The Weekly Sift

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

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

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

Ongoing stories

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

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the postal service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and dissent inside the Pentagon

That’s the subject of the featured post.

and Trump’s clueless midterm strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Germany

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

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

Here’s how far out AfD is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something incongruous

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

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

– Jamelle Bouie

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

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Supreme Court again failed to defend Congress’ power. It allowed the construction to continue on Trump’s ballroom, which Congress has never authorized.
• Climate change. The oceans are now hotter than ever.
• 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.

Also, he turned up his rhetoric.

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

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

and control of the Senate

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

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

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

and some outrage stories: Harp and the USS Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the part that does matter:

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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?

Tyranny is the handmaiden of the moneyed interests.

– Robert Reich
“The real meaning of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan“

This week’s featured post is “Why the freak-out over El-Sayed?“

Ongoing stories

• 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.
• Climate change. Lots of climate stories this week. Wildfires are still raging. Lake Mead is at a historic low point. The Trump regime continues to spend taxpayer money to pull the plug on renewable energy projects. A judge is stopping the Pentagon from blocking all new onshore wind projects. Ford is planning a cheap EV pick-up truck for next year.
• 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.

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Interesting gender disparity in the jobs numbers:

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.

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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.

and Dr. Fauci

Imagine you’re a Republican in Congress looking for some TV time, but wanting to stay in Trump’s good graces. What are you going to talk about? Not the war, which has turned out to be a big mistake. Not the economy, which is limping towards stagflation. Not the wildfires spreading all across the northern hemisphere, because that leads into climate change, which Trump insists is a “con job”, a “scam”, and a “hoax”. Not the budget deficit, which is approaching $2 trillion for the year, because who’s fault is that exactly? Not the great job ICE is doing as it terrorizes cities across the country and murders American citizens on the streets. Not corruption, obviously, and not your vote to approve Todd Blanche, because he winks at Trump’s corruption. The Epstein victims? No way.

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.

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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.

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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.

To be fair, a renewable energy PAC did the same thing to Andy Ogles in Tennessee.

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.

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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.

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Trump seems to think this meme works in his favor. (Note the misplaced apostrophe.)

El-Sayed accepted the challenge in an interview with Jake Tapper:

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.

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The WaPo claims Trump is upset with War Defense Secretary 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.

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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.

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A few weeks ago I reviewed Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification, 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Ross Douthat’s final NYT column (before he moves on to be a white conservative DEI hire at 60 Minutes) expresses the it’s-not-so-bad view of the Trump administration that I think we need to push back hard on.

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.

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.

– Jess Piper

There is no featured post this week.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. This week’s primary target was the free press. Fortunately, federal judges still believe in the First Amendment.
• Climate change. This summer continues to set heat records. Next summer should be worse.
• 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.

On the other hand, we’ve had a few days of both sides pausing their attacks while they see if new talks can be started.

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.

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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.

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I’m not sure who said it first, but numerous people have responded to Hegseth pushing a “Spartan mindset” in the Pentagon with: Maybe that’s why we’re losing to the Persians.

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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.

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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.

and the environment

The science journal Nature reports:

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.

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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.

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Wildfires in France and Spain have forced 300K people to evacuate. AFP:

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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

On July 22, the advocacy group Ohio Immigrant Alliance released a list of 59 active and former ICE and CBP agents charged with sexual and violent crimes between 2007 and 2026.

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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%.

It’s a sham.

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.

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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.

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Bloomberg’s Bethany Benjamin observes that when you measure sales expectations against actual sales, Tesla’s Cybertruck was a bigger marketing disaster than Ford’s Edsel.

and you also might be interested in …

NPR reviews the current state of the midterm race to control the Senate.

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.

Here’s a chunk of his acceptance speech:

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.

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South Carolina will be the first Democratic primary in the 2028 cycle, followed by Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia

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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.

Friday, Trump followed up with an executive order.

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.

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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.

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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).

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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.)

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

– Cicero

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

Ongoing stories

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

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Graham Platner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do Democrats really want to go there?

and another ICE murder

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

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

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

The Mexican government is beginning to get pissed off.

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

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

BBC reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is now suing DHS. The suit alleges:

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

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

and Mitch McConnell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josh Marshall sums him up:

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

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

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something derivative

What if they based a sitcom on Marco Rubio?