Monday, March 9, 2026

Unfavorable Winds

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

- Seneca, "Moral Letters to Lucilius"
first century AD

This week's featured post is "Can Democrats compete for Christianity?"

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. Trump continues to lose in court. I'll try to do a round-up next week.
  • Climate change. Trump killed a report on the health of nature in the US, but the researchers released it anyway.
  • Ukraine. Ukraine is offering us anti-drone tech for our war with Iran. Russia is offering Iran targeting information on our forces. So Trump lowered sanctions on Russian oil. No wonder Adam Kinzinger wonders what Putin has on Trump.
  • Epstein. Miami Herald: "Three FBI interviews that contain graphic sexual and physical assault allegations against President Donald Trump were released Thursday by the Justice Department." If the purpose of attacking Iran was to make Epstein go away, it's not working.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about the Iran War

When I wrote last week, the war had only just started and it was hard to know what was happening. So I focused on the Trump regime's lack of preparation: The first lesson of our defeat in Vietnam was that a long-term war effort would fail without popular support. So any war but the briefest needs to be preceded by marshaling public opinion at home. George W. Bush did nearly everything else wrong in Iraq, but that part he understood. Conversely, Trump had done virtually nothing to explain why we needed to attack Iran.

At the time it was still plausible that there was a clear reason, but we weren't being told what it was. This week it became apparent that there is no explanation for why we attacked Iran. Or at least there is no explanation that connects clear national goals with some likely outcome of this war. For several days Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth contradicted each other and sometimes themselves. It was about nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles or regime change or freedom for the Iranian people or punishing evil or making the world safe for Israel or remaking the Middle East or some other thing that you would hear about one day but not the next. The war would be short or maybe long or maybe something in between.

Eventually it came down to this: We attacked Iran because Trump had a "feeling" or a "hunch" that this was the right thing to do. And the war will last "until we decide it's over". Josh Marshall seems to be to have this right:

If the goal of your military action is clear, your exit strategies should be straightforward. Indeed, you shouldn’t need a ‘strategy’ at all. When your goals or met you’re done and you leave. ... This war is probably just about Donald Trump being in charge. That’s not a clear or definable goal. It leaves the initiative in the hands of whoever currently controls the Iran state and military. It’s a recipe for unclarity.

Here are the most insightful takes on the war I've seen:

James Fallows' "The Arrogance of Ignorance". He's been reporting on war and the military since the1980s, and boils the lessons we should have learned during that time, but haven't, into five points.

  • "How does this end?" That's the question to ask before you begin.
  • The importance of morale and moral factors. Your side needs to believe that you are right and your cause is just.
  • The memories a war creates will persistent for decades. Iranians still remember 1953, when the US engineered a coup to topple the elected government and install the tyrannical Shah.
  • What if the war comes home? Even a country that is dominant militarily can be vulnerable to terrorism.
  • Leadership matters. Fallows drives this point home with the following juxtaposition of photos: George Marshall and Pete Hegseth.

[T]hink of the clowns and posturers who now have the controls. They don’t know what they don’t know. They have no idea what they are unleashing. It took years for the United States to get into its quagmire in Vietnam. It took many months to prepare the groundwork for the disaster in Iraq. These people have changed the world, for the worse, in just nine days. And none of us knows how it will end.

"The Epic Miscalculations of Trump and Khamenei" by Karim Sadjadpour points out how hard it was for either man to understand the other.

One leader views the world as a transactional playground where everything is for sale, while the other views his own survival as a world-historic necessity, regardless of the ruin it brings to his people.

Trump really has only two methods of trying to influence people: He buys them off or he intimidates them. He does not understand people who act out of values deeper than greed or fear (which is why he gets so frustrated with "the Deep State", i.e., government workers who believe in the mission of their agency). And he is fundamentally incapable of forming a shared understanding of the situation and arriving at a win/win solution.

Khamenei, on the other hand, did not want money and welcomed the prospect of martyrdom. So none of Trump's levers could move him. Quite possibly, Trump won't do any better moving Khamenei's successor, his son.

Marcy Wheeler looks at how the NYT and other mainstream publications indulge Trump's fantasies of omnipotence.

The most irksome reporting, however, is the response to Trump’s promise, on the fourth day of this war, that he will jerry-rig a program to ensure the “FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD ... as soon as possible.”

His "program" is an order to the US Development Financing Corporation to offer risk insurance to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz "at a very reasonable price. Wheeler points out that such a program would take time to set up and funding from Congress. Maybe it could work if somebody had thought of it months ago and had it ready to implement as soon as the first bomb dropped.

But Politico covers this as if Trump's tweet had already created this program in a "Fiat lux!" sort of way. Clearly the world sees through this: That's why the price of a barrel of oil has jumped from below $60 in January to over $100 today.

It was the US, not Israel, and not the Iranians themselves (as Trump claimed) who blew up the girls school in Iran.

The Times has identified the weapon seen in the new video as a Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon that neither the Israeli military nor the Iranian military has. Dozens of Tomahawks have been launched by U.S. Navy warships into Iran since Feb. 28, when the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran began.

James Fallows commends the NYT for reporting this straight rather than watering it down to please Trump.

Not "appears to contradict" or "is at odds with" or "may give rise to suspicions that." Flat out: "Contradicts." "Video shows." About the US blowing up a school full of little girls.

I'm not sure who started this meme:

If your pastor is telling you that murdering Iranians will hasten the return of Jesus, you’re not a church member. You’re a cult member.

and the primaries

The flashy news from Tuesday's primaries in Texas, Arkansas, and North Carolina was the Texas Senate race. (Complete primary calendar here.) James Talerico defeated Jasmine Crockett on the Democratic side, while Republican incumbent John Cornyn goes to a run-off with Ken Paxton.

Turning Texas blue is a longstanding dream of the Democrats. The hope is that Texas follows the California model: Republican hostility to the growing Hispanic population eventually makes the state unwinnable for them. So far it hasn't happened. Beto O'Rourke got within three points of Ted Cruz in 2018, but so far that has been the high-water mark. (Cruz beat Colin Allred in 2024 by 6.5%.)

This race was interesting from both sides. Cornyn and Paxton have waged a nasty and expensive campaign, and unless Trump forces one of them to drop out -- he's been making noises -- the run-off is likely to be even nastier and more expensive. Paxton is the more true-blue MAGA, but is a scandal machine. The Texas House passed 20 articles of impeachment against him in 2023, mostly focusing on misuse of his office and bribery, but the Senate didn't convict him. Last year, his wife of 38 years filed for divorce "on biblical grounds". His legal problems go back to 2008, and he appears to have never held an office he didn't misuse for personal gain.

Talerico is a Presbyterian seminarian who speaks the language of religion comfortably without compromising progressive positions on the major issues. I discuss what this might mean for the nation in the featured post.

Give Crockett credit for offering a timely and complete concession to Talerico. The only way Democrats pull this off is if they stay united. Crockett showed the kind of class that used to be standard, but is rare these days.

One of the winners in Texas was Rep. Tony Gonzalez who, despite being married with six children, pressured a staffer into an affair; she later committed suicide by setting herself on fire. Fortunately for Republicans, party leadership is wiser than Gonazlez' voters: They forced Gonzalez out on Thursday, but want him to serve out his term because they have such a small margin in the House. (Moral considerations only go so far. Power is more important.)

Prior to his withdrawal, Gonzalez provided a lesson in how Republican Christianity works. Here, Gonzalez admits to the affair, but assures the voters that it's all fine now.

I have reconciled with my wife Angel, I've asked God to forgive me (which He has), and my faith is as strong as ever.

What the staffer's family thinks is not worth mentioning.

I love the "which He has." Not "I believe He has" or "I trust He has" or "My faith tells me He has." Just "He has."

How convenient a powerful man must find it, to believe in a God who lets you speak for Him. And once God had spoken (through Rep. Gonzalez), what voter would dare not to forgive him too? No wonder Gonzalez' faith has remained strong, probably just as strong as it was when he was screwing his staff.

You see this over and over in Republican circles: We do far worse things than Democrats do, but God forgives us and not them. God, in His mysterious ways, works through flawed men like Donald Trump, but not through far better men like Barack Obama.

Republican Christianity is a very convenient religion. I recommend it to powerful-but-amoral people everywhere.

and Noem

Kristi Noem finally lost her job as Homeland Security Secretary, but not for of the reasons you might expect. It wasn't that her agents murdered two people in Minneapolis, or that she blatantly lied about it. It wasn't because DHS under her leadership routinely ignored court orders. It wasn't that she had DHS buy a $70 million luxury jet under the guise of "deportations", but really for her own use.

An executive jet the Department of Homeland Security has told the White House’s Office of Management and Budget it needs for immigrant deportation flights and Cabinet officials’ travel features a bedroom with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen TVs and even a bar, according to images of the aircraft obtained by NBC News.

I can't quite imagine who we'd want to deport in that kind of luxury. But that is just corruption; you can't get fired for that in this administration.

It also wasn't because of her barely-hidden affair with underling Cory Lewandowski. (They're both married.) And it wasn't even because she wasted $220 million of DHS money on TV ads that seem aimed more at raising her name recognition and personal profile than any legitimate DHS purpose.

The ad campaign did indirectly lead to her downfall, but only because she passed the buck to Trump.

During a congressional hearing this week, Ms. Noem was asked if Mr. Trump had approved a $200 million-plus government ad campaign in which she was prominently featured. Ms. Noem said Mr. Trump had tasked her with “getting the message out to the country.” Asked if Mr. Trump had signed off on the campaign before the ads aired, Ms. Noem responded, “We had that conversation, yes, before I was put in this position and sworn in and confirmed. And since then as well.”

That's Rule #1 in the Trump regime: Nothing is the Boss' fault.

You can now add a third covered-up murder to Noem's tally: We now have video showing that Ruben Ray Martinez was not trying to run over an ICE agent when he was shot nearly a year ago. Like Rene Good and Alex Pretti, Martinez was a US citizen.

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The February jobs report was terrible: Nonfarm payrolls fell by 92K workers. It's a mistake to read too much into any single month's report, but the trend over the last year is not looking good. And things are not likely to improve now that oil prices are soaring.

The British medical journal The Lancet unloads on RFK Jr.'s first year in office, which it characterizes as "1 year of failure".

Cutting-edge discoveries and clinical investigations—on subjects ranging from mRNA vaccines to diabetes and dementia—are denied crucial resources while junk science and fringe beliefs are elevated without justifiable explanation. ... Kennedy has continued to spread misinformation and push politicised agendas at the expense of the country's most vulnerable. When called to account for his decisions by Congress, he has been evasive and combative. The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.

When you're trying to predict the outcome of some misguided policy, don't forget to figure in how it will interact with other misguided policies. Now measles have broken out inside one of Trump's concentration camps.

This is discouraging. A 25-country survey by Pew Research asks whether your fellow citizens' morals are very good, somewhat good, somewhat bad, or very bad. US citizens showed the least trust in each other, with only 47% rating fellow citizens as very or somewhat good. No other country was under 50%, and Canada was the most trusting at 92%.

With so many substantive reasons to denounce Trump, I don't like to focus on his symbolic outrages. But when he attended the return of the coffins of the first six American troops to die in the Iran War -- known to the military as the "dignified transfer" and considered a solemn ritual -- he wore a white USA golf hat that he sells on his website.

Fox News apparently realized how bad this was, because they "inadvertently" deceived their viewers to cover for him. Instead of showing the actual footage, they replayed video from a dignified transfer in December when he wasn't wearing a hat.

The next time someone asks why you don't like Trump, show them this 6 1/2 minute video from Dean Withers. He goes through Trump's character, domestic policies, and foreign policies in an amazing amount of detail.

Thursday, Alabama is scheduled to execute Sonny Burton. Burton was involved in a 1991 robbery in which someone got killed. He was not the shooter. The shooter has already died in prison. He's 75, and the victim's daughter has asked for clemency. Will Governor Ivey intervene?

and let's close with something anachronistic

What if "Staying Alive" had been done in the 1500s as a four-part madrigal?

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Monday, March 2, 2026

Stop Asking

Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US government's intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory. He has made the national interest entirely personal.

- Phillips P. OBrien

This week's featured post is "Why this? Why now?"

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. The Iran attack further undermines the role of Congress in our democracy. But congressional Republicans seem content to watch their institution fade into irrelevance.
  • Epstein. From the beginning, I've been in denial about the depth and persistence of this scandal. It's not going away. So I'm moving it onto the Ongoing list.
  • Climate change. My limited attention didn't spot anything this week.
  • Gaza. The US has opened two consular offices in West Bank settlements that past administrations of both parties have deemed illegal.
  • Ukraine. Ukraine seems to have survived the "battle of winter", gaining more territory than it lost during February.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about the attack on Iran

In the featured post I focus on how little Trump seems to care about either Congress' approval or the public's.

and the State of the Union

In past years I've often devoted a featured post to analyzing the State of the Union, but this one doesn't deserve that kind of attention. Ordinarily, a president whose party controlled Congress would list things he wants Congress to do in the coming year, and use his public platform to build popular support behind those proposals. But Trump views himself as a dictator, so he didn't bother to ask Congress for much of anything -- not even for approval of the Iran attack that was undoubtedly already in the works.

The one noteworthy thing is a speculative theme I've seen in several places, notably from David Frum in The Atlantic: Trump has now broken the State of the Union tradition so badly that Democrats should put an end to it if they hold the House majority next year.

Lots of people think the State of the Union address is mandated by the Constitution, but in fact it isn't. Here's the relevant text:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient

Notice: no set schedule and no requirement for an in-person speech. Washington and Adams did speak to Congress on a more-or-less annual basis, usually sometime in early December. Jefferson began sending written messages instead, a practice that continued until Woodrow Wilson revived the in-person speech in 1913.

If you look at old state-of-the-union messages, they are not political speeches. What they resemble instead are the reports corporate presidents send to their boards of directors: This is what your government has been doing this last year and what we plan to do in the coming year. They aren't full of well-crafted phrases and soaring rhetoric. But they did have policy announcements: James Monroe announced the Monroe Doctrine in the 1823 SOTU.

The first SOTU broadcast over radio was Calvin Coolidge's in 1923. The first televised SOTU was by Harry Truman in 1947. Broadcasting changed the nature of the speech, turning it into an address to the nation rather than a message to Congress. Now it's an annual pageant for the president to try to whip up support.

This year's address was shameful, as so many of Trump's speeches are. It was full of lies, way too long, and insulting to the Democrats in Congress. It contained no proposals of substance. It's sole point was that Americans should love Trump and hate his enemies.

Before the speech, Democrats debated among themselves about whether to attend or boycott. Why subject yourself to two hours of lies and insults? I "boycotted" in the sense that I had better things to do with two hours of my life. (I scanned the transcript.)

Here's the piece of the SOTU ritual that Trump has forgotten and needs to be reminded of: He is not the master of this event; he is a guest of the Speaker of the House. He comes in response to an invitation. Guests should act with a certain decorum. In particular, they should not gratuitously insult their hosts.

The Democrats are widely expected to regain the House majority in the fall. So when it's time for the 2027 SOTU, the Speaker may be a Democrat like Hakeem Jeffries. He should not invite Trump to come speak in person. Trump should not be invited back at all until he pledges to behave as a guest should.

and ICE

Every week, more horror stories.

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a refugee from Burma who was nearly blind, died after Border Patrol agents took him into custody, determined that they couldn't hold him, and then abandoned him outside a closed Tim Horton's franchise on a freezing-cold night in Buffalo. His family (who put up fliers asking if anyone had seen him) wasn't told about his release or where to find him. His body was found five days later.

A Nashville man who was in this country legally and had a work permit was stopped, had his windows broken, and was taken away. His wife says he showed the agents his papers but they didn't care.

The Portland Press Herald has found 35 Maine residents (out of the 206 swept up by ICE in the recent Operation Catch of the Day) who have been arrested and detained, but were then released by immigration judges who found that the government had no reason to hold them. Many of them have done nothing wrong.

[South Portland resident Evaristo] Kalonji’s name was on ICE’s target list even though the agency knew he had no criminal record, according to notes the government submitted in court that were viewed by the Press Herald. He said he had left his native Angola, completed an ardous journey up through the Americas and arrived in California a few years ago. He presented himself at the border, he said, then applied for asylum, so the Department of Homeland Security knew he was here.

He spent weeks in custody, paid a $3000 bond, and was released back into the same situation he was abducted from: He's living with his family and working while he waits for his next asylum hearing.

“People were held in detention facilities for weeks for an immigration judge to essentially find that they were not a danger or a flight risk and should be released,” said Jenny Beverly, an immigration attorney in Portland and a former immigration judge. “That tells me that the arrests were needless to begin with.”

Being in detention meant Kalonji and others missed paychecks. Some lost their jobs. Their families and friends scrambled to raise money to continue to pay their bills, to pay bond, while waiting anxiously for news.

Here's what grinds on me: The Maine detainees were brought to a detention facility in Burlington, Massachusetts -- the next town over from where I live. The site was built to be a temporary processing center, but has turned into an overcrowded jail where people spend weeks or months under "inhumane" conditions. I've protested outside this facility, which is a quick walk from the popular Burlington Mall, with its Nordstrom's and Victoria's Secret. (Mall police chase away protesters who try to use the mall's parking.) But those of us who live nearby have no way of knowing what goes on inside.

You may feel like all this Gestapo activity is far away from you. But it probably isn't.

Politico tells the inside story of Minnesota officials dealing with Trump's crackdown, and what lessons they have for other cities.

and Epstein

So now Bill and Hillary Clinton have both testified before the House Oversight Committee that is investigating the Epstein files. Reportedly, they answered every question. Both denied wrongdoing, and Hillary said she had never met Jeffrey Epstein, although she did know Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.

There is way more evidence linking Trump to Epstein than either of the Clintons. So why isn't he testifying?

and deadly AIs

The Pentagon was negotiating a contract to use Anthropic's AI app Claude, a competitor of ChatGPT. They hit a snag when Anthropic wanted the contract to ban Claude "being used for the mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons with no humans involved".

That demand didn't just result in Anthropic losing the contract, but being declared a "supply chain risk", which would blacklist the company from just about any government work. Axios says this designation is "usually reserved for companies from adversarial countries, such as Chinese tech giant Huawei".

The future is not working out the way Isaac Asimov pictured. Sticking to his three laws of robotics will get you punished.

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Florida is making it virtually impossible to teach introductory sociology at their state universities.

In 2023 the Florida Legislature passed a bill that bans curriculum at state-funded schools that supposedly teaches identity politics or diversity, equity and inclusion, or that suggests racism, sexism and other forms of oppression are embedded in American institutions.

You might wonder what kind of sociology textbook Florida professors could find that stays clear of all that. Well, Florida has made its own.

Florida’s new 267-page sociology textbook is an abbreviated version of the 669-page free and open-source “Introduction to Sociology 3e” and excludes chapters not just on race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality — the usual targets — but also on media and technology, global inequality and social stratification.

The word "racism" appeared 115 times in the original textbook, but just six times in the censored version. Sociology Professor Robyn Autry comments:

Because sociology aims to better understand “today’s most divisive issues,” it’s hard to imagine how any sociology course, especially an introductory one, can be taught without delving into topics that have been censored. And that appears to be the point for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies on the board of governors. It’s rational to conclude that they don’t want sociology taught at all, and that it’s not just particular topics but the discipline as a whole that bothers them.

Robert Cassanello, president of the United Faculty of Florida, warns:

I have it on good authority that next year they’re going to look at the psychology and American history textbooks. It’s an assault on critical thinking.

Hegseth won't allow officers to take courses at Ivy League universities. Anything that interferes with the indoctrination he wants the military to have is off the table.

India has shifted towards Israel because they are both ethno-nationalist states now.

How does MAGA want to make ObamaCare plans cheaper? By raising the annual deductible to $31,000.

Trump's Trumpiest judge isn't satisfied with just blocking his prosecution for his document-stealing crimes. She has also banned Jack Smith from releasing volume 2 of his report.

and let's close with something slick

What do Canadian dads get up to when their wives aren't looking? Curling with the baby in a car seat.

Until I went looking for that video, I never realized that "Dads unsupervised" is a popular YouTube search term. Here's something else it will get you.

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Monday, February 23, 2026

Kindness or Cruelty?

I am begging my fellow politicians, my fellow Illinoisans, my fellow Americans to realize that right now in this country we are not fighting over policy or political party. We are fighting over whether we are going to be a civilization rooted in empathy and kindness — or one rooted in cruelty and rage.

- Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois
"I Love Illinois. I Love America. I Refuse to Stop."

This week's featured post is "The Tariff Decision".

Ongoing stories

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about tariffs

This is covered in the featured post. Short version: The Supreme Court has ruled that the "liberation day" tariffs are illegal. Trump immediately replaced them with 15% across-the-board tariffs, which are almost certainly illegal too.

One additional comment from Paul Krugman: Even if the new tariffs stand up in court "Tariffs as an instrument of arbitrary power have been dismantled." Under this law, Trump can't impose large tariffs on countries he doesn't like and low tariffs on countries that grovel to him.

Something I didn't mention in the featured post is how catty the conservative justices got with each other in their written opinions. For example, Roberts strongly implied that Kavanaugh was simply a Trump mouthpiece:

The Government, echoed point-for-point by the principal dissent, marshals several arguments in response.

and the Epstein files

The big recent news about the Epstein scandal is that other governments are taking it far more seriously than the Trump administration is. The former Prince Andrew, brother of King Charles of the UK, was arrested Thursday morning. The King expressed his "deepest concern" over Andrew, but showed no indication to help his brother in any practical way, saying "the law must take its course".

US Republicans are mostly doing the exact opposite: expressing "concern" over Epstein's victims, but not lifting a finger against the men who abused them.

Andrew was arrested for "suspicion of misconduct in public office". I'm not sure how that correlates to anything in the US justice system. You can't be convicted of "suspicion", but a formal investigation will decide whether a charge will be pressed. Because "misconduct in public office" is such a catch-all term, the penalties range all the way up to life imprisonment. Ultimately, the charges may include not just sex crimes, but also leaking confidential information to Epstein. (Andrew used to be a trade envoy for the UK, so his insider knowledge could be useful to a financier.)

In spite of King Charles revoking Andrew's title in November, for now he remains 8th in the line of succession to the throne. Removing him from succession requires an act of Parliament, which is under consideration.

I can't discuss the Epstein case without mentioning Pam Bondi's shameful testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She responded to virtually every question by yelling attacks at the questioner. Among other questions she dodged in this manner, she refused to comment on why the Justice Department had not talked to any of the Epstein victims who were present in the gallery, and segued onto the high stock market and how we really ought to be talking about that.

Just for the record: The performance of the stock market should never come up during the testimony of an attorney general. Her job has nothing to do with that.

The NY Times Pitchbot skewers both Andrew and the US Supreme Court's decision giving Trump immunity:

"Charges against Former Prince Andrew must be dropped if it’s determined that raping teenagers was an official act." - by John Roberts (joined by Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett).

WaPo lists prominent people -- mostly non-US or in the US private sector -- whose connections with Epstein have produced consequences. Notably missing: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

The commerce secretary previously told Congress he cut ties with Epstein in 2005 after the late financier - a neighbour of Lutnick in New York - used sexual innuendo to explain why he owned a massage table in a room of his home. In Tuesday's testimony, he said: "Over the next 14 years, I met him two other times that I can recall." The justice department files show Lutnick visited Epstein's Caribbean island on 23 December, 2012. That came four years after Epstein was convicted for soliciting prostitution from a child.

Tina Brown:

Hunting for revelations about the occupant of the Oval Office in this email blizzard is a fool’s errand. Trump’s name attached to anything incriminating is redacted. Of the 5,300 files with 38,000 references to Trump, Melania, or Mar-a-Lago, none are direct communications between Trump and Epstein. Deputy AG Todd Blanche has already said that the second half of the tranche—another two-and-a-half million pages—will never see the light of day.

Nonetheless, people are finding things. Jay Kuo summarizes what he's seen so far. Nothing he mentions constitutes beyond-reasonable-doubt proof. But it's a far cry from Trump's claim "I've been totally exonerated."

Another look at Trump's culpability comes from the NYT.

Celeste Davis wonders about the Epstein-files question hardly anybody asks:

Everyone is asking how did these men get away with so much rape? No one is asking what would cause so many to want to rape so much in the first place?

We seem to take for granted that men whose power puts them beyond any restraints will of course abuse underage girls. Why do we do that?

A. R. Moxon makes a related point not specific to the Epstein story. He comments on the "male loneliness epidemic", which he finds frequently discussed in the media.

This is a problem. What I am inviting you to contemplate is how frequently it is treated as a problem for men, caused by women, to be solved by everyone else. I'm inviting you to contemplate how seldom it's being treated as a problem caused by men who have never even started the work they need to do on themselves.

Moxon traces the "problem" to the decline of patriarchy: Men who expect to dominate a woman domestically and sexually are less and less likely to find a woman who agrees to be dominated.

The loneliness of women—also quite real—is not a problem that's usually mentioned at all, much less as one worth seeking a solution to, and certainly never as one that ought to be solved by men deciding that they no longer need to dominate others as a core of their identity.

If patriarchal men are "dying off" (as they often phrase it) due to women finding them unfit for mating, that's evolution at work. Survival-of-the-fittest isn't always about becoming a better predator. Sometimes it's about recognizing that the environment has changed, and adapting to it.

Continuing in this vein, Jessica Valenti discusses the Heritage Foundation's plans for America's cultural future, in a piece called "They're Coming For Our Daughters". Purportedly high-minded rhetoric about "Saving the Family" translates to limiting girls' potential futures, and turning back the clock to a time when women could aspire to little other than the protection of a man and the opportunity to bear and raise his children.

People who didn't take Heritage's Project 2025 seriously enough are probably not taking this seriously enough either.

and Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson, who died last Tuesday at the age of 84, was the most visible Black leader of the post-Martin-Luther-King era. The Guardian published a summary of his influence on American politics.

One thing I remember from listening to Jackson was how he tried to unite all discriminated-against groups in a "rainbow coalition". I'm going to get this quote wrong, but it went something like: "You have to decide whether you don't want your group sent to the back of the bus, or you don't want anybody sent to the back of the bus."

and Iran

Are we going to war with Iran? We have an enormous armada in the region, including two of our largest aircraft carriers.

according to Robert A. Pape, the Founding Director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST), the US’s current force mobilization in the Middle East accounts for 40-50% of the deployable US air power worldwide.

Trump is giving deadlines and threatening "bad things will happen" if Iran doesn't give him what he wants. Talking in his mob-boss style, Trump told reporters: "We're either going to get a deal or it's going to be unfortunate for them."

and Cuba

Did you realize that we're already more-or-less in a regime-change war with Cuba? I didn't until recently, and I'm pretty sure a lot of Americans still don't. (By contrast, the Cubans all know about it.)

Nine days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order declaring Cuba "an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy, requiring immediate response to protect American citizens and interests". The order imposed tariffs on "any country that directly or indirectly provides oil to Cuba".

Venezuela had been supplying most of Cuba's oil, until the Trump regime attacked. While the US has not formally announced a blockade of the island, on January 11 of this year, Trump posted:

THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA - ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.

Make a deal about what? Before it's too late for what? But no list of demands accompanies Trump's threats. The NYT reports:

Cuban tankers have hardly left the island’s shores for months. Oil-rich allies have halted shipments or declined to come to the rescue. The U.S. military has seized ships that have supported Cuba. And in recent days, vessels roaming the Caribbean Sea in search of fuel for Cuba have come up empty or been intercepted by the U.S. authorities. ...

“Among us longtime Cuba watchers, we’ve always resisted people using the word blockade,” said Fulton Armstrong, the former lead Latin America analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, who has been studying Cuba since 1984. “But it is indeed a blockade.”

So OK, "make a deal" about what? Regime change.

“There’s no oil, there’s no money, there’s no anything,” US President Donald Trump told reporters Monday, adding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading efforts to negotiate with top Cuban officials. Rubio, who is Cuban American and a longtime opponent of the Cuban government, has previously said the only thing he intends to discuss with the island’s communist leadership is when they would relinquish power.

Just so we're clear, a blockade is an act of war. Human rights experts at the UN put out a statement:

“It is an extreme form of unilateral economic coercion with extraterritorial effects, through which the United States seeks to exert coercion on the sovereign state of Cuba and compel other sovereign third States to alter their lawful commercial relations, under threat of punitive trade measures,” they said. ... “There is no right under international law to impose economic penalties on third States for engaging in lawful trade with another sovereign country.”

And it's having devastating effects on the people of Cuba: Not only is there little-to-no imported food, there isn't fuel to bring food into the cities from the countryside. When food arrives, there may not be electric power to keep it refrigerated. Recently, the crisis has been damaging the healthcare system:

The situation however has reached a new extreme, with authorities now saying that ambulances are struggling to find fuel to respond to emergencies. Persistent power outages have also further deteriorated hospitals.

Flights bringing in vital supplies, which the island nation has been relying on since the blockade, have now stopped, as Havana is no longer capable of refuelling airplanes for their outbound flights from Cuban airports.

We're doing that. And why, exactly?

and Gaza

Wielding a golden gavel, Trump presided over the first meeting of his Board of Peace, which, among other vague ambitions, is supposed to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. The meeting was held in the newly renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. (Like the Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace's name is in the legislation that established it. Legally, Trump has no power to change it, but his name is on the facade anyway.)

Trump pledged $10 billion in contributions from the US. Other BoP members have pledged $7 billion. (By contrast, the US is about $4.5 billion behind in its commitments to the United Nations.) You might wonder where this money will come from. Congress has not yet appropriated anything. But does that matter any more?

The Board, all of whom have been chosen by Trump, includes no Palestinian representative, but does include First Son-In-Law Jared Kushner, whose vision for Gaza is of high-rise towers and beaches full of tourists -- basically pre-civil-war Beirut.

As I've pointed out before, the BoP's charter gives all power to its chairman, who is defined in the charter to be "Donald J. Trump". (Not the President of the United States, but Trump personally.) Like a king, he serves in perpetuity and names his own successor. If the taxpayers are going to contribute $10 billion to the BoP, we might as well just put the money directly into Trump's pocket.

Major NATO allies like the UK, Germany, and France have seen through this scam and refused to join. Canada's invitation was withdraw after Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech Trump didn't like at Davos.

The Guardian reports:

The Trump administration is planning to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza, sprawling more than 350 acres, according to Board of Peace contracting records reviewed by the Guardian. The site is envisioned as a military operating base for a future International Stabilization Force (ISF), planned as a multinational military force composed of pledged troops.

During the Gaza War, death toll estimates were given by local Palestinian authorities who were answerable to the Hamas government. For this reason, many observers -- especially those sympathetic to Israel -- tended to discount them. Surely the carnage wasn't as bad as the Palestinian numbers made it look.

In fact, it now appears to have been worse. The Lancet has raised its estimate of the death toll of the first 16 months of the two-year Gaza war: from 49,000 to 75,000. That total includes 22,800 children under 18.

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If you haven't seen Illinois Governor Pritzker's state-of-the-state speech, you should look it up. (The opening quote comes from it.) It is part political speech, but part sermon on the values that make America what it should be.

DHS is wildly unpopular, partly because it keeps telling the public ridiculous lies that are easily disproven by video. When DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin left the job, then, many hoped for a change in the department's policy regarding the Truth. Not so fast. New spokesperson Lauren Bis might be worse.

Trump's White House ballroom passed its first hurdle: approval by the Commission on Fine Arts that Trump has packed with allies.

Friday, students at a Philadelphia-area high school staged a walkout to protest against ICE. According to witnesses, a man in a brown jacket lunged towards students and put one girl in a chokehold. (There's a picture of that.) Other students started hitting the man, as you well might when an adult attacks one of your classmates. Police arrived.

The attacker turns out to be the local police chief. He walked away. The students who fought him have been locked up over the weekend. Here's are phone numbers of authorities you might complain to.

Marcy Wheeler sums up Marco Rubio's message to European representatives to the Munich Security Conference like this: "We want to be friends, if you want to be as racist as we are."

So Trump announced that he's sending a hospital ship to Greenland "to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It's on the way!!!". No one seems to know what he's talking about. Both of the Navy's hospital ships (including the one he posted a picture of) are moored in Mobile.

In Greenland, as in Denmark, access to healthcare is free. There are five regional hospitals across the vast Arctic island, with the Nuuk hospital serving patients from all over the territory.

The Danish defense minister responded: "The Greenlandic population receives the healthcare it needs. They receive it either in Greenland, or, if they require specialised treatment, they receive it in Denmark. So it’s not as if there’s a need for a special healthcare initiative in Greenland."

You know where there are "people who are sick and not being taken care of"? The United States. There are going to be a lot more of them this year because Trump's Big Beautiful Bill cut funding for Medicaid.

The Danes should send us a hospital ship.

and let's close with something celebratory

Welcome to the Year of the Horse:

The Chinese Zodiac has 12 animals and five elements, so the pattern repeats every 60 years. This is a Fire year, and the Horse represents speed and energy, two fiery qualities. So a Fire Horse year is essentially "double fire". Expect sparks to fly this year.

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Monday, February 9, 2026

Uncooperative Responses

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on February 23.

Our response should not be "This response to Bad Bunny's inclusion shows how divided we are, how can we stop this polarization?" Our response should be uncooperative: "The response to Bad Bunny's inclusion shows just how racist our society is. Racists are angry about the halftime show? Good! Everything about our society should make racists feel alienated. How do we make racists feel even more alienated from even more of society?

- A. R. Moxon, The Reframe

This week's featured posts are "Non-Cooperation" and "Dying in Broad Daylight: The Washington Post".

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. This week he threatened to "nationalize" vote-counting in 15 states, and continued the violent occupation of Minneapolis.
  • Climate change. Trump's war against renewable energy is having results: Last year, for every new dollar committed to renewable energy projects, three dollars were rolled back.
  • Gaza. The ceasefire is holding more or less, but it can't hold forever if Gazans' lives don't start improving.
  • Ukraine. The question is less who is winning than who will crack first. Russia's economy is in serious trouble, and Ukraine is running out of soldiers.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about election interference

In the wake of the regime's seizure of Georgia's 2020 ballots and election records, and Trump threatening to "nationalize" the midterm elections rather than let states run them (as the Constitution mandates), it's hard to decide how alarmed to be. Trump may daydream about counting the ballots himself and proclaiming his lackeys the winners, but what can he actually get away with?

Hakeem Jeffries sounds very confident: "What Donald Trump wants to do is try and nationalize the election – translation: steal it. And we’re not going to let it happen. This is going to be a free and fair election. [It] is going to be conducted like every other election where states and localities have the ability to administer the laws."

Democracy Docket's Marc Elias gets down into the weeds a little and has a more nuanced take on the situation. He starts with the strange fact that the warrant for the Georgia seizure came from a Missouri prosecutor, Thomas Albus, rather than from any Georgia prosecutor. It turns out that Albus has been named a "special assistant" to the attorney general. That gives him national scope, and might allow him to seize ballots anywhere in the country.

But Elias thinks seizing ballots in an ongoing election might be more difficult.

It is one thing to seize old ballots; it is quite another to imagine federal agents seizing ballots from county offices on election night or the day after. And that’s only the beginning of the chaos he could unleash. States and counties have limited supplies of voting machines and tabulators, and Trump has already threatened to unilaterally decertify certain machines. A federal prosecutor willing to abuse his power would be a potent tool in achieving Trump’s stated goals. The same is true of mail-in ballots and other forms of voting that Trump seeks to outlaw or disrupt.

But Albus would need cooperation from other prosecutors, FBI agents, and local judges. While Albus might be willing to corruptly serve his boss, others might not be.

Vox interviewed the Brennan Center's Wendy Weiser, who has a similar opinion.

There is a very high risk that the administration will use every tool at its disposal to get voting machines or ballots in the course of an upcoming election. But I don’t think there is a high risk that they will succeed. I think every magistrate judge in the country would understand the difference between a search warrant to seize materials for an election that happened five years ago and a search warrant to seize election materials from an election in progress. I understand why people are worried. But it’s not remotely the same.

The Vox article also addresses the worry that ICE will create chaos in Democratic cities in swing states -- maybe Atlanta or Philadelphia or Milwaukee. The point would be to lower voter turnout and shift the state Republican. However, it's just as likely that a heavy ICE presence would energize Democratic voters rather than deter them. Weiser concludes:

There is clearly an effort afoot to interfere in our elections and that is something that people should be alarmed about. But this can be thwarted. And it must be.

and Minneapolis (still)

If you think the regime has changed its tactics in Minneapolis, think again. Watch this video, for example. A woman is following an unmarked ICE vehicle when agents jump out with guns drawn on her. The quickness with which agents draw their guns tells you everything you need to know. Has there been a single incident in Minneapolis in which an agent drawing a gun was an appropriate response? I think not.

More senseless gun-drawing and tear-gassing is recorded here. And then there's this incident:

Four days after ICE arrested a Rochester man who is the recipient of a kidney transplant, federal authorities still have not given him the life-saving medications he needs to prevent his body from rejecting the donated kidney, according to the man’s wife.

There hasn't been a headline-grabbing ICE murder in the last couple of weeks. But that doesn't mean anything has fundamentally changed.

Speaking of murder, Trump explains to NBC's Tony Llamas how unfair it is to judge his immigration crackdown by the completely unjustified killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti: "two people out of tens of thousands, and you get bad publicity".

Has anybody in history ever been treated more unfairly than Donald Trump? I mean, I get that two people are dead and their families will never see them again, but Trump has had to suffer through bad publicity. How can you not sympathize with him?

Yesterday I spoke to my minister, who was part of the clergy demonstrations in Minneapolis two weeks ago. He described a church in Minneapolis that invited families who are afraid to leave their homes to sign up online to have groceries delivered to them. They expected to get maybe a dozen responses, but instead they got hundreds. And they mobilized volunteers to deliver the food.

Fox News loves to describe the resistance in Minnesota as "a national network of socialist, communist and Marxist-Leninist cells in the United States" who are funded by "foreign adversaries". But it's neighbors helping neighbors, using free online tools (like Sign-Up Genius) to organize themselves.

Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis" was the most-downloaded song in the country last week.

Law Dork discusses a remarkable court transcript in Minnesota. You may have heard one quote from it, where the administration's lawyer fantasizes about being held in contempt so that she can get some sleep.

The larger story is that lawyers and prosecutors have been resigning from the Minnesota office because the administration's policies challenge them ethically. Simultaneously, ICE is arresting so many people for no reason that it's hard to process all the court orders releasing them. So they remain in custody for no reason.

The judge, understandably, disapproves. "What you cannot do is detain first and sort out lawful authority later."

and Trump's racism

As anyone with a shred of objectivity knows, Donald Trump has been racist his whole life. NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie sums up:

For years, a cottage industry of political observers has contorted itself to obscure and occlude the obvious. That regardless of what others see in him, Trump’s entire political career — from his embrace of birtherism to his hatred of birthright citizenship — cannot be understood outside the context of his bitter, deep-seated racism.

Thursday night, he ended all legitimate doubt by posting a one-minute video that included an image of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, a common racist trope. After expressions of outrage even from friendly Republicans like South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the post was removed. But Trump insisted that he would not apologize because "I didn't make a mistake." He claimed he hadn't watched the video all the way through, and so had missed the Obamas-as-apes part. Of course, reposting to millions of people videos you haven't watched all the way to the end is not a "mistake", and the people who do watch it to the end don't deserve an apology.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced the "fake outrage" the video provoked. Obviously, no one could be genuinely offended by the President of the United States promoting a centuries-old slander that casts your people as subhuman.

A federal judge blocked Kristi Noem's attempt to end temporary protected status for over 350K Haitians living in the US. The judge points out that Noem has attempted to block all 12 of the TPS designations that have come up for renewal during her tenure. The law establishing TPS had very specific condition for ending TPS status, and Noem has completely ignored them.

Notice, this has nothing to do with "illegal" immigration. TPS recipients come here legally, work, and play significant roles in some communities. These are the same people that J. D. Vance slandered as eating their neighbors' dogs and cats.

and the Washington Post

That's covered in one of the featured posts.

but I want to introduce you to somebody

The other featured post links to The Reframe, a Substack written by A. R. Moxon.

and the Kennedy Center

Putting Trump's name on the Kennedy Center resulted in audiences staying away and artists canceling their performances. So Trump decided to take his ball and go home: The Trump-Kennedy Center will close for two years for renovations, starting on July 4.

The "Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding" is supposed to cost $200 million, which will either come from private donations or from money for "capital improvements" in the Big Beautiful Bill. NPR doesn't see how this is possible, given that renovations on the David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center in New York cost $550 million for a less complicated space.

The Center has contracts that go beyond July 4: scheduled performances, employees contracted to work there, and so on. It's not clear what will happen to them, or if anybody has even thought about them. Five unions issued a joint statement:

At this time, no formal notice or briefing has been provided to the unions of arts workers whose labor sustains the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. We only know of public statements issued by President Trump and an internal message to some Kennedy Center employees that reiterated the President’s social media remarks. A pause in Kennedy Center operations without due regard for those who work there would be harmful for the arts and creative workers in America. Should we receive formal notice of a temporary suspension of Kennedy Center operations that displaces our members, we will enforce our contracts and exercise all our rights under the law. We expect continued fair pay, enforceable worker protections, and accountability for our members in the event they cannot work due to an operational pause. Our members remain steadfast in bringing to life theatrical, music, opera, dance, and other live artistic performances in the nation’s capital that speak to and resonate with all Americans.

During his second term, Trump has put a lot of effort into making a mark on DC and the country that will live on after him. This project, I think, is doomed to fail. As soon as he is gone, the country will undo virtually everything he has done. From the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico, everything will get its pre-Trump name back. His battleship class will never sail. His ballroom will become something else entirely. His triumphal arch, if it gets built at all, will be torn down. The Trump Era is going to be remembered as a time of American shame. By the time he's gone, not even his current supporters will want to commemorate it.

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Economist Oren Cass wrote an important piece in the NYT: "The Finance Industry is a Grift. Let's Start Treating it That Way". Once, the banking industry was how people's spare cash turned into houses, railroads, and factories. But the vast majority of what the finance industry does today is disconnected from the productive economy, and its profits are largely parasitic.

The Epstein survivors have released a new ad calling on Pam Bondi: "It's time for the truth".

When the Trump administration gets beat, it turns vindictive. We've seen that spiteful side in their unending persecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who they were forced to return to his family after illegally sending him to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Now we're seeing the same hate unleashed against the family of Liam Ramos, the five-year-old whose detention became national news. A week ago Saturday, a federal judge ordered Liam and his father released from the concentration camp in Texas where they had been held since January 20. His ruling was scalding.

But of course, the regime can't let that stand. So Wednesday they petitioned to expedite deportation hearings on Liam's father, who came to the border legally, requested asylum from persecution in his home country of Ecuador, and is cooperating with the legal asylum process. Friday, a federal judge granted a continuance, slowing the process down. The reports I've seen so far don't say for how long.

J. D. Vance got booed during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan. But if you were watching live in the US, you didn't hear it; the rest of the world did. Best response is from Keith Oregel: "Imagine getting booed for being a fascist in Italy."

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