Monday, September 7, 2026

Freakish Events

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

- Gwen, Critical Latitude
"Everything we know about Nepal's flood"

This week's featured post is "Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon".

Ongoing stories

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

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about the postal service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and dissent inside the Pentagon

That's the subject of the featured post.

and Trump's clueless midterm strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Germany

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

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

Here's how far out AfD is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let's close with something incongruous

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

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Monday, August 31, 2026

Margins of Permission

Bullies seem to have a finely tuned awareness of where the margins of permission lie as regards abuses, and choose their targets based on whose suffering will be most broadly acceptable to others.

- A. R. Moxon "Soon You Too Will Be a Commie"

This week's featured post is "Hazards and pitfalls of moving to the center".

Ongoing stories

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about Canada

Here we see a combination of a substantive issue with one of those blood-boiling but essentially meaningless things we see over and over: We find ourselves in an all-out trade war with our nearest neighbor and closest ally. That's important. And Trump has ordered the name of Lake Ontario changed to Lake America, which is annoying but of no real consequence. (As soon as Trump is out of office, no one will say "Lake America" or "Gulf of America" ever again.)

The Toronto Star reports:

As [Prime Minister Carney] described it, he was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.

Paul Krugman explains why the US will lose this war. The US may be the much larger economy, but

an all-out trade war would create a lot of pain in the U.S. in addition to inflicting severe damage to the Canadian economy. And all indications are that the Canadians will be much more willing to bear the pain of a trade war than Americans will – especially given that the great majority of Americans are already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management.

Former Trump official Miles Taylor sees Canada's resistance as a harbinger of nations getting fed up with trying to appease Trump. "nothing on earth scares Donald Trump like an opponent who fights back."

Unlike Google, MapQuest is just not having this Lake America thing.

and the fall elections

Trump's bid to control who can cast a mail-in ballot had another set-back Thursday, when his executive order was blocked by a federal judge. A previous block had been lifted by the Supreme Court just a few days before, but on technical grounds that didn't reach the merits of the case.

Things continue to look good for Democrats. A series of polls in Michigan have El-Sayed up slightly. Josh Marshall concludes:

I’m not saying El-Sayed has this wrapped up. I’m saying that the idea that he can’t win or that the results of the primary were some kind of decisive setback for Democrats’ chances just can’t be squared with the available evidence. At least not so far. This is very much a race and it’s one in which El-Sayed kind of has to be viewed as a favorite to at least some degree.

So-called "centrist" pundits like Jonathan Chait really need to calm down. His column is about how El-Sayed needs to denounce this guy and separate himself from that guy more strongly than just saying he disagrees with what they're saying. Chait says virtually nothing about what El-Sayed himself says or believes or hopes to do in the Senate.

Last week, I described the Democrats' chance of winning a Senate majority this fall. I went through the states commonly viewed as having competitive Senate races and came out with a winning scenario -- far from a sure thing, but more than wishful thinking. I didn't consider any of the true long-shot races Jay Kuo covered Thursday: Mississippi, Kansas, South Carolina, Nebraska, and Arkansas. I'd be surprised if any of these red states seats flipped, but Kuo makes a good case that it's not impossible.

and Venezuela

Friday, Trump announced on social media "THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!" The deal, which AFAIK still hasn't been confirmed by any on-the-record American government office, supposedly involves 17 oil fields with 65 billion barrels of proven reserves.

The agreement allows for the United States to partner with an unnamed private operator in Venezuela to create a new private company to take hold of the reserves, according to a U.S. official familiar with the contours of the deal. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, added that [Venezuelan President Delcy] Rodríguez granted the company 100-year rights to develop the oil fields. The deal gives the United States 55% effective output of the new private company -- including an ownership stake and rights to buy oil at cost. The company would be the second largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco, according to the official.

Phillips O'Brien points out that there all kinds of problems with this arrangement. For one thing,

it is not clear what element of the US government (if any) either can or will hold the equity stake in any new company

The American stake would have to be controlled and overseen by some particular department or agency, and without any congressional action it's not clear who could do that. And without Senate ratification, this isn't an official treaty. Like Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, it could be cancelled by any future president.

There are also problems on the Venezuelan side, because their constitution does not allow the government to sign away the country's natural resources. If a future Venezuelan government thought it could get away with taking the oil fields back, it would face no legal barriers.

And finally, who are we making this agreement with? When we deposed Maduro, we were supposedly bringing freedom to the Venezuelan people. But since then we've ignored the democratic opposition and recognized Maduro's henchmen as the government. O'Brien sums up:

I am providing this information so that there is no mistake about what the Trump administration is, and has been doing. It got rid of Maduro to entrench even more ruthless alleged criminals, the exact kind of people with which it can and, indeed, likes to do business.

Add to the mix that the country's oil industry is a mess and requires huge amounts of capital investment (which so far the major oil companies haven't been willing to fund). It will take years to substantially increase production. Also, Venezuelan crude oil is heavier than most American refineries can process, so there won't be any big increase in gasoline production any time soon. Clean Technica has a fairly technical analysis that comes to the conclusion:

Raising output materially would require something closer to $100 billion over a decade. That scale of capital must be patient, politically insulated, and confident in long term demand. Even if someone was willing to pay for it, significant increases are a decade away in a world clearly pivoting away from oil and toward renewables and electrification.

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I hope to review Gil Duran's "The Nerd Reich" before long. In the meantime, check out this five-minute video about J. D. Vance and his puppet-master Peter Thiel.

David Frum looks at how other countries have recovered money from their past despots, and speculates about using civil suits to claw back Trump's "ill-gotten gains".

For about a year Christopher Armitage was a corrections officer in a prison. It taught him something about politics and the psychology behind MAGA.

I began to see a pattern that my psychology training wouldn’t let me ignore. The same personality traits that concentrated behind bars, what psychologists call the “dark triad” of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, were appearing throughout our political system. The empathy deficits that defined prison life weren’t confined to cellblocks. They were running for office, hosting talk shows, and writing legislation. ... American conservatism has become an ideology that systematically suppresses empathy. It rewards the prison mentality: dominate or be dominated, trust only your tribe, see kindness as weakness. It’s created a political movement that mirrors the psychological dynamics of incarceration, complete with gang colors in the form of red hats and protection rackets in the form of vote-for-us-or-the-criminals-will-get-you rhetoric. ...

The prison mirror reflects perfectly here: just as inmates must perform toughness to maintain status, conservative politicians must perform cruelty. Expressing empathy for the wrong group, immigrants, trans kids, the poor, marks you as weak, a “RINO” who’ll get primaried

A Stanford student newspaper won its suit against the Trump administration. It claimed that international students were afraid to write articles for fear they would be deported if Trump disagreed with what they said. The judge ruled that foreign citizens on student visas have the same free-speech rights Americans do, and that they cannot be deported based on what they have written or said.

and let's close with a look back

I'm sure you've had no trouble finding coverage of Dolly Parton, who died Tuesday. She was one of the few public figures -- it's hard to find a comparable one -- whose appeal spanned the political divide. She was an authentic up-from-poverty success story who never forgot about the kind of people she grew up around. Late in life, her philanthropy was as famous as her music.

If you wonder what the fuss is all about, The Guardian provides a curated list of 10 of her best songs. As someone lost a spouse less than two years ago, I resonate with her final hit "If You Hadn't Been There" about her husband Carl Dean who died in 2025 a few weeks before their 59th anniversary. "I wouldn't be here if you hadn't been there."

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Monday, August 24, 2026

Best Descriptions

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

- Jamelle Bouie

This week's featured post is "Can Democrats take the Senate?"

Ongoing stories

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about our strange foreign policy

So North Korea is good and Canada is bad. Got it?

As North Korea goes full speed ahead on building the nuclear weapons we're spending billions to keep Iran from getting, Trump wants a summit meeting with Kim Jong Un. To make himself more attractive to Kim, Trump cut short our planned military exercises with South Korea, saying that the exercises are "inappropriate and hostile" to the North, which is in the running for the most oppressive country in the world. If you're looking for some good behavior that Trump is rewarding, you won't find any.

Trump has maintained that he enjoys a "great relationship" with Kim, telling reporters on Wednesday: "He likes me".

That's all that matters. Previous American presidents didn't think having a "great relationship" with one of the world's bloodiest dictators was a worthy goal, absent some concession from the North Koreans. But Trump is focused on himself, not on the interests of the United States or the free world.

Meanwhile, we have entered into a trade war with Canada. Phillips O'Brien summarizes: The dispute is

is about far more than trade, it is about Canada’s right to exist as a sovereign state. ... Canada is faced with a USA that is now fundamentally dishonest and rapacious. Moreover, it is faced with a US government that denies its ultimate right to exist and speaks openly (and regularly) about how Canada should be annexed into the USA.

All through Trump's second term, foreign leaders have been treating him like a crazy uncle: Flatter him. Don't do anything to set him off. Don't call him on his bad behavior. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is done with that. He described the impossibility of coming to any agree with the Trump regime.

We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.

In other words, an agreement with Trump only lasts until he decides he wants something else from you. Friday, tariffs on an estimated $20 billion of Canadian goods went into effect, and Trump is threatening 50% across-the-board tariffs on January 1.

Also, he turned up his rhetoric.

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

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

and control of the Senate

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

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

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

and some outrage stories: Harp and the USS Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the part that does matter:

  • Trump often says stuff that makes you wonder what world he's widwidth=580 living in. Well, it's Natalie's World. Both her behavior and the relentlessly worshipful stuff she shows him communicates to Trump that he is a uniquely successful president who is widely admired and universally loved by the American people. Those ridiculous AI-generated images he posts of himself as Jesus or a great general -- where do you think he gets them?
  • She worked for a year without a security clearance. Given her constant proximity to the president, you have to assume that she's seen or heard some of the nation's most important secrets. But she didn't have clearance because she didn't submit the appropriate forms.
  • She is the most egregious example of a general trend inside the Trump regime: The sole qualification for any job -- attorney general, defense secretary, whatever -- is abject submission and obsequious flattery.

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

Another story that is more symbolic than consequential: According to ABC News and "three sources familiar with the matter", the Navy is thinking about renaming an aircraft carrier under construction. The USS Doris Miller may be renamed for Donald Trump.

If true, this is outrageous in both directions: In the United States, we don't name things after sitting presidents. Or at least we didn't used to. Honors like these are supposed to be History's to decide. Worse, Trump has no military record, and is widely believed to have dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by speciously claiming to have "bone spurs". He's also in the process of losing the Iran War.

But as in the previous note, the Navy knows that flattery is the way to get what you want from Trump. And Trump knows (I believe) that future generations will be ashamed of him and the things that happened during his presidency. If he waits for the judgment of History, there won't be any Trump aircraft carriers or battleships or airports or performing arts centers.

The other side of this swap is to dishonor Doris Miller.

Doris "Dorie" Miller (October 12, 1919 – November 24, 1943) was a U.S. Navy sailor who was the first black recipient of the Navy Cross and a nominee for the Medal of Honor. As a mess attendant second class aboard the battleship USS West Virginia, Miller helped carry wounded sailors to safety during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He then operated an anti-aircraft gun and, despite no prior training in gunnery, officially shot down one plane (according to Navy Department records), but Miller and other eyewitnesses claimed a range of four to six.

What makes Miller's story even more inspiring is that in 1941 Black sailors weren't assigned significant combat duties. Without the chaos of Pearl Harbor, he might have spent the war peeling potatoes and ladling out soup.

But Pete Hegseth's Pentagon is doing everything it can to erase the contributions of anyone who isn't or wasn't a White man. Naming an aircraft carrier after a Black hero? Impossible!

Your life and everybody else's will go on as before, but it's hard to look away.

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

When people tell you about how "far left" or "out of the mainstream" Democratic candidates like El-Sayid are, remind them of Victor Marx, the Republican candidate for governor of Colorado. In Marx's book, he describes physical battles he has fought against people possessed by demons.

His detailed descriptions include claims that one man “transformed” in front of him, developing “pointy” ears and “superhuman strength.” In another episode, Marx said a “demonized” teenage girl “turned reptilian” before his eyes.

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

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

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

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

As our HHS Secretary and President keep badmouthing vaccines, kindergarten vaccination rates are headed downward. The rates vary considerably from one state to the next. Idaho is the least-vaccinated state, with only 75% of kindergarten children getting the MMR vaccine, compared to Maine's 98%.

Often this gets framed as a personal choice by parents, but it's more than that. When vaccination rates dip below the level of herd immunity, diseases can spread widely. Some children are unable to benefit from vaccinations, so herd immunity is their only protection. Each unvaccinated child creates risks for other children.

Texas is refusing to extradict an ICE agent accused of shooting a Minneapolis man through a home's front door and then lying about it, falsely claiming that the man had attacked him. TPM pulls together several examples of Trump or Trump allies preventing criminal ICE agents from facing justice.

and let's close with something aspirational

Going to a dance lesson this afternoon. Think I'll come out looking like Astaire?

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Monday, August 17, 2026

Far Out

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.

Last Monday

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.

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