The Weekly Sift: August 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.

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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.