Strict Body Composition 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢

War:  On Tuesday, CBS News published photos showing extensive damage to US military bases across the Middle East, including but not limited to bases in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait.  The damage is the result of Iranian missile and drone attacks.  The photos which were provided to CBS by active-duty members of the military who asked to remain anonymous reflect destruction that the Pentagon has not shown the American public.  Other major news outlets have since reported on the accuracy of the CBS story. Yesterday, after asserting that this year’s Congress had been the most productive ever, Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home early, they won’t be back until after the midterms. Though he didn’t say so, it’s widely believed that he sent them home to avoid having to take a vote on Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie’s resolution to impeach Secretary of Defense/War/Beer Pete Hegseth and also to avoid voting on the release of more Epstein files.  To state the obvious, this Congress has not been the most productive ever, in fact it’s barely ever in session because Johnson keeps sending its members home to avoid taking votes, the war is not going well, and Johnson had every reason to believe that while the vote on Hegseth might not have led to his impeachment, it was going to be embarrassing.  For his part Hegseth, who at least for now isn’t moving forward with his plan to test troops testosterone levels has been focused on other similarly ridiculous things. The Wall Street Journal reports that he’s notified commanders that only service members who meet “strict body composition, fitness, and appearance benchmarks” including somewhat meaningless waist to height ratios, will be considered for attendance at his upcoming “State of the Force address” scheduled to take place on September 30.  Does that mean that the Commander in Chief with the chunky ankles won’t be invited?  The less photo ready soldiers get to remain in harms way in the Middle East, as punishment for being dumpy and/or genetically challenged while Trump, if he’s excluded will just play another round of golf.  In other diplomatic news, Trump is now threatening to go to war with Canada and to impose more tariffs on the EU’s member countries in retaliation to the possibility that our neighbors to the north might join the EU as its first associate member, an option that is only on the table because of the miserable way Trump’s been treating them.        

The Economy:  Yesterday, in an effort to control “stubborn” inflation, the Federal Reserve, now Chaired by Kevin Warsh who despite being known as an inflation hawk, was appointed by Trump to replace his previous appointee Jerome Powell who he pushed out for refusing to lower rates, unanimously voted to raise the benchmark interest rate by one quarter of a point. Trump is not happy; he responded to the Fed’s move by once again asserting that interest rates in the US should be lowered to 1% while also reupping a threat to cut trade “with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them.”  It’s not clear what he was doing during his days at Wharton but it clearly didn’t involve attending Economics classes. Not only is Trump’s threat to cut trade “shoot in the foot” stupid, but it’s his Iran war and its impact on gas prices combined with his tariffs that are  causing the “stubborn” inflation that led to the Federal Reserve Board’s action, not that Trump would ever acknowledge that his actions and policies are anything less than brilliant. Perhaps in response to everyone pointing out that Warsh was his appointee, last night Trump said he still supports his new Fed Chair, asserting that the rate increase wasn’t Warsh’s fault, that he had been “forced” to raise rates by all the other members of the Federal Reserve Board, a weird take on Warsh’s action and his accompanying statement that the rate increase was necessary to combat inflation but then again, given the source, not all that shocking.    

Polls:  On Tuesday, the NY Times reported that the Democrats have a “clear advantage” going into the midterms.  Their conclusion is based on national polling undertaken by the Times together with it’s polling partner Siena University.  The Times/Siena polls are well respected so their conclusions are nothing to sneeze at.  Their polling suggests that Trump is seriously underwater across almost every metric and as a result is a drag on his party.  As a result Democrats have a 9 point advantage going into the midterms.  In prior elections an advantage of that magnitude would indicate that a big blue wave was coming, but given that Republicans won the gerrymandering war and have a bigly funding advantage, it remains unclear just how large the predicted blue wave will be.  That’s not to say that Democrats aren’t expected to take over control of the House but the number of seats they pick up, and the size of their majority are likely to be smaller than they would have been absent all the redistricting shenanigans.  Democrats also stand a chance of regaining control of the Senate, but that hill is harder to climb.  To come out on top they need to hold all their contested Senate seats, including Georgia which given incumbent golden boy Jon Ossoff’s increasing popularity looks like a done deal but also in Michigan and New Hampshire where polls show Democratic candidates El Sayed and Pappas neck and neck with their respective Republican oppoments, Rogers and Sununu, while also picking up four more.  Although Democrats are currently running ahead of Republicans in lots of the states they need to pick up like North Carolina, Maine, Texas, and Ohio as well as in a few others like Iowa, and Alaska where until recently they didn’t think they’d have any chance of winning, with the exception of North Carolina where former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is likely to coast to victory their leads mostly fall within the margin of error. Moreover, if we’ve learned anything by now polls can be depressingly wrong:  Maine’s Susan Collins has a history of outpeforming hers; Texas is Texas; and that Iowa poll completed by then respected pollster Ann Selzer that showed Kamala Harris winning the state in 2024 by 3 points was off by 16 points. 

More 💩:  Keep an eye on the Kennedy Center.  After a court ruled that Trump can’t have his name etched on its façade, its Trump appointed board voted to shut it down temporarilly as in forever because Trump, bigly mad that he can’t get his name on the Center’s walls, is holding up $257 million that was previously allocated for its rehabilitation and repair.  Yesterday, Trump’s minions began putting up a fence around the Center, and many fear that Trump who has threatened to tear down the Center’s building might do that, replacing it with an amphitheater.  A few members of the Kennedy family have expresed their outrage, but not RFK Jr, he’s too busy pretending that the measles outbreak in Pennsylvania where there more than 700 cases of measles have been confirmed and four deaths have occurred, is just fake news.  Trump has been busy too, not just with his war and his golf game, but also stock trading.  He’s traded 24,000 times since the beginning of this term, quite a bit more than his predecessors Bush, Obama, Clinton, and Biden whose grand total number of trades was 0. It’s fair to assume that some of Trump’s trades involved Data Center and AI related companies but nothing to see there because while lots of people including the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI think it’s time for some regulation, Trump says that since he, the genius whose uncle was a brilliant MIT professor, knows all, is in charge, who needs any regulation, anyway?  Besides, odds are that he won’t be around in ten years when AI takes over possibly killing the rest of us.           

  

Mousetrap 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢 🎇

Vote, Vote, Vote:  Yesterday evening in an unsigned one paragraph statement, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to have the Postal Service suppress voter turnout in the upcoming midterms. A majority of the Justices concluded that it was unlikely that the government would succeed on the merits of its challenge to a District Court’s preliminary injunction barring the implementation of the Postal Service’s new regulations.  Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the majority's decision, saying “that even if the agency has the technical authority to enforce such rules, doing so this close to an election is unfeasible.”  However, just as he did in the birth right citizen case, he hedged, leaving Trump an opening to proceed with his anti-mail-in crusade by saying that “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority.”  In other words, at a future date Kavanaugh would be open to joining his righter than right wing Trump abetting colleagues Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas who both disagreed with the majority’s decision since they thought that it would be fine for the Postal Service to implement Trump’s voter squelching regulations now, midterms or any future elections be damned.  The Court’s decision is a very good thing for those who care about democracy and free elections, but it doesn’t mean that Trump’s efforts to limit voter participation have been put on hold.  Yesterday, via a whistle blower it was revealed that the Department of Homeland Security has been violating state laws by inappropriately using state data bases to “test” whether some voters are really citizens eligible to vote.  Noncitizen voting is extremely rare, and the illegal effort has turned out to be for naught.  And there’s still the specter of INS troops showing up at “blue” polling places on election day.   

🎇 🎇 🎇: Score a big one for ProPublica.  Yesterday in a story that has now been confirmed by other news outlets, they reported that Don Junior’s Bahama’s wedding to Bettina Anderson wasn’t the intimate close family and friends affair that he said it was.  In fact, a few Russians were in attendance, fair since one of them helped plan and then footed the bill for some of the festivities. That “foot” included paying for a wedding weekend party at a nearby private island and for some fancy fireworks.  In all it’s estimated that Umar Kremlov, the current name of the Russian oligarch and friend of Putin in question, coughed up somewhere in excess of $100,000, maybe even a multiple of $100,000, to fete his “good friend” Don Jr.  Little Don doesn’t deny that Umar gifted him the party and accompanying fireworks, nor does Bettina.  They both defended their “grateful” acceptance of Umar’s largesse, saying that’s what good friends do for each other even for people like Donny who is reported to be worth $300 million. In addition to being a good friend of Donny, Umar frequently travels with Putin.  He is also sanctioned by Ukraine, something to do with his “charity” which has been credibly accused of kidnapping Ukrainian children.  It’s fair to assume that Umar didn’t gift Donny and Bettina out of the goodness of his heart because there’s no such thing as a free ride, or as Russians put it “free cheese is only in a mousetrap.”  Hunter Biden and his dad probably have a lot to say about this. One more fun tidbit in the story: in preparation for his wedding or maybe for a future run for president, Don Jr had his chin shaped to look more chiseled.     

More 💩 :  It turns out that reports of Mitch McConnell’s death were greatly exaggerated.  He’s wheelchair bound, and looking Weekend at Bernie’s level fragile but he’s back and ready to cast Senate votes.  Bo French is alive too, though some Texas Republicans running for office probably wish he’d go into witness protection.  French is running for Texas Railroad Commissioner, not a position that ordinarily gets a whole lot of attention outside of Texas.  However, French is now front and center because over the weekend he tweeted out a picture of a crowd of Asian students at a University of Texas football game saying that he’d heard that “UT graduation ‘looked like this,’ adding that the problem was ‘far worse than anyone imagined.’ In another post, he wrote that Americans are being “displaced by foreigners.”  Texas Republican candidates, already facing competitive races, have now been put in the position of having to condemn French’s xenophobic comments or endorse them with their silence.  Fun. Then there’s Macklemore who is outraged that a lot of people think his showing up in an intentionally hateful and disparaging costume, one that included a sterotypical big nose, while making “pro-Palestine” chants and displaying “imagery” at an Ed Sheeran concert was okay. He’s now been banned from several venues and will no longer be accompanying Sheeran.  To be fair, Macklemore’s entitled to say what he wants however he shouldn’t be surprised that attendees of what was supposed to be a family fun Ed Sheeran concert were not “receptive” to his vitriole and found his obviously meanspirited costume repellant.  Naturally, Maklemore whose anti-Israel screeds long predate the events in Gaza is blaming “that Jew” Robert Kraft  for having him banned. In response, Kraft issued a very impressive and nuanced statement last night in which he talked about his ongoing fight against anti-Semitism as well as the resources he has contributed to support Palestinians.  Ed Sheeran has not commented publicly, but has not so bravely let leak that he wasn’t pleased with Macklemore’s shxtshow.  Pink, who did criticize Macklemore for his hatefilled screed has gotten all kinds of hate thrown in her direction.  Being Pink, she can handle it because at the end of the day she’s Pink and she’s great.    

 

 

50 Days 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢

🍀 🍀 🍀 :Fresh off the Trumpapalooza midterm convention, Trump traveled to Ireland this weekend.  In theory he went to the Emerald Isle to promote relations with Ireland, but the real reason he went was to attend the Irish Open taking place at his Doonbeg Golf Club because with him personal business always comes first, second and third.  Naturally, he brought his usual entourage of hangers on with him, including binky/printer girl Natalie who received first lady treatment, fitting because Melania, who has mostly checked out opted not to join the traveling squad. While in Ireland Trump came close to reigniting the Irish Troubles by calling for the immediate unification of Ireland and Northern Ireland because what’s another war, or as he likes to call them, skirmish, anyway? Proving that his tariffs are bunk, he removed the one he’d imposed on Irish Whiskey as a parting gift before departing.  As to wars, the Iran “small potatoes” one is getting worse. The Strait of Hormuz which Trump insists is open is not open and now due to attacks by the Houthis, one of those nice Iranian surrogate groups that we were told the Iranians would no longer have the resources to fund but that they apparently are still funding maybe because they are getting some strategic assistance on targeting US assets from China, the Saudis’ work around route is no longer safe.  That’s bad news for the price of oil, which is bad news for inflation and interest rates, though Trump would prefer that we all hold Ukraine responsible for any diesel price increases because apparently it’s their refusal to concede to Russia’s land grab that is the problem, not the war that Russia started or the Iran disaster.     

Midterm Madness:  Most of us know that Trump will not be sending us $5000 checks if the Republicans hold on to their House and Senate majorities after all the Midterm votes are counted, assuming they are ever counted.  Nor do most of us expect to ever receive the tariff or DOGE dividends that Trump promised but he doesn’t need most of us to believe him, he just needs to convince more MAGA voters to show up on election day even though his name won’t be on the ballot while also convincing a few delusional swing voters, the same ones still waiting for free IVF, to buy into his faux promises. It’s Trump’s preference that his voters actually show up in person because though he votes by mail, he doesn’t want the rest of us to do the same.  On the mail-in front, we’re still waiting for the Supreme Court to weigh in. The fact that SCOTUS hasn’t opined yet, is either a good thing or a truly bad thing.  Good because, even if they don’t rule now that Trump’s Executive Order is unconstitutional, deciding instead to kick the can forward, the onerous new Post Service ballot requirements won’t apply to the midterms.  Worse than bad, because if they do rule in favor of Trump’s Executive Order, an outcome which should be inconceivable except for the fact that this Court has done inconceivable things, they’ll inject more chaos into the midterms elections since ballots have already been printed and in some cases have already been mailed out and will do immeasurable damage to election results by squelching votes.  In any case, keep checking your news alert because something will pop up shortly.  One indication that Trump is getting nervous about the elections is that he, like his abettor Elon Musk is finally sending some of the buckets of cash that he’s been hoarding onto Republican candidates.  Not all of it, just some of it because having seen pictures of Obama’s library, Trump wants to save some to make his biglier, while also setting aside some to operate his Qatari plane that only the most delusional believe he won’t continue using after 2028.  As to the elections, retired Conservative Judge Michael Luttig, is raising alarms.  He’s concerned that the “decisive test may not come on Election Day, but on January 3, 2027, when duly elected members of the 120th Congress could be denied their seats, raising a fundamental question for our democracy:  Will the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box be honored?” Judge Luttig is concerned that current House Speaker Johnson who has repeatedly shown himself to be nothing more than a Trump tool will refuse to seat any newly elected Democratic members of Congress and that there will be no Republicans like former VP Mike Pence willing to say no to Trump’s orders. Not seating the election winners would be litigated and eventually overturned but the damage to democracy would be immeasurable.  

More 💩:  Last week Joseph DiGenova, a former US Attorney and a long-term Trump ally, resigned from the Department of Justice.  He’d been leading the “grand conspiracy” investigation taking place out of the DOJ’s Miami office.  That investigation has been tasked with prosecuting people like former CIA Director John Brennan, who Trump holds responsible for looking into his “alleged” election canoodling with the Russians.  DiGenova was being pressured to hand down indictments of Brennan and other Trump “enemies” but apparently had not found the dirt he needed.  He defended his work, and the lack of indictments saying "I make cases the old-fashioned way: witnesses, evidence, etc. That takes time.’ He added that “rushing indictments without proper evidence creates an ethical problem.”  Indictments could still happen, because Trump and AG Todd Blanche aren’t all that concerned about ethics and will just pressure someone less “ethical” and/or stupid to move forward.  It says a lot about the legitimacy of the Miami investigation, nothing good, that someone as dedicated to Trump as DiGenova couldn’t find it within himself to move forward.  Back in DC, the Trump administration position is that the Kennedy Center will have to file for bankruptcy if the courts won’t allow Trump to emboss his name on its walls.  Their legal filing actually says that if Trump’s name isn’t etched in, he won’t approve financing for the Center.  Breathe deeply now because soon you won’t want to. The EPA is on the “verge” of eliminating limits on the amount of pollution that gas and coal plants can release into the environment because apparently despite global warming and erratic weather, we’ve got nothing to worry about.  On the AI (Artificial Intelligence) front, everyone including the leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI, but not Trump is concerned that Hal’s increasingly errant children will soon destroy us.  Speaker Johnson is concerned but doesn’t have time to deal with it mostly because Trump doesn’t want him to find the time.  Lastly, in one piece of good news, the Supreme Court once again refused to allow Missouri to move ahead with the redistricting that would have eliminated one of its two Democratic House seats.         

 

 
Chaos Theory 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢 🍎 🍯

💰 💵 💰 💵:  The Iran war continues to escalate with Iran shooting missiles at US ships in the Strait of Hormuz and at US bases in Jordan.   Trump says that he’s not trying to negotiate an end to the “small potatoes” war right now but that it will mysteriously end right after the midterms which is also the time that he promises gas prices will return to normal levels.  In an effort to drum up attention for the Republican’s weird midterm convention master manipulator Trump who wants voters to pretend he’s on the ballot promised to send every American adult a $5000 check if Republicans win both the House and Senate in the midterms. Estimates are that Trump’s giveaway would cost more than $1 trillion.  He provided no details about how he would fund the giveaway, whether he’d issue more debt or whether he’d zero out something else like maybe Social Security or Medicare.  Then again, Trump who has a habit of bankrupting his companies appears determined to do the same to the US economy. In any case, it’s fair to assume that his promise is just a campaign ruse, one that some voters will fall for, but that’s the point. On the subjects of weird and attention getting, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senator John Fetterman appeared via video at Trump’s shindig.  Fetterman continues to insist that he has no plans to change his party affiliation, reminding everyone that he mostly votes with Democrats, but since he really likes his fellow Pennsylvanian Senator Republican David McCormick and hates socialism, he was happy to appear.  Points to McCormick and a few other shrewd Republicans like Alabama’s Katie Britt for figuring out that the emotionally fragile Fetterman responds well to hugs, tea and sympathy and that the unending criticism, warranted or not, that he’s been getting from some in his party is a sure way to push him into their arms.  Fetterman has always been odd, these days he’s also unpredictable, a Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema mash-up in shorts and a sweatshirt.  Neither Manchin or Sinema are still in the Senate, it’s fair to assume that Fetterman won’t be able to win a Democratic primary when he comes up for reelection in 2028 and will be a one term Senator, at least as a Democrat.

Ballot Box 🗳️ Chaos:  Yesterday was primary day in Rhode Island.  Proving that at the end of the day politics is a local affair, sitting Democratic Governor Dan McKee lost his primary to business executive Helena Foulkes. McKee wasn’t ousted by a socialist uprising, rather he was tanked by his mishandling of repair work on Providence’s Washington bridge, the major east-west traffic artery that carries roughly 100,000 vehicles per day.  After next week’s Delaware election, primary season will be over.  Some states have already mailed out ballots for the November midterm election. Despite that, Trump and his anti-mail in ballot fight continues.  The Supreme Court is expected to rule shortly on his efforts to have the US Postal Service insert itself into the election process by refusing to deliver ballots that don’t meet Trump’s “standards.” Even a few Republican states are on record opposing Trump and the Post Office’s efforts, not because they don’t want to make it more difficult for Democrats to vote, but because a lot of their Republican constituents vote by mail and also because there’s not enough time to implement the Postal Service’s screwball and untested new voter system.  Few legal pundits expect SCOTUS to give the Trump administration the signoff it’s seeking, though if we’ve learned anything by now predictions about how this Supreme Court will act are frequently proven wrong.  It’s more likely that instead of ruling on the constitutionality of Trump’s plans, SCOTUS will opt to kick the ballot box ball down the road, leaving Massachusetts District Court judge Indira Talwani’s stay in place. That would prevent the Postal Service from implementing Trump’s Executive Order through the midterms, leaving the bigger issue of the constitutionality of the federal government interfering in what are supposed to be state run elections until after the November elections.  Regardless of what SCOTUS does, Trump has already introduced uncertainty and chaos into the midterms. As to chaos things are getting increasingly nuts in Missouri right now where Republican efforts to redistrict away one of the state’s two Democratic districts remain in limbo. Last week, Missouri’s Supreme Court ruled that the new Trump-backed Republican map could not be used in the midterms because of a citizen backed petition demanding a statewide vote on it. On Tuesday, US Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh let stand that decision ordering that the state’s old districts be used for the upcoming midterms but then a Trump appointed federal district judge in Missouri issued a contradictory order, temporarily blocking the state from using the old map, saying instead that the state should use the new Republican one that gerrymandered away the Democratic seat.  The decision about which map should be used is now back in court. If this sounds nuts it’s because it is. Chaos is the point.  

More 💩: Saying that AI (Artificial Intelligence) has a more than 10% chance of killing all humans and that AI companies “are gambling with our lives” Jacob Coxon, a respected AI researcher who has worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI resigned from Anthropic yesterday.  His stunning announcement follows recent reports that AI models have been talking, coordinating, and even conspiring with each other autonomously without human supervision. Yikes.

Shana Tovah 🍎 🍯

 

 

 
Goodbye Summer 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢 🦱

Summer Breeze: Labor Day weekend is now in the rearview window. Most of us spent the holiday enjoying the waning days of summer, not Trump.  While he played his usual amount of golf, with the help of his ever-present human printer/gal Friday Natalie he posted increasingly demented missives on Truth Social, including a “holiday” message to “all including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists and Democrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country.” In a pot calling the kettle black moment, he went on to call anyone who didn’t recognize that he was the best president ever “deranged” while asserting that he was going to win the midterms.  He probably won’t legitimately win the midterms, but he likely will disrupt them as much as he possibly can. In contrast, in his holiday message Joe Biden thanked workers and the middle class.  It wasn’t just Trump’s holiday message that was bizarre and crass, Trump and/or Natalie shared a few dozen more, that included maps and memes in which he changed the name of New Mexico to New America; included Canada, Mexico, Iceland, Greenland, and Iran as a part of the US; claimed the moon as a US territory; asserted victory in Iran; depicted himself as the evil killing Green Lantern; and showed himself wrestling Hulk Hogan to the ground. We’ve mostly grown used to his aberrant behavior; we shouldn’t.  Nor should we be used to son in law Jared and real estate buddy Witkoff serving as his designated “peace” negotiators, but they are.  The two compromised and inept ones spent part of their weekend visiting with Putin before meeting with Ukraine’s Zelenskyy where Jared delivered the message that to achieve “durable” peace Ukraine would have to give up land to those nice Russians who’ve invaded his country.  The nice Russians stopped bombing long enough to allow Kushner and Witkoff to safely travel in and out of Russia, but they’ve now resumed attacking Kyiv. Nothing good to report out of Middle East either where we’ve been exchanging fire with Iran and Iran-backed Houthis launched a major wave of missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, wounding at least 73 people, damaging energy facilities, and driving global oil prices higher. 

Walking on Sunshine:  On the political front, sans Melania, Trump is off to Texas to for his midterm convention/money grab.  Reports are that while a lot of the usual suspects will show up for his self-celebratory party, many Republicans, especially those facing tight races will not be attending and some that do will have the exorbitant attendance fees waived to get them to fill seats.  Those staying away will miss the opportunity to hear Trump use his two primetime speaking spots to ramble on endlessly about how great he is, how great the economy is, how he won in 2020, and how the Democrats are all communists. The point of the “convention” is to drum up enthusiasm for the midterms, encouraging Trump voters to vote as if he’s on the ballot. Some will, but assuming the polls are anywhere close to correct, quite a few voters, particularly those who consider themselves Independents despite voting for Trump at least once and many of the Hispanic voters who shifted his way during the 2024 race, are expected to vote blue or stay home turning some of the Republican gerrymandered districts into dummymanders.  As to election predictions, assuming Trump doesn’t pull a militia or two out of his hat or get the frequently disappointing Supreme Court to sign on to his anti-mail-in scheme, Republicans are likely to lose the House, but the Senate remains in play. To that end, today is primary day in New Hampshire where the Senate seat being vacated by retiring 79-year-old Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen is up for grabs. In all likelihood, Republican John E Sununu will win the Republican Senate primary where he is facing one time Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown while Congressman Chris Pappas will win the Democratic primary although he is facing an insurgent challenge from progressive Karishma Manzur.  The November race, likely to be between Sununu and Pappas, is looking more and more like it could be a toss-up.  That’s a problem for Democrats who can’t afford to lose the seat to stand a chance of retaking the Senate. Republican Sununu has loads of name recognition in New Hampshire because, though he’s never been Governor, he’s related to two people who were.

Hot Fun in the Summertime:  The Wall Street Journal has been on a tear of late.  Last week they ran a hit piece on Pennsylvania’s erratic Senator John Fetterman.  Fetterman, who walked in his trademark shorts to the beat of a different drummer even before his health struggles, appears to have lost the “man of the people” crown that previously helped him win statewide elections.  He’s also very pro-Israel which has earned him the wrath of the progressive and Hamas sympathizing parts of the Democratic Party. Over the weekend the WSJ paper shifted its focus from dooming Fetterman to trashing Corey Lewandowski, providing details about how he leveraged his relationship with former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and his longer-term friendship with Trump to monetize his advisory position with companies seeking DHS contracts.  It’s long been suspected that Lewandowski was grifting but given the buckets of money that DHS received from Congress, the extent of his grift appears to have been even larger than was previously known. The WSJ’s tear didn’t stop with Fetterman and the Lewandowski/Noem duo, over the weekend the paper’s Editorial Board went with a scathing rebuke of Trump, listing all the ways he’s screwing up and how (🤞🤞) he might be responsible for the Senate going blue in the midterms. They are calling for him to change course and to free up all the money he’s greedily sitting on to help out Republican candidates.  Hopefully, other than changing his hair dye from orange to some version of pukey brown, Trump will continue showing his true colors.  Regardless, it’s fair to assume that the Murdochs who pissed off Trump with last week’s firing of the 💰 🍯, got a few very irate and threatening calls over the weekend.

 

 

No Money No Honey 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢

Gaslighting: Yesterday, while acting as stand in Press Secretary, VP Vance said he wouldn’t call the Iran war a war because it is just a conflict and anyway the conflict is over since all the recent back and forth attacks that took place this week are nothing more than the kind of “flare ups” that happen during a conflict that’s not a war. In a moment of uncharacteristic candor, he admitted that he didn’t know when the four to five-week conflict that’s morphed into a six-month plus war will be over.  He also said that he’s sticking by his good friend Tucker Carlson, because despite his criticism of the Iran war that’s not a war and that he keeps blaming everything bad on “the Jews” Vance likes him, a lot. According to Commerce Secretary Lutnick one of the remarkable achievements of the Iran “conflict” is that there has been no loss of American lives, surprising news for the families of the 18 US soldiers who’ve died during the war that’s just a conflict not to mention the 750 others who’ve been injured. When questioned on his idiotic and callous remark, Lutnick said he’d confused Venezuela with Iran, an easy mistake to make since both countries have oil. Keeping up with his Trump colleagues’ buffoonery, Treasury Secretary Bessent blamed the increase in gas prices on Ukraine because everything that’s not the fault of “the Jews” is due to Ukraine, but definitely not Putin. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is considering announcing that the war, that’s just a conflict, is over, news to Secretary of War/Beer Hegseth who is extending Mideast deployments into 2027.  That’s the same Hegseth whose Pentagon posted guidelines this week about the implementation of his planned testing of testosterone deficiency in troops 30 years and over only to rescind them and then delete them from the Pentagon’s website. Also, the Strait of Hormuz is fully open and under US control even though it’s not.

Ballot Box 🗳️:  Yesterday, in an emergency filing intended to skip the normal appeals process, the administration asked the Supreme Court to lift the freeze imposed by a federal district court on implementing Trump’s executive order in order to allow the US Post Office to resume its efforts to restrict mail-in voting in the lead-up to the midterms.  The administration wants the Justices to permit the immediate implementation of a new rule that would prohibit the Postal Service from delivering ballots to voters in states that do not share the voter data that they ordinarily do not share because elections are run by states rather than the federal government. The new rule would require the Postal Service to review ballot envelopes for compliance with new standards before sending them on to voters.  Indira Talwani, the Massachusetts based District Court judge who imposed the freeze, said that in addition to likely being unconstitutional the implementation of the new Postal Service rules would introduce chaos into the midterm elections but that’s a feature not a bug to the Trump administration who’ve seen the polls and fear that legitimate elections will be disastrous for Trump and the Republicans. North Carolina, where voters are likely to replace retiring Republican Senator Thom Tillis with a Democrat, former Governor Roy Cooper, is set to begin sending ballots out today.

💰 🍯: Yesterday, Fox announced that it was parting ways with former 💰 🍯 Maria Bartiromo. The Twitterverse and the Kalshi prediction site immediately assumed that Bartiromo was exiting Fox to become Trump’s next Press Secretary.  Though it remains possible that she will become Press Secretary that’s not the reason that she’s gone from her far more lucrative Fox spot.  It turns out that Bartiromo, who has been off the air since August 9, was axed for sharing an internal Fox memo with the White House.  The shared memo included guidance instructing senior Fox News employees to “steer clear of giving credence” to the claims Trump made in his July 16 prime time speech, specifically the ones where he pushed old, debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that he lost. Apparently Bartiromo, whose spreading of misinformation (as in lies) about voting machines flipping votes from Trump to Biden contributed to Fox’s decision to cough up $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems, shared the internal Fox guidance with the White House to explain why no one from Fox had amplified Trump’s regurgitated misinformation on their programs.  Worth noting, Bartiromo is also cited in the long simmering, still not settled lawsuit against Fox by voting machine company Smartmatic.

Other 💩: On Wednesday, the sculpture known as Blue which has stood in front of the Kennedy Performing Arts Center since 2019 was taken down because it’s not Trump’s cup of tea, possibly because it was blue and not covered in gold leaf. In other esthetic news, the Trump administration is moving forward with the building of the oversized Arc D’ Trump even though it’s expected to interfere with flight patterns over the Capitol city.  On a more positive note, a federal judge in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s newest attempt to restrict birthright citizenship,

Enjoy your Labor Day holiday!

 

Flock You 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢

Escalators:  The Iran war appears to be in escalation mode again. After Iran attacked two tankers leaving the Strait of Hormuz the US launched a “barrage” of airstrikes which then prompted another Iranian retaliation.  The most recent kinetic tit-for-tat follows last weekend’s exchange of missiles and drones.  In response to all of the hullabaloo, global oil prices rose $4 yesterday, settling in at a five-week high. Also yesterday, Trump’s BFF Vlad Putin met with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to affirm his support for all that the IRGC and Mullahs are doing.  That meeting of likeminded friends followed the appearance of Russia’s sanctioned Finance Minister Anton Siluanov at Monday’s G20 economic meeting in North Carolina. Siluanov was invited by the Trump administration; his unusual appearance did not please most of the other attendees given Russia’s Ukrainian endeavors then again it’s not like Trump cares much about Ukraine or maintaining civil relationships with allies, or soon to be former allies.  It’s not just the diplomatic front where things aren’t all that copacetic, the flood of reports about what’s going on at the Pentagon continue to be concerning.  Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who’d long been on the outs with War/Beer Secretary Pete Hegseth, resigned on Monday.  Before leaving he met with Trump to express his concerns about the future of the Army under Hegseth.  Axios reports that Trump was “surprised” when Driscoll told him how many generals and other top officers Hegseth had fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion. Trump was either being very disingenuous or really is suffering from dementia because as President and Commander in Chief, he had to have been in the loop for all the Hegseth generated disruption and in any case, the firings have been widely covered in the press. With Driscoll gone, and his Deputy Undersecretary Dave Fitzgerald following him out the door, the military’s largest service is left without a top civilian leader, a Senate-confirmed top general, a confirmed Army general in charge of operations, or a confirmed commander of Army troops in Europe. Perhaps Trump’s been too busy destroying the East Wing, ruining the Reflecting Pool, and putting gold leaf on everything to pay attention to what’s going on at the Pentagon during the war that he started?  Or maybe he really is Putin’s pawn? As to the East Wing, the Supreme Court gave him the go ahead to continue tearing the White House apart, with all the conservative Justices, including Justice Amy but excluding Chief Justice Roberts ruling that those opposing Trump’s extreme renovation plans lacked standing.   

The Ballot Box 🗳️:  Yesterday was primary day in Massachusetts.  There were no upsets. In their infinite wisdom, the Bay State’s Democrats decided to stick with 80-year-old Senator Ed Markey, despite his age, ignoring the Mitch McConnell situation while also forgetting that when Senator Ted Kennedy died while in office, the special election for his replacement was won by Republican Scott Brown, putting the passage of Obamacare in jeopardy. Buoyed by endorsements from former President Biden and VP Kamala Harris, something that still counts in Massachusetts, Dan Koh won the crowd election to fill the seat being vacated by Markey’s failed challenger, Congressman Seth Moulton.  The Massachusetts elections ran smoothly but fears about the midterms are growing.  Connecticut Senator Blumenthal revealed that a US Postal Service whistleblower provided his office with details about how the USPS is rushing to put in place the infrastructure to implement Trump’s anti-mail-in voting executive order. Putting aside that Trump’s mail-in order is supposed to be on hold pending Supreme Court review, his new Federal Ballot Mail Portal is seriously flawed or intentionally devious, or both, because as currently designed it would reject any bundle of mailed in votes if just one vote in the bundle was determined to be out of compliance with Trump’s onerous requirements; that could result in the disqualification of tens of thousands of votes.  Keeping with that voter squelching scheme, Republican officials in Tarrant County, Texas dramatically cut the number of voting sites for the midterms yesterday, reducing the total number of sites from 316 to 224.  Tarrant, Texas’ third largest county, includes Fort Worth and neighbors Dallas; it’s an area chock full of Democrats.  The intent of the polling site shrinkage is to make it harder for James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the Senate who has been polling ahead of his Republican rival Ken Paxton, to get the votes he’ll need to pull off a victory.   

The Big NIMBY: The AI boom has generated an outsized need for more electricity because AI needs lots of data centers and those data centers need lots of electricity.  There was a time when politicians welcomed the building of data centers in their states but that was before voters woke up to the strains that those “ugly” data centers place on local electrical and water infrastructure.  Data centers are now the NIMBY that could influence the outcome of elections. Despite the increase in voter pushback, Trump who hates “ugly” electricity generating windmills, is all in on data centers. Democrats, including some who thought that the centers would create lots of jobs, are increasingly opposed to them, or at the very least want to be more judicious about where they’re built in part because it turns out that in addition to taxing local utilities, the centers mostly provide only short-term construction jobs rather than long term employment.  It’s not just data centers, Flock cameras, the automated license plate reading systems built by the Flock Safety company have now joined the midterm political discourse.  Civil libertarians and anyone who hasn’t figured out by watching a whole bunch of FBI and Law and Order episodes that little we do is private anymore are concerned. It’s not just that the increasingly ubiquitous Flock cameras help local authorities catch speedy drivers and “bad” guys, functions that are acceptable to many, it’s that the Flock cameras can also be set to send data to federal entities like ICE, those nice people who’ve been sending the Afghans who helped US troops back to the Taliban, Cubans refugees to Africa, Haitian law abiding workers back to the violent places they fled, while also accidentally deporting a few brown US citizens. 

More 💩:  The Met Gala will not be celebrating John Galliano on Holocaust Remembrance Day or any other day.  By a vote of 413 to 2, North Carolina Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards who is not seeking reelection was censured for harassing his female staff.  Milo Yiannopoulos, the right wing confrontational political commentator and operator who among other things spoke out against illegal immigrants overstayed his visa and has been deported back to the UK.