August 31, 2026 (Monday)

Alex Horton and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday, August 30, that military leaders are warning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a plan to continue large-scale operations in Iran is unsustainable and is weakening their ability to protect U.S. interests in other places, including at home.

The warning is in the classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book of August 14 and is laid out by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and the four-star commanders who oversee U.S. operations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Trump’s insistence that he must keep all options open, including the ability to launch major attacks, has forced more than 50,000 troops to be kept on alert for months. Plans to extend that alert made the Navy’s top admiral, along with leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, register that they did not concur with those plans, although their disagreement does not mean they will not execute the order.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle warned that the Navy, which has borne the brunt of operations against Iran, cannot sustain its current level of support for the war. Barely a quarter of the Navy’s destroyer fleet is currently able to deploy, while delays in maintenance are threatening the readiness of other ships.

Leaders of the Army and Air Force concurred with the plan to extend force deployments but warned that there would be significant risk to such an extension.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell took to social media to push back against the story, saying, “Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime. It’s a betrayal of the force…. We are in great shape around the world. This story isn’t about readiness. It’s TDS and PDS —they hate President Trump and Secretary Hegseth more than they love America.”

Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts pointed out that Hegseth has either fired or forced into early retirement several admirals and generals whom he considered insufficiently loyal in what appears to be “an ongoing, blatant campaign of intimidation to keep senior brass in the Pentagon toeing the line and not pushing back against administration officials.” And yet, a broad range of military leaders are speaking out against the administration’s plans in Iran.

“If any of the defense secretaries under Presidents Biden, Obama, or Bush had gotten this degree and range of pushback from top uniformed personnel, there would be immediate congressional hearings, calls for resignations, and talks of impeachment,” Clymer writes. “Moveover,” she notes, “someone had to leak the information contained in this classified briefing and did so knowing that it would further confirm the extraordinary weakness the Trump administration has exhibited in its apparently dead-on-arrival ‘negotiations’ with the Iranian regime to end the war.”

National security scholar Tom Nichols commented: “This is a good time to note that Hegseth is terrible at his job, that the Pentagon is a mess, that he should never have been confirmed, and that he should be fired first thing in the morning. But in this administration, sycophancy is more important than competence.”

At 10:18 last night, Trump posted an AI video of military strikes and fires on what appears to be Iran’s Kharg Island, a major storage facility for Iran’s oil and the seaport for about 90% of its oil exports. The caption read: “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT.”

The Defense Department this morning clarified that the U.S. had not attacked Kharg Island. The U.S. did claim to have launched attacks on two Iranian rocket launchers yesterday as they attempted to mine the Strait of Hormuz. Iran claimed to retaliate with strikes against Jordan, which the Jordanian military said were all intercepted. The price of oil rose again.

At 8:09 this morning, Trump posted: “Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD! They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead. They must be tried for war crimes against humanity!), and a good line of “BULLSH*T.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Trump continues to try to sell an image about Iran that does not reflect reality. In that, he appears to have the support of Defense Secretary Hegseth, who has restricted journalists’ access to the Pentagon and last week oversaw the firing of three staffers at the military publication Stars and Stripes.

In January the Pentagon tried to take away protections for the paper’s editorial independence, and last week it fired Erik Slavin, editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes, and Lara Korte, a reporter who covers the Middle East. Max Lederer, the paper’s publisher, announced he would retire at the end of September but was pushed out immediately.

The three are suing Hegseth, the Defense Department, Principal Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Andrew Brey, and Defense spokesperson Sean Parnell, saying they were being attacked “for speaking up as private citizens in support of the press’s freedom to cover military operations, its need to reach all servicepersons, and in retaliation for their publication of a news report on deteriorating conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during its extended tour of duty in the Mid-East.” They called the firings a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment and called out the “extraordinary censorship efforts” of the Defense Department.

But it appears Hegseth is doing more than just trying to stop negative press. Last week, Will Sommer of The Bulwark reported that the Pentagon has hired right-wing social media influencers as special government employees, using taxpayer money to amplify Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack anyone who tries to hold the Trump administration to account.
Sommer also noted that an active-duty U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Adam D’Ortona, posts pro-Hegseth and anti-Democratic material during working hours in violation of the military’s traditional nonpartisanship.

Sommers reported on a video by former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who commented: “How many more people that are blue checkmarks on X, that are putting out information on behalf of the federal government and Donald Trump and the Republican Party…are actually special government employees being paid by your tax dollars?”

A story in the Washington Post by Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp yesterday found more. They report that the Pentagon has secretly hired several right-wing military veterans with large social media accounts, including Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson, to boost Hegseth’s positions. A Pentagon spokesperson would not comment on the content of their jobs, whether they are receiving a taxpayer-funded salary, or how long their employment is expected to last.

In Public Notice today, Paul Waldman notes that Trump intended to show strength when he made a show of changing the name of Lake Ontario last week, but it really shows he is “weak and getting weaker.” He is still trying to shore up his fantasy world even as the real world is asserting its power.

On Saturday, Trump made an exception in his war on the media, praising CNN’s pollster Harry Enten “because he was willing to show that Donald J. Trump is six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or any other President.”

Tonight Michael R. Gordon and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has submitted his resignation after struggling with Hegseth for months over Hegseth’s firing of senior Army officers and over the direction of the military.

Driscoll’s departure, the journalists note, leaves the Army without any Senate-confirmed civilian or military leaders.

Neophyte said:

August 31, 2026 (Monday)

Alex Horton and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday, August 30, that military leaders are warning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a plan to continue large-scale operations in Iran is unsustainable and is weakening their ability to protect U.S. interests in other places, including at home.

The warning is in the classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book of August 14 and is laid out by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and the four-star commanders who oversee U.S. operations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Trump’s insistence that he must keep all options open, including the ability to launch major attacks, has forced more than 50,000 troops to be kept on alert for months. Plans to extend that alert made the Navy’s top admiral, along with leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, register that they did not concur with those plans, although their disagreement does not mean they will not execute the order.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle warned that the Navy, which has borne the brunt of operations against Iran, cannot sustain its current level of support for the war. Barely a quarter of the Navy’s destroyer fleet is currently able to deploy, while delays in maintenance are threatening the readiness of other ships.

Leaders of the Army and Air Force concurred with the plan to extend force deployments but warned that there would be significant risk to such an extension.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell took to social media to push back against the story, saying, “Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime. It’s a betrayal of the force…. We are in great shape around the world. This story isn’t about readiness. It’s TDS and PDS —they hate President Trump and Secretary Hegseth more than they love America.”

Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts pointed out that Hegseth has either fired or forced into early retirement several admirals and generals whom he considered insufficiently loyal in what appears to be “an ongoing, blatant campaign of intimidation to keep senior brass in the Pentagon toeing the line and not pushing back against administration officials.” And yet, a broad range of military leaders are speaking out against the administration’s plans in Iran.

“If any of the defense secretaries under Presidents Biden, Obama, or Bush had gotten this degree and range of pushback from top uniformed personnel, there would be immediate congressional hearings, calls for resignations, and talks of impeachment,” Clymer writes. “Moveover,” she notes, “someone had to leak the information contained in this classified briefing and did so knowing that it would further confirm the extraordinary weakness the Trump administration has exhibited in its apparently dead-on-arrival ‘negotiations’ with the Iranian regime to end the war.”

National security scholar Tom Nichols commented: “This is a good time to note that Hegseth is terrible at his job, that the Pentagon is a mess, that he should never have been confirmed, and that he should be fired first thing in the morning. But in this administration, sycophancy is more important than competence.”

At 10:18 last night, Trump posted an AI video of military strikes and fires on what appears to be Iran’s Kharg Island, a major storage facility for Iran’s oil and the seaport for about 90% of its oil exports. The caption read: “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT.”

The Defense Department this morning clarified that the U.S. had not attacked Kharg Island. The U.S. did claim to have launched attacks on two Iranian rocket launchers yesterday as they attempted to mine the Strait of Hormuz. Iran claimed to retaliate with strikes against Jordan, which the Jordanian military said were all intercepted. The price of oil rose again.

At 8:09 this morning, Trump posted: “Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD! They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead. They must be tried for war crimes against humanity!), and a good line of “BULLSH*T.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Trump continues to try to sell an image about Iran that does not reflect reality. In that, he appears to have the support of Defense Secretary Hegseth, who has restricted journalists’ access to the Pentagon and last week oversaw the firing of three staffers at the military publication Stars and Stripes.

In January the Pentagon tried to take away protections for the paper’s editorial independence, and last week it fired Erik Slavin, editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes, and Lara Korte, a reporter who covers the Middle East. Max Lederer, the paper’s publisher, announced he would retire at the end of September but was pushed out immediately.

The three are suing Hegseth, the Defense Department, Principal Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Andrew Brey, and Defense spokesperson Sean Parnell, saying they were being attacked “for speaking up as private citizens in support of the press’s freedom to cover military operations, its need to reach all servicepersons, and in retaliation for their publication of a news report on deteriorating conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during its extended tour of duty in the Mid-East.” They called the firings a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment and called out the “extraordinary censorship efforts” of the Defense Department.

But it appears Hegseth is doing more than just trying to stop negative press. Last week, Will Sommer of The Bulwark reported that the Pentagon has hired right-wing social media influencers as special government employees, using taxpayer money to amplify Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack anyone who tries to hold the Trump administration to account.
Sommer also noted that an active-duty U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Adam D’Ortona, posts pro-Hegseth and anti-Democratic material during working hours in violation of the military’s traditional nonpartisanship.

Sommers reported on a video by former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who commented: “How many more people that are blue checkmarks on X, that are putting out information on behalf of the federal government and Donald Trump and the Republican Party…are actually special government employees being paid by your tax dollars?”

A story in the Washington Post by Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp yesterday found more. They report that the Pentagon has secretly hired several right-wing military veterans with large social media accounts, including Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson, to boost Hegseth’s positions. A Pentagon spokesperson would not comment on the content of their jobs, whether they are receiving a taxpayer-funded salary, or how long their employment is expected to last.

In Public Notice today, Paul Waldman notes that Trump intended to show strength when he made a show of changing the name of Lake Ontario last week, but it really shows he is “weak and getting weaker.” He is still trying to shore up his fantasy world even as the real world is asserting its power.

On Saturday, Trump made an exception in his war on the media, praising CNN’s pollster Harry Enten “because he was willing to show that Donald J. Trump is six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or any other President.”

Tonight Michael R. Gordon and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has submitted his resignation after struggling with Hegseth for months over Hegseth’s firing of senior Army officers and over the direction of the military.

Driscoll’s departure, the journalists note, leaves the Army without any Senate-confirmed civilian or military leaders.

I remember reading articles about the USA navy readiness before Trump was even on the scene or his first presidency.
Stress and maintenance issues were mentioned.
Plus once enjoying invulnerability from attack how would they react if hit

Cymek said:

Neophyte said:

August 31, 2026 (Monday)

Alex Horton and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday, August 30, that military leaders are warning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a plan to continue large-scale operations in Iran is unsustainable and is weakening their ability to protect U.S. interests in other places, including at home.

The warning is in the classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book of August 14 and is laid out by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and the four-star commanders who oversee U.S. operations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Trump’s insistence that he must keep all options open, including the ability to launch major attacks, has forced more than 50,000 troops to be kept on alert for months. Plans to extend that alert made the Navy’s top admiral, along with leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, register that they did not concur with those plans, although their disagreement does not mean they will not execute the order.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle warned that the Navy, which has borne the brunt of operations against Iran, cannot sustain its current level of support for the war. Barely a quarter of the Navy’s destroyer fleet is currently able to deploy, while delays in maintenance are threatening the readiness of other ships.

Leaders of the Army and Air Force concurred with the plan to extend force deployments but warned that there would be significant risk to such an extension.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell took to social media to push back against the story, saying, “Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime. It’s a betrayal of the force…. We are in great shape around the world. This story isn’t about readiness. It’s TDS and PDS —they hate President Trump and Secretary Hegseth more than they love America.”

Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts pointed out that Hegseth has either fired or forced into early retirement several admirals and generals whom he considered insufficiently loyal in what appears to be “an ongoing, blatant campaign of intimidation to keep senior brass in the Pentagon toeing the line and not pushing back against administration officials.” And yet, a broad range of military leaders are speaking out against the administration’s plans in Iran.

“If any of the defense secretaries under Presidents Biden, Obama, or Bush had gotten this degree and range of pushback from top uniformed personnel, there would be immediate congressional hearings, calls for resignations, and talks of impeachment,” Clymer writes. “Moveover,” she notes, “someone had to leak the information contained in this classified briefing and did so knowing that it would further confirm the extraordinary weakness the Trump administration has exhibited in its apparently dead-on-arrival ‘negotiations’ with the Iranian regime to end the war.”

National security scholar Tom Nichols commented: “This is a good time to note that Hegseth is terrible at his job, that the Pentagon is a mess, that he should never have been confirmed, and that he should be fired first thing in the morning. But in this administration, sycophancy is more important than competence.”

At 10:18 last night, Trump posted an AI video of military strikes and fires on what appears to be Iran’s Kharg Island, a major storage facility for Iran’s oil and the seaport for about 90% of its oil exports. The caption read: “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT.”

The Defense Department this morning clarified that the U.S. had not attacked Kharg Island. The U.S. did claim to have launched attacks on two Iranian rocket launchers yesterday as they attempted to mine the Strait of Hormuz. Iran claimed to retaliate with strikes against Jordan, which the Jordanian military said were all intercepted. The price of oil rose again.

At 8:09 this morning, Trump posted: “Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD! They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead. They must be tried for war crimes against humanity!), and a good line of “BULLSH*T.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Trump continues to try to sell an image about Iran that does not reflect reality. In that, he appears to have the support of Defense Secretary Hegseth, who has restricted journalists’ access to the Pentagon and last week oversaw the firing of three staffers at the military publication Stars and Stripes.

In January the Pentagon tried to take away protections for the paper’s editorial independence, and last week it fired Erik Slavin, editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes, and Lara Korte, a reporter who covers the Middle East. Max Lederer, the paper’s publisher, announced he would retire at the end of September but was pushed out immediately.

The three are suing Hegseth, the Defense Department, Principal Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Andrew Brey, and Defense spokesperson Sean Parnell, saying they were being attacked “for speaking up as private citizens in support of the press’s freedom to cover military operations, its need to reach all servicepersons, and in retaliation for their publication of a news report on deteriorating conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during its extended tour of duty in the Mid-East.” They called the firings a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment and called out the “extraordinary censorship efforts” of the Defense Department.

But it appears Hegseth is doing more than just trying to stop negative press. Last week, Will Sommer of The Bulwark reported that the Pentagon has hired right-wing social media influencers as special government employees, using taxpayer money to amplify Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack anyone who tries to hold the Trump administration to account.
Sommer also noted that an active-duty U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Adam D’Ortona, posts pro-Hegseth and anti-Democratic material during working hours in violation of the military’s traditional nonpartisanship.

Sommers reported on a video by former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who commented: “How many more people that are blue checkmarks on X, that are putting out information on behalf of the federal government and Donald Trump and the Republican Party…are actually special government employees being paid by your tax dollars?”

A story in the Washington Post by Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp yesterday found more. They report that the Pentagon has secretly hired several right-wing military veterans with large social media accounts, including Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson, to boost Hegseth’s positions. A Pentagon spokesperson would not comment on the content of their jobs, whether they are receiving a taxpayer-funded salary, or how long their employment is expected to last.

In Public Notice today, Paul Waldman notes that Trump intended to show strength when he made a show of changing the name of Lake Ontario last week, but it really shows he is “weak and getting weaker.” He is still trying to shore up his fantasy world even as the real world is asserting its power.

On Saturday, Trump made an exception in his war on the media, praising CNN’s pollster Harry Enten “because he was willing to show that Donald J. Trump is six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or any other President.”

Tonight Michael R. Gordon and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has submitted his resignation after struggling with Hegseth for months over Hegseth’s firing of senior Army officers and over the direction of the military.

Driscoll’s departure, the journalists note, leaves the Army without any Senate-confirmed civilian or military leaders.

I remember reading articles about the USA navy readiness before Trump was even on the scene or his first presidency.
Stress and maintenance issues were mentioned.
Plus once enjoying invulnerability from attack how would they react if hit

And all this firing of senior military personal is very reminiscent of Stalin and Hitler when the paranoia set in and they believed they were a threat.

Thanks for posting HCR.

September 1, 2026 (Tuesday)

Yesterday, by a vote of 5–4, the United States Supreme Court allowed Trump to continue to build his ballroom. The five right-wing justices concluded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which had sued to stop the construction of the ballroom, did not have legal standing to sue and that national security considerations came down on the side of construction.

The majority said it was not resolving the issue of whether the project is legal.

It was Chief Justice John Roberts who covered that aspect of the controversy. He wrote in dissent that the project is “likely unlawful.” “The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” Roberts wrote. He wrote that it is critical to “ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”

Nonetheless, as Josh Gerstein of Politico reported, the project will likely be completed before the question of its legality is resolved.

Trump’s behavior in his second term is a logical outcome of the theory of the “unitary executive.” Under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, those eager to stop Congress from passing legislation that benefited the American people at the expense of businessmen began to argue for the idea that because the president was the head of one of the three branches of the U.S. government, he could not be checked by either of the other two branches: the legislative branch (Congress) or the judicial branch (the courts).

On July 1, 2024, the United States Supreme Court, stacked with Trump’s appointees, took this theory to a conclusion that overturned the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.

It decided that the president of the United States has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president ever asserted that he was above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.

This permission structure appears to have convinced Trump he can do whatever he wishes, including rigging elections so he cannot lose.

Yesterday Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exposed what appears to be a plot to steal the 2026 midterm elections.

Blumenthal released a letter he had written to Postmaster General David Steiner calling attention to an official whistleblower report, which he attached to the letter.

It’s eye-popping.

The whistleblower warns that there are “potentially catastrophic problems in the development of the United States Postal Service’s…new system for handling federal election ballot mail.” According to the whistleblower, the “process for the creation and implementation of an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” for delivering ballots to voters for the midterm election has been “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

The whistleblower says “the administration has hidden the high likelihood that the new ballot mail verification processes will result in major disruptions in mail ballots ever getting delivered to voters. As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state—effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”

The complaint continues: “Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process.” But the rushed IT development of the new system means it “will almost certainly have significant operating problems when released to the public.” The whistleblower notes that multiple officials from the USPS have described the development process for the system as “a sh*t show.”

The whistleblower said that work on the “USPS election ballot mail IT project” began in June 2026 and has continued despite an injunction from a federal court ordering work on it to stop. Normally, it would take “nine months to a year or more” to roll out a project “of this complexity, magnitude, and importance.” Considering the rush and the consequences, the whistleblower wondered “whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.”

The complaint says: “The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk. Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

Blumenthal noted that the USPS has a restrained role as a mail carrier. It has never before played a gatekeeping function and yet is now building an entirely new system to put itself “in a position to refuse to mail ballots that state election officials have determined should be sent out.” He called for Postmaster General Steiner to “to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.”

Blumenthal demanded Steiner answer no later than Friday whether the USPS has stopped work on the project as ordered by the courts, as well as provide the names of those who worked on the project and the dates they were active. By September 8, he wants to see all records about the project.

Blumenthal told reporters: “The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”

The administration’s attack on elections is especially concerning considering the recent suggestions that Trump is spending most of his time on his legacy projects like the ballroom, leaving him largely unaware of what is going on in the administration. Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic reported yesterday that when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll went directly to Trump with his concerns about what Hegseth is doing to the Army, Trump was surprised to learn “how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth” and “expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership.”

Driscoll resigned yesterday.

As for the plan to sabotage mail-in voting? Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on House Administration, which oversees the administration of federal elections, posted: “These whistleblower allegations are extraordinary. If Trump Administration officials knowingly built a system designed to prevent Americans from receiving their ballots, that is not election security. It is a betrayal of our Constitution and the American people.”

September 2, 2026 (Wednesday)

A number of pundits, especially Republican pundits, interpreted Trump’s win in 2024 as a permanent political realignment proving that post–World War II liberalism was dead. That conviction appeared to help feed Trump’s insistence that he had won a “landslide” and had a “mandate” to enact draconian policies.

Skeptics disagreed with this interpretation, noting that Trump’s victory in the popular vote was small— more people voted for someone else than for him— and that the 2024 election appeared to be determined by inflation and the pandemic, two things that had little to do with political positions. Rather than being an embrace of a political ideology, it appeared the swing toward Trump had more to do with anti-incumbent feeling, especially over inflation.

Still, after the 2024 election, hopeful Republicans set out to redistrict states like Texas to try to guarantee they would hold on to control of Congress after the 2026 election. They redrew districts based on the idea that what they thought was a new coalition would last, banking especially on Hispanic voters continuing to cast their ballots for Republicans. With that expectation, they created gerrymanders that shaved their margins thinner than they had been before the redistricting.

And then, in the elections of November 2025, dramatic gains by Democrats across Texas made some observers wonder if the gerrymandering of Texas hadn’t been a “dummymander,” teeing districts up for Democrats in a blue wave.

After the election, G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted that the anti-incumbent feeling had turned against the Republicans and that voters were even more strongly opposed to Republicans than they had been against Democrats in 2024. He explained that by then, Republicans had lost an average of 25 points of support from the very voters they were counting on to create their new coalition: young people, nonwhite voters, and working-class/lower-income voters.

And then, in a special election on January 31, 2026, voters flipped a seat in the Texas Senate from Republican to Democratic in a historically Republican-dominated district in Tarrant County. Democrat Taylor Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and machinist, defeated right-wing Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a seat that Republicans have held since the early 1990s.

Robert Downen of Texas Monthly noted that in the final days of the campaign, the Wambsganss campaign spent $310,000 while Rehmet spent nothing, and Daniel Nichanian of BoltsMag posted that overall, Wambsganss spent nearly $2.2 million more than Rehmet in the campaign. Both Texas governor Greg Abbott and Trump himself publicly supported Wambsganss.

Voters flipped a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024 to Rehmet, electing him by a 14.4-point margin. Without the minor-party candidates in the vote, the swing from the Republican in 2024 was 32 points toward the Democrats.

Liz Crampton of Politico noted that “Republicans are in full-out panic mode” after the election, especially over the swing of Hispanic voters toward Rehmet. Republican consultant Mike Madrid referred back to the newly gerrymandered maps and the voting patterns of young Hispanic men when he told Crampton: “They’ve banged three of these five new Republican seats on a demographic that Democrats were never able to turn out for 30–40 years.” Now, though, they had turned toward Democrats as Trump’s arrests, detentions, and deportation policies had “angered and upset them.”

In the wake of the election, Trump immediately began talking about nationalizing voting in the country, despite the provisions in the U.S. Constitution establishing that states, not the federal government, are in charge of elections. “If you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections,” Trump said during a press conference at the White House in early February. “I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway.”

Trump’s allies began talking about rigging the election by sending armed officers to the polls. Steve Bannon said on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Since then, the administration has worked hard to take over the midterm elections, but so far everything it has tried has been blocked by the courts or failed in Congress. It is 0–23 in its effort to take over state voter data with the apparent plan of running it through a program designed to make sure noncitizens aren’t receiving welfare benefits for which they’re not eligible, a process that mistakenly flags citizens as noncitizens with a failure rate of at least 14%.

Courts also blocked Trump’s attempt to use the United States Postal Service (USPS) as a gatekeeper to stop ballots that the federal government decides shouldn’t be delivered even though state agencies determine they should be. We learned yesterday that, despite court orders, the administration’s plan to use the USPS to impose federal control on elections has continued. It has rushed into place a system a whistleblower warns would throw out entire batches of up to 10,000 ballots if a single one gets rejected.

This is a deliberate attempt to skew the midterm election. An analysis by Charles Stewart III of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Election Data and Science Lab shows that Democrats vote by mail more than Republicans. In 2024, 37% of Democrats voted by mail, while only 24% of Republicans did.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters yesterday that he is not ruling out sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to the polls. “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” Mullin said. “ICE’s job is immigration, customs enforcement. That’s their job…if we’re serving a warrant we will be where we need to be.”

Maya Yang of the Guardian notes that Mullin’s threat flies in the face of federal law, which prohibits armed agents from “any place where a general or special election is held.”

Last night, in Tarrant County, Texas, county commissioners tried an even cruder way of rigging the election. As Cecelia Lenzen of the Texas Tribune reported, they voted 3–2 along party lines to get rid of 92 of the polling sites the county had in 2022 before the midterm election. In 2022 there were 316 election sites; the Republican commissioners cut that number to 224. They also cut three sites for early voting, from 50 to 47. Republicans voted for the cuts; Democrats voted against them.

“It’s not about cost. This is about power. This is very political. This is campaigning from the dais,” said Democrat Alisa Simmons. Throughout the eight-hour meeting about the cuts, speakers from the audience called on the commissioners to increase, rather than decrease, the number of voting sites for the more than 1.3 million people registered to vote in Tarrant County.

Those 1.3 million people are more than live in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, or Montana, and about the same number of people who live in Maine or New Hampshire.

Voters in Tarrant County had plenty to say to the Republican commissioners about the cuts. One constituent warned: “You guys are out!” When County Judge Tim O’Hare refused to look at him, the man called out the disrespect. “What could possibly be so important, Mr. O’Hare? Can you listen to me, please? Hello? Hello? Can you look at my eyes, please?”

O’Hare answered: “I can hear every word you’re saying. You can use your minute however you choose.”

The man responded: “I want you to look me in the eyes.”

When O’Hare still wouldn’t, the man continued: “Yeah, look down because down is what you’re going in November. So keep looking where you’re going. Okay? ’Cause this is what we’re doing after this from now until November, whether you cut these places or not. We’re going and we’re knocking on doors and we’re bringing people out. And we’re telling them where the voter locations are, and we’re helping them get there, and nothing you can do can stop us from removing you in November.”

Thanks.

Could the KKK provide ballot security
Being anonymous they wouldn’t have to worry about being attacked by racists outside of the polling place and allow free voting to take place

September 3, 2026 (Thursday)

Election analyst Charlie Cook told Republicans today to “brace themselves” for the midterms. “The three most plausible outcomes are that it will be bad, really bad, or truly horrible.”

To stop voters from turning Republicans out of office and handing Democrats control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, or both, the Trump administration is trying to implement a new rule for the United States Postal Service that would enable it to act as a gatekeeper for who can vote by mail. Such a measure flies in the face of the fact that the Constitution gives states, not the federal government, control over elections, while the role of the USPS is simply to carry mail. Nonetheless, the administration insists this novel measure is necessary to combat voter fraud.

There is widespread consensus that voter fraud is not a real issue in the United States. Notably, President Donald J. Trump himself votes by mail, along with about a third of all U.S. voters.

On Monday, news broke that a whistleblower has said there are “potentially catastrophic problems in the…new system for handling federal election ballot mail.” “As presently designed,” the whistleblower said, “if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state—effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”

Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts has blocked the administration’s plan until September 10. Today, a day before the state starts sending out mail-in ballots to voters, she held a hearing about whether to extend that block.

“We are 70 days from the election and I have nothing from the USPS about how this will happen,” she said to Michael Velchik, the Justice Department lawyer representing the Postal Service. Lawyers for the USPS suggested the new plans were independent of Trump’s March executive order calling for a national list of citizens against which the USPS would check mail-in ballots.

Talwani expressed concern that the new system could cause “major disenfranchisement” and said it was “puzzling” that there is such a rush to put the system in place. She also noted that if states wanted such a system, they could have put one in place. “Why is it you want U.S.P.S. to stop batches of ballots from your voters?” she asked a lawyer for a group of Republican-dominated states. “You can decide you want those measures in your state,” she said. “I don’t understand—you come to me and say, ‘We really want to have election integrity in our state decided by U.S.P.S.’?”

Apparently concerned about the direction of the hearing, Solicitor General John Sauer went directly to the Supreme Court this afternoon to ask it to let the new restrictions on mail-in ballots go into effect. As Law Dork’s Chris Geidner notes, although Talwani found that the new requirements were significant and likely unconstitutional, the Department of Justice is arguing that the new rule “imposes only modest requirements on the use of the federal postal system” and “does not regulate state administration of elections.”

With just four days of work under their belts after the August recess, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) today canceled votes for the last two weeks in September, leaving the House with only another four days in Washington between now and the midterms. Leaving town will protect Republicans from having to weigh in on Trump’s wild AI posts that he has won the war in Iran, his threats to sic the Federal Communications Commission on journalists who report his tanking job approval ratings, or his claims that the economy is thriving.

Today G. Elliott Morris and David Nir of Strength in Numbers noted that “Donald Trump is acting like he wants to lose the midterms.” Their evidence is that he has taken to supporting the losing side of issues. “From tweeting his support for data centers…to renaming Lake Ontario to lavishly spending on the White House ballroom, Donald Trump is constantly taking positions that are opposed by the vast majority of voters.”

Yesterday the U.S. Mint began selling $1 “gold” coins bearing Trump’s likeness and “LIBERTY 1776–2026” on one side and the presidential seal on the other. The mint says the gold-colored coins, which are composed of copper, zinc, manganese, and nickel, are legal tender, as well as collectibles to honor the nation’s 250th birthday. Although the coins are worth a dollar, Aimee Picchi of CBS News reports, a roll of twenty-five costs $61, and a hundred of them cost $154.50.

Today Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced that the administration is beginning the construction of Trump’s 250-foot triumphal arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, despite lack of approvals for the structure.

In June, Senator Angus King (I-ME) and five Democratic lawmakers who sit on committees responsible for national parks and resources wrote to Burgum to oppose “in the strongest terms” Trump’s proposed triumphal arch. They pointed out that there are many different laws the construction would break. “Most fundamentally,” though, they wrote, the arch falls within an area called Area I that Congress established in the 1986 Commemorative Works Act. In that law, Congress specified that any commemorative work within Area I requires Congress to pass a law authorizing the memorial.

Congress has done no such thing.

Luke Broadwater and Emily Badger of the New York Times reported that Representative Donald S. Beyer Jr. (D-VA), whose district includes Arlington National Cemetery, said that Trump and Burgum were “disregarding the risks and rushing this towering monument to Trump’s vanity because they believe Republicans will get crushed in November.”

There is already speculation about what the midterms will bring.

Nandita Bose, Humeyra Pamuk, and Gram Slattery reported today at Reuters that Trump’s top aides are trying to keep events in Iran quiet before the midterms to keep the conflict out of the news and avoid making voters even angrier than they already are, but are already considering ramping up attacks after the election is over.

The election might also change calculations about a new Epstein Files Transparency Act 2.0, backed by Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY). The new measure would give state courts access to the Epstein files to launch their own prosecutions since the Department of Justice under Trump is stonewalling the process.

Khanna and Massie are trying to force the House to vote on the measure by pushing it to the floor under a discharge petition, which bypasses the House speaker. Joshua Barajas of PBS News reported Massie’s comment to the Washington Times, in which he said that if the three Republicans necessary to reach the 218-signature threshold to push through the discharge petition won’t sign it before the midterms, he is confident of sufficient support after the election if Democrats retake the majority in the House.

Americans can really go on about things. American politics makes its own complexity, a bit like how a bush fire makes its own weather, America should look to forming a simple government like Nauru. Too many people in American politics, it needs reforms.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Americans can really go on about things. American politics makes its own complexity, a bit like how a bush fire makes its own weather, America should look to forming a simple government like Nauru. Too many people in American politics, it needs reforms.

They do seem to approach many things in an overly complex or strange manner allowing corruption or hiding what’s going on.
What’s interesting is the approach of minimal government involvement in the lives of the population.
However this throws away protection from exploitation and also allow lots of unhealthy choices because of lack of government oversight
The freedom part also ends when you have something the government wants.

Cymek said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Americans can really go on about things. American politics makes its own complexity, a bit like how a bush fire makes its own weather, America should look to forming a simple government like Nauru. Too many people in American politics, it needs reforms.

They do seem to approach many things in an overly complex or strange manner allowing corruption or hiding what’s going on.
What’s interesting is the approach of minimal government involvement in the lives of the population.
However this throws away protection from exploitation and also allow lots of unhealthy choices because of lack of government oversight
The freedom part also ends when you have something the government wants.

Their federal government distances itself from the population while grabbing more money from the population.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Americans can really go on about things. American politics makes its own complexity, a bit like how a bush fire makes its own weather, America should look to forming a simple government like Nauru. Too many people in American politics, it needs reforms.

It is a product of their history. At the time of the revolution against British colonial rule there were not many examples around of countries not ruled by a king. So they had to make it up as they went along. They got most of it right but they got a few things wrong too. One is too much executive power in the hands of one person: the president is more or less a king, but not for life and his children have no right of succession. As far as their voting system goes, yes it is too complicated and convoluted, but it was thought up before modern communications and railways. Things had to be done at a local level and then consolidated into a national outcome through a process. If you were starting up a new country today without any baggage you wouldn’t do it their way.

party_pants said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Americans can really go on about things. American politics makes its own complexity, a bit like how a bush fire makes its own weather, America should look to forming a simple government like Nauru. Too many people in American politics, it needs reforms.

It is a product of their history. At the time of the revolution against British colonial rule there were not many examples around of countries not ruled by a king. So they had to make it up as they went along. They got most of it right but they got a few things wrong too. One is too much executive power in the hands of one person: the president is more or less a king, but not for life and his children have no right of succession. As far as their voting system goes, yes it is too complicated and convoluted, but it was thought up before modern communications and railways. Things had to be done at a local level and then consolidated into a national outcome through a process. If you were starting up a new country today without any baggage you wouldn’t do it their way.

They aren’t really any different to any empire from history.
All of them collapse pretty much in the same manner.
Over extended, become complacent in superiority (not realising humans are pretty much equal in capability given the chance), corrupt to the point nothing gets done without greasing the wheels.
They also value military and economic might instead of basic human rights for their own people.
Their own population deserve better care as they are actual living people far more valuable than money.

Voter fraud in first world democratic nations should be rare to almost never happen.
Its set up to prevent this very thing happening on a large scale.
You’d need to override so many safeguards and need thousands of people involved who never say anything.
If its easy then you aren’t a democracy which is how the USA seems to be heading with these reforms which are the opposite of what they claim.

Dontcha miss the days when the biggest US presidential scandal was Bill Clinton denying sexual relations with “that woman”?

Cymek said:

party_pants said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Americans can really go on about things. American politics makes its own complexity, a bit like how a bush fire makes its own weather, America should look to forming a simple government like Nauru. Too many people in American politics, it needs reforms.

It is a product of their history. At the time of the revolution against British colonial rule there were not many examples around of countries not ruled by a king. So they had to make it up as they went along. They got most of it right but they got a few things wrong too. One is too much executive power in the hands of one person: the president is more or less a king, but not for life and his children have no right of succession. As far as their voting system goes, yes it is too complicated and convoluted, but it was thought up before modern communications and railways. Things had to be done at a local level and then consolidated into a national outcome through a process. If you were starting up a new country today without any baggage you wouldn’t do it their way.

They aren’t really any different to any empire from history.
All of them collapse pretty much in the same manner.
Over extended, become complacent in superiority (not realising humans are pretty much equal in capability given the chance), corrupt to the point nothing gets done without greasing the wheels.
They also value military and economic might instead of basic human rights for their own people.
Their own population deserve better care as they are actual living people far more valuable than money.

Their rich elite abuse children and so does the general population, yes they have lots of issues. They need deep cleaning. They will jail people like Cosby but not those who went to abuse children on Epstein Island. Double standards abound over there.

Divine Angel said:

Dontcha miss the days when the biggest US presidential scandal was Bill Clinton denying sexual relations with “that woman”?

He never went to that Island either, he was at home with Hillary.

Cymek said:

party_pants said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Americans can really go on about things. American politics makes its own complexity, a bit like how a bush fire makes its own weather, America should look to forming a simple government like Nauru. Too many people in American politics, it needs reforms.

It is a product of their history. At the time of the revolution against British colonial rule there were not many examples around of countries not ruled by a king. So they had to make it up as they went along. They got most of it right but they got a few things wrong too. One is too much executive power in the hands of one person: the president is more or less a king, but not for life and his children have no right of succession. As far as their voting system goes, yes it is too complicated and convoluted, but it was thought up before modern communications and railways. Things had to be done at a local level and then consolidated into a national outcome through a process. If you were starting up a new country today without any baggage you wouldn’t do it their way.

They aren’t really any different to any empire from history.
All of them collapse pretty much in the same manner.
Over extended, become complacent in superiority (not realising humans are pretty much equal in capability given the chance), corrupt to the point nothing gets done without greasing the wheels.
They also value military and economic might instead of basic human rights for their own people.
Their own population deserve better care as they are actual living people far more valuable than money.

Yeah, pretty much. A bit like ancient Athens: a democracy at home but tyrants abroad. Eventually they lost their allies and were defeated by their enemies. The US relentlessly pursues abroad the interests of US big business and the capital owning class. Their foreign policy has been profit over principle for nearly the last century.

But they have got to a point domestically where only the capital owning classes have a way of making money, while the rest of the real economy shrinks. They are acting like an empire because they are desperate to hold onto their profits. At some point the international system of trade turns from a voluntary system of mutual benefit to coercion aimed at preserving their interests. Trump has just stomped on the accelerator and sped up the decline a bit.

party_pants said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Americans can really go on about things. American politics makes its own complexity, a bit like how a bush fire makes its own weather, America should look to forming a simple government like Nauru. Too many people in American politics, it needs reforms.

It is a product of their history. At the time of the revolution against British colonial rule there were not many examples around of countries not ruled by a king. So they had to make it up as they went along. They got most of it right but they got a few things wrong too. One is too much executive power in the hands of one person: the president is more or less a king, but not for life and his children have no right of succession. As far as their voting system goes, yes it is too complicated and convoluted, but it was thought up before modern communications and railways. Things had to be done at a local level and then consolidated into a national outcome through a process. If you were starting up a new country today without any baggage you wouldn’t do it their way.

^^^

party_pants said:

Cymek said:

party_pants said:

It is a product of their history. At the time of the revolution against British colonial rule there were not many examples around of countries not ruled by a king. So they had to make it up as they went along. They got most of it right but they got a few things wrong too. One is too much executive power in the hands of one person: the president is more or less a king, but not for life and his children have no right of succession. As far as their voting system goes, yes it is too complicated and convoluted, but it was thought up before modern communications and railways. Things had to be done at a local level and then consolidated into a national outcome through a process. If you were starting up a new country today without any baggage you wouldn’t do it their way.

They aren’t really any different to any empire from history.
All of them collapse pretty much in the same manner.
Over extended, become complacent in superiority (not realising humans are pretty much equal in capability given the chance), corrupt to the point nothing gets done without greasing the wheels.
They also value military and economic might instead of basic human rights for their own people.
Their own population deserve better care as they are actual living people far more valuable than money.

Yeah, pretty much. A bit like ancient Athens: a democracy at home but tyrants abroad. Eventually they lost their allies and were defeated by their enemies. The US relentlessly pursues abroad the interests of US big business and the capital owning class. Their foreign policy has been profit over principle for nearly the last century.

But they have got to a point domestically where only the capital owning classes have a way of making money, while the rest of the real economy shrinks. They are acting like an empire because they are desperate to hold onto their profits. At some point the international system of trade turns from a voluntary system of mutual benefit to coercion aimed at preserving their interests. Trump has just stomped on the accelerator and sped up the decline a bit.

Yeah, it’s a bit like that.

Thanks.

Such strange goings on.

Neophyte said:

August 31, 2026 (Monday)

Alex Horton and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday, August 30, that military leaders are warning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a plan to continue large-scale operations in Iran is unsustainable and is weakening their ability to protect U.S. interests in other places, including at home.

The warning is in the classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book of August 14 and is laid out by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and the four-star commanders who oversee U.S. operations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Trump’s insistence that he must keep all options open, including the ability to launch major attacks, has forced more than 50,000 troops to be kept on alert for months. Plans to extend that alert made the Navy’s top admiral, along with leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, register that they did not concur with those plans, although their disagreement does not mean they will not execute the order.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle warned that the Navy, which has borne the brunt of operations against Iran, cannot sustain its current level of support for the war. Barely a quarter of the Navy’s destroyer fleet is currently able to deploy, while delays in maintenance are threatening the readiness of other ships.

Leaders of the Army and Air Force concurred with the plan to extend force deployments but warned that there would be significant risk to such an extension.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell took to social media to push back against the story, saying, “Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime. It’s a betrayal of the force…. We are in great shape around the world. This story isn’t about readiness. It’s TDS and PDS —they hate President Trump and Secretary Hegseth more than they love America.”

Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts pointed out that Hegseth has either fired or forced into early retirement several admirals and generals whom he considered insufficiently loyal in what appears to be “an ongoing, blatant campaign of intimidation to keep senior brass in the Pentagon toeing the line and not pushing back against administration officials.” And yet, a broad range of military leaders are speaking out against the administration’s plans in Iran.

“If any of the defense secretaries under Presidents Biden, Obama, or Bush had gotten this degree and range of pushback from top uniformed personnel, there would be immediate congressional hearings, calls for resignations, and talks of impeachment,” Clymer writes. “Moveover,” she notes, “someone had to leak the information contained in this classified briefing and did so knowing that it would further confirm the extraordinary weakness the Trump administration has exhibited in its apparently dead-on-arrival ‘negotiations’ with the Iranian regime to end the war.”

National security scholar Tom Nichols commented: “This is a good time to note that Hegseth is terrible at his job, that the Pentagon is a mess, that he should never have been confirmed, and that he should be fired first thing in the morning. But in this administration, sycophancy is more important than competence.”

At 10:18 last night, Trump posted an AI video of military strikes and fires on what appears to be Iran’s Kharg Island, a major storage facility for Iran’s oil and the seaport for about 90% of its oil exports. The caption read: “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT.”

The Defense Department this morning clarified that the U.S. had not attacked Kharg Island. The U.S. did claim to have launched attacks on two Iranian rocket launchers yesterday as they attempted to mine the Strait of Hormuz. Iran claimed to retaliate with strikes against Jordan, which the Jordanian military said were all intercepted. The price of oil rose again.

At 8:09 this morning, Trump posted: “Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD! They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead. They must be tried for war crimes against humanity!), and a good line of “BULLSH*T.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Trump continues to try to sell an image about Iran that does not reflect reality. In that, he appears to have the support of Defense Secretary Hegseth, who has restricted journalists’ access to the Pentagon and last week oversaw the firing of three staffers at the military publication Stars and Stripes.

In January the Pentagon tried to take away protections for the paper’s editorial independence, and last week it fired Erik Slavin, editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes, and Lara Korte, a reporter who covers the Middle East. Max Lederer, the paper’s publisher, announced he would retire at the end of September but was pushed out immediately.

The three are suing Hegseth, the Defense Department, Principal Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Andrew Brey, and Defense spokesperson Sean Parnell, saying they were being attacked “for speaking up as private citizens in support of the press’s freedom to cover military operations, its need to reach all servicepersons, and in retaliation for their publication of a news report on deteriorating conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during its extended tour of duty in the Mid-East.” They called the firings a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment and called out the “extraordinary censorship efforts” of the Defense Department.

But it appears Hegseth is doing more than just trying to stop negative press. Last week, Will Sommer of The Bulwark reported that the Pentagon has hired right-wing social media influencers as special government employees, using taxpayer money to amplify Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack anyone who tries to hold the Trump administration to account.
Sommer also noted that an active-duty U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Adam D’Ortona, posts pro-Hegseth and anti-Democratic material during working hours in violation of the military’s traditional nonpartisanship.

Sommers reported on a video by former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who commented: “How many more people that are blue checkmarks on X, that are putting out information on behalf of the federal government and Donald Trump and the Republican Party…are actually special government employees being paid by your tax dollars?”

A story in the Washington Post by Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp yesterday found more. They report that the Pentagon has secretly hired several right-wing military veterans with large social media accounts, including Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson, to boost Hegseth’s positions. A Pentagon spokesperson would not comment on the content of their jobs, whether they are receiving a taxpayer-funded salary, or how long their employment is expected to last.

In Public Notice today, Paul Waldman notes that Trump intended to show strength when he made a show of changing the name of Lake Ontario last week, but it really shows he is “weak and getting weaker.” He is still trying to shore up his fantasy world even as the real world is asserting its power.

On Saturday, Trump made an exception in his war on the media, praising CNN’s pollster Harry Enten “because he was willing to show that Donald J. Trump is six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or any other President.”

Tonight Michael R. Gordon and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has submitted his resignation after struggling with Hegseth for months over Hegseth’s firing of senior Army officers and over the direction of the military.

Driscoll’s departure, the journalists note, leaves the Army without any Senate-confirmed civilian or military leaders.

The Republicans could end this tomorrow. Bar stewards.

September 4, 2026 (Friday)

On September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.

Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity.

By 1882, though, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government toward men of capital, and workingmen worried they would lose their rights if they didn’t work together. A decade before, the Republican Party, which had formed to protect free labor, had thrown its weight behind Wall Street. In 1884, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”

The workers marching in New York City carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.”

The New York Times denied that workers were any special class in the United States, saying that “very one who works with his brain, who applies accumulated capital to industry, who directs or facilitates the operations of industry and the exchange of its products, is just as truly a laboring man as he who toils with his hands…and each contributes to the creation of wealth and the payment of taxes and is entitled to a share in the fruits of labor in proportion to the value of his service in the production of net results.”

In other words, the growing inequality in the country was a function of the greater value of bosses than their workers, and the government could not possibly adjust that equation. The New York Daily Tribune scolded the workers for holding a political—even a “demagogical”—event. “It is one thing to organize a large force of…workingmen…when they are led to believe that the demonstration is purely non-partisan; but quite another thing to lead them into a political organization….”

Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”

Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever had,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”

As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).

They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.

In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement , and the laws will be changed.”

September 5, 2026 (Saturday)

Events of Friday, September 4, showed the Trump administration in a nutshell.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts blocked Trump’s plan to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voters. Referring to the final rule the USPS is trying to put into place, Talwani wrote: “Unauthorized by the Elections Clause, the Final Rule clashes with Congress’s statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress’s Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States.”

In other words, the plan is both illegal and unconstitutional.

As Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket reported, Talwani was responding to a lawsuit over the plan brought by groups defending the right to vote, including the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and Democratic attorneys general from 24 states and the District of Columbia. Talwani agreed that the rule threatens the voting rights of millions of American citizens.

Hours after Judge Talwani’s order, the Trump administration asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to permit the rule to go into effect, claiming it simply “imposes modest informational requirements on senders of outbound federal ballot mailings.” Contradicting Talwani, the Department of Justice lawyers claimed: “The Rule does not displace a single State election law. And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”

Meanwhile, a day after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the administration was starting work on the 250-foot (76-meter) triumphal arch Trump wants in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the administration to give the court at least 48 hours’ notice before doing anything except dig pits to identify cultural artifacts at the site. She noted that in April the administration agreed to provide 14 days’ notice before any construction started, an agreement ordered by the court.

Burgum’s announcement suggested the administration is pushing the project forward without going through any of the required permitting or obeying the law that requires Congress to pass a law allowing another memorial in the protected area of Washington, D.C., known as Area I.

Questioned about the war in Iran, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that it is actually not a war but “a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us.” He compared the Iran war, which is in its sixth month without congressional authorization of any sort and has taken the lives of 18 U.S. service members, to the much longer Vietnam War which he claimed took more than 100,000 service members’ lives (the Department of Defense says the actual number was 58,220).

Trump also denied that military personnel are seeing record long deployments, and insisted that the U.S. controls the Strait of Hormuz. He turned back to the argument that the war was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, although those discussions now appear to be off the table as the U.S. tries to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported on Friday that although Trump and members of the administration insist that reports of a shortage of crucial munitions are a lie, government investigators forced about 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff—about 2,000 officials who coordinate operations and policy with commanders around the world—to take lie detector tests to determine if they had been the source of the leaks to journalists.

The journalists note that such a proceeding is unprecedented and comes as Hegseth works harder and harder to control information coming from the Pentagon. “Mass polygraph tests have never been administered to the top ranks of the U.S. military in modern history,” they write.

Also on Friday, Catie Edmondson and Carolyn Y. Johnson reported in the New York Times that the Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health have signed an agreement providing a framework to collaborate on biodefense and pandemic preparedness. According to officials who spoke with the reporters, the deal could mean moving as much as $2 billion from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—roughly one-third the budget of the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci used to run—to the Pentagon.

Amidst reports that the Navy has run out of money, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been trying unsuccessfully to push through Congress a short-term injection of $350 billion on top of the additional $150 billion congressional Republicans gave the Pentagon last year. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, accused the Defense Department of “trying to rob N.I.H. of billions of dollars that Congress provided for medical research so that it can pad the Pentagon’s budget.”

NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya appeared to confirm the agreement when he posted on social media that “far from siphoning money away from research, this partnership between and focuses on research projects that will drive discoveries to improve the health of American citizens and members of the military.”

In the White House on Friday, Trump appeared to misunderstand not only that since World War II trade has made the United States wealthy, but also the concept of trade itself. “We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with other countries,” he said. “We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year. They have nothing that we have to have, I mean, hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things.”

Aside from the fact the U.S. imports machinery, agricultural products, vehicles, auto parts, electronics, and so on from Mexico, readers on social media noted: “The trade deficit is not a debt, it does not represent losing money to the other country. It means more goods were imported from it than exported to it. Why has to do with many factors, mainly the United States has more highly paid, skilled, and educated service workers.”

On Friday, the White House debuted computer games on the official White House website. The “games” are ripoffs of older games like Snake, this one with a white man in a suit picking up Black, Asian, and Latino men and putting them in orange jumpsuits. There was also apparently one ripping off Tetris, which was apparently about building Trump’s wall, but it disappeared as the real Tetris posted: “At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.

“P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’.

“P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.”

On Friday, September 4, the administration also reiterated its determination to roll back environmental protections, proposing a new rule that would end protections against pollution and industrial impacts for a significant number of streams and wetlands. As Zahra Hirji of Bloomberg reported, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed redefining which bodies of water would qualify for federal protection.

Also on Friday, the United Nations General Assembly voted 164–1, with six countries abstaining, for a resolution changing the world map to more accurately reflect the sizes of the continents. As Jewel Bright of NPR reports, the commonly-used Mercator projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, was designed to enable navigators to plot courses on the straight lines of compass bearings. It distorts the size of landmasses, making the ones closest to the poles disproportionately large, while areas close to the Equator—like Africa—are shown as significantly smaller than they really are.

The African Group, made up of 54 African member states, introduced the resolution, which is not binding but will put the weight of the U.N. behind a different map projection that shows the continent sizes much more accurately. The United States was the only country to vote against the measure.

Also on Friday, Joe Sommerlad of the Independent confirmed reporting from the Washington Examiner the day before that, according to a White House official, First Lady Melania Trump will not attend Trump’s novel midterm convention next week in Dallas. She joins at least 45 Republican lawmakers who told Mia McCarthy, Meredith Lee Hill, and Jordain Carney of Politico they are steering clear of participating in an event with the deeply unpopular president for which tickets for Republican lawmakers start at $25,000.

One lawmaker called the event “a waste of time,” explaining: “You shouldn’t be having to rally your base at this point. You should be trying to convince independents. Independents are not attending nor watching the midterm convention.” Republican National Committee press secretary Natalie Baldassarre countered that “the outreach and enthusiasm to attend, participate, and speak at this historic midterm convention has been incredible.”

In an interview with Ben Terris of New York Magazine published Friday, Trump agreed that Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) was right to say that he was putting his name on things now because nobody else will when he’s gone. “That’s true,” Trump told Terris. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

“ Friday, Trump agreed that Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) was right to say that he was putting his name on things now because nobody else will when he’s gone. “That’s true,” Trump told Terris. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.””

Untrue.
“Here lies Donald Trump”

September 6, 2026 (Sunday)

Storm clouds over the horizon looked like mountains last week as I came in from a late afternoon paddle in the kayak.

There’s a lot going on, but it feels like we could all use a break on this holiday weekend.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

Neophyte said:

September 6, 2026 (Sunday)

Storm clouds over the horizon looked like mountains last week as I came in from a late afternoon paddle in the kayak.

There’s a lot going on, but it feels like we could all use a break on this holiday weekend.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

Good lad.

Neophyte said:

September 6, 2026 (Sunday)

Storm clouds over the horizon looked like mountains last week as I came in from a late afternoon paddle in the kayak.

There’s a lot going on, but it feels like we could all use a break on this holiday weekend.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

Nice!

:)

Neophyte said:

September 6, 2026 (Sunday)

Storm clouds over the horizon looked like mountains last week as I came in from a late afternoon paddle in the kayak.

There’s a lot going on, but it feels like we could all use a break on this holiday weekend.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

😍

September 7, 2026 (Monday)

Since yesterday, President Donald J. Trump has been posting on social media at a frantic pace, showing AI images of himself with President George Washington on his own account and, on the official White House account, a video of himself as the DC Comics Green Lantern superhero. The White House social media account ripped off Green Lantern’s oath, captioning the video: “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!”

Back on his own account, Trump posted images of Space Force uniforms that mimic those of Starship Troopers, whose design the director of that 1997 film claimed was meant to invoke Nazis. He also posted two AI images of himself in what appears to be a spaceship with his hands on buttons as two nuclear mushroom clouds billow off planet Earth behind him, and two images of himself as a sort of superhero dark lord with a dark army around him with the captions “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN,” “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES,” and “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.”

He posted multiple images of himself changing maps or of new maps showing the change of the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” and the state of New Mexico to “New America,” and labeling the Strait of Hormuz as “NEW U.S. Territory.” He showed the colors of the United States over the North American continent, and he posted “before” and “after” maps in which Iran was replaced with a silhouette image of his own head, as well as an AI image of a U.S. military plane blowing up Iran’s Kharg Island with the caption: “Bye bye, Kharg,” along with repeated claims that Iran is collapsing. He posted an AI-generated image of himself beating Canadian prime minister Mark Carney at hockey and saying, “GET UP, GOVERNOR,” an insulting reference to Canada as a U.S. state.

He also posted an image of the moon with the caption: “THE MOON IS OURS” along with a U.S. flag.

And, of course, many of the things Trump posted claimed he would “GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF ALL TIME!” He posted AI images of former president Joe Biden wearing a Trump 2024 hat and anti-Trump actor Robert DeNiro holding up a shirt saying “TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT.” He posted an AI image of what seemed to be the luxury liner RMS Titanic, labeled “DUMOCRATIC PARTY,” sinking in flames.

He acknowledged complaints about the fact he has pocketed more than two billion dollars from rapid-fire stock trading since taking office a second time. He posted an image of himself trading stocks at his desk in the Oval Office at a screen that reads “BOUGHT: INTEL $20” and another that reads “NOW $95” with the caption: “I do this for our Country, not myself. I’ve made Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks, and many other type Holdings, for the U.S.A., not myself, and all I do is get criticized by the Radical Left Dumocrats. Very unfair, but what can you do! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

He reiterated his demand for the SAVE America voter suppression act and claimed: “Except for the RADICAL LEFT that wants to RAISE YOUR TAXES, and wreck our Economy, EVERYONE LOVES TAX CUTS! My Big Beautiful Bill was the BIGGEST relief in HISTORY for hardworking families—Nobody’s seen anything like it!”

It seems likely that he and his aide Natalie Harp, who is apparently behind much of his social media, think trolling the country is a good way to keep attention focused on Trump rather than on rising inflation, corruption, or the war in Iran.

There is much to distract from. On CNN today, pollster Harry Enten noted that while Trump enjoyed a 20-point advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, in 2024 on economic issues, Trump’s approval rating for how he is handling the economy is now 41 points underwater. “We’re talking about a switcheroo in the wrong direction of 61 points on this Labor Day,” Enten said. “It is not a happy Labor Day, indeed, for President Trump when it comes to how those who are employed view him on the economy.”

Also today, when Martha Raddatz of ABC News noted that gas and diesel prices are soaring, with the Labor Day gasoline average at $4.10 a gallon compared with $3.16 last year, she played a clip of Trump telling an audience that when they had to “pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have—a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world. We don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So remember that, when you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4, it’s okay. I mean, it’s, I’m not, I’m not. I will never apologize. I did the right thing.”

Raddatz asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright today about when we might see a nuclear agreement with Iran, since it’s already been six months of higher prices and there doesn’t seem to be one on the table. Wright answered: “There may not be a nuclear agreement. It may be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. An agreement may await a next administration in Iran. We simply don’t know that. But I think what the president was communicating there is how critically important this is.”

Tonight, Trump posted: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA! President DJT”

But while at some level Trump might think he is being clever by keeping the focus on himself, what he is really doing is demonstrating that he is no longer even trying to govern and is instead retreating into a world where he simply does whatever he wants without regard for the country. In the early hours of Trump’s rants yesterday, even before they had gained their full momentum, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) called out the Republicans who are refusing to exercise their constitutional powers to protect the country.

“This is truly unhinged,” she posted on social media over a video of his posts. “I don’t want to hear ‘oh, it’s just Trump being Trump’ or he’s ‘trolling.’ Republicans cannot keep shrugging this off. Congress, the Cabinet + everyone around him has a responsibility to stop enabling this dangerous behavior and start asking whether he is fit to hold office.”

Today Trump acknowledged the Labor Day holiday, saying: “Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Former president Joe Biden had a different message for the country on Labor Day: “I’ve said it my entire career,” he posted on social media, “the middle class built America. And unions built the middle class. To every worker who’s ever punched a clock, worked a double, or walked a line for fair wages—and to everyone who stands up for them, at the bargaining table, in the statehouse, or on the shop floor: thank you. This country runs in large part because of you.”

For my part, I hope everyone had a restful Labor Day and is ready to face the fall season—and the midterm elections—with renewed energy.

Thanks.

Having Trump as your favourite president is like having a favourite bout of diarrhoea.

Divine Angel said:

Having Trump as your favourite president is like having a favourite bout of diarrhoea.

1987, man that was gooooood.

Neophyte said:

September 7, 2026 (Monday)

It seems likely that he and his aide Natalie Harp, who is apparently behind much of his social media, think trolling the country is a good way to keep attention focused on Trump rather than on rising inflation, corruption, or the war in Iran.

And not the Epstein files…

Neophyte said:

There is much to distract from. On CNN today, pollster Harry Enten noted that while Trump enjoyed a 20-point advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, in 2024 on economic issues, Trump’s approval rating for how he is handling the economy is now 41 points underwater. “We’re talking about a switcheroo in the wrong direction of 61 points on this Labor Day,” Enten said. “It is not a happy Labor Day, indeed, for President Trump when it comes to how those who are employed view him on the economy.”

1.2 million dumped off the voter rolls. Link analysis: South Carolina removed 1.2 million voters from the rolls since 2022

Neophyte said:

“This is truly unhinged,” she posted on social media over a video of his posts. “I don’t want to hear ‘oh, it’s just Trump being Trump’ or he’s ‘trolling.’ Republicans cannot keep shrugging this off. Congress, the Cabinet + everyone around him has a responsibility to stop enabling this dangerous behavior and start asking whether he is fit to hold office.”

Will the Republicans finally take action?

ms spock said:

Will the Republicans finally take action?

No.

Currently, Trump occupies the media all of the time.

Trump essentially is the government, ruling by decree/executive order, or at least, trying to.

With control of both the Congress and the Senate, the Republicans can ensure that both of them do, essentially, nothing.

This leaves the Republican Congress and Senate members lots of free time to pursue graft, corruption, and profiteering.

That might all change after the November elections, but, right now, the Republicans are busy grabbing everything that they can to add a final layer to the feathering of their nests.

They’re quite content for Trump to carry on as he does, at least until after the mid-term elections. If, somehow, they come out of those ok, then the Trump matter might need to be addressed.

captain_spalding said:

ms spock said:

Will the Republicans finally take action?

No.

Currently, Trump occupies the media all of the time.

Trump essentially is the government, ruling by decree/executive order, or at least, trying to.

With control of both the Congress and the Senate, the Republicans can ensure that both of them do, essentially, nothing.

This leaves the Republican Congress and Senate members lots of free time to pursue graft, corruption, and profiteering.

That might all change after the November elections, but, right now, the Republicans are busy grabbing everything that they can to add a final layer to the feathering of their nests.

They’re quite content for Trump to carry on as he does, at least until after the mid-term elections. If, somehow, they come out of those ok, then the Trump matter might need to be addressed.

Agree with all that. Add one extra point:

Trump/MAGA have taken over the party and they heavily influence who gets chosen as the party candidate for the election. Pretty much only factional cronies get to run. They spent huge dollars competing against any other factional or independent voices contesting the primaries. Trump has many wealthy donors who are quite happy to grab whatever they can too.

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

ms spock said:

Will the Republicans finally take action?

No.

Currently, Trump occupies the media all of the time.

Trump essentially is the government, ruling by decree/executive order, or at least, trying to.

With control of both the Congress and the Senate, the Republicans can ensure that both of them do, essentially, nothing.

This leaves the Republican Congress and Senate members lots of free time to pursue graft, corruption, and profiteering.

That might all change after the November elections, but, right now, the Republicans are busy grabbing everything that they can to add a final layer to the feathering of their nests.

They’re quite content for Trump to carry on as he does, at least until after the mid-term elections. If, somehow, they come out of those ok, then the Trump matter might need to be addressed.

Agree with all that. Add one extra point:

Trump/MAGA have taken over the party and they heavily influence who gets chosen as the party candidate for the election. Pretty much only factional cronies get to run. They spent huge dollars competing against any other factional or independent voices contesting the primaries. Trump has many wealthy donors who are quite happy to grab whatever they can too.

Well, don’t be surprised if there’s another assassination attempt on Trump.

You can always find some dumb kid with a gun, and somehow convince him to take a shot at the President. Who knows, one of them may actually be able to shoot straight.

Then the Republicans’ problem disappears in an instant, and they can make him into a martyr and a saint, and there’s all sorts pomp, ceremony, and panoply in which to indulge, and all sort of inquiries that can shit suspicion all over the place, and his family is relieved of him (i’d really like an invite to the post-shooting party at Melania’s place), the family won’t care as they’ll be busy fighting over the estate, the Epstein files might finally go away rather than ‘sully the memory of’ a President killed in office, and the Republicans might garner some sympathy votes in 2028.

All for the price of one bullet and one dumb kid.

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

ms spock said:

Will the Republicans finally take action?

No.

Currently, Trump occupies the media all of the time.

Trump essentially is the government, ruling by decree/executive order, or at least, trying to.

With control of both the Congress and the Senate, the Republicans can ensure that both of them do, essentially, nothing.

This leaves the Republican Congress and Senate members lots of free time to pursue graft, corruption, and profiteering.

That might all change after the November elections, but, right now, the Republicans are busy grabbing everything that they can to add a final layer to the feathering of their nests.

They’re quite content for Trump to carry on as he does, at least until after the mid-term elections. If, somehow, they come out of those ok, then the Trump matter might need to be addressed.

Agree with all that. Add one extra point:

Trump/MAGA have taken over the party and they heavily influence who gets chosen as the party candidate for the election. Pretty much only factional cronies get to run. They spent huge dollars competing against any other factional or independent voices contesting the primaries. Trump has many wealthy donors who are quite happy to grab whatever they can too.

But how long can it last?

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

No.

Currently, Trump occupies the media all of the time.

Trump essentially is the government, ruling by decree/executive order, or at least, trying to.

With control of both the Congress and the Senate, the Republicans can ensure that both of them do, essentially, nothing.

This leaves the Republican Congress and Senate members lots of free time to pursue graft, corruption, and profiteering.

That might all change after the November elections, but, right now, the Republicans are busy grabbing everything that they can to add a final layer to the feathering of their nests.

They’re quite content for Trump to carry on as he does, at least until after the mid-term elections. If, somehow, they come out of those ok, then the Trump matter might need to be addressed.

Agree with all that. Add one extra point:

Trump/MAGA have taken over the party and they heavily influence who gets chosen as the party candidate for the election. Pretty much only factional cronies get to run. They spent huge dollars competing against any other factional or independent voices contesting the primaries. Trump has many wealthy donors who are quite happy to grab whatever they can too.

Well, don’t be surprised if there’s another assassination attempt on Trump.

You can always find some dumb kid with a gun, and somehow convince him to take a shot at the President. Who knows, one of them may actually be able to shoot straight.

Then the Republicans’ problem disappears in an instant, and they can make him into a martyr and a saint, and there’s all sorts pomp, ceremony, and panoply in which to indulge, and all sort of inquiries that can shit suspicion all over the place, and his family is relieved of him (i’d really like an invite to the post-shooting party at Melania’s place), the family won’t care as they’ll be busy fighting over the estate, the Epstein files might finally go away rather than ‘sully the memory of’ a President killed in office, and the Republicans might garner some sympathy votes in 2028.

All for the price of one bullet and one dumb kid.

Lee Harvey Oswald?

roughbarked said:

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

No.

Currently, Trump occupies the media all of the time.

Trump essentially is the government, ruling by decree/executive order, or at least, trying to.

With control of both the Congress and the Senate, the Republicans can ensure that both of them do, essentially, nothing.

This leaves the Republican Congress and Senate members lots of free time to pursue graft, corruption, and profiteering.

That might all change after the November elections, but, right now, the Republicans are busy grabbing everything that they can to add a final layer to the feathering of their nests.

They’re quite content for Trump to carry on as he does, at least until after the mid-term elections. If, somehow, they come out of those ok, then the Trump matter might need to be addressed.

Agree with all that. Add one extra point:

Trump/MAGA have taken over the party and they heavily influence who gets chosen as the party candidate for the election. Pretty much only factional cronies get to run. They spent huge dollars competing against any other factional or independent voices contesting the primaries. Trump has many wealthy donors who are quite happy to grab whatever they can too.

But how long can it last?

It depends on whether or not the mid-terms in November go smoothly and the result is accepted. I get the feeling that if things go badly for Trump then ICE will be mobilised to interfere in the election count – seizing ballot machines, arresting any non-white people lining up to vote… that sort of thing. if that happens and then there is no “robust push-back”, then democracy will be dead in the USA. This can’t be left to the courts to take months to sort out by legal argument.

Then it will last as long as Trump lives.

ms spock said:

Neophyte said:

September 7, 2026 (Monday)

It seems likely that he and his aide Natalie Harp, who is apparently behind much of his social media, think trolling the country is a good way to keep attention focused on Trump rather than on rising inflation, corruption, or the war in Iran.

And not the Epstein files…

Neophyte said:

There is much to distract from. On CNN today, pollster Harry Enten noted that while Trump enjoyed a 20-point advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, in 2024 on economic issues, Trump’s approval rating for how he is handling the economy is now 41 points underwater. “We’re talking about a switcheroo in the wrong direction of 61 points on this Labor Day,” Enten said. “It is not a happy Labor Day, indeed, for President Trump when it comes to how those who are employed view him on the economy.”

1.2 million dumped off the voter rolls. Link analysis: South Carolina removed 1.2 million voters from the rolls since 2022

Neophyte said:

“This is truly unhinged,” she posted on social media over a video of his posts. “I don’t want to hear ‘oh, it’s just Trump being Trump’ or he’s ‘trolling.’ Republicans cannot keep shrugging this off. Congress, the Cabinet + everyone around him has a responsibility to stop enabling this dangerous behavior and start asking whether he is fit to hold office.”

Will the Republicans finally take action?

Most unlikely.

September 8, 2026 (Tuesday)
On Sunday, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The AfD is anti-immigrant and pro-Russia and has won the support of both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk.

When Musk posted “Well done!” in German to the co-founder of AfD, Alice Weidel, another AfD leader responded with thanks, posting: “If we take on responsibility here, I would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation. Germany would then once again be a place worth investing in. Best regards from Saxony-Anhalt!”

Jon Henley of the Guardian noted that right-wing leaders across Europe celebrated the outcome, including ousted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who called the election results “a huge night for Germany and Europe,” adding: “Buckle up. This is just the beginning.”

Musk was the largest donor to any political committee in the 2024 U.S. elections, putting around $290 million into the 2024 election to help elect President Donald J. Trump and Republicans. On August 28, Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Musk was planning to meet with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as he considered investing at least $100 million to elect Republicans in the midterm elections.

Since that meeting, Musk has plowed money into the Texas Senate race to support Texas attorney general Ken Paxton against Democratic nominee James Talarico. According to Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times, Musk’s investments—many through political action committees—target Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, as well as House races in at least California, Wisconsin, and Washington.

Musk’s open attempt to buy elections for the Republicans should be bigger news, not only because of the political power his money has given to one man, but also because of what his behavior says about the MAGA administration’s ideology and its goals.

After supporting Trump in 2024, Musk appeared to become the head of the Department of Government Efficiency—the administration was coy about who actually held that title—where he worked to slash government spending. On February 3, he posted on his social media: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” Musk called USAID—the United States Agency for International Development—“a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America.”

In July 2026, Ari Daniel, David Augustine, Kazeem Olawale Nasiru, and Lameck Nyagudi of NPR reported on a study by Boston University infectious disease modeler Brooke Nichols that estimated more than 700,000 people had died from the sudden stop in USAID funding, including more than half a million children in developing countries.

And yet, for all his talk about slashing government expenditures, Musk’s DOGE did not appear to save much. Emilio Perez Ibarguen of Politico reported in August, when DOGE officially ended, that a report by the Government Accountability Office found that the savings it claimed were in large part exaggerated or couldn’t be corroborated.

Meanwhile, government contracts continued to flow to Musk’s businesses. As Desmond Butler, Trisha Thadani, Emmanuel Martinez, Aaron Gregg, Luis Melgar, Jonathan O’Connell, and Dan Keating reported in the Washington Post in February 2025, Musk himself has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer dollars in history, taking in at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the course of more than 20 years. Once he was in power in Trump 2.0, government investigations into those businesses ended.

The very public nature of Musk’s antics has helped to wake the public up to the fact that our current system is skewed toward billionaires. In July, economist Paul Krugman noted a growing backlash against those billionaires. A poll by UMass Amherst found that 58% of Americans think billionaires are a threat to democracy, and 45% of them say the U.S. is an oligarchy, “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” As Krugman noted, only 28% of those polled disagreed.

Krugman pointed out that wealth has been concentrating at the top of the U.S. economy for decades, so the growing wave against that concentration of wealth appears to be driven by those like Musk and Trump himself, who has flaunted his use of taxpayer money for his own interests while dismissing the pain of regular Americans.

This flow of taxpayer dollars to favored businesses rather than to programs that serve the needs of the people seems to be a feature rather than a bug in the Trump administration and reflects its rejection of democracy in favor of the right-wing axis of authoritarianism.

Last night, Tarini Parti, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal published a deep investigation into the machinations of Corey Lewandowski when his colleague Kristi Noem was secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They report that Lewandowski, who was Trump’s campaign manager for part of 2016, appeared to offer aid to foreign countries navigating U.S. bureaucracy in the department for a fee, selling government services for his own gain.

The journalists also report that Lewandowski may have been involved in awarding government contracts improperly, an accusation covered in a November 14, 2025, article by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security an additional $75 billion to spend during Trump’s term on deportations, detention facilities, and technology, providing deep pockets for corruption.

While the administration appears to have sidelined Noem and Lewandowski since Noem resigned under pressure in March, the journalists say Lewandowski “has told people close to him he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case.”

Lewandowski responded on social media that the story was “just another example of the kind of anonymous-source, politically driven reporting that Americans have seen time and again. We’ve lived through the Russia collusion hoax the fake Birthday card and countless other sensational allegations that ultimately failed to withstand scrutiny. I’m tremendously proud of my work as a volunteer in advancing this administration’s agenda and remain confident that the facts and not anonymous accusations will ultimately speak for themselves.”

But, of course, every official investigation into the 2016 election, including the one conducted by the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee and unanimously adopted, agreed that Russia did work to get Trump elected in 2016. And while Trump claims he did not create the birthday card to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein apparently bearing Trump’s signature on a drawing of a nude girl that was produced by the Epstein estate, the story was convincing enough that it helped to push Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act and the first case he brought against the Wall Street Journal for publishing the story was dismissed. A second case is pending.

There is, in fact, increasing pushback against the world Musk and Trump are trying to put into place instead of liberal democracy. In the U.S., the growing opposition to data centers, which seems to represent anger at the very wealthy tech bros who want to call the shots, is perhaps a sign of the direction the wind in the U.S. is blowing.

Whether that popular pressure can withstand the extraordinary amounts of money Musk and other right-wing billionaires are pouring into the midterms is unclear. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that Musk is funding an advertising campaign encouraging people in swing states to check their voting registration status at a different website than the one run by the Election Assistance Commission, which is an independent agency of the U.S. government.

Instead, Musk’s campaign urges people to go to “votesafe . org,” which collects their full name, home address, date of birth, email address, cell phone number, IP address and location (which identifies city and zip code), every link clicked, every page looked at, and voter registration status, among other information.

Legum reports that the privacy policy of the website “allows America PAC to ‘share’ or ‘sell’ personal information ‘with our business partners,’” including “whether you are registered to vote” and “how you submit your vote… where permitted by law.” America PAC can also sell “inferences” it makes about a user, including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude.”

A new documentary about Musk by filmmaker Alex Gibney argues, as Steven Zeitchik of the Hollywood Reporter put it, that Musk is “a dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data.” The documentary, called “Musk,” notes that, under Musk, DOGE had access to federal IT systems and, as Zeitchik recalls, a whistleblower warned that members of DOGE accessed and shared sensitive data from the Social Security Administration.

Zeitchik reports on the onscreen comments of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” who said: “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”

In Europe, in the wake of the rise of the AfD, German defense minister Boris Pistorius said today that Germany will send missiles to Ukraine to help it fight off a winter incursion from Russia.

“ The very public nature of Musk’s antics has helped to wake the public up to the fact that our current system is skewed toward billionaires.”

It will trickle down, Reagan promised it!

Ta.

So well written. So disheartening.

Michael V said:

Ta.

So well written. So disheartening.

Radio news today said a new poll shows if an election were held today, Labor would win but One Nation would be the new opposition 🫪

Neophyte said:

September 8, 2026 (Tuesday)
On Sunday, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The AfD is anti-immigrant and pro-Russia and has won the support of both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk.

When Musk posted “Well done!” in German to the co-founder of AfD, Alice Weidel, another AfD leader responded with thanks, posting: “If we take on responsibility here, I would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation. Germany would then once again be a place worth investing in. Best regards from Saxony-Anhalt!”

Jon Henley of the Guardian noted that right-wing leaders across Europe celebrated the outcome, including ousted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who called the election results “a huge night for Germany and Europe,” adding: “Buckle up. This is just the beginning.”

Musk was the largest donor to any political committee in the 2024 U.S. elections, putting around $290 million into the 2024 election to help elect President Donald J. Trump and Republicans. On August 28, Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Musk was planning to meet with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as he considered investing at least $100 million to elect Republicans in the midterm elections.

Since that meeting, Musk has plowed money into the Texas Senate race to support Texas attorney general Ken Paxton against Democratic nominee James Talarico. According to Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times, Musk’s investments—many through political action committees—target Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, as well as House races in at least California, Wisconsin, and Washington.

Musk’s open attempt to buy elections for the Republicans should be bigger news, not only because of the political power his money has given to one man, but also because of what his behavior says about the MAGA administration’s ideology and its goals.

After supporting Trump in 2024, Musk appeared to become the head of the Department of Government Efficiency—the administration was coy about who actually held that title—where he worked to slash government spending. On February 3, he posted on his social media: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” Musk called USAID—the United States Agency for International Development—“a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America.”

In July 2026, Ari Daniel, David Augustine, Kazeem Olawale Nasiru, and Lameck Nyagudi of NPR reported on a study by Boston University infectious disease modeler Brooke Nichols that estimated more than 700,000 people had died from the sudden stop in USAID funding, including more than half a million children in developing countries.

And yet, for all his talk about slashing government expenditures, Musk’s DOGE did not appear to save much. Emilio Perez Ibarguen of Politico reported in August, when DOGE officially ended, that a report by the Government Accountability Office found that the savings it claimed were in large part exaggerated or couldn’t be corroborated.

Meanwhile, government contracts continued to flow to Musk’s businesses. As Desmond Butler, Trisha Thadani, Emmanuel Martinez, Aaron Gregg, Luis Melgar, Jonathan O’Connell, and Dan Keating reported in the Washington Post in February 2025, Musk himself has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer dollars in history, taking in at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the course of more than 20 years. Once he was in power in Trump 2.0, government investigations into those businesses ended.

The very public nature of Musk’s antics has helped to wake the public up to the fact that our current system is skewed toward billionaires. In July, economist Paul Krugman noted a growing backlash against those billionaires. A poll by UMass Amherst found that 58% of Americans think billionaires are a threat to democracy, and 45% of them say the U.S. is an oligarchy, “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” As Krugman noted, only 28% of those polled disagreed.

Krugman pointed out that wealth has been concentrating at the top of the U.S. economy for decades, so the growing wave against that concentration of wealth appears to be driven by those like Musk and Trump himself, who has flaunted his use of taxpayer money for his own interests while dismissing the pain of regular Americans.

This flow of taxpayer dollars to favored businesses rather than to programs that serve the needs of the people seems to be a feature rather than a bug in the Trump administration and reflects its rejection of democracy in favor of the right-wing axis of authoritarianism.

Last night, Tarini Parti, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal published a deep investigation into the machinations of Corey Lewandowski when his colleague Kristi Noem was secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They report that Lewandowski, who was Trump’s campaign manager for part of 2016, appeared to offer aid to foreign countries navigating U.S. bureaucracy in the department for a fee, selling government services for his own gain.

The journalists also report that Lewandowski may have been involved in awarding government contracts improperly, an accusation covered in a November 14, 2025, article by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security an additional $75 billion to spend during Trump’s term on deportations, detention facilities, and technology, providing deep pockets for corruption.

While the administration appears to have sidelined Noem and Lewandowski since Noem resigned under pressure in March, the journalists say Lewandowski “has told people close to him he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case.”

Lewandowski responded on social media that the story was “just another example of the kind of anonymous-source, politically driven reporting that Americans have seen time and again. We’ve lived through the Russia collusion hoax the fake Birthday card and countless other sensational allegations that ultimately failed to withstand scrutiny. I’m tremendously proud of my work as a volunteer in advancing this administration’s agenda and remain confident that the facts and not anonymous accusations will ultimately speak for themselves.”

But, of course, every official investigation into the 2016 election, including the one conducted by the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee and unanimously adopted, agreed that Russia did work to get Trump elected in 2016. And while Trump claims he did not create the birthday card to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein apparently bearing Trump’s signature on a drawing of a nude girl that was produced by the Epstein estate, the story was convincing enough that it helped to push Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act and the first case he brought against the Wall Street Journal for publishing the story was dismissed. A second case is pending.

There is, in fact, increasing pushback against the world Musk and Trump are trying to put into place instead of liberal democracy. In the U.S., the growing opposition to data centers, which seems to represent anger at the very wealthy tech bros who want to call the shots, is perhaps a sign of the direction the wind in the U.S. is blowing.

Whether that popular pressure can withstand the extraordinary amounts of money Musk and other right-wing billionaires are pouring into the midterms is unclear. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that Musk is funding an advertising campaign encouraging people in swing states to check their voting registration status at a different website than the one run by the Election Assistance Commission, which is an independent agency of the U.S. government.

Instead, Musk’s campaign urges people to go to “votesafe . org,” which collects their full name, home address, date of birth, email address, cell phone number, IP address and location (which identifies city and zip code), every link clicked, every page looked at, and voter registration status, among other information.

Legum reports that the privacy policy of the website “allows America PAC to ‘share’ or ‘sell’ personal information ‘with our business partners,’” including “whether you are registered to vote” and “how you submit your vote… where permitted by law.” America PAC can also sell “inferences” it makes about a user, including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude.”

A new documentary about Musk by filmmaker Alex Gibney argues, as Steven Zeitchik of the Hollywood Reporter put it, that Musk is “a dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data.” The documentary, called “Musk,” notes that, under Musk, DOGE had access to federal IT systems and, as Zeitchik recalls, a whistleblower warned that members of DOGE accessed and shared sensitive data from the Social Security Administration.

Zeitchik reports on the onscreen comments of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” who said: “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”

In Europe, in the wake of the rise of the AfD, German defense minister Boris Pistorius said today that Germany will send missiles to Ukraine to help it fight off a winter incursion from Russia.

When they mean bloated government spending it means welfare, healthcare, people, living creatures, etc
They want to weaken government rules and guidelines on exploitation

Cymek said:

When they mean bloated government spending it means welfare, healthcare, people, living creatures, etc
They want to weaken government rules and guidelines on exploitation

Sounds vaguely familiar, maybe some country somewhere in Europe once went down that path in the 1930s…?

Divine Angel said:

“ The very public nature of Musk’s antics has helped to wake the public up to the fact that our current system is skewed toward billionaires.”

It will trickle down, Reagan promised it!

team sports democracy good

Neophyte said:

Musk is funding an advertising campaign encouraging people in swing states to check their voting registration status at a different website than the one run by the Election Assistance Commission, which is an independent agency of the U.S. government.

Instead, Musk’s campaign urges people to go to “votesafe . org,” which collects their full name, home address, date of birth, email address, cell phone number, IP address and location (which identifies city and zip code), every link clicked, every page looked at, and voter registration status, among other information.

Legum reports that the privacy policy of the website “allows America PAC to ‘share’ or ‘sell’ personal information ‘with our business partners,’” including “whether you are registered to vote” and “how you submit your vote… where permitted by law.” America PAC can also sell “inferences” it makes about a user, including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude.”

Let’s hope security software flags this as a phishing website.

September 9, 2026 (Wednesday)

Yesterday, at a White House event honoring those who sacrificed their lives on 9/11, President Donald Trump went off script and claimed he had taken a crew downtown “right after this happened. They were, they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but uh, it never came down. And uh, I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us and two firemen—big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world—they grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down, U.S. Steel.”

In fact, as CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale reported, there is no evidence for any of this story. Trump was at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan when the planes hit the World Trade Center, and there is no evidence for any of his other claims, either. Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump, added that Trump did not have a big building under construction at the time and the “only crew he claimed to bring to the site would have been secretarial and accounting employees.” The younger Trump said he was so offended by President Trump’s claim that he felt the “need to speak out.”

The White House said, “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented,” and White House spokesperson Davis Ingle attacked the media for “using this to try to attack him.”

Trump posted on social media: “Everything I said was exactly accurate.”

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S.-made goods went into effect yesterday, matching Trump’s tariffs on Canada dollar for dollar and rate for rate, covering about $20 billion in U.S. goods. Trump responded by escalating his trade war with Canada even further, banning certain products outright, and establishing new tariffs on Canadian motorcycles, alcohol, and dairy products on September 29.

The U.S. and Iran are striking at each other again. The U.S. said it attacked and destroyed five Iranian oil tankers on Tuesday; Iran said it targeted two U.S. ships and eight oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday as they tried to traverse an area Iran has said is off-limits. They also said they had fired at a U.S. military base in Jordan. The price of oil has surged as fighting resumed, with the cost of Brent crude rising above $100 a barrel.

Tonight, Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News reported that Iran’s strikes on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan caused damage to “ultiple American military aircraft.” Jacobs also posted that U.S. forces launched more than 30 Patriot missiles in their defense against the Iranian strikes.

Today Trump told reporters that the Iranians are prolonging the war because of the U.S. midterm elections and that he expects the war on Iran will end and gas prices will come down as soon as the elections are over. “They can’t hold out any longer,” Trump said. “They’re desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice, weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapons.”

But tonight, Alexander Ward, Shelby Holliday, and Michael R. Gordon of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s top advisors have warned him that the Iran war could continue for the rest of his term. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already extended the deployment of some of the troops in the Middle East and has planned for additional extensions.

The conflict is already straining the military and disrupting global oil markets.

What is most astonishing about the nation’s economic and military problems is that they are entirely self-inflicted at the whim of one man. On October 19, 2024, the month before Trump was reelected, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.” “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust,” wrote Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr. “Expect that to continue.”

But Trump insisted the economy was weak and that tariff walls would make it boom. Months after taking office, he grabbed Congress’s authority to levy tariffs and on “Liberation Day” began trade wars around the globe, hobbling the free trade system that had underpinned global trade since World War II. When the Supreme Court ruled his power grab unconstitutional, he turned to temporary powers to achieve the same results.

And now we are in a trade war with our longtime friend and ally Canada, and the president is posting insulting memes about Canada’s prime minister on social media. Economist Paul Krugman wrote today: “I don’t think there has ever been a dispute this stupid. Bear in mind that this crisis is entirely gratuitous.”

“As Trump’s failures, from soaring fuel prices to plunging approval, multiply,” Krugman wrote, “he is doubling down on his disrespect for and attempted bullying of our northern neighbor and former ally. That is, you should think of this conflict not as something reflecting U.S. national interests, but as a form of self-medication from a sundowning president.”

Krugman called attention to the fact that the economies of the U.S. and Canada have been tied closely since at least 1965. Canada supplies about 60% of U.S. aluminum and about 70% of the oil refined in the Midwest. It supplies almost all of the lumber the U.S. uses for framing in new homes. This trade war will do real damage to both economies.

The Iran war, too, was self-inflicted and has been conducted without authorization by Congress as required by the Constitution and by the 1973 War Powers Act. Trump appeared to think the U.S. military could get rid of the head of the Iranian regime when it attacked Iran on February 28 as it had done to the head of Venezuela in just hours the previous month. Repeatedly, Trump has expressed surprise that Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s seaborne oil had passed before the attacks.

And while Trump is now trying to justify the attacks by claiming he is working for a nuclear-free Iran, under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated between the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran during the Obama administration, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, reports of corruption in the administration continue to drop.

Cat Zakrzewski and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported yesterday that Trump gave his executive assistant Natalie Harp and two other young female employees gifts of $45,000 in cash last year. That amount is about a third of their $150,000 annual salary. He gave $20,000 to Walt Nauta, who was Trump’s co-defendant in the case of Trump retaining classified documents after he left office.

The chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, Richard Painter, told the journalists the gifts appear to violate federal law: federal employees can’t receive salary supplements from outside sources. The acting director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) under Obama, Don Fox, said the legality of the gifts was not clear, in part because such payments are “not a circumstance that OGE ever really envisioned. This just doesn’t happen.”

Bill Allison of Bloomberg reported yesterday that Steve Witkoff earned $107 million in 2025 from the holding company that keeps his share of World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture he and the Trump family founded and in which Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ president, has invested half a billion dollars. Witkoff is Trump’s special agent for the Middle East and has been negotiating with Russia. Trump reported earning more than $594 million in 2025 from the same venture.

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios reported today that they are hearing from top White House officials and elected Republicans that they are no longer even trying to persuade Trump to do something or not to do something. They are worn out, VandeHei and Allen report. “They know they can’t stop him and they don’t even try.”

“Trump insiders calculate they lived by Trump and so will die by Trump, rather than break with Trump.”

Their utter dereliction of duty to the United States of America has opened the field for Democrats. Yesterday, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker’s team announced the creation of a new political action committee that will invest at least $20 million in Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. Shia Kapos of Politico reported that the “Ready for the Fight” PAC, which echoes the phrase the governor uses to end his political speeches, is targeting seats currently held by Republicans.

“Democrats must think big and take the fight to every corner to support candidates in often-overlooked races,” Pritzker said.

On CNN tonight, Pritzker warned Americans not to believe Trump’s lies. “This is the president who ran in 2024 and told you that on day one he was going to lower prices, he was going to end forever wars. And what do you know? He’s done neither. In fact, he’s done the opposite. Prices have gone up since he took office, and, of course, we’re in this endless war in Iran. He can’t stop it. Does not know what he’s doing. And after complaining about Joe Biden’s age, he himself—President Trump, that is—is suffering from dementia, and I think we can all see that. So I think that that’s what I would say about whatever he’s promising for the future, you know he never delivers.”

Tonight, at the “Trumpapaloosa” midterm convention in Dallas that Trump insisted on holding to rally his base, he promised that if the Republicans win the midterm elections, he will give all adult Americans a check for $5,000, a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars and would require congressional approval. He called it the “Trump Dividend,” thanks to “our tremendous strength and success economically.”

Tonight, at the “Trumpapaloosa” midterm convention in Dallas that Trump insisted on holding to rally his base, he promised that if the Republicans win the midterm elections, he will give all adult Americans a check for $5,000, a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars and would require congressional approval. He called it the “Trump Dividend,” thanks to “our tremendous strength and success economically.”

See? Economics does trickle down!

Divine Angel said:

Tonight, at the “Trumpapaloosa” midterm convention in Dallas that Trump insisted on holding to rally his base, he promised that if the Republicans win the midterm elections, he will give all adult Americans a check for $5,000, a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars and would require congressional approval. He called it the “Trump Dividend,” thanks to “our tremendous strength and success economically.”

See? Economics does trickle down!

yeah but Nepal should show yous all what happens if the high ups can’t keep the trickle from becoming a great redistribution

SCIENCE said:

Divine Angel said:

Tonight, at the “Trumpapaloosa” midterm convention in Dallas that Trump insisted on holding to rally his base, he promised that if the Republicans win the midterm elections, he will give all adult Americans a check for $5,000, a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars and would require congressional approval. He called it the “Trump Dividend,” thanks to “our tremendous strength and success economically.”

See? Economics does trickle down!

yeah but Nepal should show yous all what happens if the high ups can’t keep the trickle from becoming a great redistribution

!!!

September 10, 2026 (Thursday)

We woke up today to news that Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants have taken control of the city and seaport of Mocha and much of the shoreline of the Red Sea near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another chokepoint for world trade including trade in oil. With the Strait of Hormuz largely closed, Saudi Arabia has relied for seagoing transport on the Red Sea route that empties into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

As Diana Roy of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in July, the Red Sea is one of the most important routes for global shipping. It carries twelve to fifteen percent of the global maritime trade every year, worth about $1 trillion. The waterway extends about 1,400 miles from the Suez Canal—which connects it to the Mediterranean Sea—at the northern end to the Bab El-Mandeb strait in the south.

The Iran-backed Houthis are in a struggle against the Saudi Arabia–backed Yemeni government. A fragile truce has been in place since 2022, but clashes between the two forces have escalated for weeks, and on Tuesday, September 8, Houthi attacks on Saudi targets started fires at oil facilities and wounded more than 70 people.

The Yemeni government told Reuters that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have guided the Houthi advance, and according to Zachary Cohen, Katie Bo Lillis, and Kylie Atwood of CNN, U.S. officials think that hundreds of IRGC officers are currently in Yemen working with the Houthis to shut down the Bab el-Mandeb. The journalists note that CNN has previously reported that in case U.S. negotiations were unsuccessful, Iran had planned an economic “nuclear option”: closing the Bab el-Mandeb.

Cohen, Lillis, and Atwood reported this afternoon that more than 100 U.S. military advisors are in Saudi Arabia as part of a new joint forces command, providing the Saudis with intelligence and helping them find Houthi targets.

The sources who told the journalists about the joint effort emphasized that the U.S. routinely shares intelligence with the Saudis and that it is neither participating directly in the strikes nor providing operational support. Still, U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis in 2025 killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others in Yemen in 2025.

The price of oil jumped to $109 a barrel, and U.S. gasoline rose to an average of about $4.28 a gallon. GasBuddy said the national average price of diesel had hit $6.00 for the first time in history. Just a year ago, the national average was about $3.70.

GasBuddy issued a statement, saying: “While gasoline gets the headlines, diesel is the fuel that moves the economy, powering the freight trucks, trains, agricultural equipment, and construction machinery behind nearly everything Americans buy. That means its impact reaches far beyond the transportation sector. As diesel climbs, higher supply chain costs work their way into the price of groceries, household goods, deliveries, and countless other products families rely on every day, even for households that never fuel a diesel vehicle.”

GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, said the new record “will be a particularly painful one for the economy” and is “likely to reignite inflation up and down the supply chain.” He continued: “I suggest Americans anticipate a costlier holiday season, as it appears diesel prices could continue climbing as geopolitical tensions continue to remain a main factor.”

While all this was going on, tonight President Trump attended the second day of his Dallas rally to fire up his base before the midterm elections. There, a video from the Republican National Committee intoned: “And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

Neophyte said:

September 10, 2026 (Thursday)

We woke up today to news that Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants have taken control of the city and seaport of Mocha and much of the shoreline of the Red Sea near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another chokepoint for world trade including trade in oil. With the Strait of Hormuz largely closed, Saudi Arabia has relied for seagoing transport on the Red Sea route that empties into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

As Diana Roy of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in July, the Red Sea is one of the most important routes for global shipping. It carries twelve to fifteen percent of the global maritime trade every year, worth about $1 trillion. The waterway extends about 1,400 miles from the Suez Canal—which connects it to the Mediterranean Sea—at the northern end to the Bab El-Mandeb strait in the south.

The Iran-backed Houthis are in a struggle against the Saudi Arabia–backed Yemeni government. A fragile truce has been in place since 2022, but clashes between the two forces have escalated for weeks, and on Tuesday, September 8, Houthi attacks on Saudi targets started fires at oil facilities and wounded more than 70 people.

The Yemeni government told Reuters that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have guided the Houthi advance, and according to Zachary Cohen, Katie Bo Lillis, and Kylie Atwood of CNN, U.S. officials think that hundreds of IRGC officers are currently in Yemen working with the Houthis to shut down the Bab el-Mandeb. The journalists note that CNN has previously reported that in case U.S. negotiations were unsuccessful, Iran had planned an economic “nuclear option”: closing the Bab el-Mandeb.

Cohen, Lillis, and Atwood reported this afternoon that more than 100 U.S. military advisors are in Saudi Arabia as part of a new joint forces command, providing the Saudis with intelligence and helping them find Houthi targets.

The sources who told the journalists about the joint effort emphasized that the U.S. routinely shares intelligence with the Saudis and that it is neither participating directly in the strikes nor providing operational support. Still, U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis in 2025 killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others in Yemen in 2025.

The price of oil jumped to $109 a barrel, and U.S. gasoline rose to an average of about $4.28 a gallon. GasBuddy said the national average price of diesel had hit $6.00 for the first time in history. Just a year ago, the national average was about $3.70.

GasBuddy issued a statement, saying: “While gasoline gets the headlines, diesel is the fuel that moves the economy, powering the freight trucks, trains, agricultural equipment, and construction machinery behind nearly everything Americans buy. That means its impact reaches far beyond the transportation sector. As diesel climbs, higher supply chain costs work their way into the price of groceries, household goods, deliveries, and countless other products families rely on every day, even for households that never fuel a diesel vehicle.”

GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, said the new record “will be a particularly painful one for the economy” and is “likely to reignite inflation up and down the supply chain.” He continued: “I suggest Americans anticipate a costlier holiday season, as it appears diesel prices could continue climbing as geopolitical tensions continue to remain a main factor.”

While all this was going on, tonight President Trump attended the second day of his Dallas rally to fire up his base before the midterm elections. There, a video from the Republican National Committee intoned: “And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

Amen

September 11, 2026 (Friday)

Last night was the second night of the Republican midterm convention Trump staged to fire up his base. Such a midterm convention is rare—the purpose of national conventions is to pick a president and write a platform—but Trump has turned the Republican Party into a vehicle for his own power and apparently thinks putting himself at the center of the midterms can overcome the headwinds the Republicans are battling.

Or perhaps, with his approval ratings hitting a new low, he just wanted to stand in front of cheering crowds again.
The audience at the American Airlines Center in Dallas was sparse, and according to Kara Voght of the Wall Street Journal, many who were there had received their tickets for free from state parties or right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty. But, she wrote, “everyone wanted to watch another episode of the Trump show.”

Although the crowd was small enough that it did not fill the arena, Trump got the absolute loyalty he demanded from those who had turned out. At the event, he led the crowd in an oath. “Please raise your right hand,” he shouted. “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe.” The crowd chanted dutifully after him.

“That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way—I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do, they’d never, there’s never been bigger cheaters, they don’t care. I am gonna go out and I’m gonna get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November third or we are going to vote before that!” The crowd erupted in applause.

Once again, he promised that if the Republicans held control of the House and Senate after the midterms, he would distribute a $5,000 check to all adult U.S. citizens, a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars even if it were legal for him to do so (which it is not).

But while the Trump show in Dallas was being broadcast to the president’s fans, reality was very much on the minds of those watching events in the Middle East.

There are two main shipping routes for oil and other products out of the region, and both have strategic chokepoints. The Strait of Hormuz sits on the eastern side of the Arabian Peninsula where the Persian Gulf empties into the Arabian Sea. The Bab el-Mandeb strait sits on the western side of the Arabian Peninsula. It pinches the outlet of the Red Sea on its way to the Arabian Sea and from there to the Indian Ocean and world markets.

When Trump struck Iran in February 2026, Iranian forces took control of the Strait of Hormuz, largely stopping traffic of oil through the outlet. And so Saudi Arabia, which is the world’s largest oil exporter and a close ally of the United States, relied on sending exports via the Red Sea route, passing through the Bab el-Mandeb strait.

It did so by moving oil across the Arabian Peninsula from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through the East-West oil pipeline, which runs about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) across Saudi Arabia. It can move about 7 million barrels of crude oil per day and has been sending about 5 million a day since the outbreak of the war on Iran. From there, oil can be loaded onto tankers and shipped down the Red Sea, through the Bab el-Mandeb, and on to global markets.

Yesterday Iran-backed Houthi militants swept along the shoreline of the Red Sea toward the Bab el-Mandeb. They captured the seaport and city of Mocha, which is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the strait, from Saudi-backed Yemeni forces.

Today Yemeni government officials told Mohammed Ghobari, Eman Abouhassira, and Yasmine Ghania of Reuters that the Houthis have taken the coastal town of Dhubab, which sits on the Yemen mainland at the point of the strait. The sources said Yemeni forces had also evacuated the island of Perim, which sits about a third of the way between the mainland and the Djibouti shore to the west. Later this afternoon, sources said the Houthis had captured the island.

Although the Houthis do not control the Djiboutian side of the strait, they now threaten shipping through the passage. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline has also come under attack. Spencer Kimball of CNBC reports that the Saudi Energy Ministry announced the pipeline had been shut down as a precautionary measure after it had sustained a number of attacks. Kylie Atwood, Katie Bo Lillis, Thomas Bordeaux, and Zachary Cohen of CNN added that the attacks apparently originated in Iraq, that U.S. officials had told them that pumping stations had been hit, and satellite imagery showed smoke coming from one of them and fire damage at another.

The price of oil briefly jumped to about $110 a barrel on Friday. Diesel prices moved to $6.06 a gallon, up 60% since the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran in February.

Trump and his advisors have said they plan to strangle Iran economically through their blockade of Iranian ports. Now it appears Iran is retaliating with a plan to strangle the U.S. economy by slowing the transport of oil even further.

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, the day terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States.

President Donald Trump did not attend the commemoration at Ground Zero, now the National September 11 Memorial, in downtown Manhattan because, according to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dana Rubinstein, and Sally Goldenberg, he wanted to deliver a speech but the event organizers don’t allow speeches, focusing on nonpartisanship and honoring the victims. Trump responded to the story with a personal attack on Haberman, calling her “Maggot.”

Instead, Trump went to the Pentagon, where he delivered a speech tying his war on Iran to the attacks of 9/11, saying: “We salute every member of the United States military who served in the ‘war on terror’. And we salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added: “We’re still sending terrorists where they belong—to hell. And tankers to the bottom of the ocean where they belong, and we are ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. The economic pressure tightens every day.”

All four living ex-presidents and first ladies—Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and Laura Bush, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden and Jill Biden—attended the Ground Zero commemoration in Manhattan. There the victims’ names were read, and the ceremony for the first time included a moment of silence for those who died of illnesses related to conditions in the aftermath of the buildings’ collapse.

Fifteen years ago, a wonderful student introduced me to the issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, volume 2, number 36, published on November 14, 2001. Famously, the cover of the issue is entirely black. Written by J. Michael Straczynski, the story takes on the impossible question: How, in a city that hundreds of superheroes call home, were those superheroes powerless to stop the 9/11 attacks?

“The sane world will always be vulnerable to madmen,” Spider-Man answers when a devastated couple fleeing from the devastation challenges him, “because we cannot go where they go to conceive of such things. We could not see it coming. We could not be here before it happened. We could not stop it. But we are here now. You cannot see us for the dust, but we are here. You cannot hear us for the cries, but we are here.”

But the superheroes Spider-Man identified in the chaos did not wear capes. They wore hats that said “FDNY” and “FEMA” and “POLICE.” The “true heroes,” Spider-Man said, were those ordinary people who ran back into the buildings to rescue others waiting in the dark, who joined together to storm the cockpit of a hijacked airplane and bring it down to the ground before it could hit the Capitol or White House, and who helped each other to safety or to face the terror.

They were ordinary men and women “made extraordinary by acts of compassion, and courage, and terrible sacrifice,” and who rejected “the self-serving proclamations of holy warriors of every stripe.”

“ The audience at the American Airlines Center in Dallas was sparse”

An interesting choice of venue, considering the date. Or maybe it’s because it’s “American” Airlines and he’s all about yay America.

Divine Angel said:

“ The audience at the American Airlines Center in Dallas was sparse”

An interesting choice of venue, considering the date. Or maybe it’s because it’s “American” Airlines and he’s all about yay America.

I’m guessing it’s just a corporate sponsorship naming rights thing. Like our stadium here is now officially called Optus Stadium, even though it has nothing to do with phones.

party_pants said:

Divine Angel said:

“ The audience at the American Airlines Center in Dallas was sparse”

An interesting choice of venue, considering the date. Or maybe it’s because it’s “American” Airlines and he’s all about yay America.

I’m guessing it’s just a corporate sponsorship naming rights thing. Like our stadium here is now officially called Optus Stadium, even though it has nothing to do with phones.

Let’s not forget Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Divine Angel said:

party_pants said:

Divine Angel said:

“ The audience at the American Airlines Center in Dallas was sparse”

An interesting choice of venue, considering the date. Or maybe it’s because it’s “American” Airlines and he’s all about yay America.

I’m guessing it’s just a corporate sponsorship naming rights thing. Like our stadium here is now officially called Optus Stadium, even though it has nothing to do with phones.

Let’s not forget Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Indeed

Divine Angel said:

party_pants said:

Divine Angel said:

“ The audience at the American Airlines Center in Dallas was sparse”

An interesting choice of venue, considering the date. Or maybe it’s because it’s “American” Airlines and he’s all about yay America.

I’m guessing it’s just a corporate sponsorship naming rights thing. Like our stadium here is now officially called Optus Stadium, even though it has nothing to do with phones.

Let’s not forget Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

LOL

Thanks for posting.