Labor Day is the unofficial day that America leaves its summer to start all things Autumn. This is a particularly notable Labor Day because there are ongoing attacks on workers and unions, as well as universities and public schools that are opening up to greet a new fall term. Fall is the time for harvesting. This year’s harvest is full of the results of extremist policies and plots. It’s time to start campaign season with an eye to ridding ourselves of the sources.
I live in New Orleans, which is well known as America’s most European city, and I’m glad of that. It’s surrounded by the Deep South and many rural areas. Things are not going so well there. Resources have been pulled from many of the country’s outlands when they need them badly. I’ll start with this analysis from AXIOS. “Rural South, West states have highest violent crime rates: FBI.” Contrary to the belief of this racist regime, the nation’s outlands have the worst violent crime rates. Watching what’s become of our Nation’s Capital City sickens me. People feel invaded and demonstrate daily. Our National Guard, needed in their own states, our literally picking up garbage.
Rural states in the American South and West had some of the nation’s highest violent crime and homicide rates in 2024, driven by violence in small communities, according to an Axios analysis of FBI data.
Why it matters: A state-by-state comparison paints a complex picture of U.S. crime trends as President Trump threatens to send the National Guard to Democrat-controlled cities in blue states over concerns about violent crime.
The big picture: The president has already dispatched the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and is threatening to send troops to Chicago, Oakland, Calif., and Baltimore.
Now Trump is facing questions about whether he’ll send troops to communities in red states — many of them largely rural — where crime rates are actually higher than the areas he’s targeted.
“Sure, but there aren’t that many of them,” Trump said last week.
By the numbers: The southern states of Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and South Carolina were among the national leaders in both violent crime and homicide rates last year, an Axios review of FBI data found.
All had violent crime and homicide rates well above the national average.
Alaska, the country’s most rural state, led the nation with the highest violent crime rate of 1,194.3 per 100,000 residents. That’s more than three times the national average of 359.1.
New Mexico, another rural state, was second with a violent crime rate of 757.7 per 100,000 residents, more than two times the national average.
Big states such as California and New York, both targets of Trump, ranked high in total violent crime numbers because of their large populations, but their per-capita rates were similar to those of Arkansas and Tennessee, the Axios review found.
Zoom out: Alaska and New Mexico also led the nation in homicide rates with 11.3 homicides per 100,000 residents each, more than twice the nation’s homicide rate of 5 per 100,000 residents.
Pennsylvania was third nationally with a homicide rate of 10.1, followed by Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee.
Illinois, home to Chicago, which Trump has called a “killing field,” had a homicide rate of 6 per 100,000 residents, ranked 20th in the nation.
Zoom in: Big-city crime often receives the most attention in political discourse, but an Axios analysis of rural states found that violence in small towns is driving some of the nation’s highest crime rates.
For example, Fairbanks, Alaska, population roughly 32,000, had a violent crime rate of nearly 700 per 100,000 residents, about twice the national average.
McKeesport, Pa., a city of 18,000 outside Pittsburgh, had a violent crime rate of 1,693.7 and a homicide rate of a whopping 32.5 per 100,000 people. It consistently ranks among the most dangerous cities in the country, a situation officials have largely attributed to a long-term decline in its industrial economy.
Dyersburg, Tenn., a community of 16,000, has a violent crime rate of 1,256.5 and a homicide rate of 18.8.
What they’re saying: “If Washington, D.C., (were) a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the nation,” the White House said in a statement on Aug. 11 before dispatching the National Guard.
D.C.’s homicide rate was 25.9 per 100,000 residents in 2024.
Yes, but: D.C. isn’t a state, it’s a city. Among the cities with the highest homicide rates in the U.S., Washington is ranked 11th, according to an Axios review of cities with 100,000 people or more with high homicide rates.
Jackson, Miss., population about 141,500, had the nation’s highest homicide rate last year — nearly 78 per 100,000 residents. That’s more than 15 times the national average. There has been no national discussion about sending troops there to combat crime.
Between the lines: Rural crime often gets overlooked because most media outlets are centered in urban areas and focus just on crime there, Ralph Weisheit, a criminal justice professor at Illinois State University, tells Axios.
The reasons for crime in rural areas vary, but Weisheit said in many cases, communities have been ravaged by drug addiction.
Mike Johnson really needs to pay more attention to his constituents than he does #FARTUS. The consensus among many analysts is that Trump is militarizing large democratically run cities to terrorize their citizens into not voting. It’s also why he’s so interested in stopping early and mail-in voting.
This is from The Brennan Center for Justice. “Crime as a Cover. The claim that troops are needed to fight local crime is nothing but a pretext.” The analysis is reported by Michael Waldman. Trump is doing everything he can to become a despot.
President Trump has threatened to send troops to Chicago to “straighten that one out.” New York City, he says, might be next.
Already, armed National Guard regiments are patrolling the streets of Washington, DC. All this on top of the deployment of troops to Los Angeles earlier in the summer.
The deployment of out-of-state troops to occupy cities cannot plausibly promote public order. It’s blunt force, a brutal power grab. It runs afoul of the Constitution and the proper role for states.
I write history books and consider myself an expert on the presidency. I can think of few analogies — not in this country, anyway — for such a move by a chief executive.
Why is this particular turn so alarming? After all, public safety is important, and fighting crime is a worthy goal. My colleague Liza Goitein explains the legal and constitutional issues:
Trump is on even thinner legal ice with this plan than he is in Los Angeles and DC. Unlike in the capital, the president doesn’t command the Illinois National Guard unless he calls them into federal service (i.e., “federalizes” them). There are various laws that authorize him to federalize the Guard, but none of them would apply here.
In Los Angeles, Trump is relying on a law (Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code) that authorizes federalization when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States,” meaning federal law. Immigration law is federal law. Trump claimed that the protests rendered him “unable . . . to execute” ICE raids. Although dozens of raids happened during the protests and the administration did not cite a single raid that was thwarted, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals deferred to Trump’s assessment.
But that law simply wouldn’t apply to the type of crime Trump has cited in Chicago — essentially, violent street crime. The laws that are implicated are largely those of Illinois and Chicago, not the “laws of the United States.”
Even under the Insurrection Act — which is the main exception to the law barring deployment of the military for domestic law enforcement — the president may deploy troops to execute the law only in situations involving either federal laws or those state laws designed to protect the constitutional rights of classes of people (basically, civil rights laws).
Nor can Trump ask other states’ governors to send their Guard forces into Chicago, as he did in DC under a law known as Section 502(f), which authorizes governors to voluntarily use their Guard forces for missions requested by the president or secretary of defense. Under this law, presidents have asked governors to deploy Guard forces within their own states, in other states that consent, or (as only Trump has done) in DC without local consent. No governor has sent Guard troops into another state that did not consent, as would be the case here. That’s because Guard forces deployed under this law remain state officers as a legal matter. And under the Constitution, states are sovereign entities vis-à-vis one another. That means one state cannot invade another, even at the president’s request.
If the president wants to send one state’s National Guard forces into an unwilling state, he must federalize them first. But to federalize them, he needs statutory authority. And there is no statutory authority to federalize the Guard to police local crime.
The Pentagon reportedly sees its planned military deployment in Chicago as a model for other cities. And of course, the other cities Trump has name-checked in this context are governed by Democrats: Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Oakland.
Flooding “blue” cities with soldiers on the pretext of fighting crime would be an unprecedented abuse of power that would violate states’ rights and threaten our most fundamental liberties. The plan is profoundly un-American. And it is illegal.
Public safety matters greatly. But facts belie the (ever shifting) rationale. New York, for example, remains one of the nation’s safest large cities. As Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday, crime has dropped dramatically, even this year. Fighting crime is not a rationale — it’s a pretext.
The cities targeted so far have two things in common: a Black mayor and a fusillade of presidential rhetoric denouncing them as “hellholes.”
Bill Kristol, founder of The Bulwark and a longtime prominent Republican, surveyed the past week and put it this way: “What we are seeing is not merely a ‘slide toward authoritarianism.’ It’s a march toward despotism. And it’s a march whose pace is accelerating.”
What can be done to push back? Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker warned federal forces, “Do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here.” Trump, in turn, mused, “They say . . . ‘He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’” He added, “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator.” (As presidential quotations go, it’s about as reassuring as Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”)
Pritzker and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul can play pivotal roles. States and cities can go to court — an epic legal battle. They can rally the public in their states and around the country. They can monitor and document the conduct of deployed forces.
We must all speak out when our Constitution is under threat.
Get some rest this Labor Day. It’s going to be a busy fall.
I still see most of these actions as enablements of the Supreme Court. I’m not the only one. This is from Justin Jouvenal writing forThe Washington Post. “The Supreme Court has expanded Trump’s power. He’s seeking much more. The president’s firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and other cases could serve as major tests of how far the high court is willing to go.” Removing the independence of the FED is another way of turning us into a Banana Republic.
The Supreme Court has already expanded President Donald Trump’s authority in a string of emergency rulings, but he’s signaling in his firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and other issues likely headed to the court that he continues to seek broader powers for the executive branch.
The cases could serve as major tests of how much further the nation’s high court is willing to go to bless the president’s assertion of executive authority. They differ from previous showdowns because of the sheer magnitude of the authority Trump is seeking to wield and because he wants greater control over powers the Constitution ascribes to another branch of government.
In addition to Cook’s lawsuit, which could make its way to the high court after she sued last week, a blockbuster case over Trump’s tariffs is expected to arrive at the high court soon after an appeals court struck them down. The Trump administration’s pushto withhold tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid appropriated by Congress could also end up in the court.
Peter Shane, a law professor at New York University, called Trump’s assertions “breathtaking.”
“Other presidents have tried to use their authority aggressively, but usually it’s been done through aggressive interpretations of statutory law and in a pretty targeted way,” Shane said.
Each of the presidential powers being contested by Trump, he said, “is a challenge to what I think heretofore would have been regarded as a core power of Congress.”
The high court has already signaled openness to broad presidential authority to replace some heads of independent agencies.
The justices handed Trump a major victory in May when they allowed him to remove the leaders of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board while legal challenges play out over their firings. Trump gave no reasons for the dismissals.
The court’sconservative majority ruled the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, so Trump could fire the agency heads “without cause” even though Congress set up the agencies to be insulated from political interference.
There it is. The direct attacks on labor. This is a guest Op-Ed in the New York Times (gift article) by labor historian Erik Loomis.”Trump Is Wiping Out Unions. Why Are They So Quiet?”
This is a most unfortunate Labor Day for labor. The labor movement has taken it on the chin repeatedly in the last several decades, but President Trump is the most ruthlessly anti-labor president since before the Great Depression.
If the labor movement does not fight harder than it has since Mr. Trump regained the presidency, its future will be dire.
Mr. Trump and his administration have unilaterally stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. At the Department of Veterans Affairs alone, 400,000 workers, or 2.8 percent of America’s unionized workers, have lost their collective bargaining rights because of an executive order that will eventually affect more than one million federal workers. Mr. Trump ushered in Labor Day weekend on Thursday by continuing his assault of federal unions, adding the Patent Office, NASA and the National Weather Service to his list of targeted agencies.
Despite this assault on their very existence, we have barely heard a peep from unions. Where is organized labor in the public fight to maintain union jobs, stop the stripping of the safety net and lead the fight for democracy? Other than some statements and angry speeches, the movement has been muted.
If the labor movement wants to fight for its survival, it must return to mass mobilization tactics, reminding Americans that their rights come through working together — not through supporting a president who talks about helping American workers while slashing worker safety regulations, supporting tariffs that raise the cost of consumer goods and stripping workers of their legal rights to contracts.
All this is happening at a time when Americans’ approval of unions is the highest it has been since the mid-1960s.
One cannot overstate the significance of Mr. Trump’s attacks on government workers. Public sector work has become organized labor’s power base, allowing the total workforce’s union membership rate to remain at around 10 percent, despite less than 6 percent of private sector workers having unions.
Based on actions Mr. Trump has taken this year — and without any notable public pushback from supposedly pro-labor Republicans like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio — it is unlikely that there will be any unionized federal workers outside of policing agencies by the end of his term in 2029.
Mr. Trump has attacked workers in other ways. He has gutted the Department of Labor through cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency. He is also rolling back Labor Department rules from the Obama and Biden administrations that allowed home care workers to earn overtime and farmworkers to campaign for better working conditions. And he has severely undermined the National Labor Relations Board, which handles thousands of union matters every year by firing its head and nominating corporate-friendly figures to steer its operations away from supporting workers.
A plane carrying the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was targeted by GPS navigation jamming while trying to land in Bulgaria on Sunday, a spokesperson for the commission told CNN.
The commission received “information from Bulgarian authorities that they suspect this blatant interference was carried out by Russia,” said European Commission Deputy Chief Spokesperson Arianna Podestà.
The plane landed safely, the spokesperson said. A source familiar with the situation told CNN the pilots landed the plane using paper maps.
Von der Leyen and the commission have been staunch supporters of Ukraine as Kyiv tries to defend itself against Russia’s unprovoked aggression. She was one of the European leaders who attended US President Donald Trump’s summit on Ukraine last week and has consistently urged EU member states to allocate more resources to helping Ukraine.
The incident occurred as the president was about to land at the Plovdiv International Airport in the south of Bulgaria, part of her tour around member states in the eastern part of the bloc to rally support for Ukraine.
“This incident underlines the urgency of the President’s current trip to frontline Member States, where she has seen first hand the every day threats from Russia and its proxies,” Podestà told CNN.
Not only are Russia and China getting brave, but India’s Modi has been driven straight into their arms by Trump. This is an alarming headline from Christian Shepherd writing for The Washington Post. “China tries to use Trump turmoil to unite leaders against U.S.-led order. Twenty leaders — including from Russia, Iran and India — are in China for a summit designed to promote Beijing as a reliable counterweight to the U.S.” This is happening as Trump cuts more foreign aid and Kari Lake disables the Voice of America. I thought Yam Tits considered them his buddies?
Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Monday called on the leaders of countries including Russia, Iran and India to integrate their economies and build an “orderly multipolar world,” as he tried to unite them in their shared grievances with the U.S.-led global order and the policies of President Donald Trump.
Xi used the platform of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit here, 90 miles southeast of Beijing, to implicitly criticize Trump’s policies — without naming him or mentioning the United States.
He urged the 20 foreign leaders in attendance to “seek integration, not decoupling” and “unequivocally oppose power politics.”
Member countries should “serve as a cornerstone for the promotion of a multipolar world” and join a China-led “global governance initiative,” he said in closing remarksafter a day in which leaders put on shows of chumminess and met for private talks on the sidelines of the mostly scripted event.
The Chinese leader’s new initiative will help provide stability at a time of rising turbulence and end “the monopoly of global governance by some countries,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a news briefing Monday night after Xi’s remarks.
Xi held a bilateral meeting with India’s Narendra Modi Sunday and will hold a one-on-one with Vladimir Putin of Russia on Tuesday.The three were filmed holding hands and smiling as they chatted on Monday.
Xi also proposed deepening economic ties to take advantage of the group’s “mega-sized market,” including by establishing a SCO development bank. China has already invested $84 billion in member countries and would provide another $1.4 billion in loans over the next three years, he said.
The forum is a key part of China’s campaign to be seen as a reliable partner and a counterweight to U.S. unpredictability in an increasingly multipolar world. Modi’s attendance in particular — his first visit to the country in seven years — is a milestone in Beijing’s attempt to mend ties with an influential U.S. partner that has been alienated by Trump’s tariffs.
California’s Governor Newsom is still trolling Trump. It may not be classy, but it sure is funny! “Gavin Newsom continues to troll Trump by blasting ‘I’m a Survivor’ in post about president’s health. Donald Trump’s bruised hands mocked by California governor in Instagram video bringing together some of the president’s most embarrassing moments.” This is from The Independent and reported by Joe Summerlad.
California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has continued his trolling campaign against Donald Trump, this time posting a video on Instagram making light of the president’s health complaints.
The montage, set to the 2001 song “I’m a Survivor” by country music star Reba McEntire, pulls together some of Trump’s most embarrassing gaffes in the public eye, from tripping on the steps to Air Force One to recoiling in horror from a squawking eagle and being bumped in the chin by a rogue reporter’s microphone.
“He’s trying,” the post is captioned.
Drawing an ironic contrast between the president’s opulent lifestyle and the song’s lyrics about a “single mom who works two jobs,” the clip also pays particular attention to the bruises spotted on Trump’s hands in recent months.
The commander-in-chief was recently diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency but speculation about his wellbeing raged well before that and has not abated since the condition was revealed.
JJ has informed me that you must turn off your location before going to Instagram, as they are posting it on MAPS.
I hope you got some rest and relaxation this weekend. I’ve been hanging in the house trying to avoid reality.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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I’m moving quite slowly today. I thought I had mentally prepared myself for the 20th Katrinaversary. Emotions have check-mated all that. I’m glad for the 4-day weekend because I need more solitude than usual. I evacuated with Miles, my cat, and my labs, Honey and Karma, to join the Grad students who were staying in a Lake Charles Motel. I had told them to evacuate even though my original plan was to stay. I grabbed the craziest things before heading out in the mighty mustang. The last thing I did was try to cover my grandmother’s Steinway parlor grand with an orange tarp. It took me all day, in mostly stopped traffic, to get to Lake Charles. I slept on a futon on the floor with two grad students. I drove to Dallas, where they could catch a plane and a bus to safety. I headed to Omaha, where my oldest daughter had just started Med School, and my youngest was finishing up high school. I really wanted to avoid talking about it today. But it is what it is.
My late friend Jane took me in, and I spent a lot of time glued to CNN reports. All I heard was the devastation in the Ninth Ward. They did not figure out that there were upper and lower 9. I finally saw my house on Google’s satellite. It was there, roof and all. When I got home and realized that buying a house on the “sliver by the river” was the best decision I ever made. I had minor wind damage and some damage caused by the neighbor’s roof hitting my house. When I was finally able to see the real damage up close, I developed survivor’s guilt as well as PTSD. I relive that annually. I’ve made my short trips to the Gulf Coast since then. Every time I drove to the lower 9 to show friends and family the devastation up and beyond Thanksgiving, they were still pulling bodies from buildings. Never forget the incompetence that let this happen and killed so many.
I never thought I’d see an administration as incompetent as Dubya Bush. But here we are. Let’s review today’s disaster. I planned to start with RFK Jr., but then Yam Tits did something astoundingly awful today. This is from Politico. “White House declares $4.9B in foreign aid unilaterally canceled in end-run around Congress’ funding power. The administration is setting up clash with Capitol Hill over its use of the “pocket rescission.”
President Donald Trump threw a grenade Friday into September government funding negotiations on Capitol Hill, declaring the unilateral power to cancel billions of dollars in foreign aid by using a so-called pocket rescission.
Escalating the administration’s assault on Congress’ funding prerogatives, the White House budget office announced Friday morning that Trump has canceled $4.9 billion through the gambit that Congress’ top watchdog and many lawmakers argue is an illegal end-run around their “power of the purse.”
The move to unilaterally nix money previously approved by Congress raises tensions on Capitol Hill as lawmakers face an Oct. 1 deadline to avoid a government shutdown, pitting Republicans at the White House against GOP lawmakers and increasing pressure on Democrats to force a funding lapse unless Trump stands down.
Democrats and Republicans alike have warned that a pocket rescissions request would hamper cross-party talks to avert a shutdown at the end of September, while fulfilling White House budget director Russ Vought’s wish that the process of funding the government be “less bipartisan” to accommodate a raft of conservative priorities.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hinted Friday that Democrats could refuse to offer the votes to get a government funding bill through the chamber before funding lapses late next month if congressional Republicans don’t push back against Trump’s latest funding move.
“Republicans don’t have to be a rubber stamp for this carnage,” Schumer said, adding that “if Republicans are insistent on going it alone, Democrats won’t be party to their destruction.”
Yet three congressional Republicans, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they expect Vought to send additional requests to revoke funding between now and the end of the current fiscal year, which would only inflame tensions.
“Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” the Senate’s top Republican appropriator, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, said in a quick and clear rebuke of the Trump administration’s gambit.
But the Trump administration is embracing the strategy boldly and without apology, while also signaling it intends to stare down any legal challenges that may come its way as a result: “Congress can choose to vote to rescind or continue the funds — it doesn’t matter,” an official from the White House budget office said in a statement. “This approach is rare but not unprecedented.”
I’m seriously waiting for the Democratic Congress Leadership to respond to this. Talking Points Memo has that angle on this story. “Democrats Predict Shutdown After Trump Tries to Snatch Congress’ Most Important Power.” We’ll see. This is reported by Kate Riga.
Congressional Democrats point to skyrocketing odds of a government shutdown Friday after President Trump announced that he’ll unilaterally take back money Congress had already appropriated for foreign aid, according to multiple outlets.
“As the country stares down next month’s government funding deadline on September 30th, it is clear neither President Trump nor Congressional Republicans have any plan to avoid a painful and entirely unnecessary shutdown,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement.
The move forces members of Congress to confront a question that has lingered over the legislative branch all year: What is the point of the two parties negotiating a federal budget if the executive branch insists it has the power to unilaterally determine what funds get spent? In this case, the administration seeks to make use of a loophole it claims it has discovered to refuse to spend funds appropriated by Congress.
The unprecedented gambit goes even further than what unfolded in July, when the White House sought to cancel money Congress had already approved. Then, at least, lawmakers voted on the rescission, which required only 50 votes and passed with only Republican support. This time, Trump isn’t bothering to get congressional Republicans’ sign-off. This new so-called pocket rescission totals $4.9 billion, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
“Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the Senate’s head appropriator, said in a Friday statement. She pointed to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finding that pocket rescissions are illegal under the Impoundment Control Act, as well as Congress’ power of the purse. The GAO, an independent watchdog agency within the legislative branch, has repeatedly stated that pocket rescissions are illegal.
“Republicans should not accept Russ Vought’s brazen attempt to usurp their own power. No president has a line item veto — and certainly not a retroactive line item veto,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the head Democratic appropriator, said in a statement, calling it an “absurd, illegal ploy” to “steal” lawmakers’ congressional power.
Vought, the director of the OMB, has led the charge on pocket rescissions, telegraphing for months his intention to request the rescission once the clock wound down on the fiscal year. Under the administration’s untested theory of the case, the timing loophole lets the President zero out any already allocated funds he chooses.
“I refuse to label Vought’s gambit a ‘pocket rescission’ because it gives his unlawful attempt to steal the promises Congress enacted an air of legitimacy it does not deserve,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the head Democratic appropriator in the House, said in a Friday statement.
Experts are dubious that even this ultra-conservative Supreme Court will sign off on such a brazen defiance of the separation of powers, with one telling TPM he doubts the gambit will get “a single vote” from the justices.
The move also strips the minority of what little power it usually has to demand concessions in exchange for votes during the appropriations process.
Now, we may switch to the conspiracy theorist who runs Health and Human Services, and specifically the CDC. RFK Jr. is in a race with Yam Tits to win the crown for the most insane person in this regime. This analysis is from Don Monyihan’s Substack, Can We Still Govern? “RFK Jr. is bad for your health. Public servants are trying to warn us that state capacity is being undermined. The Centers for Disease Control shitshow is a microcosm of the mismanagement of the Trump era. It also demonstrated some extraordinary courage among principled public servants, who were willing to lose their jobs to draw attention to damage being done to public health.”
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vax crank. He should never have been confirmed to any sort of public health position. He lied to the Senate about how he would manage vaccines if confirmed, and most Republican Senators, including physician Dr. Bill Cassidy, chose to believe him and ignore his record.
While much of RFK Jr.’s work at HHS is meaningless photo-ops with food providers promising to remove food dyes here, or add beef tallow there, he has invested real effort in exactly the place his record suggested: targeting vaccines. He has fired all members of the CDC vaccine advisory committee, baselessly accusing them of conflicts-of-interest, and replacing them with fellow vaccine skeptics.
To be clear, this goes beyond Covid vaccines: childhood vaccines to stop the spread of preventable diseases are now in the crosshairs, even after Kennedy assured Senator Cassidy that they would not be touched. Kennedy has defunded research on mRNA vaccines, ensuring that the world will less ready for the next pandemic. He is encouraging states to weaken vaccine requirements.
On Monday, RFK Jr. told the CDC Director, Susan Monarez, in place for just over a month, to accept two conditions if she wanted to keep her job.
First, he wanted her public support for his policies to limit access to vaccines. Monarez is an infectious disease scientist who has served in government for a long time. In effect, RFK Jr. was asking that she lend her personal credibility as a scientist, and the credibility of CDC, to his anti-vax policies. She demurred, saying she needed to talk to senior staff at CDC.
Second, Kennedy ordered her to fire those staff. Since they are career civil servants, it would be illegal to fire them without cause, although this has become the norm now in the Trump administration. For example, career officials at FBI were fired for refusing to fire their fellow civil servants without cause.
Monarez refused both requests.
To be clear, RFK Jr. can implement these vaccine policies without the blessing of Monarez. What he wants is for public health officials to lie to the public. What he wants is to purge medical doctors and infectious disease researchers with decades of public health experience if they don’t go along with his woo-woo medical theories.
Elizabeth Cooney has this analysis at STAT. “Crisis within CDC is spilling into real world, experts say. From food safety to vaccine availability, loss of trust and talent threaten health: ‘We are in much worse shape’”
The implosion of leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention threatens the agency, its mission, and the trust people place in public health, medical experts told STAT Thursday, a day after Director Susan Monarez refused to dismiss top scientists only to be ousted herself.
The crisis in the agency, which has been battered by personnel and policy changes ordered by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is spilling into real-world harms, the experts said. They are seeing uncertainty from the public about vaccine recommendations and availability, in light of new Covid-19 vaccine policies announced by Kennedy, as well as deeper concerns about emergency preparedness for the inevitable next challenge to the nation’s health.
“I’m worried that CDC will not be there with the full capacity that’s necessary to help us with the next big threat,” Georges Benjamin, a physician and executive director of the American Public Health Association, told STAT. “But I’m also worried about the current threats that we have today.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that a statement from Monarez’s lawyers “made it clear she was not aligned with the president’s mission to make American health again,” so Kennedy asked for her resignation.
“The president and Secretary Kennedy are committed to restoring trust and transparency and credibility to the CDC by ensuring their leadership and their decisions are more public-facing, more accountable, strengthening our public health system and restoring it to its core mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases, investing in innovation to prevent, detect, and respond to future threats,” Leavitt said.
Budget cuts ordered by President Trump have steadily hammered at jobs and programs, in some cases erasing entire sectors of the agency’s public health activity. That list includes air quality as well as individual diseases like HIV, viral hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, and tuberculosis. There has been an erosion of the study of gun violence.
In other news, we have some more craziness by the Orange Caligula. First, from the New York Times, this piece on the continuation of Trump’s resurrection of traitors of the Lost Cause. Greg Jaffee reports this. “Pentagon Is Reinstalling Portrait of Confederate General at West Point Library. The Pentagon is putting back up a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee at the military academy, as the Trump administration seeks to restore honors for American figures who fought to preserve slavery.” Trump still continues to argue that slavery wasn’t that bad.
The Pentagon is restoring a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee, which includes a slave guiding the Confederate general’s horse in the background, to the West Point library three years after a congressionally mandated commission ordered it removed, officials said.
The 20-foot-tall painting, which hung at the United States Military Academy for 70 years, was taken down in response to a 2020 law that stripped the names of Confederate leaders from military bases.
That legislation also created a commission to come up with new base names. In 2022, the commission ordered West Point to take down all displays that “commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy.” A few weeks later, the portrait of General Lee with his slave in the background was placed in storage.
It was not clear how West Point could return General Lee’s portrait to the library without violating the law, which emerged from the protests that followed George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers in 2020.
This is from the AP. “Trump ends ex-Vice President Harris’ Secret Service protection early after Biden had extended it.”
President Donald Trump has revoked former Vice President Kamala Harris’ Secret Service protection that otherwise would have ended next summer, senior Trump administration officials said Friday.
Former vice presidents typically get federal government protection for six months after leaving office, while ex-presidents do so for life. But then-President Joe Biden quietly signed a directive, at Harris’ request, that had extended protection for her beyond the traditional six months, according to another person familiar with the matter. The people insisted on anonymity to discuss a matter not made public.
Trump, a Republican, defeated Harris, a Democrat, in the presidential election last year.
His move to drop Harris’ Secret Service protection comes as the former vice president, who became the Democratic nominee last summer after a chaotic series of events that led to Biden dropping out of the contest, is about to embark on a book tour for her memoir, titled “107 Days.” The tour has 15 stops, including visits abroad to London and Toronto. The book, which refers to the historically short length of her presidential campaign, will be released Sept. 23, and the tour begins the following day.
CBS News reports this headline. “Joni Ernst won’t seek reelection to Senate in 2026, sources say.”
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa has told confidantes she plans to reveal next week that she won’t seek reelection in 2026, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.Ernst’s announcement is scheduled for Thursday, the sources said. Ernst, 55, has served in the U.S. Senate since 2015.
Spokespeople for Ernst did not reply to requests for comment.
Some Iowa Democrats have already jumped into the race, including state Sen. Zach Wahls, state Rep. Josh Turek, and Des Moines School Board chairwoman Jackie Norris.
Ernst has been evasive about whether she would run for a third term in 2026, but in public remarks earlier this month, predicted continued GOP control of Iowa.
This is from Zoe Schiffer writing at WIRED. “The White House Apparently Ordered Federal Workers to Roll Out Grok ‘ASAP’. A partnership between xAI and the US government fell apart earlier this summer. Then the White House apparently got involved, per documents obtained by WIRED.” You may remember this AI disaster went on full metal NAZI meltdown a few months ago.
“Team: Grok/xAI needs to go back on the schedule ASAP per the WH,” states the email, sent by Josh Gruenbaum, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service. “Can someone get with Carahsoft on this immediately and please confirm?” Carahsoft is a major government contractor that resells technology from third-party firms.
“Should be all of their products we had previously (3 & 4),” the email continued, seemingly referring to Grok 3 and Grok 4. The subject line of the email was “xAI add Grok-4.”
Sources say Carahsoft’s contract was modified to include xAI earlier this week. Grok 3 and Grok 4 both currently appear on GSA Advantage (an online marketplace for government agencies to buy products and services) as of Friday morning. Now, following some internal reviews, any government agency can roll Grok out to federal workers.
The White House and GSA did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
The email comes after a planned partnership with xAI fell apart earlier this summer following Grok’s widespread praise for Hitler and the spouting of other antisemitic beliefs on X, WIRED previously reported.
One last one as Yam Tits moves to take over more big American Cities beyond L.A. and the District. This is from Reuters and written by Tom Hals. ”
As President Donald Trump began his push to send the National Guard and Marines to U.S. cities, military leaders privately questioned whether the troops had received proper training and warned of the “far-reaching social, political and operational” risks of aiding law enforcement, according to a Reuters review of military records disclosed in court.
U.S. Army officials planning an operation in MacArthur Park during the June deployment in Los Angeles determined that using troops to protect agents carrying out Trump’s immigration crackdown posed an “extremely high” risk to civilians, troops and the military’s reputation, according to an internal document.
Officials warned that the operation could attract protests and spiral into a riot with potential for “miscommunication and fratricide” as well as accidental harm to civilians, including children, the operation planning document said.
The trove of internal military reports and messages, disclosed during a trial to resolve a lawsuit by California Governor Gavin Newsom, offers a rare inside look at concerns from commanders after Trump broke a long-standing tradition against using the military in support of domestic law enforcement over the objections of local officials.
Since deploying 4,000 National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to quell protests against immigration arrests, Republican Trump has sent National Guard troops to Washington and is considering expanding the military presence in other Democratic-run cities.
To mitigate the risks of the Los Angeles deployment, military lawyers drafted rules for using force and de-escalation that troops could access on their phones and that warned of the high stakes of the deployment.
The very nature of domestic operations — American military forces operating in U.S. communities — has such significant implications that the mistakes of a few soldiers can have far-reaching social, political, and operational effects,” according to an undated document titled “Los Angeles Civil Unrest SRUF.” The acronym means Standing Rules for the Use of Force.
Louis Caldera, Army Secretary to Democratic former President Bill Clinton, said in an interview that deploying the military domestically threatens to put soldiers and civilians at risk, undermines recruitment and erodes public support.
Trump has broken a lot of norms,” said Caldera. “His predecessors would not use the military in this way.”
I hope you have a great Labor Day Weekend. I plan to stay away from the news and throw myself into movies, books, and games which reflect a reality different from the horrible one we find ourselves in now. Hang tough! The resistance is growing.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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“Come on, he picked it up at Walgreens.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein may be dead and gone, but the damage he and his buddies have done to the lives of teenage girls will never be undone. I can only imagine their suffering as the news cycle reminds them of a life they try daily to forget and move beyond. This is the reason everyone should honestly put them first in the search for justice for those men who joined Epstein in stealing their youth. More stories of the exploitation of these girls are reaching front pages.
Today, in People Magazine, we learn that an “Ex-Casino Boss Claims Trump and ‘Best Friend’ Jeffrey Epstein Were Once Caught Bringing Underage Girls to Casino Floor. A former executive at Trump’s Atlantic City casino told CNN that the duo brought three girls to the gambling floor who were not yet 21. The White House is calling his story “fabricated.” I’m enjoying the turning of the screw as many of the MAGA faithful burn their red hats in effigy. I just hope that support is available as the victims of their abhorrent crimes relive spiritual murder.
A former employee of Donald Trump claimed in a new interview that the president and Jeffrey Epstein were once caught bringing girls into Trump’s casino who were not old enough to gamble. The White House denies the allegations.
Jack O’Donnell, who oversaw the Atlantic City Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino for four years in the 1980s, spoke with CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday, July 16, about the president’s friendship with the late billionaire, who later became a convicted sex offender.
“In my mind, [Epstein] was his best friend, you know, [throughout] the time I was there for four years,” O’Donnell said in the interview, noting that the pair “frequently” came to Trump’s casino together.
One alleged instance stood out to the former casino boss. He claimed that one night in the late 1980s, Trump and Epstein visited Trump Plaza with three women and brought them onto the casino floor despite them being under 21.
O’Donnell said he found out about the incident the following day, when state casino commission inspectors were waiting for him in his office. An inspector, it seems, had identified one of the girls with Trump and Epstein as “the No. 3-ranked tennis player in the world.”
“This [inspector] happened to be a tennis fan and he said, ‘Jack, I know she’s 19 years old,’ ” O’Donnell said. “They had determined that the women that they brought down were underage to be in the casino.”
In the state of New Jersey, it is illegal for anyone under 21 to gamble on a casino floor. Despite the law, O’Donnell claims the commission gave Trump a “break” for the incident, but told him to warn the future president about the potential consequences.
“I had to call them and say, ‘They’re giving you a break this time, but if this happens again, the fine is going to be substantial and it’s going to be on your head,’ ” he claimed.
O’Donnell also claimed to have told Trump that continuing to hang out with Epstein and underage women was “not gonna look good.”
“I did tell him in that conversation, ‘I don’t think you should be hanging out with this guy, just so you know, and you certainly shouldn’t be doing that in Atlantic City,’ ” he said.
When asked on Thursday about O’Donnell’s CNN interview, the White House passionately denied his claims.
“Jack O’Donnell is a stone cold loser who is a liar and fraud,” White House communications director Steven Cheung told PEOPLE in a statement. “This is completely fabricated story from his warped imagination as he suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his pea-sized brain.”
The repetitive use of the same old explanations has certainly become insufficient. Trump is the forever victim. We knew of his proclivities a long time ago. He even bought a teen beauty pageant to gain access to the dressing room of the contestants. But her emails. This is the PolitiFact take on the case from back in the day.
As wavesofallegations of Donald Trump’s inappropriate behavior toward females swept over the presidential campaign, reaction from around the country was swift.
During an Oct. 12, 2016, meeting with the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., commented on one of the latest revelations, saying:
“I was just reading on the way over here this morning on how Trump would walk into the (Miss) Teen USA dressing room, all these 15- and 16-year-olds completely naked, just walk right in on them. Man, is that the image we want of the president of the United States? It’s just disturbing to think that he could get away with all this stuff.”
So, did Trump “walk right in on” naked 15- and 16-year-old contestants in their dressing room?
The implication is that the alleged incident, back when the Republican nominee owned the pageant, wasn’t a mistake.
We’re not going to rate this on our Truth-O-Meter, since some of the key sources are anonymous. But we’ll lay out what we do know about the allegation.
The nightmare of every woman, mother, and grandmother is that their young girl will fall under the power structure set up by these men to hide their proclivities. Hebephiles are omnipresent in places that give them access to prepubescent children. There is not a day that goes by where we learn some minister or priest is abusing an adolescent or young child. One of the most amazing things I’ve seen is this year’s book and appearances written by E Jean. Carroll. Just a week ago, a Judge ruled on Trump’s latest court attempt to overturn the verdict in her case. You would have to be deliberately blind to not see Yam Tits as a sexual predator. This is from The Hill.
The mandate reaffirms the 90-day clock for Trump to appeal the case to the Supreme Court after the court last month rejected Trump’s bid to overturn the verdict.
A three-judge panel on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict late last year, keeping intact Carroll’s $5 million judgment over claims Trump sexually abused her at a New York City department store in the mid-1990s. He denies her allegations.
“Thursday, July 10th, 2025 So long, Old Man! The United States Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit, bids thee farewell,” Carroll wrote in a social media post celebrating the mandate.
A White House spokesperson described Carroll’s case as “liberal lawfare” in a statement sent to CNBC.
Breaking news: “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert will end in May 2026, CBS said in a statement.The announcement came days after Colbert spoke out against the $16 million paid earlier this month by Paramount, the parent company of CBS News.
You have to wonder about Paramount’s decision to end the successful run of Steven Colbert’s show. Colbert was undoubtedly the best Trump detractor on TV. The timing is definitely suspicious, and Yam Tits immediately celebrated the news on his propaganda social media site, Truth Social. This is from the Washington Post.
“The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert will end in May 2026at the conclusion of its current broadcast season, CBS announced Thursday in a statement. It called the cancellation “purely a financial decision.”
“It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount,” the network said, describing it as an “agonizing decision.” Colbert took over as host, executive producer and writer of the show in 2015.
Colbert told the audience at a Thursday taping that he found out about the cancellation the previous night. “I share your feelings,” he said, when the crowd booed after his announcement.
He said it was the end of “The Late Show,” not just his stint at its helm. “I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away,” Colbert said. He added that he was “extraordinarily, deeply grateful to the 200 people who work here.”
CBS staffers were caught off guard by the announcement. “We are flabbergasted,” said one staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.
The announcement came days after Colbert spoke out against the decision earlier this month by Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump during last year’s presidential campaign.
We may never know for certain what role that lawsuit and the settlement played in that decision, but I have my suspicions. So does Senator Elizabeth Warren.
CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump – a deal that looks like bribery.America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.
President Trump said Friday morning that he was thrilled by the news that CBS is canceling the decade-running “Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social. “His talent was even less than his ratings.”
Meanwhile, the Republican attack on children continues with a new trick to pull back funding for NPTV and NPR. Rural communities receive vital weather warnings from the stations, as it is the only provider of that information in the many middle-of-nowhere places in this country. It’s truly fitting that PBS News writes its own obituary. The Senate caved shortly after. “House gives final approval to Trump’s $9 billion cut to public broadcasting and foreign aid.”
The cancellation of $1.1 billion for the CPB represents the full amount it is due to receive during the next two budget years.
The White House says the public media system is politically biased and an unnecessary expense.
The corporation distributes more than two-thirds of the money to more than 1,500 locally operated public television and radio stations, with much of the remainder assigned to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service to support national programming.
Democrats were unsuccessful in restoring the funding in the Senate.
Lawmakers with large rural constituencies voiced particular concern about what the cuts to public broadcasting could mean for some local public stations in their state.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the stations are “not just your news — it is your tsunami alert, it is your landslide alert, it is your volcano alert.”
As the Senate debated the bill Tuesday, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck off the remote Alaska Peninsula, triggering tsunami warnings on local public broadcasting stations that advised people to get to higher ground.
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said he secured a deal from the White House that some money administered by the Interior Department would be repurposed to subsidize Native American public radio stations in about a dozen states.
But Kate Riley, president and CEO of America’s Public Television Stations, a network of locally owned and operated stations, said that deal was “at best a short-term, half-measure that will still result in cuts and reduced service at the stations it purports to save.”
You may recall that early in this blog’s history, I was commuting about an hour to a university across the lake. NPR was my companion on the long commute. I can attest that there was a good part of the drive where my cellphone did not work, and that the only radio station I could get in the swamps along I-55 was NPR. I’d start with the local in New Orleans, and everything would drop until I got the NPR station from Baton Rouge. I can only imagine what the hinterlands are like up North in places like Montana and Wyoming. We’re definitely in the fascist country of Trumpistan now. Lisa Murkowski complained about the funds cut to NPR and voted against it. This is from UPI. “Coming PBS, NPR cuts already hurting many stations.”
The public stations already have received funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to get them through September. Once that money runs out, more than 100 PBS and NPR stations are at risk of closing. The cuts will hit especially hard in rural areas.
“Their response to today’s earthquake is a perfect example of the incredible public service these stations provide,” Murkowski said Wednesday on X. “They deliver local news, weather updates, and, yes, emergency alerts that save human lives.”
Murkowski was one of two Republican senators who voted against the bill.
The effects of the cutting off of funding could be even wider-reaching than expected, observers said.
“Failing stations will create a cascade effect in this highly connected and interdependent system, impacting content producers and leading to the potential collapse of additional distressed stations in other areas of the country,” Tim Isgitt, CEO of advisory firm Public Media Company, told The New York Times.
An analysis by non-profit Public Media Company identified 78 public radio organizations and 37 TV organizations that will likely close. They rely on funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for about 30% of their budgets.
“I think unfortunately this is cutting off their constituents’ noses to spite NPR’s face,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher said Wednesday on CNN. “It doesn’t help anyone to take this funding away.”
PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger said in a statement that the cuts “will be especially devastating to smaller stations and those serving large rural areas.”
The Trump Justice Department continues to be ground zero of his second term. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the impact of a White House-run DOJ dwarfs most other Trump II depredations precisely because it allows space for them continue unchecked. A totally compromised DOJ eliminates accountability for breaking the law in the criminal sense and for the mass lawlessness in non-criminal contexts.
I offer that as an introduction to the series of news items below that either directly involve malfeasance under Attorney General Pam Bondi or are a byproduct of DOJ bad acts. As the Jeffrey Epstein matter threatens to consume the Trump White House, remember that it, too, is an outgrowth of trying to abuse and misuse the powers of the Justice Department. It just happened to backfire.
Fired DOJ prosecutor Maurene Comey sent this note to her former colleagues in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office.
Comey’s firing by Main Justice blindsided acting U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who was reduced to “just a paper-pusher,” in the words of one observer.
Trump is starting a new initiative to put more political appointees into federal jobs. This is from GovExec.com. “Trump creates ‘Schedule G’ to add more political appointees to agencies’ top ranks. The new, non-career employees will serve in policy-making roles and add “horsepower” to carrying out the administration’s agenda, White House says.” Why aren’t folks screaming Communism at this attempt to stack the federal government with idiots? It sure sounds like a command and control model of government, ala the Soviet Union, to me.
President Trump created another new category of federal employee on Thursday evening, issuing an executive order to expand the number of political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation and will serve in policy-making or policy-advocating roles.
While presidents can already tap an uncapped number of appointees to serve in Schedule C positions, Trump noted those individuals serve in more narrow confidential or policy-determining roles. The new positions will therefore fill a gap that currently exists in federal appointments, the White House said.
The order is the latest in Trump’s effort to establish a tighter grip on the executive branch and its actions. He has already created Schedule Policy/Career, formerly known as Schedule F, which is similarly defined to Schedule G but reserved for career civil servants. Agencies are in the process of determining who qualifies for conversion to Schedule Policy/Career and those employees will become easier to fire for any reason.
“President Trump believes creating non-career Schedule G positions will enhance government efficiency and accountability and improve services provided to taxpayers by increasing the horsepower for agency implementation of administration policy,” the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the order.
Appointments to Schedule G positions are expected to lapse at the end of a presidential administration. The roles are particularly aimed at the Veterans Affairs Department and will go to applicants who prove to be suitable supporters of the president’s agenda. Agencies cannot take into consideration an applicant’s political affiliation.
“Schedule G employees will be hired to help faithfully implement the President’s policy agenda,” the White House said.
It boasted that Schedule G’s creation is just the latest effort to deliver “on his promise to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our government from Washington corruption.”
Trump tasked the Office of Personnel Management with establishing regulations to implement Schedule G. In April, OPM issued guidance that encouraged agencies to consider offering the maximum salary of $195,200 to attract Schedule C employees. It is not immediately clear if that pay cap will apply to Schedule G appointees. OPM’s guidance also removed career human resources staff from the process of vetting Schedule C appointees, onboarding them and setting their pay.
Don Moynihan, a professor at University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, said the executive order was the president’s latest effort to strip career experts of influence within federal agencies.
The order “opens space at top ranks of government for Trump loyalists as policymakers, with no limit on hires,” Moynihan said, adding it “continues [a] pattern of politicization.”
This frightening analysis from David R. Lurie–writing at Public Notice--is not going to let your meals settle gently today. “The emerging coup. Lawless authoritarian regimes don’t give up power willingly.”
Six months into the second Trump administration, two things are becoming clear: First, the president remains a nearly entirely non-strategic actor, motivated only by an abiding desire to accumulate ever greater power, adulation, and wealth. And second, he’s fundamentally changing the nature of the United States in ways that threaten to bring an end to the nation’s 249 year old status as the world’s leading democracy.
Despite Trump’s consistently haphazard “governance” style, it’s becoming easy to foresee how his regime could effectively void our democracy. The now fully MAGA-fied GOP is increasingly likely to lose the next presidential electionafter incurring bracing losses in the midterms and other intervening state races. And as the nation learned before and following the 2020 election, Trumpists are more than willing to use force and other extra-legal actions to attempt to cling to power.
For Trump and his cronies, the prospect of losing power — or even sharing it with Democrats in the event control of the House shifts in 2026 — could prove to be catastrophic because of their reasonable fear of being held accountable for criminality that dwarfs Trump’s first term. And unlike January 2021 — when the Big Lie scheme failed — Trump and his cohorts will have new tools to carry out a coup, including a massive federal police force with a proven willingness to engage in systemic illegality.
Trump’s brownshirts
From its outset, Trump 2.0 has been grounded on systemic illegality and unilateral executive actions, a course of (mis)conduct the administration has succeeded in pursuing because of pliant GOP majorities in Congress the Supreme Court. It’s all but certain that the administration’s authoritarian conduct will grow in scope and intensity over the succeeding months, in no small part because the GOP reconciliation bill will hand over a staggering $170 billion to the Department of Homeland Security.
The bill includes nearly $30 billion in new “enforcement” funds. DHS boasts that it is already the largest federal law enforcement agency, with over 80,000 officers spread across nine organizations. But DHS says it plans to use the new funding to quickly hire 10,000 more more ICE thugs. And in recent months, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has systematically dismantled DHS’s oversight offices, thereby paving the way for a lot of corner cutting.
My daily mantras these days are ‘We are so fucked’ and ‘Why doesn’t he just die?’ I have to pull myself back to my normal meditation routines. At least it hasn’t impacted my exercise schedules, where I actually am encouraged to focus on my abdomen.
So, this is “all I can stands and I can’t stands no more.” Funny, how my kindergarten cartoon hero seems more necessary given we have Orange Bluto for FARTUS.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
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Well, I know I’m not sleeping well at night. How about you?
JJ sent me the link to this horrifying story. It gave me my first share, but now I’m wondering if I’ll actually be able to eat lunch today. This is from the New York Times. “Inside Trump’s Decision. The Times pieced together the days and hours leading up to President Trump’s decision to strike Iran. It’s a story of diplomacy, deception, and a secret that almost got out.” We don’t have to worry about him being around to take that 3 am phone call. The Pentagon was worried about him putting the entire attack plan on Truth Social. I’ve gifted the link to you so you can read the entire thing. You know the Missouri Bombers he blathered about? One fleet was a ruse. Aaron Fritschner, Deputy Chief of Staff at Congressman Don Beyer, tweeted it out.
Inside the Pentagon and the U.S. Central Command, military planners worried that Trump was giving Iran too much warning about an impending strike. So they worked up their own ruse: They had two fleets of B-2 bombers leave Missouri at the same time, one flying east and one flying west. Flight trackers spotted the westward planes, which offered some idea of the timing of a possible attack. But those planes were a decoy.
The eastbound planes crossed the Atlantic undetected, joined with fighter jets and flew into Iranian airspace. At 2:10 a.m. local time yesterday, the lead bomber dropped two of the bunker-busters on the Fordo site. By the end of the mission, 14 of the bombs had fallen.
You may read about the details of the attack at PBS if you aren’t overwhelmed already by the thought of Sex Pest and Drunk, Pet Hegseth being a part of this. This headline from The Hillwon’t make you feel any less queasy. I’m assuming you knew that #FARTUS was also posted that he would help Iran Make Iran Great Again. That was while Hegseth and Rubio were busily telling the press that our hijacked country had no plans for regime change. Remember, if his lips are moving, he’s telling a big ol’ story. “Israel attacking government sites in Iran as Trump floats regime change.” The reporting here is by Sarah Fortinsky.
Israel said it is carrying out attacks on Iranian government sites and “regime targets” — including the notorious Evin Prison — as President Trump muses publicly about a regime change in Tehran.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a social media post at noon local time on Monday that Israeli forces are “currently striking with unprecedented force regime targets and governmental oppression entities in the heart of Tehran,” according to an English translation of the Hebrew statement.
He said those targets include the headquarters of Basij, the paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Evin Prison, used to incarcerate political prisoners and opponents of Iran’s leadership; and the “Destroy Israel” clock in Palestine Square.
Katz said the attacks are also striking “additional regime targets,” including internal security headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards and the ideology headquarters.
Throughout Monday morning, meanwhile, the Israeli military said sirens were sounding across the country as Iran continued to launch missiles targeting Israel.
That sure sounds like a war to me. Peter Nicholas, NBC News, reports that Democrats in the District are finally sounding some kind of alarm. “‘Biden didn’t start any wars’: Democrats sharpen their arguments against Trump’s foreign policy. In the wake of the U.S. airstrikes on Iran, Democrats are pointing to Trump’s own promises that he wouldn’t ensnare the country in foreign conflicts.”
Democrats are seizing on Donald Trump’s surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities to make the case that the world is becoming more dangerous on his watch, not less, and that he is reneging on a promise to avoid foreign military interventions.
The argument strikes at Trump’s contention that his blend of negotiating skills and toughness is enough to keep the United States safe.
In the space of a few days, Trump has made the United States a combatant in another Middle East war that exposes soldiers to potential deadly reprisals, Democrats contend.
In a statement, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin pointed to Trump’s inaugural address, in which he said he would measure his success by “the wars we never get into.”
Yet, Martin said, “against his own words, the president sent bombers into Iran. Americans overwhelmingly do not want to go to war. Americans do not want to risk the safety of our troops abroad.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Several lawmakers said Sunday that they will press the Trump administration for clarity about the attack on Iran and the endgame he envisions. But they are also using the moment to try to undercut Trump’s standing with those who voted for him in the hope he would not get entangled in foreign wars.
Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said Trump’s commitment was “to get us out of foreign wars.”
“Say what you want about Joe Biden, Joe Biden didn’t start any wars,” Smith said. “He got us out of the one war that we were in [in Afghanistan]. Trump has now started a war with Iran.”
The Guardianhas a headline today that’s spot on. George Bush got led on by his own advisors. Trump’s advisors said no to the mission. Evidently, Trump was taken by strongman Benjamin Netanyahoo! After all that speechifying about Hillary getting us into another World War and how he’d never drag us into something like Dubya did to Iraq and Afghanistan. Here we are. “Like George W Bush, Trump has started a reckless war based on a lie. The Iraq War was built on a lie. Now history is repeating itself.” Mohamad Bazzi has the analysis.
In May 2003, George W Bush landed on the deck of a US aircraft carrier to deliver a triumphant speech, declaring that major combat operations in Iraq had ended – six weeks after he had ordered US troops to invade the country. Bush spoke under a now-infamous banner on the carrier’s bridge that proclaimed: “Mission Accomplished”. It would turn into a case study of American hubris and one of the most mocked photo-ops in modern history.
As Bush made his speech off the coast of San Diego, I was in Baghdad covering the invasion’s aftermath as a correspondent for a US newspaper. It was clear then that the war was far from over, and the US was likely to face a grinding insurgency led by former members of the Iraqi security forces. It would also soon become clear that Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq was built on a lie: Saddam Hussein’s regime did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not intent on developing them. And Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, despite the Bush administration’s repeated attempts to connect Hussein’s regime to al-Qaida.
Today, Donald Trump has dragged the US into another war based on exaggerations and manipulated intelligence: the Israel-Iran conflict, which began on 13 June when Israel launched a surprise attack killing some of Iran’s top military officials and nuclear scientists, and bombing dozens of targets across the country.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that Israel had to attack because Tehran was working to weaponize its stockpile of enriched uranium and racing to build a nuclear bomb. “If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” Netanyahu said, as the first wave of Israeli bombs fell on Iran. “It could be a year. It could be within a few months.”
Before dawn on Sunday, US warplanes and submarines bombed three major nuclear facilities in Iran. In a speech from the White House, Trump declared the operation a “spectacular military success” and said the sites had been “totally obliterated”. Trump added that his goal was to stop “the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror”.
But does Iran pose the immediate threat that Netanyahu and Trump have claimed?
US intelligence officials, along with the UN’s nuclear watchdog and independent experts, say that while Iran has dramatically increased its supply of uranium enriched to nearly weapons grade, there is no evidence it has taken steps to produce a nuclear weapon. In March, the US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress that America’s intelligence agencies continued “to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon”. She added that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.
I’m sure none of this is lost on us. Mark Landler writes this analysis for The New York Times. “Iran’s Nuclear Dreams May Survive Even a Devastating American Blow. Through revolution and upheaval, the program has become intertwined with the country’s security and national identity.” Let’s hope all of this sinks in before Trump’s Folly starts costing American lives.
By joining Israel’s military campaign against Iran, Mr. Trump has greatly raised the costs for Iran’s leaders in refusing to accept stringent curbs on their uranium enrichment program. Yet, however this conflict ends, he may have given them even more compelling reasons to seek a nuclear deterrent, experts say.
“Any strategic thinker in Iran, present or future, realizes that Iran is located in the Middle East, that its neighbors are Netanyahu’s Israel, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and M.B.S. in Saudi Arabia,” said Professor Alvandi, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
To that list of threats, Iran can now add the United States.
The American bombardment likely inflicted serious damage on the enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, and the research complex at Isfahan. Earlier Israeli strikes killed several of Iran’s prominent nuclear scientists, as well as damaging installations. Taken together, that could set back Iran’s program by years.
But bombs alone cannot erase the knowledge that Iranians have accumulated over nearly seven decades, since 1957, when Iran first signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the Eisenhower administration. The United States was then encouraging countries to engage in the peaceful exploration of nuclear science through President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative.
In 1967, with American help, Iran built a small research reactor in Tehran that still exists. A year later, it signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a symbol of the shah’s desire to be accepted into the club of Western nations.
Flush with cash from 1973 oil shock, the shah then opted to rapidly expand Iran’s civil nuclear program, including developing a homegrown enriching capacity. He sent dozens of Iranian students to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study nuclear engineering.
The shah viewed it as a prestige project that would vault Iran into the front ranks of Middle Eastern countries. But that put him at odds with the United States, which worried that Iran would reprocess spent fuel into fissile material that could be used in a weapon.
“It was an icon of the country having arrived as a major power, with the side idea that if Iraq ever threatened Iran, it could be diverted to military uses,” said Professor Alvandi, who published “Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War.”
Everything old is new again. History repeats itself. Yup, another Republican steps on the detonator. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has a bigger perspective at her Substack, Letters from an American.
In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”
This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It’s way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it’s way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”
There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.
White Christian Nationalists have been at the heart of the big problems in just living your American life, extending their warmongering, hateful, bigoted selves into a second century. Meanwhile, back in the USSR, the bear awakens. Has Trump changed his fealty? This is from the Washington Post. Will he give up his position as RasPutin Fangirl and such to Netanyahoo? “Russia condemns U.S. strikes on Iran but takes no concrete actions. Iran’s foreign minister is in Moscow seeking support, but other than condemning the attack, Putin has not taken any major moves to back Tehran.” I was last night years old when I read that a Russian official told the press there were lots of countries willing to send actual nukes to Iran. It was part of the reason I didn’t sleep last night without a hefty dose of Benadryl. I didn’t snore either, from my poor stuffed sinuses suffering from the humidity and pollen here.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday condemned the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran ahead of a meeting with Iran’s top diplomat, describing the strikes as “absolutely unprovoked,” but he has so far stopped short of any more concrete measures to assist Russia’s regional ally.
The U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran have underscored Putin’s declining capacity to influence events in the Middle East — once a key plank of his foreign policy — with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria last year, Moscow’s cooler relations with Israel and Putin’s failed effort to convince President Donald Trump that he could be a mediator in the Iran crisis.
In comments Monday to military graduates, Putin said Washington’s involvement was dangerous and a sharp escalation. “Non-regional powers are also being drawn into the conflict,” he said, referring to the U.S. bombings. “All this is bringing the world to a very dangerous point.”
The conflict has demonstrated the limits so far to Russia’s willingness to assist Iran militarily — after both sides signed a strategic agreement in January without a mutual defense clause.
I’m going to start wrapping things up, but I wanted to share a few of the reporters outside the beltway. Jude Legum writes this for Popular Information. “A new war based on manipulated intelligence. More than two decades after the Iraq War commenced, history is repeating itself.” Even the weirdos he put in his cabinet saw the intelligence and just thumbed their noses at them. He “knew” better and used his instincts.
On March 20, 2003, President George W. Bush began the bombing campaign in Iraq, justifying the attack with manipulated and bogus intelligence. Twenty-two years later, history is repeating itself.
The clear judgment of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and its leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has not authorized a nuclear weapons program. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s top intelligence official, said so publicly on March 25, 2025. “The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” Gabbard asserted in her opening statement.
Last Tuesday, asked about Gabbard’s testimony on Iran, Trump said, “I don’t care what she said.” On Friday, as his rhetoric became more bellicose, Trump was reminded of that March assessment and asked: “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon?” Trump did not say that the intelligence community had gathered new information since March. Rather, Trump said that “my intelligence community is wrong.” He also publicly rebuked Gabbard again, adding, “She’s wrong.”
Now, to justify the bombing of several sites in Iran, top members of the Trump administration claim Iran is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday morning, Vice President JD Vance said that the administration believed “the Iranians were rushing toward a nuclear weapons program.” That directly contradicts the March assessment by the IC that no such program had been authorized, much less commenced.
Vance dodged questions on whether the intelligence has changed since March:
KRISTEN WELKER: Why launch this strike now? Has the intelligence changed Mr. Vice President?
VANCE: A couple things about that Kristen. What Tulsi said back in March is that Iran was producing highly-enriched Uranium that was only consistent with them wanting to build a nuclear weapon.
The transcript of Gabbard’s Congressional hearing reveals Vance’s characterization of Gabbard’s remarks is false and misleading. She did say that Iran was enriching Uranium, something that has been true for many years, and that its enriched uranium stockpile was higher than that of other nations without nuclear weapons. But she was clear that they had not taken steps to build a nuclear weapon, nor had such a program been authorized.
On Sunday, in an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the intelligence about whether Iran had decided to build a nuclear weapon “irrelevant.”
Margaret Brennan: Are you saying there that the United States did not see intelligence that the supreme leader had ordered weaponization?
Rubio: That’s irrelevant. I see that question being asked in the media all the time. That’s an irrelevant question. They have everything they need to build a weapon.
Brennan: No, but that is the key point in U.S. intelligence assessments. You know that.
Rubio: No, it’s not.
Brennan: Yes, it was.
Rubio: No, it’s not.
At a Pentagon press conference, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also avoided answering whether the intelligence assessment had changed since March …
Jennifer Ruben, now writing at The Contrarian, has the term I’ve been using for at least two weeks. “Trump’s wags the dog. Risky military action disrupts the political dynamic. He’s been trying to get us off the topics of Doge, the Big Beautiful Budget-Busting bill, and the incredible cuts floating around the Senate.
Donald Trump, without authorization from Congress and without substantive consultation, took a fateful step in ordering the bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites, based on the false pretext that Iran was on the verge of completing a nuclear weapon. The consequences of this move have yet to unfold, and the breathtaking array of outcomes—from another forever war to a failed state in Iran to a quickly negotiated nuclear deal—makes it impossible to predict how this will affect Trump’s agenda and his ongoing assault on democracy.
His failure to get authorization for a strike in a war in which the U.S. was acting offensively, despite there being no immediate threat (no one with sense believes Trump’s contradiction of our own intelligence that Iran was on the verge of making a bomb) raises grave constitutional and political consequences.
Despite Trump’s war-talk Saturday night, Vice President JD Vance insists we are not at war. That, as even this crew understands, would require congressional action. On one level, such an assertion is preposterous—as we have indeed become combatants in an extended, ongoing war.
Whatever fiction the administration advances, as Tom Nichols points out, “the enemy gets a vote.” The most likely scenario, he suggests, is not as tidy as Trump would have us believe:
The Iranian regime will be wounded but will likely survive; the nuclear program will be delayed but will likely continue; the region will become more unstable but is unlikely to erupt into a full-blown war involving the United States.
Should we get bogged down in an extended war or face retaliation, Trump’s unilateral action based on a lie (not even DNI Tulsi Gabbard thinks Iran was on the verge of making a bomb) will be viewed as a gross error and a constitutional overstep.
I’m ready for No Drama Obama to make a comeback. Trump is an exhausting and soul-snatching miscreant. I’m so tired but yet I cannot sleep. How are you doing? We shall live in Peace someday.
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Earlier today we taped tomorrow’s show, and we discussed the potential for the U.S. to bomb Iran. Since taping, the U.S. has carried out several bombings. We’ll have more to say in the future, but for now our piece on Trump and the Iran Deal can help explain what got us here. youtu.be/5xnZ_CeTqyM
Iran hasn't unconditionally surrendered for some reason. Who could have predicted?They are threatening Americans in the region. I wonder if they're going to threaten the world oil supply by closing the straits of Hormuz? Or maybe some light terrorism? Anything can happen.
We’ve bombed Iran. And dismantled our joint terrorism task force. And sent a third of the FBI to help ICE. And gutted the National Security Council. And a drunk guy is in charge at the pentagon. And our intelligence allies probably won’t share intel with us. Because people couldn’t vote for a woman.
During a nationwide address from the White House on Saturday, Trump warned Iran that it would face future attacks from the United States if it did not make peace with Israel. Read the U.S. president’s full remarks here: foreignpolicy.com/2025/06/21/t…
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Mike Johnson really needs to pay more attention to his constituents than he does #FARTUS. The consensus among many analysts is that Trump is militarizing large democratically run cities to terrorize their citizens into not voting. It’s also why he’s so interested in stopping early and mail-in voting.
I still see most of these actions as enablements of the Supreme Court. I’m not the only one. This is from Justin Jouvenal writing for The Washington Post. “The Supreme Court has expanded Trump’s power. He’s seeking much more. The president’s firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and other cases could serve as major tests of how far the high court is willing to go.” Removing the independence of the FED is another way of turning us into a Banana Republic.
There it is. The direct attacks on labor. This is a guest Op-Ed in the New York Times (gift article) by labor historian Erik Loomis.”Trump Is Wiping Out Unions. Why Are They So Quiet?”
Not only are Russia and China getting brave, but India’s Modi has been driven straight into their arms by Trump. This is an alarming headline from Christian Shepherd writing for The Washington Post. “China tries to use Trump turmoil to unite leaders against U.S.-led order. Twenty leaders — including from Russia, Iran and India — are in China for a summit designed to promote Beijing as a reliable counterweight to the U.S.” This is happening as Trump cuts more foreign aid and Kari Lake disables the Voice of America. I thought Yam Tits considered them his buddies?
California’s Governor Newsom is still trolling Trump. It may not be classy, but it sure is funny! “Gavin Newsom continues to troll Trump by blasting ‘I’m a Survivor’ in post about president’s health. Donald Trump’s bruised hands mocked by California governor in Instagram video bringing together some of the president’s most embarrassing moments.” This is from The Independent and reported by Joe Summerlad.
I never thought I’d see an administration as incompetent as Dubya Bush. But here we are. Let’s review today’s disaster. I planned to start with RFK Jr., but then Yam Tits did something astoundingly awful today. This is from Politico. “White House declares $4.9B in foreign aid unilaterally canceled in end-run around Congress’ funding power. The administration is setting up clash with Capitol Hill over its use of the “pocket rescission.”
I’m seriously waiting for the Democratic Congress Leadership to respond to this. Talking Points Memo has that angle on this story. “Democrats Predict Shutdown After Trump Tries to Snatch Congress’ Most Important Power.” We’ll see. This is reported by Kate Riga.
Now, we may switch to the conspiracy theorist who runs Health and Human Services, and specifically the CDC. RFK Jr. is in a race with Yam Tits to win the crown for the most insane person in this regime. This analysis is from Don Monyihan’s Substack, Can We Still Govern? “RFK Jr. is bad for your health. Public servants are trying to warn us that state capacity is being undermined. The Centers for Disease Control shitshow is a microcosm of the mismanagement of the Trump era. It also demonstrated some extraordinary courage among principled public servants, who were willing to lose their jobs to draw attention to damage being done to public health.”
Elizabeth Cooney has this analysis at STAT. “Crisis within CDC is spilling into real world, experts say. From food safety to vaccine availability, loss of trust and talent threaten health: ‘We are in much worse shape’”
In other news, we have some more craziness by the Orange Caligula. First, from the New York Times, this piece on the continuation of Trump’s resurrection of traitors of the Lost Cause. Greg Jaffee reports this. “Pentagon Is Reinstalling Portrait of Confederate General at West Point Library. The Pentagon is putting back up a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee at the military academy, as the Trump administration seeks to restore honors for American figures who fought to preserve slavery.” Trump still continues to argue that slavery wasn’t that bad.
This is from the AP. “Trump ends ex-Vice President Harris’ Secret Service protection early after Biden had extended it.”
This is from Zoe Schiffer writing at WIRED. “The White House Apparently Ordered Federal Workers to Roll Out Grok ‘ASAP’. A partnership between xAI and the US government fell apart earlier this summer. Then the White House apparently got involved, per documents obtained by WIRED.” You may remember this AI disaster went on full metal NAZI meltdown a few months ago.
One last one as Yam Tits moves to take over more big American Cities beyond L.A. and the District. This is from Reuters and written by Tom Hals. ”
The repetitive use of the same old explanations has certainly become insufficient. Trump is the forever victim. We knew of his proclivities a long time ago. He even bought a teen beauty pageant to gain access to the dressing room of the contestants. But her emails. This is the PolitiFact take on the case from back in the day.
We may never know for certain what role that lawsuit and the settlement played in that decision, but I have my suspicions. So does Senator Elizabeth Warren.
You may recall that early in this blog’s history, I was commuting about an hour to a university across the lake. NPR was my companion on the long commute. I can attest that there was a good part of the drive where my cellphone did not work, and that the only radio station I could get in the swamps along I-55 was NPR. I’d start with the local in New Orleans, and everything would drop until I got the NPR station from Baton Rouge. I can only imagine what the hinterlands are like up North in places like Montana and Wyoming. We’re definitely in the fascist country of Trumpistan now. Lisa Murkowski complained about the funds cut to NPR and voted against it. This is from UPI. “Coming PBS, NPR cuts already hurting many stations.”
Here’s some interesting analysis of the week’s events from TPM. “Nearly All The Trump II Depredations Run Through DOJ.”Comey’s firing by Main Justice blindsided acting U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who was reduced to “just a paper-pusher,” in the words of one observer.
Trump is starting a new initiative to put more political appointees into federal jobs. This is from GovExec.com. “Trump creates ‘Schedule G’ to add more political appointees to agencies’ top ranks. The new, non-career employees will serve in policy-making roles and add “horsepower” to carrying out the administration’s agenda, White House says.” Why aren’t folks screaming Communism at this attempt to stack the federal government with idiots? It sure sounds like a command and control model of government, ala the Soviet Union, to me.
This frightening analysis from David R. Lurie–writing at Public Notice--is not going to let your meals settle gently today. “The emerging coup. Lawless authoritarian regimes don’t give up power willingly.”
You may read about the details of the attack at PBS if you aren’t overwhelmed already by the thought of Sex Pest and Drunk, Pet Hegseth being a part of this. This headline from The Hill won’t make you feel any less queasy. I’m assuming you knew that #FARTUS was also posted that he would help Iran Make Iran Great Again. That was while Hegseth and Rubio were busily telling the press that our hijacked country had no plans for regime change. Remember, if his lips are moving, he’s telling a big ol’ story. “Israel attacking government sites in Iran as Trump floats regime change.” The reporting here is by Sarah Fortinsky.
That sure sounds like a war to me. Peter Nicholas, NBC News, reports that Democrats in the District are finally sounding some kind of alarm. “‘Biden didn’t start any wars’: Democrats sharpen their arguments against Trump’s foreign policy. In the wake of the U.S. airstrikes on Iran, Democrats are pointing to Trump’s own promises that he wouldn’t ensnare the country in foreign conflicts.”
The Guardian has a headline today that’s spot on. George Bush got led on by his own advisors. Trump’s advisors said no to the mission. Evidently, Trump was taken by strongman Benjamin Netanyahoo! After all that speechifying about Hillary getting us into another World War and how he’d never drag us into something like Dubya did to Iraq and Afghanistan. Here we are. “Like George W Bush, Trump has started a reckless war based on a lie. The Iraq War was built on a lie. Now history is repeating itself.” Mohamad Bazzi has the analysis.
I’m sure none of this is lost on us. Mark Landler writes this analysis for The New York Times. “Iran’s Nuclear Dreams May Survive Even a Devastating American Blow. Through revolution and upheaval, the program has become intertwined with the country’s security and national identity.” Let’s hope all of this sinks in before Trump’s Folly starts costing American lives.
Everything old is new again. History repeats itself. Yup, another Republican steps on the detonator. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has a bigger perspective at her Substack, Letters from an American.
White Christian Nationalists have been at the heart of the big problems in just living your American life, extending their warmongering, hateful, bigoted selves into a second century. Meanwhile, back in the USSR, the bear awakens. Has Trump changed his fealty? This is from the Washington Post. Will he give up his position as RasPutin Fangirl and such to Netanyahoo? “Russia condemns U.S. strikes on Iran but takes no concrete actions. Iran’s foreign minister is in Moscow seeking support, but other than condemning the attack, Putin has not taken any major moves to back Tehran.” I was last night years old when I read that a Russian official told the press there were lots of countries willing to send actual nukes to Iran. It was part of the reason I didn’t sleep last night without a hefty dose of Benadryl. I didn’t snore either, from my poor stuffed sinuses suffering from the humidity and pollen here.
I’m going to start wrapping things up, but I wanted to share a few of the reporters outside the beltway. Jude Legum writes this for Popular Information. “A new war based on manipulated intelligence. More than two decades after the Iraq War commenced, history is repeating itself.” Even the weirdos he put in his cabinet saw the intelligence and just thumbed their noses at them. He “knew” better and used his instincts.
Jennifer Ruben, now writing at The Contrarian, has the term I’ve been using for at least two weeks. “Trump’s wags the dog. Risky military action disrupts the political dynamic. He’s been trying to get us off the topics of Doge, the Big Beautiful Budget-Busting bill, and the incredible cuts floating around the Senate.
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