The Weekly Sift: 2025

Monday, August 18, 2025

Groundwork

If we show weakness today in front of Russia, we are laying the ground for future conflict.

This week's featured post is "The Timescale of News, or why the Sift's weekly summary has a new format".

Significant ongoing stories

As I explain in this week's featured post, our news media only sees motion. So events that move slowly tend not to get covered. That doesn't mean they aren't important, just that they don't fit into a breaking-news model. If they get covered at all, it's usually as "context" for some faster-moving story. (Some of those faster-moving stories will get covered in the next section.) But whether you hear anything "new" about them or not during a particular news cycle, you shouldn't lose sight of them.

Here's a list of the ongoing stories that I'm paying attention to, and a few ways they manifested in this week's news.

Climate change. This week the faster-moving story was Hurricane Erin, which briefly hit category 5 on Saturday.
The genocide in Gaza. This tends to get coverage whenever the Israeli government announces something new. (This week Israel announced plans for a new offensive that would displace over a million Palestinians, most of whom have already been displaced multiple times.) But whether there are new announcements or not, the beat goes on: There isn't enough food; more people starve; more buildings are turned to rubble and life gets more precarious for Gaza's 2 million residents.
Trump's assault on American democracy. This theme ties together a bunch of related stories that have played out over the last seven months. Recently, the faster-moving stories that have gotten attention are Trump's takeover of the DC police, and Texas' attempt to give Republicans five more House seats via a mid-decade gerrymander. Also, I've linked below to an account of how shows trials against people like John Brennan might go.
The war in Ukraine. Friday's Trump-Putin summit got all the attention, but meanwhile the war continued. Russian forces continue to inch forward at a terrible cost, while Ukraine puts up a fierce resistance, also at a terrible cost. Trump is right to want to "stop the killing", as he so often says. But fundamentally this is a war of conquest, so it will continue until the aggressor -- Putin's Russia -- either achieves its goals on the battlefield or is convinced that it can't achieve them.
Trump's tariffs are tanking the economy. I explained the larger pattern last week in "An Authoritarian Economy is a Bad Economy". This week's news-visible piece was a report from the Labor Department on the producer price index (PPI), which rose 0.9% in July. That's the largest monthly jump in three years.

The Epstein-files story is not gone yet, though I continue to wonder how significant it is. It didn't make many headlines this week, largely because Congress is in recess. The basic situation is that Trump's Justice Department has a lot of information on Epstein which it refuses to release, despite the fact that Trump campaigned on releasing it, and the Justice Department is run by people who used to insist on releasing it. Administration officials constantly say that they want full transparency. But they clearly don't, and (while it's easy to imagine that the reason somehow concerns Trump's friendship with Epstein) no one knows exactly why.

The Justice Department tried to pass the buck by asking a court to release the grand jury files on Epstein-related cases. But a judge turned that request down, and anyway, those files probably don't contain much relevant evidence that isn't already public. Congress went into recess early so that Republicans could avoid voting on a resolution calling for release of the Justice Department's Epstein files. But the story hasn't died, and they'll have to come back into session eventually.

The one clear significance the Epstein files story has is political: It's the first broken Trump promise that his base is taking seriously.

This week's developments

The Trump-Putin summit

All week the news networks were full of speculation about what would happen when Trump and Putin met Friday. I found this tedious, because it was totally obvious what would happen: the same thing that always happens. As I observed last week: "Whenever Trump meets with Putin, he comes out repeating Putin’s talking points."

Going in, Trump was demanding an immediate ceasefire and threatening "severe consequences" if he didn't get one. But Putin didn't agree to the ceasefire, and there are no consequences.

Putin went in saying that a ceasefire could only come about as part of a comprehensive settlement that involved Ukraine yielding significant amounts of territory to Russia. He clearly thinks he is winning on the battlefield -- albeit slowly -- and will continue to win as long as the West fails to provide Ukraine with enough weapons to turn the tide. So he believes that time is on his side. He'll only stop the fighting if he is given what he wants.

Trump came out of the summit saying that he would push for a comprehensive settlement rather than an immediate ceasefire. And that Ukraine would have to yield significant amounts of territory to Russia.

Fox News reported:

After meeting with Putin, Trump said the Russian leader was willing to end the war in exchange for key Ukrainian territorial concessions. He added that Kyiv should take the deal because "Russia is a very big power, and they're not."

On Truth Social, Trump painted Zelenskyy as the obstacle to peace.

President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight. Remember how it started. No getting back Obama given Crimea (12 years ago, without a shot being fired!), and NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE.

This is exactly Putin's position: The fighting will stop when Ukraine gives up the territory Russia wants. In exchange they'll get his pinkie-swear that he won't invade the rest of the country after he's had time to replenish his losses. And any enforceable guarantees to the rest of Ukraine, like membership in NATO, is off the table.

Trump also may pinkie-swear that Putin will face severe consequences if he starts the war up again at a more convenient time. (News stories refer to this as "security guarantees".) But we've seen what Trump's "consequences" amount to when he's dealing with Putin.

Fundamentally, this is the same deal that Neville Chamberlain made with Hitler at Munich: Give up territory, get meaningless promises.

Zelenskyy is scheduled to visit the White House today, flanked by some supportive European leaders. Presumably the Europeans want to avoid the ganging-up-on-Zelenskyy that happened the last time he went to the White House.

James Fallows describes just how weird the vibe was at the Trump-Putin post-summit press conference. Trump was both the host and the leader of the more powerful country. He should have indisputably been in charge. But he wasn't.

In every previous such event I have seen, the American president has always taken control. The president steps first to the microphone and begins the proceedings. He welcomes guests and foreign counterparts. He frames the issues. He expresses American ambitions, values, and interests.

He acts, in effect, not just as host but also as the boss. No one doubts who is running things.

And he does this all in English. Even if he could speak other languages. (Several presidents have been functional in a variety of languages, including Herbert Hoover in Chinese.) He does this because he is in the United States. We are playing by his home country’s rules.

But yesterday, in every conceivable way, Vladimir Putin was in command.

Putin spoke first, spoke at greater length than Trump, and framed all the issues Russia's way. There's an alpha in the Putin/Trump relationship, and it isn't Trump.

Trump sending the National Guard to D.C.

Last Monday, Trump declared a "crime emergency" in the District of Columbia, proclaiming that "crime is out of control" in DC.

But just last January, DoJ reported that violent crime in DC was at a 30-year low. US News maintains a list of the 25 most dangerous cities in the US, and DC is not on it. (#1 is Memphis. Maybe Trump should take that up with Tennessee's Republican governor. Red states Missouri and Ohio each have three cities on the list.)

That's not to deny that there is crime in DC and crime is bad wherever it is. But the point here isn't to fight crime, it's to

burnish Trump's image as a tough guy who makes forceful decisions and isn't afraid to unleash the military on American citizens
reinforce the false impression that cities governed by Democrats are dangerous
hopefully produce video of National Guardsmen beating up some black or brown people. (Trump's base eats that stuff up.)

What the invasion of DC has produced is overreach that has gotten ridiculed. Sean Charles Dunn, a veteran and former DoJ lawyer, got into a confrontation with a border patrol agent. He yelled obscenities at the agent, and then threw a "sub-style sandwich" at him. He was charged with assaulting a federal officer, a felony.

Referring to Dunn's offense, AG Pam Bondi tweeted:

If you touch any law enforcement officer, we will come after you.

That's really, really hilarious, given Trump's pardon of the people who assaulted police officers with flagpoles and bear spray on January 6. Some of them now work for the Trump administration.

Social media couldn't stop laughing, producing memes like the one above.

The redistricting wars

The Texas Democrats who left the state to deny Republicans a quorum in the legislature are returning today. Presumably the vote on Trump's plans to gain five more House seats via gerrymandering will move forward.

It was never reasonable to expect the Democratic legislators to stay away forever. The Texas legislature is not a full-time job, and these people have lives they need to get back to. Kids are starting school, their other jobs won't stay open forever, they need paychecks, and so on.

What they accomplished with their 15-day walkout was to give Democrats a chance to publicize this attempt to cheat in the 2026 midterms, and make it possible for Gavin Newsom to come up with a counter-plan to redistrict California. The plan depends on a voter referendum to be voted on in November. We'll see if the current state of Democratic anger and commitment can maintain itself until then.

Meanwhile, Governor Newsom has been doing some epic trolling of Trump, issuing threats to redistrict California in Trump's social media style:

DONALD “TACO” TRUMP, AS MANY CALL HIM, “MISSED” THE DEADLINE!!! CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE “BEAUTIFUL MAPS,” THEY WILL BE HISTORIC AS THEY WILL END THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY (DEMS TAKE BACK THE HOUSE!). BIG PRESS CONFERENCE THIS WEEK WITH POWERFUL DEMS AND GAVIN NEWSOM — YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR — THAT WILL BE DEVASTATING FOR “MAGA.” THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! — GN

Stories that should have gotten coverage but didn't

But it's important not to identify all Israelis or all Jews with the Netanyahu government. Something like 400K Israelis protested yesterday, demanding an end to the war.

Pretty much every week, climate change could be in the news much more than it is.

Other things you might find interesting

An appeals court lifted a lower court's order for the Trump administration to restore funding to USAID. It was a 2-1 ruling. The court didn't deal with the underlying question of whether Trump can impound funds appropriated by Congress. It just found that the wrong people sued. An anti-impoundment lawsuit, apparently, needs to come from the Government Accountability Office.

It's easy to brush off Trump's threats to unleash the Justice Department on people like Senator Adam Schiff or former CIA Director John Brennon. He can order investigations, but there's nothing to find and there's still a justice system. So the threat of prison is not serious.

Marcy Wheeler, though, unpacks what a show trial might look like, using the example of John Durham's investigation from Trump's first term. He had nothing and must have known he had nothing, but he garnered a lot of Fox News headlines on his way to losing in court.

and I'll get back to closing segments

I really will. I just ran out of time this week.

Monday, August 11, 2025

False Gods

Treating a state as a god is a very frightening endeavor. It confers upon mortals a level of veneration that we do not deserve and will always abuse.

- Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

This week's featured post is "An Authoritarian Economy is a Bad Economy". As an experiment, I've cross-posted that article on Substack. If you're on Substack, take a minute to comment. As on WordPress, subscription is free.

This week everybody was talking about Trump rigging the 2026 elections

At the moment the standoff in Texas continues: Texas Republicans want to give Trump the five extra congressional seats he wants by redrawing the district boundaries. (I mean, why bother trying to convince voters to support you when you can just rearrange your supporters and get the same result?) Democrats can't vote the proposal down, but do have enough seats to deny Republicans the quorum needed to hold a vote.

If Democratic legislators were in Texas, the state police could hunt them down and drag them to the Capitol. So they've left the state.

Like many observers, I suspect the Democrats can't stay out of Texas forever. In Texas, the legislature is considered a part-time job, and paid accordingly. Most of the Democrats have other jobs that they will eventually lose, or businesses they can't run from a distance. Many have children who will need to start school soon.

So eventually, Trump will get his new map and probably his five seats.

Because Democrats believe in democracy more than Republicans do, most Democratic states can't be as easily gerrymandered or re-gerrymandered as Texas. Governor Newsom has come up with a somewhat bizarre plan to gerrymander California, but we'll see if he can pull it off.

While I sympathize with the urge to fight fire with fire, the gerrymander wars are bad for democracy.

To see why, imagine a state that has 5 congressional districts, each with six voters. In the beginning, every district has 3 Orange voters and 3 Purple voters. Now imagine that we create a sixth district by plucking one Purple voter out of each of the original five.

We still have 30 voters, but now we have five districts with a 3-2 Orange majority and one district with a 5-0 Purple majority. The parties still have 15 voters each, but Orange now gets a 5-1 advantage in its congressional representation.

Now think about what that change does to the internal politics of each district. In the original configuration, each party has three voters. So the only way to get a majority is to get somebody from the other party to cross over. Both parties then are motivated to run candidates as close to the center as possible, or ones who have some other appeal to opposition voters. (Maybe they're just well-known trustworthy folks.)

But in the gerrymandered configuration, Orange's only motivation is to hang on to its base. If it gets all three of its voters to show up, it wins 5 out of 6 districts. Meanwhile, any Purple candidate in the sixth district is a sure winner, so there's no reason not to run the most radical Purple they can find.

Here's the lesson: The more balanced the districts are, the more likely it is that the winners will have cross-party appeal and feel motivated to work across the aisle when they get to Congress. The more gerrymandered districts there are, the more important party loyalty becomes.

Robert Hawks sees the gerrymandering wars as a step in the direction of civil war. Some states have always been redder or bluer than other states, but now states are self-identifying as members of the red or blue team.

In the meantime, Trump has another shortcut planned: Redoing the census so that red states can get more representatives and blue states less.

I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024. People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

As with so many of Trump's executive orders, doing this legally would require a constitutional amendment, because the 14th Amendment says 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."

The word used is "persons", not "citizens" or "legal residents".

The point of all these shenanigans, and the ones undoubtedly still to come, is that Trump knows he's unpopular and that his party will lose any honest election at this point.

and Gaza

The escalation continues:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that his plan to seize control of Gaza City and the remaining sliver of Gaza not already under Israeli control will involve displacing the population and taking control of the entire Gaza Strip.

In other news, Israel targeted and killed a well-known Al Jazeera journalist.

Anas al-Sharif ... one of Al Jazeera’s most recognisable faces in Gaza, was killed while inside a tent for journalists outside al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Sunday night. Seven people in total were killed in the attack, including the Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and the camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa, according to the Qatar-based broadcaster. ... The Israel Defense Forces admitted carrying out the attack, claiming the reporter was the leader of a Hamas cell – an allegation that Al Jazeera and Sharif had previously dismissed as baseless.

This week I read Peter Beinart's new book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I found it to be an excellent analysis of the folly of the policies of the Netanyahu government, as well as the political attitudes that make those policies possible.

The objection I always run into when I try to discuss the Palestine/Israel conflict is "You're not Jewish, so you can't possibly understand." And while there is some truth to that -- nothing in my personal or family background is comparable to the Holocaust -- I can't accept the idea that only Jewish opinions are valid.

Beinart, on the other hand, is Jewish, and is well educated in his religion and its culture. He criticizes Israel's Gaza war, and the Jewish-over-Palestinian supremacy that this war is the culmination of, from the inside. He is aware of the Holocaust, he was deeply affected by the horror of Hamas' October 7 attacks, and he wants to be able to raise his Jewish children in a world where antisemitism (in all its forms) endangers them as little as possible.

And yet he is horrified by what is happening in Gaza, and even more horrified that it is happening in the name of Judaism.

A central message of the book is that Jews need to change the story they tell about themselves. The self-image many Jews have of being history's perpetual victims (and never the victimizers of someone else) has never been true, even within the Jewish tradition itself. He notes that even the Biblical Book of Esther, one of the classic stories of Jews surviving attempted genocide, ends with the Jews themselves killing 75,000 of their enemies. Joshua's conquest of Canaan is quite bloody, with little indication that the Canaanites deserved their fate.

He cuts through many of the myths and fallacies that justify keeping the Palestinians subjugated. Israel's "right to exist", for example, does not imply a right to Jewish supremacy within the state of Israel.

He makes a distinction between Judaism (a religion) and Israel (a state), and argues that criticism of Israel need not imply antisemitism. Conversely, conflating Judaism and Israel makes an idol of the state of Israel. (That's the source of the treating-a-state-as-a-god quote at the top.)

But most importantly, he argues that the current policies are a very bad way to keep Jews safe.

Ziad al-Nakhalah, who at the age of three saw Israel murder his father when it massacred Palestinians in Khan Younis in 1956, currently heads Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel has already killed more than one hundred times as many Palestinians in Gaza in this war as it killed back then. How many three-year-olds will still be seeking revenge sixty-nine years from now?

As I have argued in this blog before, Hamas is not an organization, it is an idea. It embodies Palestinians' urge for revenge and distrust of any possible peace with Israel. No matter how many Hamas militants Israel kills in Gaza, its ranks will be refilled by those who survive when their friends and relatives did not.

Seeing this, Beinart argues that he and his children (and Jews everywhere) are less safe because of the current war. I fear, though, that as realistic as Beinart tries to be, he has missed the full horror of what's going on in Gaza.

Yes, some of the Gazans who survive will hate Israel with an undying passion. But what if there are no survivors? That's where Netanyahu's logic leads.

and Ukraine

Trump is meeting with Putin in Alaska on Friday, with the goal of stopping the Ukraine War that Trump said he could end in 24 hours.

This is a bad idea for any number of reasons. First, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023, accusing him of responsibility for the war crime of kidnapping Ukrainian children. If Putin comes to the US, we should arrest him, not hold a summit meeting with him.

Second, Ukraine is not part of these talks, raising the possibility that Trump and Putin will work out a deal that Trump will then demand Ukraine implement, despite having no role in negotiating it.

Putin comes to the meeting with a "peace" plan that is like all his previous proposals: If Ukraine gives up something real (sovereignty over Ukrainian provinces that Russia doesn't fully occupy), Putin will agree to something ephemeral (a ceasefire he could break at any moment). People throw the Munich analogy around far too often, but this is a case where it really applies: In the Munich agreement of 1938, Czechoslovakia gave up territory to Hitler, only to be totally defenseless when Hitler decided to seize the rest of the country a few months later.

Ukraine's European allies have already supported President Zelensky in rejecting such an agreement.

But the final reason this is a bad idea is that we know what will happen: Whenever Trump meets with Putin, he comes out repeating Putin's talking points. Recently, Trump has made noises about being "disappointed" with Putin's intransigence about Ukraine, but nothing ever comes of his disappointment. He recently let an ultimatum deadline go by without any action.

Putin is the alpha in this relationship and Trump is the beta. That's been true ever since they met in Helsinki in 2018, and Trump came out saying that he trusted Putin's account of events more than that of the US intelligence services. He will come out of Friday's meeting saying that Ukraine needs to give Russia territory, without any guarantees from the US or anybody else that Putin can't just start the war up again as soon as he thinks he can win.

Ukraine will rightly reject this proposal, and then Trump will once again paint Zelensky as the obstacle to peace, returning to where Trump feels most comfortable: by Putin's side.

and you also might be interested in ...

Jay Kuo looks at the cushy offers ICE is making to new recruits, and deduces that they must be having a hard time finding people who want to sign up.

NASA has two satellites specifically devoted to monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- the leading cause of climate change.

NASA staffers who work on these two carbon dioxide monitoring missions have been asked to draw up plans that NASA could use to terminate those missions, and that's according to current and former NASA employees. And if NASA were to put those plans into action, which could happen as soon as early October, one of the missions would likely burn up in the atmosphere, so it would be completely destroyed permanently.

The satellite data also turns out to have other uses.

But these missions can also measure plant growth, which is totally unexpected and super powerful. NASA has turned that into maps that are used for agriculture, like, to predict crop yield. So farmers actually use this information as well, and they rely on it.

There's nothing wrong with the satellites, and the missions they support cost about $15 million a year, a small fraction of what it cost to build the satellites and launch them. The motive to ignore (and in one case destroy) them seems to be that the Trump administration doesn't want us to know how much CO2 is in the atmosphere.

mRNA technology is a huge recent advance in vaccine production. mRNA vaccines are quicker to invent and quicker to produce than standard vaccines. They saved millions of lives worldwide during the Covid pandemic.

But RFK Jr. has decided (for no apparent scientific reason) that they're unsafe. So 22 federal contracts worth half a billion dollars just got cancelled. One of the cancelled contracts is for a bird flu vaccine. If that virus should happen to mutate in a way that spreads human-to-human, we could be in big trouble.

and let's close with something above and beyond

I think I've mentioned the Smithsonian photo contest before, but this week I notice the drone category. This photo, titled "Dragon", is an aerial view of badlands in Utah.

Monday, August 4, 2025

Adapting to Decline

We can expect the governing class to adapt pragmatically to the electorate’s collective decline in rational capacity, for example, by retaining the rituals associated with mass democracy, while quietly shifting key policy areas beyond the reach of a capricious and easily manipulated citizenry.

- Mary Harrington "Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good"

This week's featured post is "Shaping Ourselves", which raises questions about the effect on democracy of a decline in literate culture.

This week everybody was talking about the Mad King's reaction to a bad jobs report

Friday, the July jobs report validated many economists' critiques of Trump's tariff policies. Economists in general don't like tariffs, but Trump's chaotic implementation of them has looked particularly problematic. With so much uncertainty about the future, it seemed, decision-makers would freeze rather than invest in new businesses and new production. The result would be slower growth, if not outright recession.

But until Friday, it was hard to find solid evidence for that prediction. The unemployment rate remained low and GDP numbers looked acceptable. Friday, though, the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- one of those vital-but-boring agencies whose name its workers' mothers probably can't always remember correctly -- put out its monthly jobs report.

Not only was July's job growth anemic -- only 73K jobs, well below expectations -- but the BLS also revised its job-growth estimates for May and June, virtually wiping out all the jobs previously reported. All in all, the total number of jobs was actually 250K less than previously thought. And the turning points were disturbingly close to two events: Trump's election in November and the "liberation day" announcement of his tariff policy in April.

Couple that with recent reports that the inflation rate is climbing again -- slowly maybe, but that's how these things get started -- and the whole Trump economy doesn't look so good.

OK, then, bad news. Administrations get bad news all the time. I'm sure Biden didn't like the inflation reports in 2023. So you send your press secretary out to spin: The numbers don't mean what they appear to mean, you can't read too much into one report, next month will be better, and so on.

But not Donald Trump. He responded by firing the head of the BLS. Don't like the numbers? Fire the top number-cruncher. It's like firing the weatherman because your picnic got rained out. That'll fix it.

More accurately, it's like something Trump did in his first term: Blame rising Covid rates on the availability of tests.

If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.

It's hard to appreciate just how destructive this firing is. All previous administrations, including Trump's first, shared a commitment to independent agencies producing accurate data to the best of their abilities. The rates of inflation and unemployment, the total national debt, current population, crime rates ... they were what they were. Presidential spokespeople might spin those numbers, or critics might grouse about definitions by claiming that the "real" unemployment rate is U-6, rather than the much lower U-3 that gets the headlines.

But the numbers were what they were. Underneath it all was a core assumption that career bureaucrats were trying to get these numbers right. They held their jobs from one administration to the next and they had professional pride. No doubt each of them voted for somebody and had some individual political views, but when they went to the office none of that mattered.

Overall, the United States has benefited tremendously from having an honest and widely respected civil service. Investors, both foreign and domestic, don't have to build an extra risk premium into their decisions to account for their distrust of the government statistics. (When dealing with many other countries -- China, Russia, the third world, etc. -- they do need that extra risk premium.) One reason the world has been content to let the dollar be the fundamental currency of international trade, or to route their own payment systems through our Federal Reserve, is that you could always count on the US to do honest bookkeeping.

Well, Trump threw that all away Friday. The National Association for Business Economics immediately denounced the move:

The National Association for Business Economics (NABE) strongly condemns the baseless removal of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner Erika McEntarfer and the unfounded accusations leveled against the work of the agency. This unprecedented attack on the U.S. statistical system threatens the long-standing credibility of our economic data infrastructure

Business leaders and policymakers depend on reliable, impartial economic data to guide decisions that affect investment, employment, and the health of the economy. The BLS produces these data using transparent, rigorously documented, and scientifically sound methodologies. U.S. economic statistics are regarded as the gold standard worldwide, setting the benchmark for accuracy, transparency, and independence.

Here was Trump's justification:

In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad. ... We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.

In other words, the fired BLS head will be replaced by someone who will cook the books for Trump. Paul Krugman has been anticipating this since before the inauguration.

But why assume that the data will, in fact, remain objective? Imagine that we’re heading into an election and inflation numbers are running at, say, 4 or 5 percent. Do you have any doubts that Trump will insist that the inflation is fake news and pressure the B.L.S. to report better numbers?

To a lot of people, these kinds of worries sounded crazy six months ago. But here we are. Krugman sums up:

It’s one more step on our rapid descent into banana republic status.

and Gaza

It's hard to know what to say about Gaza, because while it is one of the most important things happening in the world, the story is the same week after week: People are starving; Israel has the power to save them but chooses not to.

I sympathize with the Israelis who were traumatized by the October 7 attacks and feel that Hamas must be eliminated at all costs. But here's the problem: Hamas isn't a leader, a group of people, or even an organization. Anything bombs can destroy or soldiers can kill is not Hamas.

Fundamentally, Hamas is an idea: the belief that Israel can't be negotiated with, and that no peaceful solution of the Palestine/Israel conflict is possible. As long as that belief persists among Palestinians, Hamas will always be able to rise from the ashes.

Now imagine the generation growing up in Gaza, watching their parents, siblings, and friends starve to death because Israel prevents them from getting food. Will they someday see Israel as a partner in peace, or imagine themselves living side-by-side with Israelis? Or might they think of Israelis the way that the author of Psalm 137 thought of his own oppressors:

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

I quote this not to incite violence against Israelis, or Jews in the US or elsewhere, but to point out that this kind of reaction is very human. Jews have felt it in the past and Palestinians no doubt are feeling it now.

The Israeli effort to wipe out Hamas is in fact guaranteeing its survival.

and the Smithsonian

Thursday brought an Orwellian moment, when the Washington Post revealed that the Smithsonian had removed mention of Trump's impeachments from an exhibit about the presidency. A Smithsonian spokesperson explained like this:

In reviewing our legacy content recently, it became clear that the ‘Limits of Presidential Power’ section in The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden exhibition needed to be addressed. Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance.

The 2008 version said that only three presidents had faced a serious threat of removal via impeachment: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton.

The statement makes it sound like Trump had nothing to do with this "review of legacy content", but in fact it is a direct response to an executive order Trump issued in March, which targeted the Smithsonian by name for "replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth".

Saturday, the Smithsonian was saying it would update the exhibit to re-include Trump's impeachments "in the coming weeks". We'll see if they manage to do it without provoking another "off with his head" response.

and the Texas gerrymander

By 2024, we seemed to have reached a national balance in terms of congressional gerrymandering: The GOP won a slight victory in the national popular vote, and got a slight majority of House seats for it.

Trump wants to undo that balance. Knowing that his policies are unpopular, he wants to be able to hang onto the Republican House majority even if the voters want something else. So the Trump-enslaved Republican majority in the Texas legislature is trying to vote on a mid-decade redistricting that will give Republicans five more safe seats.

Democrats have responded by leaving the state, in hopes of denying the legislature the quorum necessary to pass laws. (A quorum is 2/3rds of members.) Governor Abbott is threatening to have absent legislators removed from office, which would certainly have to be decided in court. It's not clear to me how long the Democrats would have to stay away to block the redistricting.

Democratic states like New York and California have threatened to retaliate, but considerable legal hurdles are in the way.

and the those trade deals

The NYT has been buying the claim that "Trump is winning his trade war", but it ought to be more skeptical. Last week I told you about Paul Krugman's analysis of the Japan deal, and said that the deal with the EU was too new to analyze. So let's come back to the EU deal.

Krugman sees the deal as mostly nothing: The EU promised to do things it was doing anyway (invest money in the US, buy US products), and there is no enforcement mechanism to make sure it does. The investment, for example, is supposed to come from private companies, which the EU government has no power to coerce. Similarly,

A commitment to spend $250 billion per year on U.S. energy products would also require Europe to triple their annual American energy imports. “Question one is if they need that much, can afford that much,” [William] Reinsch [former president of the National Foreign Trade Council] said. “Question two is if we can even supply that much.”

What Trump got, though, was a headline: He "won". That seems to be all he wants.

and ICE

Reports continue to mount up of masked ICE agents terrorizing people doing nothing wrong. Here, humanitarian aid workers on the border report being harassed. In this video, people videoing ICE are pushed around.

This video appears to be local police beating up anti-ICE protesters on a bridge connecting Cincinnati to Covington, Kentucky. A more detailed report was on CNN and local WLWT. The protest was against the arrest of a Muslim hospital chaplain who was here legally, but had his asylum revoked.

It's hard not to notice the pro-police news slant: Police "clash" with protesters rather than attack them. I can appreciate why local police would want to clear a bridge and get traffic moving again, but once protesters have been moved to the sidewalk, the emergency is over. And continuing to punch people who have already been wrestled to the ground is assault, not law enforcement.

and you also might be interested in ...

People are starting to notice how much damage MAGA Christians are doing to Christianity.

Why don't examples of Trump's loss of mental acuity get covered as intensely as Biden's were?

We begin to see the first fallout from the rescission package Congress passed last week.

First, the direct fallout: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it will shut down after 57 years.

Most CPB staff will be terminated by September’s end, with a small transition team remaining through January 2026 to wind down operations.

The rescission bill zeroed out funding for CPB, which previously had received about a half billion a year, which it distributed mostly to local public TV and radio stations. Most of those individual stations -- especially the ones in big liberal cities like Boston or New York -- will absorb the funding cuts and continue functioning. But CPB has been the main source of funding for many rural stations, which may have to close their doors as well, or sharply curtail their operations.

It's another example of Trump victimizing his own voters.

Rural communities are already hard hit by a lack of community journalism, as one in three US counties do not have a full-time local journalist, according to a July report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News.

The second bit of fallout is more subtle: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is calling for Democrats not to participate in negotiations over the FY 2026 budget until Trump unfreezes money that Congress appropriated for FY2025.

Her demand makes sense, and I hope the rest of the Democratic Party backs her up on this. The budget process is a back-and-forth horse-trading between the two parties, with Democrats generally supplying the last few votes to get bills over the finish line in exchange for protecting programs that they consider important. But if Trump can simply refuse to spend the money, or if congressional Republicans can renege on their deal by passing a rescission on a party-line vote, then the whole process is a charade.

When Elon Musk's DOGE was firing people and closing agencies in the first few months of the Trump administration, two criticisms were obvious:

Cuts to food and medical aid were hard-hearted and short-sighted, because feeding hungry kids and containing disease outbreaks is not "waste", even if the immediate beneficiaries aren't Americans.
Making workers suddenly disappear does not in any way promote "efficiency".

The first criticism has gotten a lot of coverage, with estimates that the DOGE cuts will ultimately be responsible for 14 million deaths. But the Trump administration has largely skated around blame for the second.

This week Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 55-page report that totals up just how much federal money DOGE wasted in its campaign against "waste": around $21.7 billion. Most of the wasted money comes from paying federal workers not to work, including $14.8 billion in the deferred resignation program, which invited federal employees to resign immediately, but get paid through the end of the fiscal year. About 200K feds took that offer. Another $6.1 billion was paid to 100K employees that were put on administrative leave, many of them in agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Notice that these are just the easily totaled costs. We don't know how much work didn't get done or was done badly because the federal workers who remain were demoralized or terrorized. Some people imagine that fear of getting fired will scare lazy workers into action. But if you've ever worked in any kind of office, you know that very little gets done when everyone is trying to figure out where the ax will fall next.

The next cartoon requires some explanation: former football players who believe they are suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) have been known to commit suicide by shooting themselves in the chest, so that their brains can be studied.

The cartoonist (Bill Bramhall) is suggesting that America's gun laws can only be explained by some kind of national brain damage.

and let's close with something foul-mouthed but tasty

Definitely NSFW, like most of Samuel L. Jackson's most memorable stuff. Here, he's advertising Windfarm Seaweed Snacks, made from seaweed cultivated at an offshore wind farm.

Monday, July 28, 2025

Choices

It's alright for you if you run with the pack.
It's alright if you agree with all they do.
If fascism is slowly climbing back,
It's not here yet, so what's it got to do with you?

So close your eyes, stop your ears,
Shut your mouth and take it slow.
Let others take the lead, and you bring up the rear,
And later you can say you didn't know.

- "Song of Choice" by Peggy Seeger

This week's featured post is "'Unitary Executive' is a Euphemism for Tyrant".

The quote above deserves some curation. Peggy Seeger was Pete Seeger's half-sister, and wrote many songs with her husband Ewan McColl. I'm a little sketchy on the exact provenance of "Song of Choice". Some web sites claim McColl was a co-author, and I haven't seen an exact date for it. It appears in a 1992 collection of Seeger's songs, which includes songs that go back as far as 1955. One version included the line "In April they took away Greece", which might refer to a Greek coup in 1967.

I heard the song for the first time Saturday at the Lowell Folk Festival, where it was sung by the Irish band Solas. Its contemporary relevance is obvious.

This week everybody was talking about ...

Oh hell, they were talking about Jeffrey Epstein, but I can't bear to lead with that again.

Let me tell you about a legal victory this week instead: Trump's attempt to undo the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship has lost again in court. This time the loss was in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, one step below the Supreme Court.

This case has wandered through a legal labyrinth, so let's review: One of the first things Trump did after getting sworn in for his second term was to sign an executive order denying the citizenship of any child born in the US if the mother's status within the US was either undocumented or temporary. He was attempting to stretch the one loophole in the 14th Amendment, that birthright citizenship requires that the child be "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, i.e., not born to a foreign diplomat or a sovereign Native American tribe.

No court that has heard this argument has found it credible. Two district courts have rejected it, and it was quickly blocked by a nationwide injunction. The administration appealed not the case itself, but the injunction, and got the Supreme Court to put limits on nationwide injunctions without addressing the citizenship issue itself.

A subsequent judge got around that ruling by declaring the children affected by the order to be a class and issuing an injunction in the class-action lawsuit. Another district judge ruled that only a nationwide injunction could provide relief to the states that filed the lawsuit in his court. The appeals court upheld that injunction Wednesday.

The Trump administration had hoped to sow chaos by limiting injunctions to the jurisdictions where cases had been filed and the states willing to file suit. In red states, then, children of undocumented immigrants could be treated as non-citizens at least until a full resolution of the case by the Supreme Court, and the Court could enable that abuse just by stalling a final decision. But so far that plan is not working.

More good news from the courts: One judge has ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia released on bail pending his criminal case, while another is barring ICE from arresting and deporting him to some random country as soon as he goes free. He's not out yet, but it could actually happen.

Abrego Garcia is the guy the Trump administration sent to their Salvadoran gulag by mistake. They've been trying ever since to avoid admitting that mistake or rectifying it.

and trade deals

Trump's on-again-off-again tariffs are due to come back on Friday, as the 90-deals-in-90-days he envisioned weren't happening. But this week the administration announced deals with both Japan (Wednesday) and the EU (yesterday).

The administration made upbeat claims for both deals, but the actual provisions may be disappointing in practice. It's too soon to grasp what's in the EU deal, but Paul Krugman has had time to look at the Japan deal and find quite a bit less than Trump has claimed.

But why are U.S. manufacturers so upset with the Japan deal? Because in combination with Trump’s other tariffs this deal actually leaves many U.S. manufacturers worse off than they were before Trump began his trade war.

This is clearest in the case of automobiles and automotive products. Trump has imposed a 25 percent tariff on all automotive imports, supposedly on national security grounds. This includes imports from Canada and Mexico. And here’s the thing: Canadian and Mexican auto products generally have substantial U.S. “content” — that is, they contain parts made in America. Japanese cars generally don’t.

But now cars from Japan will pay only a 15 percent tariff, that is, less than cars from Canada and Mexico.

OK, it’s not quite that straightforward, because imports from Canada and Mexico receive a partial exemption based on the share of their value that comes from the United States. Yes, it’s getting complicated. But we may nonetheless now be in a situation where cars whose production doesn’t create U.S. manufacturing jobs will pay a lower tariff rate than cars whose production does.

OK, this is an algebra problem, but not a very hard one: Any car imported from Canada or Mexico with less than 40% US content will face a higher tariff than a Japanese car with no US content. Example: Suppose a Canadian car is 1/5th US parts. That knocks its tariff down by 1/5th, from 25% to 20%. That's higher than the 15% tariff on a Japanese car.

Wait, there’s more. Trump has also imposed 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, which are of course important parts of the cost of a car. Japanese manufacturers don’t pay those tariffs.

Overall, the interaction between this Japan deal and Trump’s other tariffs probably tilts the playing field between U.S. and Japanese producers of cars, and perhaps other products, in Japan’s favor.

And remember reports of a $550 billion investment fund where Japan would supply the money but the US would get 90% of the profits? Not exactly.

and I can't believe the Epstein story still hasn't died

OK, I do have to mention it.

The individual pieces of this story are still getting plenty of coverage, so I won't belabor them. But the big news is that the House of Representatives recessed early so that Republicans in Congress won't have to vote on measures to demand the release of the Justice Department's Epstein files. Individual Republicans are caught between Trump (who apparently has something to hide) and members of their base who have spent years focused on Epstein conspiracy theories.

The creators of the cartoon South Park appear not to be intimidated by Trump. The opening episode of the new season shows him sleeping with Satan, having a tiny penis, and it visits various other indignities on him. Jesus warns the population of South Park that if they don't stop protesting against Trump, they're all going to be cancelled like Colbert.

South Park represents a different comic audience than comedians like Jon Stewart or Seth Meyers. This is more the burn-it-all-down crowd that includes a number of 2024 Trump voters.

The most interesting article I read about the Epstein controversy this week was by Josh Marshall, in a members-only section of TPM. He addressed the question of why pedophilia is special to MAGA. Why do they care so much about bringing Jeffrey Epstein's pedophile friends to justice, when they care not at all about the women Trump has abused, or just about any other victim of a sex crime? His answer is that it is

MAGA’s hyper-focus on pedophilia and sex trafficking conspiracy theories which needs to be emphasized. Because at a basic level, that obsession has nothing to do with pedophilia as a thing in itself — not as most of us might understand it.

The obsession isn't about justice for the victims of pedophilia. In MAGA-world the victims figure barely at all. What matters is the perpetrators, who in the various theories are the elite conspirators running the world and indulging their every whim without consequence.

In the MAGA world, pedophilia isn’t a crime or abuse that needs to be stopped. It is more a legitimating tool which provides a license for cleansing acts of retributive violence and revenge. This is what’s at the end of the story in every far-right/MAGA conspiracy: a wave of eliminationist, cleansing violence led by someone like Trump in which the bad guys, the liberals, the Democrats, the globalist elites, etc etc are wiped out.

... Because pedophilia summons a level of disgust, anger and revulsion that makes the perpetrators seem uniquely inhuman, less than human, people against whom total violence is acceptable and necessary. In other words, these conspiracy theories are systems of thought that provide sanction and legitimation for what you want to do to your enemies. They’re about the enemies. The role of pedophilia in these stories is just a means to an end, making what you want to do with your enemies okay.

and Gaza

Yesterday the WHO reported:

Malnutrition is on a dangerous trajectory in the Gaza Strip, marked by a spike in deaths in July.

Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths in 2025, 63 occurred in July – including 24 children under five, a child over five, and 38 adults. Most of these people were declared dead on arrival at health facilities or died shortly after, their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting.

The crisis remains entirely preventable. Deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.

Meanwhile,

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it would implement a humanitarian pause in several population centers across the Gaza Strip beginning Sunday morning and repeating each day until further notice. On Saturday night, the Israeli Air Force conducted air drops of food into Gaza. Jordan and the United Arab Emirates began air drops on Sunday, with more expected in the coming days.

100 aid trucks are reported to have entered Gaza Sunday. But CNN describes this as a "trickle" that is not adequate to resolve the food crisis.

I keep seeing arguments that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. The NYT's Bret Stephens quotes the UN Convention on Genocide's definition, and basically argues that if Israel intended to kill all the Palestinians, they'd be doing a much better job of it.

I want to point this much out to anybody thinking of making a similar case: When you start consulting the exact definition, you've lost the moral high ground. Let me make an analogy: Suppose you just got back from a business trip that also included some attractive colleague. Your spouse accuses you of being unfaithful, and you respond "Define unfaithful."

You're not helping yourself by making that case.

and you also might be interested in ...

How far away does Trump have to go to run away from his troubles? Scotland wasn't far enough.

Nashville is having its 27th straight day of 90-degree temperatures, with heat index predictions as high as 110 on Tuesday and Wednesday. But carry on; nothing to see here; global warming is a hoax.

During the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles,

The justice department has charged at least 26 people with “assaulting” and “impeding” federal officers and other crimes during the protests over immigration raids. Prosecutors, however, have since been forced to dismiss at least eight of those felonies, many of them which relied on officers’ inaccurate reports, court records show.

The justice department has also dismissed at least three felony assault cases it brought against Angelenos accused of interfering with arrests during recent immigration raids, the documents show.

The problem seems to be that federal officers lied in their official reports.

One DHS agent accused a protester of shoving an officer, when footage appeared to show the opposite: the officer forcefully pushed the protester.

Here's another example of that. But maybe the point of these arrests isn't to get convictions.

“It seems this is a way to detain people, hold them in custody, instill fear and discourage people from exercising their first amendment rights,” [former state prosecutor Cristine Soto] DeBerry said.

and let's close with something satirical

The great satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer died Saturday at the age of 97. Here's a video of him performing in Norway, probably sometime in the 1960s.

Monday, July 21, 2025

Fear Itself

There is a terrifying amount of hate in our country, yes. But there is far more fear. Hate is the end of a conversation. Fear isn’t always. I’ve been on the lookout for moments when an honest and respectful conversation might reach the root of someone else’s fear.

- Andrea Gibson "Post-Election Letter to a Friend"

This week's featured post is "Yes, he does think you're stupid".

This week everybody was still talking about Jeffrey Epstein

The featured post discusses how to take advantage of the strife in MAGA World.

The Onion had two articles that lampooned what's been happening these last two weeks:

"MAGA Voter Drills Hole Into Skull To Relieve Sudden Doubts About Trump".

And "Elderly Woman Keeps Mind Active Justifying Trump’s Actions".

“I’m developing new neural pathways each time I shrug off Trump’s clear violations of the Constitution and his total contempt for our system of checks and balances. You know, I have some friends who didn’t spend time rationalizing Trump’s actions, and they ended up in nursing homes.”

Meanwhile, Some Trump pronouncements are so detached from reality they seem like Onion articles even when they're legit. Like this Truth Social post:

The Washington “Whatever’s” should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.

which was quickly followed by a threat:

My statement on the Washington Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way. I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original “Washington Redskins,” and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, “Washington Commanders,” I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington.

That's delusional world he lives in: Native Americans were honored by the Redskins and Indians. Those teams should change their names back out of respect.

Oh, and the Indians being "one of the six original baseball teams" is another delusion.

The concept of an “original six” does not exist in baseball, though it does in ice hockey. The Cleveland MLB team currently known as the Guardians began play in the late 1800s in a league with eight teams, before becoming one of the eight charter members of the modern American League in 1901. Like most baseball teams, the franchise has undergone numerous moves and moniker changes. Since arriving in Cleveland in 1900, the team was known as the Lakeshores (for one year), Bluebirds (in 1901), Broncos (in 1902), Naps (from 1903-1914), and Indians (from 1915-2021).

and the rescission vote

Congress passed a rescission package to take back $9 billion it had already appropriated. The bill defunds NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It also OKs foreign aid cuts Trump was already making. The bill passed with zero Democratic votes. But with only two Republican defectors in each house, it had enough support to get through.

This bill is bad on two levels: Taken as a unique event, it cuts stuff that ought to be funded. But viewed from a higher perspective, it also creates a precedent that will make the next government shutdown much harder to avoid.

Let's start with public broadcasting, which loses $1.1 billion. This is another example of congressional Republicans abusing their own voters. People like me, who live near a big blue city like Boston, will barely notice. WGBH and WBUR get a lot of contributions from their listeners as well as grants from local foundations. They'll be inconvenienced by the loss of federal money, but they'll get by. Ditto for WNYC in New York, WHYY in Philadelphia, and KQED in San Francisco.

But if you live in Trump Country -- rural Kansas, say -- you're going to see a real difference.

Public media advocates say it is these local stations, particularly the ones in rural areas like Smoky Hills PBS, that will bear the brunt of the federal funding cuts. Aside from the potential job losses, they say it would also mean less information distributed to an already-underserved population, less coverage of popular local events such as high school wrestling and less attention to day-to-day life in rural America.

Then there's foreign aid. The rescission package zeroes out USAID, which had already had its appropriation blocked by DOGE. Politico reports:

Nearly 800,000 mpox vaccine doses the U.S. government had promised to donate to African countries experiencing an outbreak of the rash-causing disease cannot be shipped because they’re expiring in less than six months, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

And The Atlantic adds:

Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.

The Economist draws the obvious conclusion: These cuts are "a gift for China as it vies with America for soft-power supremacy".

As you consider all this, remember that the Big Beautiful Bill set aside $170 billion to support Trump's mass deportation policy, including $45 billion to build concentration camps. Republicans justified their vote for the rescissions by describing the $9 billion of cuts as "a small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue".

When we're saving lives or making sure kids can see Sesame Street or competing with China for influence in Africa, we have a spending problem. But there's always plenty of money for cruelty.

Now we come to the broader perspective. The appropriations being rolled back are part of the bipartisan deal that prevented a government shutdown in March. With majorities in Congress being as narrow as they've been in recent years, we have these kinds of deals every year or two.

Now, how can the Democrats ever do a deal like this again? A bipartisan spending bill typically contains some provisions that either party doesn't like; you allow spending you don't want here in order to get the spending you do want there. But now imagine that Republicans can take that deal, and then pass a rescission package to roll back every plum Democrats got in exchange for their votes. There is no deal that the minority party can make the majority uphold.

The next fiscal year starts on October 1. Expect to see some chickens come home to roost.

and Stephen Colbert

CBS announced that when Stephen Colbert's contract ends next May, that will be the end not just of Colbert's role at CBS, but of The Late Show, which David Letterman established in 1993.

"This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” read the statement. “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.

No one is buying that. Yes, it's true that late-night TV in general has seen its ratings decline in recent years. But Colbert's Late Show still leads the competition by a wide margin. Some kind of reorganization might be warranted, and maybe Colbert's next contract shouldn't be as lucrative is the current one. But finances dictated the end of the show? Not believable.

Vox explains the background:

Paramount Global is currently attempting to merge with Skydance Media, and company leadership has been acting as though they are concerned that President Donald Trump might try to block the merger. Earlier this month, CBS and 60 minutes announced a $16 million settlement in its lawsuit with Trump over the editing of a segment about former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris — an extraordinary concession for a media company in a case that experts agree CBS would have likely won in court.

The apparent legal settlement, in other words, was actually a bribery/extortion situation. Colbert said as much on the air:

I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: It's "big fat bribe".

Two days later, Colbert was told his show was cancelled.

On Truth Social, Trump took a victory lap.

I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.

(Greg Gutfeld hosts Fox News' pathetic attempt at news-related comedy. The "moron on NBC" is Jimmy Fallon. When Trump criticized Kimmel's hosting of the 2024 Oscars on Truth Social, Kimmel famously read the tweet on-air and responded: "Isn't it past your jail time?")

Trump isn't the only one who sees this event as the first of many. Mother Jones writes:

[T]he end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide. Though his second term has already produced a string of stunning capitulations by some of the most powerful forces in the country, one could argue that Trump’s attacks had yet to take down our actual culture. I’m talking about the literal content we consume—the television, art, movies, literature, music—no matter how much Trump complained. That it remained protected and free-willed, a rare area of control for a public that otherwise feels powerless to take action. Clearly, that was magical thinking. If this can happen to Colbert and a storied franchise, this can happen to anyone.

but I want to talk about Andrea Gibson

After my wife's memorial service in January, the comment I heard most often -- practically from everybody -- was: "I never appreciated what an interesting person she was." In a self-centered way, I was gratified to hear those words, because I had designed the service to evoke precisely that response. I had recruited speakers from every corner of her life, and not even I knew what all of them would say.

But on the other hand, that comment made me sad. Because it's such a waste that even our close friends know us so poorly, and often we don't really meet someone until we gather together to mark their death.

Well, this week I experienced that sorrow from the other side: I had never heard of Andrea Gibson until she died Monday, which started her poems bouncing around social media.

Rummaging through Andrea's substack "Things That Don't Suck", I was struck by how well her "Post-Election Letter to a Friend" holds up nine months later.

I understand why so many people are sharing what they think we should be feeling right now. Though there is love at the heart of that demand, there is no such thing as a moral emotion. No one owes the world their misery. What we owe is our active participation in finding creative and compassionate paths forward. Every activist I have ever known who believed they owed the world their unhappiness has burned out. If we consciously fuel our joy, if we put our attention on the world’s beauty, we will have far more strength and stamina to show up to the world’s pain.

We need stamina. The 73 million people who voted for Trump appear to be more energized than ever. And it’s clear to me that the narrative that every Trump voter is “ignorant and hateful” is hurting our movements. 95% of our marginalized friends have at least one family member they deeply trust who voted for Trump this year. Most people, regardless of how they are voting, believe they are voting for a better world. There is a terrifying amount of hate in our country, yes. But there is far more fear. Hate is the end of a conversation. Fear isn’t always. I’ve been on the lookout for moments when an honest and respectful conversation might reach the root of someone else’s fear.

I will try to hold that in mind as I run into Trumpists. Maybe trying to figure out what they're afraid of is a more productive path than meeting anger with anger and hate with hate.

That quote reminded of this one from the Sufi poet Hafiz.

Dear ones,
Beware of the tiny gods frightened men
Create
To bring an anesthetic relief
To their sad
Days.

Trump is exactly that: a tiny god made from his followers' fear of the world that is coming to be. The pervasive cruelty of his movement is fear dressed up to deny fear: "We can't be afraid, because we have made other people fear us."

The masked ICE agent is the perfect symbol of MAGA: afraid to show his face, but trying to strike fear into others. They have the guns, the body armor, and sometimes the Marines to back them up, but no courage of their own.

And then there's this, from Gibson's poem "My Dog Knew I had Cancer Before I Did":

“lifespan” is a word I no longer use to measure length––but width. “How wide can my heart open to this life, to this world, and to everyone in it?” feels like a far more important question now than, “How long will I live?”

More than one of my friends is dying right now. I don't think I can do anything to lengthen their lives, but maybe I can still widen them a little.

and you also might be interested in ...

Trump seems to have an uncanny knack for finding the wrong side of every issue.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro used to be president, and was sometimes described as Brazil's Trump. He had a similar disdain for democracy, and when Brazilians voted him out in 2022 (just as Americans voted Trump out in 2020), his supporters stormed the seat of government, much as Trump supporters did on January 6.

Unlike the US, Brazil is holding Bolsonaro to account. He is currently on trial for his role in the coup attempt.

Recently, Trump has been trying to interfere with that trial. He threatened Brazil with 50% tariffs if they didn't end Bolsonaro's trial. This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio withdrew US visas from judges in Bolsonaro's trial.

Writing on X, Rubio said he had ordered visa revocations for the judge leading the investigation into Bolsonaro, Alexandre de Moraes, as well as “his allies on the court” and their family members.

So that's where we are: We're trying to interfere in the legal processes of the second-biggest democracy in the Western hemisphere, to the point of threatening sanctions against the family members of judges.

ProPublica analyzed hospital-discharge data from Texas.

After Texas made performing abortions a felony in August 2022, ProPublica found, the number of blood transfusions during emergency room visits for first-trimester miscarriage shot up by 54%. The number of emergency room visits for early miscarriage also rose, by 25%, compared with the three years before the COVID-19 pandemic — a sign that women who didn’t receive D&Cs initially may be returning to hospitals in worse condition, more than a dozen experts told ProPublica.

The problem: A dilation and curettage procedure (D&C) is the safest way to clear the uterus of a woman who has had an early miscarriage. But a miscarriage followed by a D&C looks a lot like an abortion, and doctors don't want to be exposed to prosecution under the new law.

The data mirrors a sharp rise in cases of sepsis — a life-threatening reaction to infection — ProPublica previously identified during second-trimester miscarriage in Texas.

Blood loss is expected during early miscarriage, which usually ends without complication. Some cases, however, can turn deadly very quickly. [Dr. Elliott] Main [a hemorrhage expert and former medical director for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative] said ProPublica’s analysis suggested to him that “physicians are sitting on nonviable pregnancies longer and longer before they’re doing a D&C — until patients are really bleeding.”

ProPublica also examined RFK Jr.'s latest avenue to attack vaccines. Back in the 1980s, Congress established the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It's a no-fault insurance program that covers the rare injuries caused by vaccines, and it's funded by a 75-cent tax on each disease a shot is supposed to protect against. It compensates victims quickly without going through the ordinary system of lawsuits, and it shields vaccine manufacturers from more costly awards in court.

Kennedy is overhauling the system, and may do so in ways that break it. For example, if he adds autism to the list of automatically covered injuries, the trust fund that pays compensation will quickly go bankrupt. Kennedy keeps saying that vaccines cause autism, despite the fact that this theory has been studied exhaustively and has been refuted every time.

If the fund goes bankrupt and cases go back to the regular tort system, vaccine manufacturers may simply pull out of the US market. That was the problem the VICP was designed to solve.

Paul Krugman:

Democrats have indeed moved a bit to the left on economic issues in recent years. But they’re hardly extremists. They’re basically a lot like a European Social Democratic party. Republicans, however, are extremists. The whole party has raced to the right into what amounts to full-on fascism.

If that last statement has you reaching for the smelling salts, ask yourself, what more evidence do you need? Do we have to wait until a Republican administration creates a masked secret police force that snatches people off the streets and starts building concentration camps? Wait, that has already happened.

and let's close with a moment of schadenfreude

It's hard to explain what's so satisfying about this incident: The CEO and HR manager of the software company Astronomer were cuddling at a Coldplay concert in Boston's Gillette Stadium when the kiss-cam put them on the big screen. They didn't notice immediately, but when they did, the HR manager covered her face with her hands and the married-to-somebody-else CEO tried to sink into the ground. As so often happens, the cover-up is worse than the crime: Their horrified reaction to being caught together made the video go viral. Anybody who wasn't supposed to see it has certainly seen it by now.

Reportedly, Astronomer had a policy against employees dating, which the HR manager should have been familiar with. The CEO has subsequently resigned.