There’s a maddening tendency among elected officials and the political press to equate “far left” and “far right” candidates as occupying equally extreme, dangerous ends of the political spectrum, though those in the former camp mostly want universal healthcare and affordable housing while the latter is more likely to endorse the forced deportation of non-white people from the United States.
- Allegra Kirkland
"Whose Narrative Is It Anyway?"
This week's featured post is "Some revolutions are too big to see."
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. DHS's response to ICE's murders of Alex Preti and Renee Good was to launch investigations into local Minneapolis groups that organized protests. The murderers are still at large.
- Climate change. The predictions of a record-setting El Nino seem to be coming true.
- Iran. As it becomes harder to deny that his war is lost, Trump's rhetoric has become increasingly fantastic. The two-month window for a larger deal set by June's memorandum of understanding has now run out, but Trump says he is "in no hurry" to end the war. But if Oman gets in the way of a settlement with Iran, "we'll bomb the shit out of them". He has also threatened to declare the Strait of Hormuz, which remains closed, "a territory of the United States".
- Ukraine. Phillips O'Brien: "Russia's allies show they are more intent on helping Russia win than Ukraine's are in helping Ukraine win. The difference is stark." He counts Trump as an ally of Russia.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about primary elections
For the second week in a row, a progressive Democrat's big lead in the polls evaporated on election day. Last week, Abdul El-Sayed was supposed to have a double-digit victory in the Michigan Senate race, but instead he barely squeaked out a win. This week, progressive Francesca Hong actually lost by half a percent to David Crowley (who was supported by the current governor) in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin's governor.
The NYT's analysis points to three factors:
- Undecideds went overwhelmingly for Crowley, as media focused on Hong's more out-of-the-mainstream past statements.
- Young voters (who overwhelmingly supported Hong) didn't vote in the same numbers as older voters.
- Hong's more enthusiastic supporters were more likely to respond when pollsters called.
Pundits love to play the expectations game, and announce some "collapse" or "surge" as results come in differently from the most recent polls. But in truth there are just votes. You get more of them than the other candidates, or you don't.
My state, Massachusetts, has its primary September 1, and the marquee race is for the Democratic Senate nomination. My congressman, Seth Moulton, is running against incumbent Senator Ed Markey, primarily on the age issue: Moulton is 47 and Markey is 79. Unlike most generational primary struggles, though, Markey is the more progressive candidate.
So far, I am unmoved by Moulton's case. To me, the age issue has to be backed up by something more substantive: examples where the older candidate is out of touch with today's world. Absent an argument like that, I don't see the point.
and the Abraham Lincoln
When we go to war without adequate planning, eventually the men and women of our armed forces suffer the consequences.
You've probably already heard the gist of this story: Due to the Iran War, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for a long time without shore leave for the crew or the kind of maintenance that can only be done in a port. The situation has been complicated by damage Iranian missiles did to a naval base in Bahrain, which would ordinarily be the logistics hub supplying the Lincoln while it was deployed in the Middle East. So it's being supplied through Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean over 2000 miles away. The strain of constant deployment with limited supplies is taking its toll.
MSNOW talked to families of the Lincoln crew:
The families say that their loved ones have described food shortages and standing in line for the ship’s store for an hour or more, and that the store often lacks basic supplies like toothpaste, soap and deodorant. Families said there have been times during the deployment when the Lincoln was rationing portions. Nicole Conrad’s son is serving on the Lincoln, and she hasn’t been able to see his face in seven months. Exchanging messages from the ship, he has told her about days when the showers were locked and laundry was closed, and about food shortages on board that meant his meal was half a cup of rice and two tortillas.
USA Today has published photos of meals served aboard the Lincoln and also the USS Tripoli, which is also deployed to the Middle East. The trays pictured are from the Tripoli.
When Dan F.'s daughter said hygiene products were running low on the [Tripoli], the family sent a care package with shampoo and conditioner, deodorant, toothpaste and tampons, filling every open space with candy and snacks. They filled the second box with Emergen-C vitamin C packets – Dan's daughter said she was feeling a sore throat coming on – and clean socks. The boxes were sent nearly a month ago, yet neither has reached its destination.
It's easy to imagine being homesick and going stir crazy after more than 260 days at sea. What civilians have a harder time appreciating is the stress level on an aircraft carrier.
The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is already one of the most dangerous places in the military. High-speed aircraft with powerful engines can burn sailors and blow them overboard. Spinning propellers can cause accidents. And the constant loading and unloading of bombs, missiles and rockets pose the risk of explosions and fires.
Trump, Hegseth, and the Navy deny everything. US Central Command posted:
The Sailors and Marines of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group remain resilient and resolved after more than 260 days at sea, 10,000 aircraft flights, and 1.5 million pounds of ordnance expended. No service members aboard the aircraft carrier have died, and the one Sailor who fell overboard Aug. 3 was quickly and safely recovered. The rampant misreporting on Abraham Lincoln's historic deployment is a disservice to our men and women in uniform and their loved ones.
The Guardian quotes one relative's response:
The sister of a Lincoln crew member in his late 30s said that the remarks made her want to grab Trump and Hegseth and shake them. “I grew up in a United States where you have to be very respectful of the military, as they’re making the ultimate sacrifice and protecting their country, and now you have the commander-in-chief and defense secretary dismissing their experiences and calling them liars. I’m really angry,” she said. “It’s a feeling of betrayal. These are frustrating, false and careless comments, and they are going to have a lot of consequences for my brother.”
The USS George Washington reportedly is moving from the western Pacific to replace the Lincoln. This leaves the Pacific temporarily with no carriers.
No one expects China to invade Taiwan because an American aircraft carrier has left the region. But the carrier's absence gives the Chinese another opportunity to show its strength, said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner who is a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.
"They're using this as part of the narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that the US is not the big dog in the western Pacific anymore," Clark said. "They would just prefer that countries in the region decide that China is the bigger power and the US is not able to guarantee their security anymore."
While continuing to deny that the US supply of high-tech missiles is being depleted, Trump is blaming the problem (which he insists doesn't exist) on President Biden, who gave Patriots and other weapons to Ukraine.
I am reminded of what Donald Rumsfeld said when he was Secretary of Defense during the Iraq War:
You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Whatever you think about how Biden handled our armed forces, Trump arrived in office commanding a particular stockpile of weapons. It was up to him to use them wisely. But Trump has never in his life taken responsibility for any of his numerous mistakes.
and ignorance-based executive orders
If there was a theme of the week, it was Trump giving orders based on his disastrous combination of ignorance and confidence. Two were related to his ignorance of naval technology and ship design, and another had to do with public health.
Trump has frequently cited his admiration of steam-powered catapults for launching planes off aircraft carriers, rather than the newer electromagnetic tech. Thursday, he signed a memo instructing the War Defense Department to replace the newer systems with the older tech.
The new mandate would likely cost billions of dollars and revert the Navy’s most advanced ships to a system that takes more sailors to operate and is more difficult to maintain.
Reportedly, Trump also has the Navy looking at redesigning the Ford-class carriers still under construction to move the tower to the center of the ship, similar to the look of World War II era carriers.
The changes – including moving the multistory aircraft carrier’s command center tower to the ship’s middle – would cost billions and worsen chronic delays, sources said. Officials also told The Post that changing the command center to the middle would remove 3 key benefits: additional parking spaces, reduced launch time and lowered chances of turbulence during landing.
Neither of these examples is Trump taking a side in a previously existing dispute among experts. It's just Trump deciding that expertise doesn't matter.
US President Donald Trump has signed an order that ... recommends splitting the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) shots. ... The order also recommends that the number of childhood vaccines drop to 11 from the existing 18 recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
During a the signing announcement, Trump spread anti-vax nonsense, claiming at one point that
I've seen proof of it. Where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child's body.
He also implied, without saying outright, that vaccines are related to autism, a well-studied and often refuted piece of anti-vax propaganda.
Trump has no real authority here, since vaccine requirements are set by the states. Mainly, this order will make parents more doubtful of vaccines and less likely to get their children vaccinated. Separating the shots would require more office visits and more expense, further motivating parents to skip some.
Meanwhile, the regime is bungling the cyclospora outbreak. The cyclospora parasite is suspected of causing over 24K illnesses so far this year, resulting in an enormous increase in the usage of the phrase "explosive diarrhea". The center of the outbreak is in Michigan, and many cases have been traced through Taco Bell to lettuce from a plant in Mexico run by Taylor Farms.
The NYT explores how efforts to shrink the US government and loosen its regulations have made it harder to prevent outbreaks like this, and harder to track them after they arise. The Guardian points out that Congress mandated a better system for tracing outbreaks 15 years ago, but it has been repeatedly delayed and now is set for 2028.
It turns out that "big government" isn't always a bad thing. In many ways, those much-derided "bureaucrats" are like offensive linemen in football: When they're doing their jobs well, nobody notices them. It's only when the quarterback gets sacked that you see a replay of the guy who was supposed to stop that from happening.
and Trump in the catering truck
I'm always torn about covering stories in which Trump does something outrageous, but it doesn't affect most people's lives. (That's why I'm ignoring the fun people had making fun of Trump's new hairpiece.) They leave me asking "Can you believe a guy like this is our president?". But in some larger sense they're inconsequential.
The Air Force One story that broke this week is a great example: Trump flew to the NATO summit in Turkey in the luxury jet he got as bribe from Qatar. While he was there, US intelligence heard rumors about a plot to shoot down his return flight on July 8, a plan made simpler by the fact that the Qatari jet still hasn't gotten all of its security upgrades. Without referencing the threat, Trump moved back to the older Air Force One plane, which also carried the White House press corps and several high officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as top aides Stephen Miller and Steven Cheung.
But it turns out that flight was only a decoy. After boarding the plane, Trump was whisked away in a catering truck and taken to another plane, which went to the UK where he met up with AF-1 again as if he had never left it.
There are two possibilities here: Either the threat was not serious, in which case Trump was just being a scared little rabbit. Or it was serious, and to save himself he was content to sacrifice not just journalists, but some of his own cabinet and staff as well.
History will little note nor long remember this incident, but it says a lot about our president's character.
and you might also be interested in ...
I copied the graph above from Noah Smith's Noahpinion blog. The original is on the Our World in Data site. I find it very striking. 36 years ago, extreme poverty was a worldwide phenomenon, mostly distributed across East Asia, South Asia, and Africa. Today it is largely a sub-Saharan Africa problem, with some contribution from the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
I don't have any grand conclusion to draw from this graph, other than that big changes in poverty are possible. And it's surprising that a change of this magnitude would draw so little attention.
According to TPM,
The Trump administration is planning to dramatically reshape the data the Census Bureau collects, setting the stage for an audacious effort to curtail crucial information used in voting rights complaints and revive a right-wing effort, pursued in Trump’s first term, to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count used to determine how many members of Congress represent each state in Congress.
The point would be to count fewer non-citizens in 2030 and thus lower the number of congressional seats that go to states with a lot of non-citizens, like New York and California.
The 14th Amendment is actually pretty clear about this:
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
That clause superseded the famous 3/5 clause in the original Constitution that distinguished free people from slaves. The word "citizen" appears five times in the Amendment, so the authors knew how to use it. The fact that they stipulated "persons" should be taken literally.
It's possible the Supreme Court plans to continue its piece-by-piece repeal of the 14th Amendment. Section 3 (which bans from office anyone who has taken part in an insurrection) was made meaningless in 2024. This June, four justices wanted to ignore the birthright citizenship clause. (They'll get another shot at it this year.) But if not, the regime's new census rules should go down quickly.
TPM's Layla Jones examines the century-long history of right-wing attempts to gain an advantage by monkeying with the census.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving her job because "I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary". The Contrarian is not inclined to be generous:
Karoline Leavitt's farewell post contained no mention of a single administration accomplishment she's proud of — just how extreme the left has become. Fitting, considering her tenure.
To be fair, she did mention "the many historic accomplishments of this Administration" without getting specific about any. The Guardian notes that her tenure started with an outrageous lie -- "she claimed that the Biden administration had planned to use $50m in taxpayer dollars to send condoms to Gaza", and did not improve from there.
A snide comment I've seen frequently on social media is that Leavitt is quitting in order to spend more time lying to her family.
Last Monday, ICE agents cut off the car of US citizen Caroline Molina. They then jumped out of their van, and one of the agents pointed his weapon through her driver-side window, in the manner of the agent who murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis. He was yelling at her, claiming that she tried to run them over -- which was a complete lie.
Molina yelled back at them that she had a dashcam video recorder, so she could prove they were "full of shit". They eventually left. Both the dashcam video and the video she shot out her window are here.
Unraveled has identified the agents.
Unraveled has verified the agents in Molina’s videos were far from their usual base of operations. The team has been recorded inflicting violence on immigrants, protesters, and observers in the Chicago area since last summer, including outside the region’s ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that became the epicenter of anti-deportation protests during Operation Midway Blitz last autumn. Members of the same team were also recorded intimidating and threatening drivers in the Twin Cities in mid-January—in the brief period after federal agents killed Renée Good, and before U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents killed 37-year old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti.
Will the agents be disciplined? Of course not.
ICE has been dragging its feet about its agents wearing body cameras that might capture their illegal actions. But they're about to roll out electric-shock gloves. No doubt they'll use them wisely.
and let's close with something celestial
Spain got to see a full solar eclipse on Wednesday. In case you missed it, here's a feline recreation.
