Despised like nobody has ever been despised before

I have an out of town handbell event this weekend. I probably won’t post again until Wednesday. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that while the US Agency for International Development, USAID, was shuttered, some of its aid to other countries was transferred to the State Department as a method of extortion. This was revealed in a State memorandum prepared for Secretary Marco Rubio. Here are some of the ideas proposed or some of the agreements already forced on African countries. Zambia was told to give the US better access to their copper, lithium, and cobalt or the US will withhold funds for HIV treatment for 1.3 million people. Several countries were forced to give patient data in exchange for health care funding. That is so Americans can detect disease outbreaks sooner and to give US companies first chance to develop vaccines. Nigeria was told they must address the alleged persecution of Christians.

These “deals” are not really deals, as none of the countries that are being pressed into this can effectively negotiate when their health care funding needs are so dire.

Kos of Kos wrote about why opening the Strait of Hormuz will be so difficult. While the Strait is 21 miles wide at its narrowest, the actual shipping channel is only 4 miles wide. Ships must go single file with no room to maneuver. Ships, and any escorts, are easy targets – they move at a predictable pace and can be reached by missiles from shore in seconds. Iran has put mines in the Strait, but minesweepers are slow and easy targets. Planes to protect shipping would also be easy targets. The US could have some great anti-drone equipment and tactics. Ukraine has been developing it over the last four years. But the nasty guy has refused Ukrainian offers.

What’s his problem? Acknowledging Ukrainian expertise would require acknowledging that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy actually does hold some cards—a fact Trump has spent over a year denying out of sheer personal pettiness and bizarre fealty to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing for his Substack:

A stunning poll from Politico — just released, but taken last month — confirms what I and other observers strongly suspected: America is now widely despised, despised like nobody has ever been despised before. ... Why has America’s global reputation fallen so far, so fast? It’s not a mystery. After all, why would anyone consider America a trustworthy ally when Trump keeps insulting our neighbor and former closest ally, Canada, by insisting that it must become the 51st state and repeatedly calling its Prime Minister “governor”? Why trust us when Trump tried to bully NATO member Denmark into handing over Greenland? Beyond that, Trump’s tariffs aren’t just economically damaging. They aren’t just, as the Supreme Court finally ruled, illegal under our own laws. They are also in clear, overwhelming violation of international trade agreements solemnly signed by previous presidents. Given the way the current administration has casually ignored those agreements, why would anyone expect America to honor any future deals?

Beth Mole of Ars Technica reported on a ruling from a US District Court that blocked a lot of harm Robert Kennedy Jr. has been doing. The ruling says Kennedy illegally fired the vaccine advisors board. The replacement board, all of whom hold anti-vax views, did not go through standard vetting. So all of their changes to the vaccine guidance must be undone. In the comments exlrrp posted a meme of the nasty guy speaking, showing why we’re despised.

Then: NATO sucks! Canada sucks! UK leadership is stupid! Denmark sucks! Zelensky sucks! Now: I DEMAND these countries help us secure the Straits! They SHOULD BE HELPING! A voice in the corner: Guess he never heard, “What goes around...!

Globe Observer tweeted: “Trump calls on U.S. media to stop reporting on damage and losses caused by Iran, saying it harms the United States.” Proud Socialist responded: “This is how you know the U.S. isn’t winning the war.” Clay Bennett posted a cartoon of Uncle Sam in a War Room gazing up at the Exit door in the ceiling. Naked Pastor posted a cartoon of Jesus talking to a group of people holding Bibles:

The difference between you and me is you use scripture to determine what love means and I use love to determine what scripture means.

In Wednesday’s roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Jonathan Last of The Bulwark, appropriate with the comment above about minesweepers.

Mining the Strait of Hormuz is the single biggest danger America faced heading into any conflict with Iran. How did our commander-in-chief plan to deal with it? Six months ago the Navy decommissioned its four Avenger-class minesweepers that had been stationed in Bahrain precisely to deal with Iranian mines. It gets dumber: Those four final American minesweepers left the theater in mid-January—while war planning for the current operation must already have been underway. But wait, it gets even dumberer! Our minesweeping capability in the Gulf now relies on Littoral Combat Ships, whose abilities have never been tested in combat. Will the LCS be a suitable replacement for the Avenger-class ships? According to the Navy, um, no?

From NOTUS:

Six months before the Trump administration started bombing Iran, the Department of State fired its oil and gas experts. As the war in Iran stretches into its third week, and the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20% of the world’s oil supply usually flows — remains effectively closed, the U.S. government is without the resources it once had to handle such crises, former State Department employees tell NOTUS.

In the comments Jesse Duquette created a cartoon of Washington crossing the Delaware while an airport signalman guides it ashore. The caption is something the nasty guy apparently said. “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports.” Duquette added:

Whenever I screw up, I think of the time Trump opined about Revolutionary War airports and the brave patriots who gave their lives at the Battle of Baggage Claim and I’m like “sure I’m dumb but at least I’m not, like, Trump dumb”

Steven Camley posted a cartoon of the nasty guy sitting in a rowboat in the Strait of Hormuz. A sign labels the water, “Shi-ite Creek” and a paddle labeled “NATO” is out of reach. A meme posted by exlrrp shows a way of getting ships in and out of the Persian Gulf without going through the Strait – let godzilla carry the ships across the United Arab Emirates peninsula. In today’s roundup Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing the nasty guy’s comment, after being rebuffed by NATO, that America doesn’t need anybody.

This fantasy of complete independence is a long-standing part of American culture. Thomas Jefferson, himself a relatively soft-handed gentleman farmer who left the hard labor to the people he had enslaved, extolled the virtues of the yeoman farmer. The political scientist Richard Hofstadter described this mythic figure as “the incarnation of the simple, honest, independent, healthy, happy human being.” The irony, Hofstadter noted, was that it was really rich, educated men such as Jefferson who romanticized this extremely difficult lifestyle. The typical yeoman farmer wanted to be integrated into the market so that he could sell his crops at a profit and escape his hardscrabble circumstances. That romantic “self-sufficiency” was in fact “usually forced upon him by a lack of transportation or markets, or by the necessity to save cash.” [...] Too many Americans believed that Trump’s mass deportation could occur without forcing families into hiding, cutting into businesses’ profits, or shooting people dead in the street. They believed that tariffs could replace global trade and revive the manufacturing industry, making the U.S. self-sufficient, when instead the burden has fallen on American farms and firms. They couldn’t see that when people lose their jobs, or go sick or hungry, it becomes everyone’s problem eventually. This desire to be severed from others culminates in the trad fantasy of a wife who keeps the homestead clean while her husband runs a self-sufficient ranch, the whole family secure with their MREs, AR-15, and safe full of gold collectibles when the apocalypse comes.

In the comments is another cartoon by Naked Pastor. Jesus tells a crowd:

I was never recorded and never wrote a book. So when someone says, “Jesus said this!” they should mean “Someone said Jesus said this!”

BioGeneticsGirl of the Kos community asked the community to come up with slogans for the third No Kings protest, which is in a bit more than a week (I’m sure there’s one near you). Some of what they came up with: knowdaboom: “Top 0.1%’s wealth has doubled in the last 5 years. How’s your family doing?” karmsysback: “Can’t we fast-forward to where he takes cyanide in his bunker?” Sally DeLurks: “Whatever happened to ‘No more wars?’” slowthought: “Regime Change Begins At Home” Albion1 posted a few from a local Indivisible Facebook page. One of them: “Hey, Trump, nobody paid us, we all hate you for free!” Progressive Muse suggests we borrow from Bad Bunny’s Superbowl Halftime Show, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

American history through the eyes of the Natives

The Sunday Detroit Free Press has expanded its arts coverage, which is how I learned about a play at a live theater and went out to see it Thursday evening. The play is Broke-ology or the science of being broke. It is at the Tipping Point Theatre in Northville. Alas, it finishes its run on Sunday. The story is about three black men in Kansas City. William is suffering from MS and is getting worse. His sons Ennis and Malcolm are trying to work out how to care for him. Occasionally, their mother Sonia appears, usually in William’s dreams. Ennis is older, his wife is about to have a baby, he is working at a wings restaurant, and is feeling stuck. Malcolm has just gotten his master’s degree at U Conn and his afraid of staying too long and becoming stuck in Kansas City. He has a job waiting for him at U Conn. But Ennis wants Malcolm to help with the burden of caring for their father. It’s a messy situation with no easy solution. Having little money doesn’t help. The title comes from Ennis teasing Malcolm about having a graduate degree. Ennis considers himself an expert in broke-ology and has even come up with equations for how it all works. People with parents near the end of life know these issues. That includes me. The acting by all three men was excellent. I was particularly impressed with the guy who played William who had to keep the physical symptoms, especially the tremors, of MS going through nearly all of the play. Alas, there were only three dozen people in the audience. I finished the book The Rediscovery of America, Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk. It is a history of America from the viewpoint of the Natives starting with first contact with Europeans. We’ve learned the basics in history lessons in school, but with the view that Europeans and their descendants were supposed to rule the continent and those pesky Natives should just get out of the way. So reading the story from the Native side is refreshing. For that I highly recommend the book. But it is also hard. Even with our knowledge of just high school history we know this is an endless cycle of violence and disease that killed off a great deal of the Native population, of treaties made and broken. Of course, I learned a lot. I wrote close to 3 pages of things I had learned. I can’t put all those points into this post, but I will include quite a few. I knew the Spanish had been in the Southwest. I hadn’t realized it was a full century before the Pilgrims. That contact and subjugation was mostly in the Pueblo communities in New Mexico. The reason for the violence was labor for mineral extraction, mostly silver. There was an uprising by the Pueblo Natives and there was an uneasy truce afterward. It is why the culture of that region is a mix of Native and Spanish. By the time the Pilgrims (English) arrived in 1621 there had been a lot of trading between Europeans and Natives and a lot of Native death from European disease. The Pilgrims wouldn’t have been able to move in if the Native population was at full strength. At a time when Africans were brought to America to be slaves more than 600,000 Natives were taken as slaves to England, Spain, and around the world. Pilgrims didn’t enslave – their religion said labor was good for them. But their religion also said it was the best religion and Natives should be converted. We think of the Pilgrims being concentrated around Massachusetts Bay, but there were a lot of settlements and violence against Natives along the Connecticut coast, an area sheltered by Long Island. The French came to trade, not so much to colonize. They had a presence in about 2/3 of North America – Canada, Great Lakes and down to the Ohio Valley, and west of the Mississippi. Their fiercest opponent was the Iroquois federation. The French agreed to a Great Settlement in 1701 that brought peace to the region. Thousands of tribes sent representatives. There is no coincidence that Detroit was founded that year. The English moved in on the French. The English took over a fort on an island near the entrance to the St. Lawrence River, which meant the French lost their ability to bring in goods to trade. A part of this long conflict was called the French and Indian War, but was really a French – English war. The French wanted to trade and the Natives tolerated that. The English wanted to the land to settle on, and the Natives didn’t want that. I was puzzled by one thing. The book said the French lost control of all of their North American holdings at the end of the French – Indian War. But didn’t we buy the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803? We’re used to thinking of the area west of the Appalachian Mountains as the frontier. To the Natives, this was the Interior. As settlers moved there the English tried to block the move. The English wanted peace, which many settlers saw as siding with the Natives. That was an important reason for the American Revolution. Pennsylvania created a Constitution in 1776. Most of the delegates were settlers. One important idea from it became important when the US wrote a Constitution 11 years later. That idea is that a central government is needed to subdue the Natives. That’s the reason why the Articles of Confederation didn’t work. The Constitution said nothing about the new US being able to buy land to make it part of the country. President Thomas Jefferson and to create a legal justification. He also had to justify turning the white residents into citizens. Georgia wanted the Choctaw to be removed. Congress said they were protected on their land. Then President Andrew Johnson sided with Georgia, leading to the Trail of Tears. I hadn’t known there was significant trading along the Pacific coast starting about 1760. The traders were Spanish, English, Russian, and a few others. Of course, the Natives were hit with violence and disease. And colonial extraction was at work as the traders wanted pelts, primarily otter, and fish, primarily salmon, which reduced the animal populations. I hadn’t known that before the railroads, when travel was on foot, horseback or stagecoach, a gathering of thousands of Natives meant there would be tens of thousands of horses. While much of the East was preoccupied with the approaching Civil War settlers poured into the West. Worse than all those people were the mines, which were quite good at polluting the environment. Mining camps were mostly male and mostly Anglo-Germanic, and also highly supremacist. Approaching and during the Civil War US soldiers stationed at forts in the West felt they were missing out on the important battles. They were brutal in their treatment of Natives. After the war settlers assumed they were to displace the Natives. The Senate ratified treaty after treaty, usually taking land while granting rights to Natives. Ratification didn’t include the House, which began to pass bills limiting and overturning treaties, though the Constitution does not give them that power. It meant treaties were violated and then replaced with something more advantageous to white settlers. From the Civil War to about 1910 the goal was to assimilate the Natives, which included extensive boarding schools that worked to separate the Native child from their heritage. Between 1910 and WWII assimilation efforts ended and tribes had a time of their own sovereignty. The expansionist policies of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were inspired by the US treatment of Natives. A German official said, “The native must give way” to the colonizer as Germany looked eastward. After WWII assimilation resumed, but in a different way. The US government offered to buy tribal land. But they made that offer to tribal members, not to the tribe leadership. That set up a conflict between a member and their community. Members were offered travel expenses to cities with a promise of a much better life. But an urban Native was usually as much in poverty as a reservation Native. Native self-determination efforts began in the late 19th century. They began to seriously change thinking of those in the federal government about 1970. Since then the federal government has recognized tribal sovereignty and able to tell states to keep their hands off. Many tribes do quite well with gaming, but many other tribes and their members remain in poverty. The book is 450 pages of text plus another 100 pages of notes. Blackhawk relied on growing scholarship of what Native life was like. Even with leaving much out my two pages of notes came out to two pages of full sentences and paragraphs. In the pundit roundup for Daily Kos for Friday a week ago Greg Dworkin quoted a tweet from Sam Stein:

Shot: Pentagon demanding Anthropic drop insistence that its AI model not fire weapons without some form of human sign off Chaser:

The chaser is a headline and subtitle from New Scientist:

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

An article in Axios adds:

"The contract language we received overnight from the Department of War made virtually no progress on preventing Claude's use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons," Anthropic said in a statement.

Dr. Catharine Young tweeted the cover of The Lancet which has this text:

The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.

In the comments Eastsidebill posted a list he got from a friend. The list of 100 entries is things the nasty guy has done. They’re mostly in alphabetical order. Here’s just some of it:

1. $25M judgment 2. “Do us a favor” 3. “Find 11,780” 4. 34 felonies 5. Atlantic City Bankruptcies 6. Bible sales 7. Big Lies 8. Birtherism 9. Black tenants 10. Branded Bibles 11. Cabinet corruption 12. Casino fines 13. Census meddling 14. Central Park Five 15. CFPB neutered 16. Charity fraud 17. Civil fraud 18. Classified files 19. Coin schemes 20. Comey firing

Nasty, rude, divisive, and as always, full of lies

Brother comes for a visit tomorrow. I probably won’t post again until the middle of next week. The nasty guy gave his State of the Union speech Tuesday night. Of course, I didn’t watch or listen. He set the record for the longest of such speeches, another reason not to listen. Daily Kos has several articles about the speech. Go find them there or at your favorite news source if you really need more information. I’ll stick to just three articles. The first is by Kos of Kos. His major point is Republicans really need to have something to run on for the November midterm election. And the nasty guy very much did not give them that. Kos took a few paragraphs to highlight why the nasty guy’s approval rating is so low – voters definitely do not agree that now is “the golden age of America,” the phrase the nasty guy used to open his marathon speech.

But Trump didn’t just fail to connect with voters’ economic anxiety. He was nasty, rude, divisive, and as always, full of lies. At a time when the nation is still basking in the warm sportsmanship of American athletes at the Olympic Games in Italy, Trump lashed out at his perceived enemies, taking repeated and nasty shots at the Democrats, blue states and cities, and various ethnic groups. ... If anything, Trump’s overall message was, “The country has never been better, but WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!”

In the second article Lisa Needham of Kos noted the nasty guy did not mention Minneapolis and his “success” in removing the “worst of the worst.” Could it be because the effort was so massively unpopular? He did mention Minnesota, as in accusing massive fraud by Somali-Americans in child care subsidies for low income families. Of course, he used numbers ridiculously high. I heard about this in the morning news with NPR host A Martínez talking to reporter Matt Sepic. It again left me puzzled. When Republicans accuse federal programs of fraud they move to stop the funding, not to offer help in combating the fraud. In this case Gov. Tim Walz says they are already working to minimize the fraud. But they are having difficulty because most of the experts in combating fraud in the FBI have left in protest over the nasty guy’s actions after the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In the last article I’ll bother with, Oliver Willis of Kos discussed the sanewashing perpetrated by mainstream media. They excused his behavior by saying he “put on a show” and had a “showman’s theatricality.” His blatant lies were described as a “reframe.” The low approval rating showed voters were merely “dissatisfied.” Republicans were said to be “breathing a sigh of relief” – well, they did praise the speech. Willis described the speech, saying, “When he wasn’t lying he was being racist.”

Since 2015, the mainstream press has worked overtime to present an image of Trump that doesn’t match up with reality. They simply omit his worst offenses or summarize his statements and actions without providing context to their audiences. When he makes disastrous mistakes, they are morphed into mere “blunders” and at moments like the State of the Union this drive to clean up after Trump goes into overdrive. Fortunately, this strategy isn’t really working among the public at large.

Needham looked at the Supreme Court decision that overturned some of the nasty guy’s tariffs. The whole thing was 170 pages, though the actual ruling was rather short, no more than 44 pages. It was the side commentary and dissents that added to the page count. Needham described those extra pages. Kavanaugh took 62 pages to show how smart he is, to flatter the nasty guy, and to offer a guide on how to keep tariffs going after the rest of the justices called them unconstitutional. Gorsuch, though in the majority, wrote a concurrence that “is pure whine and snarl, lashing out at everyone for not being as amazing and smart as he is. For 46 pages.” Part of it was complaining that Congress needs to “get off their butts” as Needham paraphrased it. Odd, coming from a guy who has been giving the nasty guy all he wants so that Congress isn’t necessary. Thomas, in a brief 18 pages, explained how the nasty guy could institute tariffs without Congress. That was some mangling of definitions so Congress could give away its power. “That’s horrifying, ahistorical, and too weird even for Alito.” Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that we know the FBI and Justice Department haven’t released all the Epstein files. We know that through reporting by NPR and confirmed by MS Now. We know it because one witness, who accused the nasty guy of sexual assault when she was 15 or younger, was reportedly interviewed by the FBI four times in 2019. However, only one of those interviews appears in the files that have been released. No surprise that the one that was released doesn’t mention the nasty guy. Einenkel provided a link to the NPR story, which is here. The audio is 3 minutes (I didn’t listen), though the associated article appears to be much longer. From the article:

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have already been investigating this allegation against the president and will now open a parallel investigation into the DOJ's decision not to release these particular documents. ... In a Feb. 14 letter to members of Congress first reported by Politico, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche insist that no records were withheld or redacted "on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary."

Kos of Kos discussed the latest from the Make America Healthy Again movement headed by Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr. They want support from the full Republican Party and to do that MAHA Action president Tony Lyons is trying to find the right message to turn “a toxic brew of wellness culture and institutional distrust” into an actual winnable coalition. So far they seem to relying on polls built on...

That’s “message testing.” You write a paragraph that makes your side sound like common sense and the opponent sound reckless, strip away party labels and governing records, and then treat the results like a revelation. ... If MAHA was truly a transformative political force, Republicans wouldn’t need to tiptoe around its core message—they’d be running on it. Instead, the memo urges nuance and careful phrasing, because they know the raw version doesn’t sell. Ultimately, the things MAHA claims to champion—safer drugs, healthier food, fewer environmental toxins—aren’t partisan tenets. This is generic stuff everyone cares about. The real divide shows up when it comes to science, regulation, and who actually confronts industry power in the real world.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Jennifer Weiss-Wolff of The Contrarian. The quote is long so here’s my summary: When pregnant children are apprehended by immigration enforcement they are being sent to a facility in San Benito, Texas. Pregnant children were likely raped and likely have sexually transmitted diseases that make pregnancy dangerous. At San Benito they are less likely to get the care they need. Why San Benito? According to the Project 2025 playbook it is because Texas has banned abortion. Here’s another summary of a quote by Timothy Snyder writing in his “Thinking About…” Substack. “Fascism demands a chosen enemy, and victims.” But, the current attack on immigrants has produced stasis, not the jump from “competitive authoritarianism” to outright fascism. It has also produced sustained protest. So the nasty guy needs more:

To complete the fascist transition, Trump has to give the country a war it does not want, and win it, and transform the society. He has brought us to the doorstep of a major war with Iran: but in the State of the Union, speaking about war preparations, he was looking around hopelessly and waving his hands. He is happy to talk about war with Iran, and hope somehow that others will deliver it. But he cannot do it himself. Americans do not want such a war. But that is not exactly Trump’s problem. Germans did not want a war with Poland in 1939, either. But Hitler fought one anyway, and won it quickly. Trump’s problem is that he does not know how to fight a war. And he flounders.

Snyder says the nasty guy must win that war. Snyder also says he doesn’t know how to fight one. That suggests if he does start one he’s likely to lose. I guess that’s a blessing? In the comments kurious linked to two news articles about the corruption in the nasty guy administration. One is from Bloomberg, the other from Daily News. Then he has a quote box, though doesn’t say which article he is quoting. Perhaps both. The box does list the corruption and crimes and some of them have links to sources. Murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti, slandered them, and allowed their killers to go free. Violated the rights of citizens and non-citizens. Killed dozens on the high seas. Released the hundreds of Jan. 6 felons. Threatened to seize Greenland, a NATO ally. Called for the execution of members of Congress for telling military personnel of their duty to disobey illegal orders. Repeatedly violated court orders. Shaken down large universities.

Viewing the Trump administration as a massive crime syndicate allows us to be clear-eyed about what is coming down the road, and to plan accordingly. To take the most urgent example, there ought to be no question as to whether Trump will try to steal the midterm elections. Of course he will try to steal them. Criminals gonna crime. It is every patriotic American’s duty to oppose the coming effort to nullify the will of the voters.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, listed the winners of the Minnesota Department of Transportation contest to name its snowplows. Some of this year’s winning names:

Oh, for Sleet’s Sake Flurrious George K Pop Blizzard Hunter. O Brother, Where Art Plow? Minne-Snow-ta

You won’t need a heart

There was a shooting at the school where Niece works as a librarian. She was not on campus at the time. One injured, perpetrator in custody. That’s way too close. The single injury was why it wasn’t in the news – it wasn’t dramatic enough. My Sunday movie was Young Hearts, a movie from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The story is about Elias, who is 14. This is a farming community and grandfather owns a farm. This is the time of life when literature class starts talking about love. He has a girlfriend in Valerie. Alexander, also 14, moves in next door. He admits he’s been in love before, and to a boy. Alex had lived in Brussels and rural life is new to him. Elias is glad to show him around. Elias soon falls in love with Alex, but he doesn’t know what to do with the feelings. He doesn’t know any gay people in his community. Isn’t he supposed to be in love with Valerie? How will his parents react? It takes a while, and the loving grandfather, to sort it out. Thankfully, the level of homophobia is quite low. I enjoyed this little movie. The actor who played Elias, Lou Goosens, did a fine job and has a good start on an acting career. Trenz Pruca of the Daily Kos community and author of his own blog looked at average income tax rates over the last six decades. He looked at the effective tax rate for the bottom 50% and middle 40% of taxpayers, then for smaller groups in the higher income levels, so that the top two are the top 0.01% to 0.001% and those above 0.001% of taxpayers. He then discussed his conclusions. I’ll mention his major points. The tax code has become much less progressive. The tax rate of the bottom 90% is roughly unchanged over these decades. When bills are passed they are described as everyone getting a tax cut, but those at the bottom (more accurately, not at the top) see little benefit. Over this time Republican administrations have cut tax rates for those at the top by a big chunk. Democrat administrations do nothing or raise the tax rate at the top by a modest amount. Then Republicans cut them again. Each cut is lower than the time before. These tax cuts are not done because the economy needs them to recover or continue growing. These tax cuts are not “paid for” within the tax system.

The adjustment occurs elsewhere: through higher deficits, increased federal debt issuance, or pressure on non-tax mechanisms such as spending cuts. This directly links the chart to the broader fiscal debates that follow major tax cuts: debt ceilings, entitlement reform, and “tough choices” about public investment. ... For most Americans, this does not arrive as a line item labeled “tax increase.” It arrives as constraints: what government can no longer afford, what benefits must be means-tested, what investments are postponed, what risks are privatized. In that sense, the chart helps explain why debates over Social Security, Medicare, healthcare access, and public investment intensify after periods of elite tax reduction. The system has already made its choice; the argument is over who absorbs the consequences.

Last Thursday, just a day after Renee Good was murdered by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, Emily Singer of Kos discussed the various ways Republicans in the administration and elsewhere praised Ross and slandered Good. Much of what they said was lies, easily shown through the various videos of the incident. No surprise here. Lisa Needham of Kos wrote on the day of the murder that it or something like it was always going to happen. She goes into a lot of detail of how we got here – the nasty guy calling in the National Guard in various cities and courts telling him he can’t. Even so, ICE has been active and brutal, yet ICE goons are the ones claiming to be fearful.

This was a favorite lie that ICE invoked in Illinois and California—basically, if your car happens to be anywhere near an ICE agent, they become so scared that they have to shoot you.

Needham gets to the core of her argument.

Trump desperately wants to invoke the Insurrection Act, which he threatened to do in 2020 during uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd—which, of course, was also in Minneapolis. With that, it’s no surprise that this shooting occurred less than a mile away from George Floyd Square. Trump has already declared that he is allowed to invoke the Insurrection Act if the courts won’t let him send in the National Guard, and … the courts won’t let him send in the National Guard. ... What we have now is a blue city on edge, enraged, and fearful—and Trump likely has a brand-new justification for a military crackdown. And, really, that’s what he wanted all along.

Mark Sumner, Kos staff emeritus, discussed whether Ross can be charged with murder. Short answer: Yes, he can, but it could be a difficult process. Sumner cites a Supreme Court ruling that says the charge is permitted. I thought he was referring to a recent case, but this one is from 1890. In the other big distraction from the Epstein files... Alex Samuels of Kos reported that less than a week after the nasty guy kidnapped Maduro if Venezuela the Senate advanced a resolution that would block using military force there without Congressional approval. All Democrats voted for it and five Republicans did too.

While largely symbolic, Thursday’s vote is a rare bipartisan check on Trump, signaling that even in a polarized Senate, some lawmakers are willing to challenge his lawlessness.

David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos. It has a caption saying, “Since the precedent has been set...” It shows a Danish news reporter saying, “In response to threats against Greenland, elite Danish forces have raided the White House and taken into custody the corrupt, authoritarian leader of the United States.” Last Wednesday Emily Singer reported:

The Trump team released a new food pyramid Wednesday, and it’s as confusing and completely out-of-touch with reality as the rest of the administration’s actions. The new pyramid is an inverted triangle that features protein, dairy, healthy fats, fruits, and vegetables at the top and whole grains at the bottom. But its guidelines are difficult to understand and fail to address how the Trump administration has been making those foods more expensive and harder to access. ... If the administration actually cared about health, it would be advocating for more assistance for poor communities to be able to access fresh fruits and vegetables, not crusading against them by vilifying food stamps. More than anything, it’s infuriating to watch the Trump administration embrace the very same idea that former first lady Michelle Obama promoted when Barack Obama was president—an idea that the right screamed about, accusing her of trying to create a “nanny state."

The next day Alix Breeden of Kos said the new guidelines “smell a little rotten.” At the news conference unveiling the new diet guidelines there was a lot of declaring these guidelines were free of conflicts of interest from food corporations. Well, that’s good. But then the actual guidelines seem to be the result of conflicts of interest – or maybe the people who put it together are a bunch of quacks. The top example is the recommendation for meat and dairy has been pushed to the top of the chart (meaning we should eat a lot of it), “despite that scientific research says these foods contribute to worsening heart health.” Robert Kennedy Jr. wants to end the “war on saturated fats.” There is some good in his efforts. He wants people to eat less processed foods and more whole foods. But his other weird efforts mean people will be skeptical of the rare good ideas he is promoting. In the comments of Friday’s pundit roundup for Kos are some good cartoons and memes. The Wolfpack posted a cartoon by BabylonBros of the nasty guy interviewing the Tin Man for a job. The nasty guy says, “You won’t need a heart. We’ll start you off working for ICE!” Adam Cochran tweeted about the way the vice nasty defended the Minneapolis killing:

The most insane thing about all this, is just that: -There is no reason to defend this. It’s not political. You could just say: “Officer didn’t follow protocol. Doesn’t reflect our values. Will be held accountable” There is NOTHING to gain from defending this UNLESS you *want* for ICE to have the freedom to kill US citizens for disagreeing with you!

Tom Gauld posted a cartoon for New Scientist marking going back to work after the break. Two scientists are talking:

First: I am a scientist, Martin. My observations must be meticulously documented rigorously analysed and objectively verified. Haste is the enemy of wisdom! Second: But could you share a preliminary appraisal of your general thinking? First: Well, if you insist on a crudely reductive answer, then, yes, I had a nice Christmas.

In Saturday’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Lawrence Willerman of Blue Amp asking us whether the country is more like Charlie Kirk or Renee Good.

Renee Good was a queer mother of three. A poet. A neighbor. A human being who cared about her community and the people in it—especially the ones with less power, less safety, and fewer voices. She lived compassion in a way that didn’t require a microphone or a donor list. And that compassion is almost certainly what put her in the path of federal agents who never should have been there, doing a job they were wildly unqualified to do. She did not die because she was reckless. She did not die because she was violent. She did not die because she was dangerous. She died because she cared. She died because she believed that warning her neighbors—her fellow Minneapolis residents—that ICE was conducting raids was the right thing to do. Because she believed community mattered. Because she believed people deserved to know when armed agents of the federal government were sweeping through their lives.

In the comments The Literate Lizard posted a quote by Margaret Atwood:

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

A cartoon posted by paulpro and created by Jonesy shows Jesus saying to a crowd, “Blessed are the meek. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth. Love your enemies. Blessed are the peacemakers.” In the crows is a guy with a MAGA hat saying, “What the hell kind of Christian is this guy anyway?”

No recordings, no paperwork, no oversight

Eli Hager, in an article for ProPublica posted on Daily Kos, reported the full story of what happened when the Department of Government Efficiency (remember DOGE?) came to the Social Security Administration. Much of that story comes from Leland Dudek, who was the SSA administrator for about four months last winter and spring. The story opens with Dudek posting a scroll 4 feet by 20 feet on the wall. In tiny print and diagrams it describes what SSA does. But that’s not yet entirely reflected in the agency’s computer systems. The SSA is 90 years old. It’s software dates back to the 1980s and has more than 60 million lines of code. Many things are still done on paper. It has been talking of upgrades for two decades without it happening. So when DOGE called for efficiency and the elimination of waste and promised IT whiz kids to make it happen Dudek thought great, bring it on. Except the other part DOGE called for was the elimination of fraud. And that was much louder than all other goals. Every little discrepancy these green kids found was taken as fraud and blown into a scandal – see the stories of 120 year old people turned into dead people still collecting SS.

They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year. They did none of these things.

Every time Dudek tried to work around his bosses, which were people at the White House, he would get a call reminding him what he was really supposed to be doing, which was not to make the SSA better. He realized the problem wasn’t the DOGE kids, it was the senior leaders. One example was the SSA Office of Transformation, which had been starting the work of modernizing the SSA systems. He was told the office was wasteful and to cut it. So he started acting the part that the White House wanted, while trying to push what would actually help the SSA. About all that did was make him unemployable after he was forced out. And the turmoil frightened many of the people who depend on their SS checks. It also made their experience working SSA agents on the phone and in person worse. The only good thing is that SS benefits are still being paid. So far. Maria Godoy of NPR discussed the release of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy. It has 100 recommendations for improving children’s health. Some of the points are good, things like promoting exercise and fitness and teaching good nutrition. But there are also not good things, such as studying the root causes of autism (which aren’t the things he wants to prove) and producing a new vaccine framework (when there is nothing wrong with the old one). There are also loopholes, such as calling on the reduction of unsafe food additives while letting food companies determine the safety and while specifying no penalties for using additives known to be harmful. And there are contradictions, such as calling for fresh local produce in schools after the administration canceled the program that did just that. Leila Fadel of NPR continued the conversation with Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. Popkin said yes, children’s health is bad. An example is the type of diabetes usually only seen in older adults is now seen in children and teens. But this list does nothing to fix that bad health. “It’s all promises but no teeth.” It’s all about “research, exploration, consideration, but nothing about any regulation or law to mandate change.” Nothing will happen, or at least nothing after Kennedy leaves office.

And you can see that, really, that the food and agriculture sectors that really profit highly from the ultra-processed food they're selling to our children and killing them at the same time, really have gotten to the government so that they had nothing in this document that will lead to any meaningful regulation, law or guideline that will improve America's health.

One thing that would help the health of children is money ffor school food programs that pay for eliminating ultra-processed foods and regulation to require it. But that won’t happen. Alix Breeden of Kos adds a bit more:

According to Marion Nestle, New York University professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health, the report doesn’t have much substance. “The report seems to twist itself into knots to make it clear that it will not be infringing upon food companies,” Nestle said in an email to NBC News. “MAHA has so much bipartisan support. This was the time to regulate food marketing to kids — not ‘explore.’” She went on to say that the report is “short of specifics and weak on regulatory actions,” echoing a similar sentiment from professionals when the preliminary report leaked.

At the bottom of the article is a quote from Kennedy:

We had lots of guns when we were kids. Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so. And nobody was walking into schools and shooting people. There are many things that could explain this. One is the dependence on psychiatric drugs.

I’m pretty sure my student handbook for high school said that a student caught with a gun at school would be expelled. I never saw a gun at school (or anywhere else, though I didn’t go into the town gun shop because my family didn’t hunt). I never heard of a bring your gun to school day. So I rate his first two sentences as false. That bit about nobody shooting people in schools is true. We didn’t practice lockdowns and didn’t need to. But at the time the rate of gun ownership was quite low. At the ending of this quote is Kennedy trying to link psychiatric drugs given to students with school gun deaths? The kids aren’t doing the killing. Fadel spoke to reporter Adrian Florido about the recent Supreme Court order that lifted the temporary order that banned ICE from doing aggressive immigration sweeps in Los Angeles. The order was brief, unsigned, and included no reasoning, meaning it was from the shadow docket. The order means ICE can resume targeting people based solely on skin color, accent, and occupation; what the ACLU called blatant racial profiling. Florido said:

In a concurrence, Justice Brett Kavanaugh cited an estimate that 10% of LA's population is undocumented and said race can be relevant when agents are determining whether they suspect someone is in the country illegally. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent. And she wrote, quote, “we should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work a low-wage job.”

A reminder that Sotomayor is Latina. There is an underlying court case. The lower court said these sweeps cannot happen while the case proceeds. The Supremes said the sweeps can. And the order will probably affect what ICE does in Chicago and other cities. Fadel and Steve Inskeep then spoke to Sarah Isgur, editor of SCOTUSblog, who recently interviewed Justice Amy Coney Barrett about the shadow docket. A Supreme Court case takes time to read through the briefings, hold oral arguments, and write the opinions. That takes several months to a year or two. The purpose of the emergency (shadow) docket is what should the law be between now and when the case is officially decided. Even so this can have permanent effects that can not reversed even if the eventual decision goes the other way. An example is a person deported now. Other examples are everything the nasty guy does through executive order, such as whether he can fire the head of the Federal Trade Commission. A problem is the orders are not explained and they usually (almost always?) favor the nasty guy. These orders leave lower courts caught between previous Supreme precedents and what these order say. This post includes a bit of that Barrett interview. She admits the emergency docket does not allow the justices to think about the issue, there is less information, and no time for reasoned opinions. Isgur says these nine people don’t really know how to handle the emergency docket and with the start of their term next month they’re going to be hit with a lot of cases coming from all those executive orders, cases like can the president invoke tariffs or fire a Federal Reserve governor. Another issue is what should be the status quo. The emergency docket is supposed to protect the status quo while the case is being decided. Is the status quo what was in effect before the president took office? Or, as the nasty guy’s team claims (and has Biden’s team claimed before them), since he is voted in by the people and is there only four years should his orders be status quo? Lisa Needham of Kos added her take on the Supreme Court orders.

The now familiar 6-3 lineup at the United States Supreme Court just threw out decades of settled law so that President Donald Trump’s roving bands of masked federal agents in Los Angeles can engage in a little light racial profiling, as a treat, and can continue scooping up people based on nothing more than looking Latino, speaking Spanish, and working at a low-wage job like a car wash. You know the drill. A lower-court judge wrote a detailed, thoughtful, lengthy opinion about how this practice was 100% racial profiling and ordered the government to stop doing it. The Trump administration ran to the Supreme Court to say that the world would crumble if they couldn’t racially profile brown people in Los Angeles right away, and the Supreme Court obliged by staying the lower court’s order. That stay prevents the lower court’s order from going into effect, so federal agents can continue this straight-up racist, unconstitutional behavior. ... Does arresting or detaining people for no reason at all violate the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that probable cause is required to search or seize someone? It sure does! If a police officer wants to stop someone on the street and search them, they have to have a level of reasonable suspicion about that particular person, such as believing they are armed and about to commit a crime. Law enforcement officers have to be able to justify stopping specific people based on specific concerns rather than being able to stop whole groups of people based on shared characteristics. ... Justice Sonia Sotomayor pulled no punches, even refusing to engage in the faux-civility of the tradition of saying “I respectfully dissent.” Nope, here it is just “I dissent.” While that may seem like a nerdy, legalistic, tiny thing to focus on, in the context of how the justices communicate with one another through their opinions, it’s Sotomayor saying the actions and reasoning—or lack thereof—of her colleagues are not worthy of respect.

Needham also reported some of the ICE ways of doing business have changed for the worse. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem says ICE agents are facing assaults (what the rest of us would consider freedom of speech). Filming of ICE agents isn’t allowed. No Supreme Court ruling has said one way or the other, though numerous state courts have rules that is a protected right. ICE agents used to be required to document the specific person they want to arrest, giving lots of details, and getting supervisor approval. Now they just arrest who they please. DHS is blocking members of Congress from doing their ICE facility oversight duties without prior approval, while the law says approval can’t be required. And DHS has shut down the oversight office, freezing 500 civil rights cases.

No recordings, no paperwork, no oversight. DHS is systematically eliminating every way we have to keep tabs on law enforcement to ensure that Trump’s immigration crackdown, no matter how illegal or violent, can’t be stopped.

In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Politico:

The justices, who apparently divided 6-3 along ideological lines, put on hold a federal district judge’s order that reined in what critics called “roving” raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That judge had found the tactics were likely unconstitutional because agents were detaining people without probable cause at car washes, bus stops and Home Depot parking lots based on stereotypes. The high court’s majority offered no explanation for its decision to grant the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to block the district judge’s order. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately in support of the decision, saying it was reasonable to briefly question people who meet multiple “common sense” criteria for possible illegal presence — including employment in day labor or construction, and limited English proficiency.

That little bit about “common sense” is partly why Sotomayor lost respect for the decision. In the comments Matt Davies posted a cartoon titled “Supreme Court guide to use of race in admission:” Over the entrance to a university is “Not OK.” Over the doors of an ICE detention van is “OK.” David Wolfe tweeted, “Children are born perfect without the need for toxic injections. Once vaccinated, the brain and body are harmed forever.” Dr. Neil Stone, infectious diseases doctor, responded, “Before vaccines, 1 in 5 kids never made it to their first birthday.” I add: What’s the evidence that the brain and body of an infant are harmed? Every vaccine must document they aren’t harmful to the vast number of people who take them. Acyn tweeted a quote from the vice nasty, “The bad news is...one of the pollsters once told me, anger usually wins midterm elections and because we done so much of what we said we are going to do, people are angry.” Gavin Newsom responded: “JD Vance admits he policies are wildly unpopular on national television.” In the comments of Wednesday’s roundup is a meme by Dan Pfeiffer,

There are only two possibilities – John Roberts is so afraid of a constitutional crisis that he will give Trump everything he wants, or Roberts is 100% in on the MAGA project to destroy our democracy.

Or both? Way down in the comments is a cartoon by the Naked Pastor. Under a banner saying these are the “Lost sayings of Jesus” Jesus is talking to a group of women. “Beware when men write something and claim it is inspired by God, for then you can’t dispute it.”

Demolition at the White House with no oversight

Kos of Daily Kos wrote about the scam PACs of the 2024 election cycle. These are groups that sent emails and texts that screamed, “Donate! Help us defeat...” They raked in $678 million and less than $11 million went to Democratic candidates or the party. “This is theft—pure and simple—bleeding the progressive movement dry while the right builds real power.” These PACs did spend some money on campaigns – on political ads. Kos calls them “grossly inefficient.” Better to spend the money on voter registration and door-knocking. The main point is Democrats will have a hard time winning while these organizations still exist. Better that we citizens donate directly to candidates. That got me wondering. Did the Democratic Party know about these groups? Did they let them stay in operation? Think they were doing good work? Try to shut them down? Or were they really Republican organizations pretending to be progressive to suck money out of the progressive cause? Yeah, that last bit sounds all “deep state” and conspiracy minded, but since this is about Republicans who have proved how willing they are to ruthlessly cheat I wouldn’t be surprised if is was true. Kos also wrote about the latest from Sen. Rick Scott, Florida Republican. In response to Zohran Mamdani doing quite well running for New York mayor as a Democratic Socialist, Scott introduced a resolution in the Senate declaring socialism to be the greatest threat to the nation. He claims “it is a proven path to tyranny, starvation, and death.” Scandinavia would disagree. Their socialist democracies are doing quite well, thank you. It seems the nasty guy would also disagree. Maybe not in words, but in actions. He has been doing quite a lot to interfere with capitalism. He’s demanded the purge of DEI programs, bullied executives, and demanded an ownership stake in Intel. Maybe Scott should have a chat with the nasty guy? Emily Singer of Kos wrote that about the jobs numbers released on Friday. The June numbers were revised downward to a loss of 13,000 jobs. July numbers were revised up a bit (I had heard early reports elsewhere that the July revision was also down). And in August a measly 22,000 jobs were added. A month ago the jobs numbers were bad enough the nasty guy fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This month he posted about – Jeffrey Epstein. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guy is ready to start work on his ballroom. The first part is demolition of some parts of the East and West Wings. The nasty guy named Will Scharf to be the head of the National Capital Planning Commission, the organization that oversees and approves changes to the White House. And Scharf says the NCPC has no jurisdiction over the demolition process. Mighty convenient. I previously wrote the nasty guy said it would be paid for through donations – as in another way to bribe him. Needham concluded:

So, let’s recap. We don’t get to know anything about the demolition of the White House, because there is no oversight and no approval process. And we don’t know anything about what the ballroom will actually look like, because there are no building plans yet. Then we don’t get to know anything about the contractor [who is named] because they didn’t have to go through an approval process. And we don’t know how it is being paid for. All we really do know is that, because Trump is involved, it is going to be tacky as hell.

Singer reported that recent comments from Robert Kennedy Jr. imply he is laying the groundwork so he can limit the access to mifepristone, one of the two medical abortion drugs. Sister sent me a link to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, written by Brandon Tensley. It is a short article about Frank Kameny. He was an astronomer with the Army Map Service, but fired because he was gay. This was a part of the Lavender Scare of the 1950s when being gay was considered a governmental security risk because gay men could be blackmailed. He appealed his firing all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear his case. A year before Stonewall he coined the slogan “Gay Is Good.” He was an early activist in the LGBTQ struggle for equality. He played a big role in getting the American Psychiatric Association to say homosexuality was not a mental illness. I had heard much of that before. There is a bit I didn’t know. Kameny kept notebooks. Two of them are now in the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History. Included in the notebooks is information about what bars and restaurants he had been to were gay-friendly. What Kameny intended to do with those recommendations is not known. Since he didn’t publish them perhaps they were only for the use of himself and friends. However, this article speculates if he had published them they would have been the first LGBTQ equivalent of the Green Book which black travelers used to avoid discriminatory businesses during Jim Crow.

Drowning out their voices with an Air Force flyover

Kos of Daily Kos reported that the MAGA faithful do have limits. When the nasty guy posts to his Truth Social account there are a lot of responses that praise him for whatever he said. But this time not. The nasty guy posted that prices are way down. The faithful, who can see that prices at the grocery store, gas pump, rent bill, and insurance bill are still quite high, actually disagreed with him. That means Democrats have an opening in proclaiming the nasty guy lied and his policies are doing the opposite of what he said. But Democrats actually have to walk through that opening – and then actually have to enact policies to lower prices (or boost pay). So far they haven’t been good at either. Oliver Willis of Kos reported that survivors of Epstein’s sexual abuse are speaking out, demanding the nasty guy end the coverup. They appeared on NBC’s Today show and ABC’s Good Morning America. They called on Congress to release the files. Democrats are on their side, Republicans say a release isn’t necessary. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos added that the survivors also held a press conference on the steps of the Capitol, calling for the release of the files. The nasty guy ordered an Air Force flyover to drown out their voices. Alix Breeden of Kos reported more than a thousand current and former Health and Human Services employees signed a letter demanding Robert F Kennedy Jr. resign as secretary. The letter says his actions compromise the health of the nation. The public version of the letter (and I imagine the copy given to RFK) did not list the names. The copies given to Congress did. RFK went before a senate committee yesterday. The reports I’ve read and heard have only given snippets of the three hour grilling. One such report is by Walter Einenkel of Kos. Congressional Republicans did not give Kennedy an easy time, though I heard that Republicans refused the Democratic demand that Kennedy give an oath that he’s telling the truth, and subject to perjury if he doesn’t. Breeden reported that about the only people still on his side are the two that count – the nasty guy and vice nasty. Yes, impeachment of cabinet secretaries is a thing, but not likely in this Congress. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin has a lot of quotes about Kennedy’s grilling, including this tweet from Larry Sabato:

I’ve watched 100s of congressional hearings over 55 years. Rarely if ever have I seen a witness so thoroughly destroyed as RFK Jr has been today.

There’s also an example that Kennedy lied, showing why Republicans didn’t want him under oath. In the comments are a few good memes and cartoons. One posted by paulpro, author unknown, shows three soldiers picking up litter in DC. One says, “Who would have guessed that some much of the trash we picked up in D.C. would be shredded paper with the name Epstein on them.” A tweet by Mickey Lenin commented on the jobs report released today: “Job growth missed expectations with only 22K created and nearly every sector losing jobs except healthcare. As an added bonus, June and July job numbers were revised lower yet again. Ketchup Alert Level 3.” A tweet by Tim Stevens discussed news I heard on NPR, though Stevens linked to one on BBC:

American Government to global automakers: We’ll make your cars impossibly expensive with tariffs unless you build them in the U.S. Also the American Government: Build a factory here and we’ll arrest the workers you bring in to get it operational.

From a tweet by Will Sommer: “Interesting: James O’Keefe put out a video today showing a DOJ official saying any Republicans would be edited out of the Epstein files.” The Naked Pastor posted a cartoon of Jesus holding a sign that says, “Free watermelon,” as he thinks, “I can’t believe I have to speak in code about an active genocide just so I don’t offend the very people who claim to follow me!”

The Constitution was written to frustrate ambition

Jasciu of the Daily Kos community started a post with:

For nearly two and a half centuries, the American experiment has endured by virtue of its capacity to restrain power. The Constitution was less a blueprint for efficiency than for frustration: ambition checking ambition, institutions restraining one another, power fractured and parceled out to preserve liberty. Yet over the last century, one of the most profound threats to this equilibrium has crept in largely unchallenged. Two entities—the political party and the modern corporation—have come to wield a quiet dominance over the electoral system, the judiciary, and the regulatory state, placing organized selfish power at the very heart of our republic.

They propose an amendment to the US Constitution to remedy the problem. I won’t quote the whole text, but here are the main points. No political party shall administer elections. Elections shall be conducted by nonpartisan bodies. No political party shall control or influence the nomination of judges. [Michigan Supreme Court justices are nominated by the parties, then run as “nonpartisan.”] Corporations are not persons with political rights. They shall not finance elections. Corporations shall not have control over regulatory agencies. The author does recognize the difficulty, close to impossibility, of getting this amendment approved in the current political climate. Commenters added other needed amendments or sections of broader amendments. From iyouwemeus: A corporation shall not be equated with a natural person or citizen. Money shall not be considered speech. Money to influence any part of government shall be transparent and controlled by law. A corporation owning more than one type of media outlet shall provide balanced and truthful news and free political advertising. Bots generated by AI shall not be equated to a natural person and shall be identified. From btfjd: Abolish the filibuster. Increase the size of the Supreme Court. From dfhamel: The filibuster must be active – a senator actually talking on the Senate floor. Rules for the House that don’t change when the party in power changes. Supreme Court Justices, Department of Justice leadership, and FBI leadership must be independent from the president. Instead of appointed by the president they should voted on by the people after a vigorous vetting system. I would add more: Congressional and state legislature districts shall be drawn by citizen redistricting commissions representing the political parties and citizen diversity. The right to vote shall not be denied. Ryan Krugman, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Kos, wrote that there is a Make Billionaires Pay march planned for September 20 in New York City, which is during the United Nations General Assembly when many world leaders will be in town. They will be protesting more than inequality; they also have demands for climate and social justice. Billionaires are targeted because they are pushing and profiting off the climate crisis. They even profit off the people displaced by the climate crisis by those people being caught in low-wage work. They also profit by being in the detention business. The climate movement is getting good at building solidarity with other social movements. That includes being involved in the Black Lives Matter protests. In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Mike Lofgren of Salon. Here’s a bit of the quote:

If you pay attention to the details, America is rapidly transforming from a service state — one that provides education, health care, infrastructure and parks to its citizens — into a carceral state that punishes and imprisons them.

Kev added:

I’ll say it again: Trump imagined designing a wall to keep people output wall can function to keep people in as well. It’s the reason why the metaphor always seemed ominous to me.

Here’s also a portion of the quote by Lorenzo Tondo of The Guardian:

Out of the International Association of Genocide Scholars’s (IAGS) 500 members, 28% took part in the vote. Of those who voted, 86% supported the resolution. The resolution states that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in article II of the United Nations convention for the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (1948).” ... The resolution said the IAGS recognised that “since the horrific Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023, which itself constitutes international crimes”, the government of Israel had engaged in systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, including indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against the civilians and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, homes and commercial buildings, of Gaza.

From Paul Sonne of the New York Times:

Now, Mr. Putin’s fortunes have changed — and so has the world. Nowhere was that more apparent in recent days than in Tianjin, China, where leaders from member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian security grouping, met on Monday alongside heads of state from other countries. Mr. Putin used his stage to publicly blame the West for the war in Ukraine. He gleefully held hands with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and erupted in laughs as the pair joined in a huddle with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. Leaders from Iran, Nepal, Tajikistan, Turkey and Vietnam glad-handed Mr. Putin in private meetings that ran past midnight.[...] The elephant in the room was President Trump, who has helped end Mr. Putin’s isolation, both by welcoming him to U.S. soil for the first time in a decade and by clashing with leaders from Brazil, India and South Africa, pushing them closer to Mr. Putin. Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mr. Modi has unraveled as New Delhi has resisted pressure from Washington to credit the U.S. leader with ending the military conflict between India and Pakistan. Mr. Trump has piled tariffs on India in response, singling out New Delhi for buying Russian oil.

In the comments is a cartoon by Bill Bramhall. It shows RFK Jr. pushing a woman off the roof of a building renamed “Department of Health and Human Sacrifices.” Chacal suggests perhaps that could be shortened to “Department of Health and Harm.” A meme posted by exlrrp and from funny snarky joke shows a perky woman holding a teacup saying in response to the nasty guy’s lack of public appearances and speculation of his health:

I can’t believe it’s already is-he-dead-yet season. I still have my holy-s***-he’s gonna-start-WWIII decorations up.

In today’s roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Jeff Tiedrich’s personal blog.

Let me state right up top that I didn’t believe any of this past weekend’s rumors that Dear Leader had shuffled off this mortal coil. But clearly, something is very wrong with Donny, and it’s being covered up — and because it’s this White House, staffed by the most incompetent clownf***ers ever to have f***ed clowns, it’s being covered up in the most inept manner possible.

On the same topic, in the comments exlrrp posted a meme with the words, “Have we been seeing Trump lately, or is it his doppleganger?” Beside a photo of the nasty guy is a woman with a very similar face and hair style.

He can't sue, cheat, bribe, or con his way out of death

I finished the book You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian. It’s a gay romance. The setting is New York City in 1960. Mark, 28, nominally works for the Chronicle newspaper but hasn’t done much actual work since his lover William died 18 months before. The paper doesn’t pay him but does allow him to use a desk. The lack of pay isn’t an issue because William left him lots of money. Eddie, 22, is a Major League Baseball player. He had a great rookie year, then was traded to an expansion team, the New York Robins. His fielding stayed good but his hitting dropped to almost zero. The title is in part because baseball streaks and slumps are frequently attributed to good or bad luck. Mark and Eddie meet because Mark’s editor proposes he do a weekly “diary” of Eddie, of what life in the big leagues is like. Eddie appreciates that Mark is someone who is interested in Eddie the person, rather than Eddie the kid who can’t hit the ball. Since this is 1960 Eddie can’t be seen as gay. He’d lose his job. Mark is tired of being William’s secret and wants to live openly. But Mark seems more concerned about Eddie’s reputation than Eddie is. The formula for a romance novel, straight or gay, is the couple falls in love, they hit a difficulty, and they overcome it. Homophobia is the difficulty and at the time it isn’t easily overcome. I enjoyed it, though I see again that many romance novels don’t have a lot of depth. Lobachevsky of the Daily Kos community wrote:

At 79, Donald Trump isn't just showing physical signs of decline—he's exhibiting the psychological collapse of a malignant narcissist confronting his own mortality. And that makes him more dangerous than ever.

Lobachevsky lists physical evidence of the bruises on the nasty guy’s hands and the announced diagnoses of chronic venous insufficiency. The psychological evidence is him telling Fox News he is trying to get to heaven. He’s “fixated on legacy, mortality, and divine judgment—classic signs of what psychologists call ‘narcissistic mortification.’” The nasty guy has a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder. When “narcissists confront mortality—the one thing they can't control, sue, or bribe their way out of—the psychological impact is devastating.” Since he can’t escape death he lashes out at everything else.

His inner circle knows it. That's why they're sprinting to consolidate power before Trump's decline makes it impossible. When desperate men feel humiliated and terrified, they don't go quietly. They try to burn everything down.

History shows (though other dictators and countries are not named) that a leader in psychological collapse drags their country down with them, creating a political crisis for millions. Lobachevsky lists his sources at the end: The Independent, BBC, TIME, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and PsyPost. Lobachevsky also linked to a thread on X, which I found on Thread Reader. It is by Andrew Wortman, a psychologist. A bit of it:

For Trump, the trigger is being faced with his own mortality. He can’t sue death. He can’t cheat it, bribe it, or con his way out of it. It’s inescapable. And for the first time in his life, he’s powerless — and the panic shows in every crazed rant/wild attempt to project control. That’s why you see him suddenly fixated on things like getting in to heaven (LMAO NEVER going to happen, Don), legacy, and being remembered. Humiliation is the narcissist’s deepest wound — and nothing humiliates more than colliding with the truth that you can’t escape the end. The Epstein files serve to make this terror far worse. Not only do they expose what he’s spent 30+ years concealing, but if they surface after he’s gone, he can’t spin them. The thought of being defined by that humiliation — with no power to control the narrative — is devastating.

Stephanie Armour for KFF Health News in an article posted on Kos, reported that Robert Kennedy Jr. is targeting the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Because vaccine makers were afraid that they wouldn’t be able to afford lawsuits against them, Congress created the VICF in 1988. A vaccine can harm people through anaphylaxis – a life-threatening allergic reaction – and in other ways. If the vaccine maker got sued for every harm they couldn’t afford to make the vaccine. The VICP, funded by a small tax, steps in to pay the injured. They work from a list of injuries that each vaccine is known to cause. Watchers are sure that Kennedy is laying the groundwork to overload the VICP. He announced a massive study to identify the cause of autism (which I wrote about recently). He fired the boards at the CDC and HHS that approve vaccines and replaced them with people who believe the conspiracies he promotes. He has revoked recommendations for vaccines. He has killed grants to develop more mRNA vaccines. And he wants to add autism to the list of known vaccine harms, though science had debunked the claim. The rising number of autism cases would bankrupt the VICP. No VICP and companies can’t afford to make vaccines.

“Make no mistake, this is a revolution that will change the face of public health policy,” Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action, said in a statement. “Americans are demanding radical transparency and gold standard science.”

No, Americans are not demanding radical transparency. They’re pretty much ignoring where vaccines come from. Keep me well and I’m good. No, this is not “gold standard science.” High quality science proves that vaccines are generally safe and highly effective. Both parts of that statement hide the true intent. Yes, it will change the face of public health policy because preventable diseases, or some new disease, will cause a great deal more death and disability than they need to. Oliver Willis of Kos writes a regular column Explaining the Right the title of which begins “Why Republicans...” Sometimes I like his answer, sometimes I think he doesn’t really explain his point. The one from last Saturday is titled, Why Republicans keep saying slavery was great. You can guess that this is one that I think doesn’t quite make it. Willis gives several examples over the years in which Republicans praise slavery or say it wasn’t all that bad. Then he wrote:

Conservative politics has for decades been focused on pushing white voters with racist sympathies to vote red. This has led the GOP to emphasize that group’s grievances, including praise for the Confederacy and made-up issues like “white genocide.” Arguing that slavery wasn’t all bad or at a minimum arguing that there was something positive about keeping millions of Black people as property fits within that morally bankrupt paradigm. Conservative leaders and Republican voters have made it clear for a long time that they prefer fairy tale narratives about America’s past over the truth—because that truth could expose the legacy of white supremacy.

While all that is true I think there is a more basic reason for their praise of slavery. As supremacists they need to oppress people to give value to their own lives. They praise slavery because they want to reinstitute slavery. In Wednesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jordan Weissmann of The Argument:

Trump’s monetary policy preferences seem like a recipe for higher inflation. The president has berated Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, urging him to lower interest rates, despite the central bank’s concerns that the administration’s tariffs could put upward pressure on consumer prices. He seems to be doing so in part out of a desire to lower mortgage costs and give the economy a jolt. But Trump has also made it clear he thinks the Fed should lower rates in order to keep federal borrowing costs low. “If they were doing their job properly, our Country would be saving Trillions of Dollars in Interest Cost,” he recently posted on Truth Social. That’s the sort of thing that makes economists’ and central bankers’ blood run cold: After all, once you’re keeping interest rates low in order to make borrowing cheap for the government, you can’t use them to keep prices in check. The technical term for this sad state of affairs is “fiscal dominance,” and it’s the kind of thing that can lead to much higher long-term inflation and potentially a rapid spiral.

In the comments is a meme posted by paulpro. It shows a young man booting a rich guy holding a sack of money. The meme says, “Refugees didn’t take away affordable housing. Rich landlords and greedy politicians did.” A cartoon by Naked Pastor marks the recent death of James Dobson. It shows two men with coffee and one says, “Actually, James Dobson helped me embrace being gay because I figured God could not possibly that heartless and cruel just for being who I am.” In today’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted several pundits discussing the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans and significantly damaged much of the surrounding area. Eighteen months after Katrina I went on a weeklong work mission to Biloxi, Mississippi to put a roof on a house still being restored. One of Kev’s quotes was by Mark Bonner and Matthew Sanders of the New York Times:

Today, New Orleans is smaller, poorer and more unequal than before the storm. It hasn’t rebuilt a durable middle class, and lacks basic services and a major economic engine outside of its storied tourism industry. The core problem was the inability to turn abundant resources into a clear vision backed by political will. Federal dollars were funneled into a maze of state agencies and local governments with clashing priorities, vague metrics and near-zero accountability. Billions went to contractors and government consultants services such as schools, transit, health care and housing were neglected. For example, one firm, ICF International, received nearly $1 billion to administer Road Home, the oft-criticized state program to rebuild houses. The focus of the effort became replacing what was lost, not building something stronger and better. For example, public funds poured into several flood-prone neighborhoods below sea level, while smarter plans reimagining New Orleans as a modern, sustainable, water-resilient city remain neglected. Countless ribbon cuttings gave an impression of vigorous recovery, belying the reality that they failed to lay the foundation for long-term growth. [...] Today New Orleans ranks near the bottom among major U.S. cites for G.D.P. per capita and is one of the nation’s weakest employment markets. Its population is roughly 23 percent smaller than it was in 2000, with about 37 percent fewer Black residents. Economic output per person lags the national average, and while the city has seen modest recent job gains, job growth remains uneven and slow overall.

Yesterday there was another mass shooting, this time the shooter shot through the windows of a church to strike children inside. Two children died. Fourteen more children and three adults went to the hospital and all are expected to recover, though they’ll have to deal with trauma. In the comments are two items related to the shooting. Dennis Gorlis posted a cartoon showing children with their school backpacks at the Gate of Heaven. St. Peter says, “They just loved their guns more, that’s all.” Denise Oliver Velez posted an excerpt from the NYT article. It says the shooter was a transgender female. At her death she was 23. At 17 she applied to change her name from Robert to Robin. It also said:

On social media, some conservative activists have seized on the shooter’s gender identity to broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill. The police did not provide any motive for the attack, but Ms. Westman’s extensive social media history was a contradictory catalog of anger and grievance. In seemingly stream-of-consciousness videos that she posted, she fixated on guns, violence and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets and what appear to be explosive devices, scrawled with antisemitic and racist language and threats against President Donald Trump. The videos also show pages from a diary, with long entries describing self hatred, violence against children, and a desire to inflict harm on herself.

As has been noted many times before, when a white guy commits a horrific act he is described as a “lone wolf.” But when a black man or woman or, as is this case, a transgender person does it, they are portrayed as a representative of their kind who are described as all being similarly violent or mentally ill. And here we are again. Yes, Robin was mentally ill. But that does not imply anyone like her is or is not.

Messing with the numbers doesn't shield you from reality

My Sunday movie was Universal Language. It is one of the most eccentric movies I’ve seen. Matthew Rankin was one of the writers. He also directed and plays a major character named Matthew Rankin. I have no idea how much is autobiographical. A tagline says it happens somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg. Most of the story takes place in Winnipeg, though the major language isn’t English, but Persian. All the signs are in Persian and nearly all the characters – Matthew is one of the few exceptions – look to be of Persian descent and speak Persian or French. How this came to be is not explained. The story takes place during a Winnipeg winter. Matthew leaves his government job in Montreal (or maybe Quebec) and takes the bus to Winnipeg, where he grew up. He is trying to find his mother. Two young girls find paper money frozen in ice and try to get a way to get it out before an adult can do so. Massoud leads walking tours of Winnipeg for tourists. Many major sites on his tour now have highways next to them. Another site features a briefcase on a bench someone left behind fifty years ago. The tourists complain of the cold. There is a turkey shop owner promoting his frozen turkeys and he paid for a prized turkey to be a passenger on Matthew’s bus. A scene takes place in a Kleenex repository. Canada submitted this for “Best International Feature Film” for the 2025 Academy Awards. It wasn’t chosen as a finalist. It did win an award at the Cannes Film Festival and won and was nominated in many other film festivals. I heard about it when it was shown at the Detroit Film Theater perhaps a year ago, but didn’t see it then. This is definitely an unusual movie, something to watch when one is tired of movies seeming all the same. And I enjoyed it. Sharon Lerner, in an article for ProPublica posted on Daily Kos, discussed Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr and his effort to find the cause of autism. He said he would have an answer by September. Erin McCanlies, an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a part of HHS, was stunned by Kennedy’s announcement. She was about to release her fourth paper on exactly that. I think she was able to finish it before she was fired, though many offices around hers were already empty. So why was her job and funding cut when Kennedy said he was looking for an answer that she and the rest of his department were well on the way to finding? Kennedy said the answer was vaccines and environmental toxins. Based on what McCanlies found he was half right. To put this in proper scientific terms, McCanlies and others found autism risk factors. The more factors the higher the chances of a child being on the autism spectrum. That doesn’t mean a particular child will be autistic. Some of the factors are genetic, others are things like parental age and whether the mother had a fever during pregnancy. Still others are whether the mother had been exposed to chemicals such as the solvents varnish, xylene, methylene chloride, and others. More culprits are certain pesticides, certain metals, and air pollution. Folic acid, one of the B vitamins, can decrease the chances of autism. One can see reasons why Kennedy doesn’t like the results McCanlies and others are publishing. His favorite culprit of vaccines has been proven not to be a cause of autism. The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin is blocking air pollution rules and reversing bans on several chemicals that have been shown to be a risk. Kennedy likes to say we don’t know the causes of autism and because the condition can be so devastating we need to find those causes quickly. I’ve heard media say over the last several years that the higher rates of autism are because of more frequent testing, implying there isn’t a cause. But we do know the causes. Alas, the corporations that back the nasty guy would rather protect their profits through the use of harmful chemicals and releasing pollutants into the air. So the nasty guy hires people willing to put corporate profits over the health of mothers and children. Mary Childs of NPR discussed the consequences of a government not publishing honest and trustworthy financial statistics. The story was aired because the nasty guy recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the reported jobs numbers. Childs talked to George Papaconstantinou, who became the finance minister of Greece in 2009, just after the financial mess that caused the Great Recession. At the start of his term a person went to him and said the financial situation is quite bad, much worse than what is officially said. His team needed more than a year to figure out the real numbers. According to European Union rules, member countries were to keep their deficits under 3%. The real deficit number, once determined, was 15%. That created a huge loss of trust. To recover Greece had to borrow a lot of money at much higher interest rates and cut its spending to austerity levels. “Messing with the numbers doesn't shield you from reality.” Recovery took nearly ten years. I usually use dashes or asterisks to soften expletives. I grew up at a time and in a family where such words were not used. There have been times where I thought including such words were critical to the tone or forcefulness of a quote, but years have passed since I’ve let one through. But I can’t hide the expletives in this next quote because they’re the point. So if such words offend you just skip the first quote. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quotes Glenn Kessler, formerly of the Washington Post and now writing his own Substack.

Twenty years ago this month, the late Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published his seminal work On Bullshit, which argued that bullshit was worse than lying. His point was that a liar knows the truth and deliberately tries to hide or distort it, while a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all — they care only about the impression they make. When Donald Trump emerged on the political stage in 2015, Frankfurt wrote in Time magazine that Trump was the epitome of the bullshit artist he had identified a decade earlier. [...] But, following Frankfurt’s theory, focusing only on Trump’s lies obscures a deeper danger to American society. As a bullshitter, Trump doesn’t care whether what he says reflects reality. He says whatever serves his momentary purpose, often contradicting himself without hesitation or shame. This indifference to truth makes Trump’s bullshit more insidious than lies.

Kev followed that quote with one from Frankfurt. I’ll let you read it. Kev also quoted Jason Linkins of The New Republic:

But Trump is getting plumped by some in the media as well: The Atlantic’s Michael Powell idly handwaves the fact that D.C. brought the violent crime rate to a 30-year low in 2024 to admonish Democrats for “downplaying crime.” (In this case, “downplaying crime” means “marshaling statistics demonstrating that the crime rate is trending in the right direction.”) Charles Fain Lehman, also in The Atlantic, goes to similar lengths to dismiss the actual facts to assert that “the reality is more complicated” and that some “deliberate intervention”—atop the one that brought the crime rate to a 30-year-low, presumably—is warranted. These authors and others are making a profound error from the jump in assuming that Trump sincerely desires to lower the crime rate in D.C. Trump is actually a “blank, sucking nullity” who wants to see himself on television and has decided that his second term in office will be about self-enrichment and revenge. He is inventing a crisis of crime as a pretext for further consolidating his power; this is authoritarianism 101. Personally, I think downplaying crime in the nation’s capital is not nearly as irresponsible as downplaying Trump’s authoritarianism. But if we must pretend that Trump’s efforts are sincere, then I’d challenge the proponents of his militarized deployments to approach their work with more rigor, and less vibes. Trump has proposed a thesis: Crime in D.C. will go down if masked paramilitaries flood the city and amble about the streets. The task, then, is to see if his theory stands up to the test—to take this seriously.