rakes and leaf blowers.
Laws against tampering with your vehicles emission-monitoring sensors? Ignore them, the government is.
and ICE
More than 300K Haitian refugees are losing their legal status today. ICE is gearing up for major round-ups, particularly in cities like Springfield, Ohio — site of the infamous dog-and-cat-eating hoax that J. D. Vance pushed during 2024 campaign.
After an ICE agent killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine earlier this month, it came out that the agent had a history of violent behavior, including domestic violence. It turns out that’s not unusual. If you’re looking for a gun-carrying job in immigration enforcement, violent thuggery doesn’t seem to be a deal-breaker. Mother Jones reports:
Around the time Trump sent the National Guard to DC, he also sent it to Memphis. That hasn’t attracted as much attention because (unlike California Governor Newsom or Illinois Governor Pritzker) Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Lee welcomed the troops — despite the fact that crime in Memphis was already at 25-year low.
Now it turns out that crime was a pretext and the National Guard served as a Trojan horse. They were accompanied by an influx of agents from federal agencies, who are mainly engaging in an immigration crackdown. The immigrant community in Memphis is just as terrorized as the ones in Minneapolis or Los Angeles were, but they are getting little attention.
and tariffs
Trump loves tariffs, so he keeps imposing them. The rationale for why he has the power to do so keeps changing. As one source of authority is denied by the courts, he moves on to another.
Here’s the latest power grab:
Levied under a statute called Section 301, the administration has said these new tariffs are designed to target countries that have not effectively banned forced labor from their supply chains.
OK, what countries would that be? 80 of them, it turns out, including such famous slave nations as Canada and the UK. They all get tariffs between 10% and 12%.
And then there are special tariffs against Canada — up to 50% “covering products ranging from wine to hockey sticks to cement”. Neither liberal Paul Krugman nor conservative National Review can find a point.
For decades, people have criticized tariffs by comparing them to the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which is widely blamed for helping turn the 1929 stock market crash into a global Great Depression. Well, the legal authorization Trump is pointing to for his authority is precisely Smoot-Hawley, which was never formally repealed.
Krugman says the new tariffs will have little immediate economic impact
But the auto industry, like business in general, has been put on notice that the huge flows of goods and services that cross those borders every day may be cut off whenever Trump has a temper tantrum. And this really is a temper tantrum, in the sense that there’s no strategy here. The new tariffs will hurt American consumers, and nobody expects them to extract any concessions from Canadians who are only getting more outraged at the United States.
National Review asks Congress to take its power back.
More broadly, this episode only reinforces our conviction that, despite the best efforts of the Supreme Court, the current state of the law still gives the president too much latitude to turn tariffs into his playthings. That has to stop. A tariff is a tax. Taxation is, under the Constitution, a matter for Congress. When it comes to tariffs, Congress must do its constitutional duty, reverse the excessive delegation of its powers to the executive, and take back control.
This is precisely what Trump loves about tariffs: He gets to impose them like a dictator, without consulting Congress. Whenever he’s feeling impotent in the world — as he must be now, given his low poll numbers and how ineffectual his bombardment of Iran has been — decreeing some new tariff makes him feel powerful again.
But there’s a bigger issue here: For more than a century, Canada has been America’s best friend in the world. Countries have got to wonder why they should want to be America’s friend these days. And why should they negotiate agreements with Trump, when he’ll break them the next time he’s jonesing for a power rush?
and Elon’s crashing companies
It’s possible that recent weeks have marked the beginning of the Musk crash I’ve been anticipating for a very long time. SpaceX stock has lost about half its value in the last few weeks, going from $225 on June 15 and $129 on Tuesday to $111 this morning. Meanwhile Tesla is down to $308 a share from a peak of nearly $500 in December and $380 on Tuesday.
But the mystery isn’t why those stocks have gone down, but why they’re still this high. Elon Musk has a history of announcing grand plans that don’t come to fruition, or at least don’t come to fruition in anything like the time scale he predicted — robotaxis by 2020, humans landing on Mars by 2024, fully autonomous Teslas by “next year” every year since 2018. And yet somehow, the stock market keeps pricing his companies as if the things he predicts might actually happen reasonably soon.
Brad DeLong looks at Tesla, which he describes as “a $50 billion company wearing a $1.2 Trillion magical rainbow unicorn costume”. He provides this chart showing Tesla’s flat revenue stream and declining earnings.
And yet Tesla’s stock is priced like like a company growing by leaps and bounds, at 280 times earnings. (Another car company, Toyota, is at 10 times earnings. A company that actually is growing rapidly, Nvidia, is at 30 times earnings.) Why? Well, the Morningstar rating service explains in a behind-a-paywall report:
Tesla has the potential to disrupt multiple industries with its technology for [electric vehicles], [autonomous vehicles], batteries, and humanoid robots.
Tesla’s full self-driving software should generate growing profits in the coming years as the technology continues to improve, leading to a robotaxi service and increased adoption by Tesla drivers.
Tesla’s humanoid robot will create shareholder value as its ability to perform multiple functions will transform manufacturing and be useful to consumers.
The word “potential” does a lot of work in that analysis. It embodies the assumption that all the promises Musk has made are worth hard cash.
Even more than Tesla, SpaceX is a “magical rainbow unicorn” company. Even Morningstar sounds skeptical:
Loyal holders of companies run by Elon Musk have a very long time horizon and are often willing to look past interim milestones toward the prospects of big bets on moonshot projects and the grander vision on the horizon.
But somebody has to keep putting up money to cover those “big bets”.
SpaceX faces an average annual cash burn of $84 billion through 2034, according to Morgan Stanley, which does not expect positive free cash flow until 2035.
That means SpaceX requires a constant stream of new investors (or old investors willing to double down on their bets) for nearly the next decade. If those investors fail to appear, the magical unicorn will never arrive.
Tempting as it may be in this case, I’ve never sold a stock short, and I’m not recommending you do either, because there’s no predicting how long it will take investors to wise up. As John Maynard Keynes said:
You need to keep in mind that the stock market can remain irrational a lot longer than you can remain solvent.
In Maine, Troy Jackson has replaced Graham Platner as Susan Collins’ opponent. There seems to have been little rancor in the convention that chose him, which is impressive given the circumstances. After it became clear Jackson would be nominated, all his rivals stepped aside. The final vote was 566-5.
For nearly 30 years, Collins has told Maine that she is “concerned”. She was concerned while she rubber-stamped Trump’s Medicaid cuts and gutted our healthcare. She was concerned when she cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, concerned when she confirmed justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. And really tragically, she was concerned when she gave ICE billions to terrorize our neighbors and murder people in the streets with no accountability.
But concern does not lower the costs of groceries or gas. Concern does not keep our maternity wards of rural hospitals like down in Lincoln County open. Concern does not restore all the rights that she’s taken away. Maine does not need another six years of concern. We need someone with courage. We need a fighter, and we need a senator who remembers exactly who sent them to Washington, which is you.
Trump’s war against the “woke” Smithsonian continues. On July 4, the White House released a report on the Smithsonian’s “ideological capture” by social-justice activists. The Organization of American Historians wasn’t impressed.
“Saving America’s Story” is part of a broad attempt to return the nation to a vision of America that never actually existed and that serves the ends of superficial patriotism. The White House seeks to impose a narrow, singular, and celebratory narrative of American greatness populated by a mythologized set of heroes. Crucially, the proposed narrative would erase the conflict, struggle, and diversity—the complexity—that have always defined the American experience. The report insists that history itself is essentially, for Americans, a special and providential story of triumph.
The Secretary of the Interior, acting through the Director of the National Park Service (NPS) and in coordination with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, shall install temporary signage along the NPS-maintained sidewalks and walkways used by the public to access the Museum, informing visitors of the findings of the Report and of the policy set forth in section 1 of this order. Such signage shall notify visitors that the Museum exhibits should be renovated consistent with the findings in the Report and direct visitors to locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history.
This is supposed to “restore trust” in the Smithsonian.
That’s typical Trumpian NewSpeak. He “restores trust” in an institution — the Smithsonian, our elections — by making up lies about how hopelessly corrupted they are. Surely no one has done more to erode trust in America than Trump himself.
I hope visitors to the National Mall find appropriate ways to deface these propaganda signs and/or ridicule them on social media.
Megan McArdle (my WaPo subscription hasn’t quite run out yet) isn’t someone I usually agree with. But in this column, she segues from the new Odyssey movie to the widespread tendency to become pointlessly enraged by cultural incidents that don’t really affect the lives of anyone you may care about. She arrives at this wise point:
However soothing it feels in the moment, all this manufactured fury is stealing our real lives, bit by bit. The high wears off, the internet mob dissipates and there we are, exactly as lonely or frustrated or sad as we were before. Meanwhile, we have not fixed any of the underlying problems, so we feel even worse.
That’s addiction in a nutshell: Something seems like it will make you feel better, but you end up feeling worse — and more in need of something to make you feel better. People who have been lost at sea talk about the temptation to drink ocean water. Their compatriots who gave in to that urge didn’t make it back, because the salt just made them thirstier and thirstier.
Another WaPo columnist, Jason Willick, reviews what happened to the Constitution’s stipulation that only Congress can declare war.
The Iran conflict makes plain that Congress has lost the war power the Founders assigned it. On matters of war and peace, the Constitution has, in effect, been amended without a vote. … America’s foreign policy is post-constitutional, with Senate-ratified treaties largely replaced by “executive agreements” and the legislature’s war power now vested primarily in the executive.
His retelling of how this happened is mostly correct, but leaves out something I think is important: The Founders (particularly the Virginians like Jefferson and Madison) didn’t picture the new Republic fielding a large standing army, which they saw as a threat to liberty. (That’s why a well-regulated militia of citizen volunteers is “necessary to the security of a free state“.) Immediate attacks would be met by state and local militias, who could be federalized under the President’s command if the conflict grew. But (as Madison found out when he tried to conquer Canada during the War of 1812) militias hate to invade foreign countries. A foreign war, or a war against a European power like Britain or Spain, would require creating a large federal army, (or, more accurately, building a large army around the skeleton of a small peacetime army) which Congress would have to fund. So of course a foreign war could only be fought with congressional support.
The modern situation, where the President always has the wherewithal to wage a major conflict for months before needing Congress, was unforeseen (and is part of the reason the Second Amendment is obsolete).
The US military has blown up 67 boats that it claims were smuggling drugs, killing 221 people — basically executing people without trials. The result? No effect on fentanyl, which the regime claimed was the target. But that was predictable, because fentanyl mostly comes into the country via land routes. But there was a temporary effect on cocaine, which is the drug the boats were actually trying to smuggle. However, the cartels adjusted, and things are back to normal now.
Preliminary findings two months after the strikes began last September showed that they had disrupted smuggling routes, the DEA analysts reported, causing increases in cocaine prices and drug-related violence. But prices have since reverted to previous levels.“Smugglers have adapted to the intensified pressure,” they wrote. “Price and availability have not been noticeably affected.” … Pentagon officials told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that DEA analysis of confiscated cocaine showed high levels of purity, according to a congressional aide familiar with the briefing. High purity suggests supply remains consistent, the DEA official said; dealers do not need to dilute the drug to stretch inventory.
As in our attacks on Iran, blowing things up and killing people seems to be an end in itself. It doesn’t need to be justified by results.
and let’s close with big Finnish
I got my solar panels working this week, so renewable power is on my mind. The well-publicized problem with wind and solar power is intermittency: Sometimes the sun shines and the wind blows, and sometimes it doesn’t. The obvious answer is as old as Genesis (i.e., Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoah’s dreams): Store the power when it’s plentiful and draw that supply back down when it’s not. But how?
Batteries tend to be techy things that use a lot of materials that may be in short supply or require some environmentally-destructive mining. But Pornainen, a town of about 5000 people in southern Finland, has a much lower-tech strategy: a sand battery, which is basically a giant thermos bottle filled with crushed soapstone. The idea is to heat up the rock at times when electricity is plentiful and cheap, and then use the hot rocks to produce steam at times when electricity is scarcer and more expensive.
I think I’m unlikely to ever put a sand battery in my back yard. But here’s a thought that I think needs wider circulation: The climate crisis isn’t going to resolve through one magic-bullet solution. It’s going to take a lot of smaller ideas that creatively adapt to the circumstances of particular places and purposes. (If you want to flesh that idea out, read the sci-fi novel The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.)
You may think the camps are for someone else. DHS has already floated “100 million deportations” as a real number. Only 47 million people living in America were born somewhere else. Hitting 100 million means coming for citizens too, native-born and naturalized alike.
Climate change. Wildfires in Canada and Mexico led to bad air quality along the East Coast. One day last week, the sky above my house in Massachusetts was a disturbing yellow color.
Iran. The deaths of two more Americans puts us firmly back in an escalation phase. I agree with Amanda Marcotte: “as long as Trump is president, we will be at war with Iran. He’s impetuous, stupid, and sociopathic. Iran will always be able to provoke him. His ego can’t handle losing, so he will always get sucked back in.”
Ukraine. Nothing really new this week. More Russian missile attacks on civilian targets in Kiev. More Ukrainian missile attacks against Russia’s oil infrastructure.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about ICE killings
As I was writing this blog last week, ICE was killing another person: Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian man who had a work permit and no outstanding warrants.
Weirdly, the DHS statement didn’t even make the usual claim that the ICE shooter feared for his life. It said merely that he “feared for public safety“, whatever that means. Since then, details about the shooter have come out:
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who allegedly fatally shot a Colombian man in Maine on Monday was prone to violence and held racist beliefs, according to some of the people who were close to him.
Meanwhile, an employee of the company that runs an ICE detention center in Colorado shot a woman who had been photographing employees’ cars. Another man was killed in Florida when he was hit by a truck while running away from ICE.
The New Yorker has an article about the horrific conditions at an ICE detention center near El Paso. The article follows Rey, a Cuban man with diabetes, high blood pressure, and a US-citizen wife.
The ICE officials who regularly appeared at Camp East Montana are called deportation officers. Officially, their job is to make sure that detainees with final orders of removal are deported; unofficially, they often pressured those without orders to agree to be deported anyway. The officers were aided, in the second task, by the conditions at the camp. Many detainees with valid or pending legal claims simply couldn’t stand to be held there any longer. But the deportation officers also had other means of persuading the holdouts. According to testimony given to the A.C.L.U. by multiple detainees from Cuba, the officers would periodically handcuff those who refused to be deported and drive them to remote stretches along the Mexican border. Buses with masked men, presumably agents from Mexico, waited on the other side. “I started yelling and screaming at the immigration guard in Mexico that this is a kidnapping,” a fifty-one-year-old Cuban man from Florida said. “Out of the thirteen people who came with me on the bus, only four people returned with me.”
Every few days, an officer showed up in Rey’s tent to ask if he was ready to sign a document acceding to his deportation. “Are you staying or are you leaving?” he’d ask Rey flatly. For weeks, Rey waved the officer away, but he was spending hours each day in bed with debilitating headaches. He could barely urinate, and he had lost about thirty pounds. “I couldn’t even tell you if there was a medical tent at the facility,” he said. “I just didn’t understand how, in an immigration detention center, they can’t give you medicine. Not only that, how is it that I can’t see a doctor?”
After six weeks in detention he did agree to self-deport, out of fear that he would die without access to his medications.
That seems to be the point. People in the camp have unresolved immigration cases. But if ICE can make them miserable enough, they may drop whatever claims they have and leave the country.
The incidents we reviewed indicate agents used force and the threat of force as default tactics and tools to coerce immediate compliance rather than to respond to a threat. Agents also turned to intimidation tactics — bullying, harassing, humiliating, and deceiving people — as they conducted enforcement, creating greater fear in communities and further undermining trust in law enforcement.
Doctors and human rights experts with PHR and HRC documented 412 verified incidents of the “misuse” of these crowd-control weapons, also known as “less-lethal weapons”, from June 2025 through May 2026. … The report documented 203 injuries stemming from the alleged misuse of the crowd-control weapons. Some of the injuries included blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions.
A. R. Moxon sums up the opposing worldviews underlying the debate over letting ICE do whatever it wants to its targets.
The oppositional worldviews? Let’s call them progressive humanism and regressive supremacy.
Progressive humanism is the belief that all people matter and deserve life, that generative human value springs from an inextricable and diverse mutually cooperative interconnectivity, and that we have a natural responsibility and moral duty to take the natural human system we have inherited and use our energies and skills to progress and improve it.
Regressive supremacy is the belief that only specific types of people matter and deserve life, and then only to the degree that they conform to specific and rigid hierarchical roles and doctrines; that all other human beings, who must earn life, get what they deserve and deserve what they get, because they are the natural property of the people who matter most.
and Senate confirmation hearings
Two laughably unqualified nominees for important posts had their Senate confirmation hearings this week: Todd Blanche is the acting Attorney General and wants to be confirmed in that role permanently. Jay Clayton is Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence.
Both were asked hard questions, sometimes by Republicans, and repeatedly dodged them. The lowlight was the exchange between Clayton and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff. Ossoff asked him who won the 2020 election, to which Clayton replied: “I’m not gonna do this with you.” Ossoff reminded Clayton of his obligation to give “honest and forthright” answers. And Clayton insisted that “I’m not gonna do this with you” was an honest and forthright answer. Finally Ossoff said:
Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question. Why can you not give it?
Thom Tillis pressed Blanche to meet with Epstein survivors, which he finally did after all this time. Afterward, a survivor described his attitude as “dismissive”.
and The Odyssey
I saw it Friday morning when it opened, in IMAX as Christopher Nolan intended (or as close as you can get in Massachusetts). For nearly three hours I was completely enthralled. The movie’s artful mixture of action with character development and story-telling never drags.
The script leaves out several pieces of Homer’s original: conversations on Olympus, Aeolus and the bag of winds, the Phaeacians, Hermes, and some other things that have slipped my mind. That’s why it’s not a five-hour movie. But the omissions are only noticeable if you’re a bit of a Homer buff (as I am). The potential plot holes have been cleanly sewn shut.
A few things have been added. Most notably: the Trojan War making Greece vulnerable to the Sea Peoples (who are rumored to be coming but don’t appear), and the contribution Odysseus’ inner doubts and guilt make to his inability to get home. But the additions do not feel grafted on. Most of them are either hinted at in the text or are already part of the post-Homeric tradition. (For example, the Sea Peoples are historical, and play a role in the sequel to The Odyssey that Nikos Kazantzakis wrote in the 1930s. The underlying immorality of Odysseus’s tricks and stratagems is in Euripides. That Odysseus himself may have felt conflicted about them is not a big stretch. In many ways Odysseus is the first modern man. A character lacking self-awareness and self-criticism would be an unconvincing Odysseus.)
The scenery is stunningly beautiful. The image of “chasing the escaping Sun” as it sinks into the western Mediterranean is a haunting invocation of freedom.
As for the various trumped-up controversies about casting and such: ignore them. Helen is Black? She’s the daughter of Zeus; she should stand out from every other woman in Sparta. You shouldn’t expect her to look like the girl next door. A trans actor (Elliot Page) as a Greek soldier? Odysseus got his character killed by fooling him into playing a part in selling the horse trick to the Trojans. He should look both young and vulnerable, which Page does.
Adaptations (especially of classic works) fail in two ways: Either they are unfaithful to the original and take off in their own directions, or they are too faithful and don’t account for the differences in media and audience. I think Nolan has hit the sweet spot. Clearly he thought long and hard about The Odyssey, and he has made me think hard about it again.
but here’s a point of view I’d like to see take off
One of the arguments anti-immigration people make is that certain (conveniently non-White) groups of people can’t assimilate into America. The Sudanese, the Somalis, the Haitians …
Now, we all know this is ahistorical. Somebody could have gone to New York’s Little Italy in the late 1800s, heard a bunch of people speaking Italian, and argued that Italians are inherently incapable of assimilating. A lot of people probably did make that argument.
But here’s a response I’d like to hear from the defenders of immigration: No nation in the history of the world has ever been as good at assimilating people as the United States. It’s our superpower, and it’s what made us great.
You may believe, when you say certain people can’t assimilate, that you’re insulting them. But really, you’re insulting America. If you think the US can’t assimilate Somalis or anybody else, think again. Believe in America.
and you also might be interested in …
So Trump gave a prime-time speech Thursday, in an attempt to convince the public that election fraud is a problem, and that foreign countries (but not Russia) have tried to interfere in our elections.
Here’s a paragraph that needs to be repeated any time a news outlet quotes Trump’s 2020-election-rigging nonsense:
Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election by 7 million popular votes and 74 electoral votes. It was not close. Joe Biden kicked his butt. Trump’s fragile ego does not allow him to face those facts, so he has made up a lot of complete bullshit to divert attention from his humiliation. He has had numerous opportunities to present evidence of his alleged fraud in court, and has never done so. In fact, he has never even assembled a coherent theory of how the election might have been stolen, and instead jumps around from one unsupported notion to another — from voting-machine hacking to vote-counting fraud to manufacturing fake ballots to non-citizens voting and so on. The one time one of these theories was about to be tested in court, Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million rather than go to trial.
I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members, ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best,
Critics pointed out that hormone therapies to raise testosterone is “gender-affirming care”.
Nearly half the Democrats in the House voted to block $3.3 billion in aid to Israel, most of which is military aid. Only one Republican joined them, so the attempt failed.
I’m with the rebel Democrats here. I understand that many Israelis believe they are in a life-or-death struggle with Palestinian organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah, so they’re going to do whatever they think they need to do, including genocide and ethnic cleansing. But they can do it with their own resources. I don’t want to be implicated in Israel’s crimes against humanity.
The weak spot in any bigotry is the personal stories of its victims. Change comes by telling those stories.
It’s official: The Mint is casting a Trump $1 coin, with his portrait next to “In God We Trust”. (Is he the God we’re trusting?) Apparently it’s meant as a collectible coin rather than a circulating coin, which creates a possible loophole in the law against memorializing living people on money. We need a circulating dollar coin, but not this one. If anyone tries to circulate it, I will refuse to accept one as change.
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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;
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
The Weekly Sift 