Road Salt 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢 💩

Midterm Madness:  Trump is out on the campaign trail saying stupid things. Though his MAGA audience loves what he says no matter how crazy and meanspirited, fewer people show up to his events now held in smaller venues, but given who he is, he still gets a disproportionate amount of press coverage.  To that end, media has gone nuts over the remarks he made in Nebraska about higher gas prices being “a small price to pay for keeping the world safe….. let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s — this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon.” The part about gas prices being just a bit high and worth it to keep the world and country safe was probably scripted, the add on about Los Angeles and San Diego getting nuked, more likely off the cuff, an unhinged statement from the increasingly unfiltered and demented Trump.  Whatever they were, it unsettled lots of people, particularly on the west coast, that Trump could so easily dismiss the specter, however unlikely, of Iran nuking parts of California.  Trump’s verbal diarrhea also appears to have spooked the White House communications team and a number of right-wing press outlets who have jumped to his defense, arguing that his words were taken out of context. They weren’t taken out of context; they were just stupid. We should probably be far more concerned about the less catchy remarks he made yesterday during a visit to Maryland where he called attention to Russell Vought, the OMB director who was also the main author of Project 2025, and said that he and Vought “have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks” adding that Vought is “going to be one of the very important people in the history of our country…..He's got some great things happening."  The midterms are in a few weeks, Trump is doing everything he can to disrupt them, so it’s not a stretch to assume that Vought’s big surprise has something to do with that, far more likely than Iran nuking San Diego and Los Angeles with weapons and long-range missiles they don’t currently have in their arsenal but still potentially devastating.  In other midterm news, Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins who is polling just a few points behind her Democratic challenger Troy Jackson, wants Maine voters to send her back to the Senate because she managed to get Canadian road salt taken off of Trump’s tariff list to which Jackson quickly responded: “what about everything else, we can’t eat road salt.” Collins also tried to distance herself from Trump by saying she’s not his favorite Republican Senator while she danced about whether or not she’d welcome him campaigning with her in Maine. It’s too early to count Collins out, she has a history of beating the polls, but it is fun watching her twist her pearls.

Viral Musings:  A lab worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia died last week triggering local quarantines amid unconfirmed but very credible reports of her death being due to her accidental exposure to a strain of pneumonic plague.  Russia is playing fast and cute with the facts, not all that surprising but concerning given what China did at the beginning of what turned into the COVID pandemic. We probably aren’t on the verge of a plague pandemic, though Russia might be facing a bit of a localized epidemic.  Nevertheless, the Siberia episode highlights just how stupid it was for the Trump administration to eviscerate the parts of the Health and Human Services that focus on epidemic, infectious disease, and pandemic preparedness research and to pull out of the World Health Organization while also putting an anti-vaxxer in charge. In other health news, New York’s Governor Hochul has declared a disaster emergency over the state’s ongoing measles outbreak. NY’s outbreak isn’t as bad as the one in Pennsylvania, but the emergency declaration expands the types of medical professionals who are allowed to administer MMR vaccines, the effective shots that RFK and his cronies hate so much because they do.    

More 💩:  The likelihood of Iran nuking LA and San Diego is very low but the possibility of more conventional attacks elsewhere isn’t which explains why the US abruptly withdrew all twelve of the B-1B Lancer strategic bombers that were stationed at Fairford, England due to intelligence warning of a potential Iranian drone and terror plot targeting the base.  On the subject of intelligence or lack thereof, Trump announced that Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton’s portfolio of responsibilities now includes serving as the AI, SI, or whatever he is calling it, Czar.  FBI Director Kash Patel is now engaged to his girlfriend, the aspiring country singer who he has been flying around the country on our dime. There’s no real evidence that Don Jr has actually reimbursed the Russian oligarch who paid for some of his wedding festivities.  There will never be any evidence that his father has reimbursed the government for the money spent on his midterm ads because though, in response to push back from many including some Republican politicians, Trump now says he plans to pay for future ads by using one of his bloated PAC accounts, he says that he has no intention of refunding the $12 million taken from the Department of Homeland to pay for the ads already produced and aired. By the way, those ads are really bizarre unless you think that watching a digitally enhanced grimace-faced Trump strut around while promising to get rid of globalists, the radical left, and communists, and touting his tax cuts and the reigniting of US manufacturing is even close to normal.

 

 

Twenty-nine Days 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢 💩

Midterm Madness:  Less than a month remains until the November 3 midterms.  Trump is now touring the country, in the process of visiting and spreading his message across seventeen states as well as to their neighbors with overlapping media markets.  Trump’s message includes his usual unhinged rhetoric; he’s even back to reading his snake poem and doxxing fellow Republicans, sharing Senator Tom Cotton’s phone number over a day light savings disagreement, something he once did to the now departed Lindsey Graham after Graham called him an asshole. Trump’s bragging about all his amazing accomplishments. Despite Friday’s anemic hiring report, a rise in unemployment, and stubborn war related inflation, he’s claiming that the economy is stronger than ever, threatening that the country will turn into a socialist hell hole if he doesn’t win, and attacking individual Democratic candidates especially those in tight battles for seats that until this year were comfortably held by his Republican enablers. He’s so nervous about the possibility of a large Democratic wave that he’s gone from promising to send $5,000 victory checks to all adults if Republicans hold both houses to announcing that he’s sending a one-time $90 rebate payment to more than 20 million seniors enrolled in Medicare Part B to help offset their monthly premium.  For Medicare recipients who don’t pay the high-income penalty, the monthly premium for Part B is $202 so the $90 won’t even wipe out one month’s payment but money is money and it’s hard to see it, as well as his promised refund to Obamacare recipients, as anything other than a bribe. He’s also “persuaded” as in threatened “allies” to release some of their diesel reserves before the midterms to help bring down fuel costs. Ironically given his ongoing attempt to eliminate mail in voting, this weekend he told his supporters to vote now by any means possible while they pretend that his name is on the ballot.

The Battleground Races:  The Republican Senate leadership fund is no longer sending money to North Carolina, an indication that they know that there’s little they can do to prevent Democrat/former Governor Roy Cooper from beating their candidate, former RNC chair Michael Whatley. Funds are instead being directed to places like Texas and Kansas, two states that the Republicans thought they’d easily hold as well as to Iowa, Ohio, Alaska, Maine, Michigan, and New Hampshire, the last two being states where Republican could actually pick-up seats currently in Democratic hands. The polls in all of these states, including the ones that show Democrats leading, are mostly within the margin of error so while Democrats do stand a chance of regaining the Senate, it’s just as likely or maybe even more likely that Republicans keep control though with fewer seats.  Over the weekend 76-year-old Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito, said that though he has no firm plans to retire this year, retirement is something he thinks about at the end of every term.  It’s fair to believe that the Senate changing hands combined with a shove from Trump, would provide him with the impetus he needs to step down before January, allowing Trump to pull an “Amy Coney Barrett” style rush appointment. The specter of someone like Florida’s 45-year-old Aileen Cannon taking over Alito’s seat should scare the daylights out of all of us. One interesting piece of trivia, if former Senator Sherrod Brown wins his Ohio race, unseating Senator Jon Husted who was appointed by Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine to replace JD Vance, he’d be seated as soon as election results were verified, likely in December rather than January.  Republicans would still hold the majority but by one less seat, more if Mitch McConnell loses what appears to be his tenuous hold on life.  The impact that Governors have on close Senate majorities shouldn’t be ignored, especially this year when quite a few Governorships are expected to switch hands. Close state races to watch include Alaska, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Kansas with Kansas the only one likely to be a Republican pick up. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, at 93 the oldest member of the Senate, is keenly aware of the possibility that the winner of his state’s Governor’s race could be Democrat Rob Sand who is currently polling 8 points ahead of his Republican competitor.  In September Grassley whose term ends in January 2029, said that though he doesn’t plan on dying in office, if he does, he doesn’t want a Democratic governor choosing” his successor.  That fear cuts both ways, though he’s a moderate, Vermont’s governor Phil Scott who is expected to win reelection in November, is a Republican.  Vermont’s Senators, Independent Bernie Sanders and Democrat Peter Welch, are 85 and 79 years of age, respectively.  The impact that a sitting governor can have on the make-up of the Senate is something we should all think about when casting our ballots.  New Yorkers and Californians, take note, now isn’t the time to take your Governor’s races lightly.  

More 💩: Kristi Noem is gone from the Department of Homeland Security but as detailed by the NY Times she managed to spend $464 million on unneeded over-priced planes on her way out the door, benefitting of one of her Republican donors at taxpayer’s expense.  On the war front things have heated up between the Iran backed Houthis and Saudi Arabia.  The Trump administration is excluding several major allies, including the UK, France and some Baltic countries, from a NATO gathering, apparently those countries are on Trump’s “naughty” list and/or on a list of countries that Putin has told Trump to exclude possibly because in the case of the Baltic states they make up the countries he plans to target next? Rolling Stone which in addition to reporting on the music industry, also does a good job reporting on political news, has a new article out about how Secretary of War and Testosterone Pete Hegseth sidelined, and forced out former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll who’d been tasked with modernizing the army. Driscoll was in the process of making the army more adept at new modes of warfare, learning from the successes achieved by Ukraine with drones and AI during its war with the Russian behemoth. With Driscoll gone, Hegseth has turned the clock back to the old, less flexible, and more expensive methods…..and testosterone.            

 

 
Cowboys and Aliens 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢 💩

Deranged: A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that only 17% of adults approve of Trump’s handling of the cost of living with just 26% approving of his handling of the economy overall; 65% blame Trump’s policies for “persistently high costs more than factors outside of his control, signaling growing weariness over his aggressive use of tariffs and continued unhappiness with the war with Iran.”  Nevertheless, Trump keeps repeating to the press and in his campaign speeches that costs are way down and coming down further and that inflation is totally under control because “we’ve done a great job.” The bigly liar is hoping that repeating his big lie will make it believable and to be fair it’s worked for him before.   In an interview with Time Magazine, he attacked any polls that say otherwise or even suggest that he isn’t still wildly popular as fake news.  He said a lot of other crazy things during the interview. He bragged about his awesome construction projects, saying that focusing on them makes him happy while also asserting that the White House and its environs needed his gold embossed clean up not that his predecessors Sleepy Joe and that Black guy Obama who didn’t know the difference between clean and dirty would have noticed. He asserted once again that he has the highest of IQs because he shares genes with the MIT professor uncle he frequently cites. That high IQ thing also means that he understands AI better than all the poor schnooks who don’t want data centers built near their homes because according to Trump they’d rather remain poor and anyway he likes hobnobbing with all the tech leaders who have high IQs too.  Those tech bros who really do have high IQs may not have much in the way of social skills and at least in the case of Elon Musk are devoid of concern for the downtrodden, know that plying Trump with flattery and contributions while constantly whispering in his ear is the way to get what they want so despite polls indicating that fear of data centers is contributing to the Republican’s poor showing in the polls, Trump remains all in on data centers and unfettered AI.  Anyway, he doesn’t believe the polls because they’re fake and he’d beat anyone running against him by 20 points, not that he won any of his elections by more than a few. Trump also regrets ever appointing Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett to the Supreme Court because despite all the things they’ve allowed him to get away with including their ruling that he’s got immunity for everything, they’re ungrateful as evidenced by the ruling that has forced the refunding of tariff proceeds to “enemies.”  That enemy part reveals that he still thinks that tariffs are paid by “foreigners” rather than US corporations and consumers because the recipient of the tariff rebates have been Walmart, Target, Amazon, and other US corporations.  If all of this sounds like a jumbled mess, it’s because Trump’s interview with Time was incoherent.  His mental state, never stable, really is deteriorating.  Nevertheless, he’s still president and won’t rule out trying to declare martial law or the sending of one of his militias to polling places to disrupt the midterms.  The polls have him spooked.  We should be too.

Who’s the Weirdo?  Trump wasn’t the only one spewing crazy.  Secretary of War and Testosterone Pete Hegseth delivered his State of the Force speech to the troops, or at least those who were svelte and impeccably groomed enough to be allowed to attend. He announced plans to slash the number of generals and admirals. Getting rid of bloat, particular overhead bloat isn’t a bad thing, it’s just that who among us believes that Hegseth who has already targeted those who disagree with him and/or senior Black and female staff for being Black and female is the right person to make critical staffing decisions at any time but especially while the country is at war? He emphatically stated that his new improved fighting force would no longer include “fatties, trannies, beardos, weirdos, wimps, or radicals” because the “ideological clowns” are out to be replaced by testosterone infused “patriotic cowboys.” As to ROTC, he plans to move away from programs at Ivy league universities instead “partnering with a new crop of premier higher institutions, including Louisiana State University [LSU], Liberty University, Tuskegee University, Mississippi State University and Hillsdale College” institutions that “understand the faith of Jerusalem.” Notably, Hillsdale and Liberty are Christian colleges which fits with his other decision to establish an office of religious affairs reporting directly to him. There’s something very special about a guy whose been married three times, with children conceived with his soon to be wives while he was still married to his disposable former ones being all in on impressing his religious beliefs on others.  So much for separation of church and state.  Worth noting that VP Vance another one all into his religion who Hegseth envisions pushing aside in his quest to become president is a beardo. Hegseth also announced that he’s appointing Elon Musk who did such a good job with DOGE; thrice married Newt Gingrich, who dumped a cancer ridden wife to marry his next one; and Palmer Luckey, former Congressman Matt Gaetz’s brother-in-law to lead a new warfare initiative.  What could possibly go wrong? Hegseth, like his fearless leader Trump, is also all in on AI, particularly scary given that the US military almost started a war during the Spring when it came close to boarding a Chinese cargo ship in the Middle East after its AI chatbot “hallucinated” a false report claiming the vessel carried nuclear weapons components that it wasn’t carrying.

More 💩:  The Trump administration has started sending $500 “refund” checks to 950,000 Obamacare enrollees to “compensate” them for “overcharges” by that evil guy Biden, at least that’s essentially what the letters accompanying the checks will say.  The reality is that the people receiving the checks have seen their health insurance premiums go up as a result of the elimination of the ended insurance subsidies and while getting $500 is nice, that amount won’t offset their premium increases or cover much in the way of health care.  Then again, Trump is hoping that those who get the checks will show their appreciation by voting Republican in November and they might.  A Superior Court judge in the District of Columbia has permanently banned Former Foxie/US Attorney Jeanine Pirro from bringing charges against the Olympic canoeist who was accused of damaging the already damaged Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.  The judge cited the exceptional circumstances around the case, as in Trump’s calling for the canoeist to be punished, as one of the reasons behind his decision to permanently put an end to the farce.  On the subject of farces, this week’s Tennessee death penalty fiasco was a big one.  Morality of the death penalty aside, at $1.5 to $3 million per inmate pursuing it takes years and costs taxpayers 2.5 to 5 times more than just imposing a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.  Moreover, as demonstrated by this week’s failed attempt to execute convicted murderer Christa Pike with two rounds of lethal injection, imposing the penalty involves a gruesome, excruciating process that sometimes doesn’t work. The failure to execute Pike wasn’t even Tennessee’s first “failed” execution. Pike, unlike some others who’ve been put to death was guilty of a grisly murder, but that doesn’t mean that our state and federal governments should be responding in kind.  One more thing for today:  everything is wrong about what happened at Cornell. For starters there’s the out-of- control frat culture that facilitated the sexual assault, the local police that shrugged it off, the university that wouldn’t even refund the victim’s tuition, and NYS’s out-of-date consent law.  There’s probably more to the depressing story than has been revealed so far, but from what we know #WTF.   

                       

 

Dumb and Dumber 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢 💩

Idiocracy:  Yesterday was one of those truly stupid days which says a lot given how stupid so much has been lately.  For some unfathomable reason, instead of addressing something relevant like the high cost of everything, the Senate Judiciary committee held a hearing featuring former Special Counsel Jack Smith.  The committee’s objective, or at least the objective of its Republican members, was to “prove” that Smith was a “dirt bag” who’d unfairly targeted Republicans in an effort to bring down their MAGA hero.  Instead, in an incident now being referred to as Schmitt’s as in 💩’s creek, Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, one of Trump’s biggest fanboys,  actually called Smith a dirtbag while accusing him of committing perjury for denying that he’d attended an Atlanta Hawks basketball game during an alleged visit to Atlanta when he supposedly was colluding with Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis on how to take Trump down.  The problem for Schmitt, is that Jack Smith wasn’t in Atlanta, he didn’t attend an Atlanta Hawks game, and he’s never met or colluded with Willis. It turns out that Schmitt’s embarrassingly inept staff had erroneously interpreted a reference to “Hawks” in one of Smith’s texts.  Smith wasn’t in Atlanta at an NBA game on the referenced date or any other date during his tenure; however, he was in Maryland at an Iowa Hawkeyes college game watching Caitlin Clark who was then a college basketball star.  It wasn’t just that Schmitt’s staff’s incompetence had set him up for an epic faceplant, they also appeared to have previewed what they thought was their “gotcha” moment with the right-wing echo chamber because shortly after Schmitt made the perjury/dirtbag accusation, several right-wing apparatchiks took to social media with posts featuring Schmitt’s accusation as did Fox’s Sean Hannity.  Most of those social media posts were subsequently removed though Schmitt, who fancies himself as a possible Republican VP contender barely backed down.  Instead, he tweeted “who knew Jack Smith was a women’s basketball fan.”  For his part Jack Smith who appears to be incapable of lying, repeated the conclusions of his investigation: that Trump had committed multiple criminal acts in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election adding that the reason he’d obtained call logs from so many Republican politicians was because Trump called so many of them, rather than Democrats as part of his effort to overturn the election.  The Schmitt debacle was only the tip of the stupid.  Having renamed a Great Lake and a gulf, Trump has now signed an executive order directing all federal executive branch agencies to replace the term "artificial intelligence" (AI) with "Super Intelligence" (SI) because apparently renaming the technology eliminates the possibility of it running amok. Not that we are supposed to be concerned about AI going rogue because the billionaires running all the AI companies and the ones manufacturing the chips that are their lifeblood promise to do their best to make their errant bots behave and Trump says that they can be trusted because they like him love the country.  Trump who earlier promised to send $5,000 checks (AKA bribes) to all adults if Republicans manage to maintain control of the House and Senate after the midterms is now promising to send bonuses to people who allow data centers to be built in their communities, not that he’ll admit that the reason so many towns don’t want the data centers isn’t because they hate him or even fear progress but because their local electric grids and water systems don’t have the capacity to support data centers’ substantial utility needs.  Trump who probably doesn’t understand what AI is because really who does, is mostly concerned about what will happen to the equity markets and his substantial personal technology portfolio if AI companies and chip manufacturers aren’t allowed to move full speed ahead.  He’s right to be concerned because a major market dive before the midterms would turn the anticipated blue wave into a blue tsunami, one that could result in both houses turning deep blue.

More 💩:  Things are going about as well as expected at the FBI considering that FBI Director Kash Patel is a right-wing social media pundit who prioritizes flying on his government funded jet and attending his girlfriend’s concerts to actually doing his job.  Andrew Bailey, FBI co-deputy director who when he was hired last year was viewed as a potential successor to FBI Director Kash Patel, has resigned.  By current standards, Bailey was viewed as a somewhat competent, serious person, though that’s probably a bit of an overstatement given that he participated in this year’s Fulton County ballot grab.  Apparently, he never got along with Patel and finally lost it when two of his respected FBI counterterrorism agents who’d been tasked with investigating harassing phone calls being made to Stephen Miller’s wife/podcaster Katie Miller were “reassigned” for failing to aggressively pursue the threatening caller(s), a function that usually falls to local police rather than to the FBI. On the subject of terrorism, something is hinky about the alleged terrorist event that took place in the UK this week outside of a US airbase.  The five suspects, all British nationals in their twenties, who’d been picked up have been released on bail because no explosives were found in their vans 🤷‍♀️ 🤷‍♀️.  Lastly, for today, Trump is running taxpayer funded campaign ads touting his accomplishments.  That’s not normal, the ads aren’t public service announcements and paying for campaign ads violates the Hatch Act but it’s not like 👑Trump has to worry about following the law which also explains why he’s illegally rescinding $810 million of Health and Human Services funding appropriated by Congress.

 

Thirty-Six Days 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢 🐼 

Iran, Iran, China: Trump is all over the place on Iran.  Some days he says he might obliterate the Republic after the election, other days he says he might do that now, and sometimes he promises there will be a peace deal after the election.  He’s pushing for Iran to make nuclear concessions that they have no interest in making since he tore up their last nuclear deal and he insists that the Strait of Hormuz which is not open is open. So basically, nothing much to report except that an attempted terrorist attack, details still not disclosed, on a US base in Southern England from which US bombing raids have originated was foiled over the weekend.  Although there was lots of pomp and circumstance during Trump’s meeting with China’s President Xi, Trump achieved little, although Zoo Atlanta is getting two cute pandas 🐼 🐼 named Ping Ping and Fu Shuang. Some tariffs were postponed, but Trump has a habit of doing that.  China did not agree to stop aiding Iran but, according to US Ambassador David Purdue, contrary to long term US policy, Trump offered to sell Xi some US weapons, particularly notable since he’s been holding up delivery of weapons promised to Taiwan.  Trump did show Xi his unfinished new ballroom though he probably didn’t point out that its first architect, James McCrery II, resigned in October 2025 over disagreements about complying with fire safety and building code requirements with Trump insisting that those annoying requirements didn’t apply because as king he gets to write his own code, fire safety be damned. Maybe to show Xi that he too can suppress news coverage, Trump is still playing games with the US press corp.  Though he finally allowed CNN, MSNOW, and Politico back into the White House on Friday morning, over the weekend he refused to let CNN, which was scheduled to provide pool coverage, onto Air Force One.   

Midterm Madness:  The midterms are only 36 days away.  Trump’s polls continue to deteriorate which is why a few Republicans in competitive races, including some which shouldn’t be competitive but now are, have begun wiping him from their websites, backing off from supporting the Iran war and/or his deportation policies. Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, running neck and neck with David Jolly, the moderate Democrat who used to be a Republican, went the wipe route while Representative María Elvira Salazar of greater Miami ran an ad criticizing Trump's deportations, saying that his efforts have "gone too far,” likely because some of her constituents have seen family members shipped overseas while a few others have lost their gardeners. Trump reacted as expected with a few scathing Truth Social posts.  On the legal front, SCOTUS finally put the Missouri mishigas to bed.  At least for the midterms, Missouri will be required to stick with their old map, the one that keeps the Kansas City area in Democratic hands.  While that’s good news for Democrats, SCOTUS’ other decision wasn’t.  By a 6 to 3 vote, the Justices ruled that the Trump administration can use its revamped SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database to check voter citizenship. The SAVE system was originally built in 1986 to check the immigration status of people applying for public benefits.  Trump expanded it to include a link to Social Security records, something that lower courts ruled violated federal privacy laws and the Social Security Act. As if those violations aren’t bad enough, as constructed the database is inaccurate; it quite frequently misidentifies citizens as noncitizens.  The somewhat good news is that federal law prohibits the purging of voter databases within 90 days of an election, the not so good news is that Trump’s crowd is pushing for a reinterpretation of that law. Still, it’s likely that there won’t be enough time for SAVE related purges to take place before the midterms.  However, the voter purge crowd are playing the long game, gearing up to implement the SCOTUS suppression ruling in time for the 2028 presidential elections.   

More 💩: OpenAI admitted to the US government that a swarm of its bots went rogue, bypassing security controls and successfully pulling data from government websites including from the Commerce Department, the Education Department, and the SEC. While asserting that the swarms haven’t done any damage, OpenAI “admitted” that it hasn’t been very good about reporting its “invasions.”  In other AI news, on Friday an Appeals Court ruled that it was okay that the Pentagon had labeled OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic a national security risk after the company had pushed to block the Pentagon from using its Claude system for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.  So apparently it’s okay for Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon to use OpenAI, rogue bots and all, but it’s not okay for Anthropic to try to limit Claude? Nothing to worry about here because the buck stops with Trump and he says he’s a genius.  While AI, and its dangers have been getting lots of attention, no one should ignore what Measles spreader RFK Jr has been up to. He’s shifted $12 million that was allocated to minority health to pay for his security detail.  Moreover, while continuing to financially benefit from his former organization’s anti-vaccination efforts, he is working to overhaul the federal agency that shields vaccine makers from frequently frivolous lawsuits.  The legislation that created the agency had been enacted to ensure that pharmaceutical companies didn’t stop manufacturing vaccines.  Not only does RFK want to eliminate the protections but he also wants autism to be included among the allowable reasons to sue even though there is no evidence that vaccines cause autism.    

  

Hopium 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢

Pooling:  The press pool is back or at the very least should be.  Overnight, US District Court Judge Jim Kelly, the same judge who reinstated Jim Acosta’s credentials after they were canceled by Trump in 2018, said that the White House must lift Trump’s ban on CNN, MSNOW, and Politico.  Judge Kelly’s ruling wasn’t a surprise since Trump’s rationale for stripping the three media outlets had no merit.  It certainly didn’t help that Trump said that he stripped them of access to “his” house because of all the mean things they’d said about him.  The judge didn’t buy the DOJ’s attempt to pivot Trump’s pathetic rationale from personal petulance to national security and military concerns.  It certainly didn’t help that one of the DOJ’s examples of the faux national security risk was Politico’s use of an unnamed source for an article about Iran when the source was a presentation made by Veep Vance in a meeting where the White House asked Politico and the other media outlets in attendance to cite Vance as an unnamed source rather than to identify him by name.  Because the UN has its own press pool, Trump’s depressingly awful speech to the General Assembly yesterday was broadcasted far and wide yesterday.  During that speech he threatened to annihilate Iran if they didn’t concede to his demands while also changing the name of Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligence. It’s not clear why Trump thinks that renaming things and places is a solution to anything, but he does so AI is now SI, Lake Ontario is Lake America, and the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America.  Whatever.

MAHA Not:  It’s also not clear why JD Vance and Mehmet Oz think that bragging about stripping Vice President JD Vance announced that the Trump administration is removing roughly 750,000 to 760,000 enrollees from the Obamacare exchanges in the run up to the midterm elections where the chances of them faceplanting continues to grow makes sense by claiming that all of them were either improperly enrolled or do not exist, they did.  Spoiler alert, it’s highly unlikely that most of the cancelled individuals were committing fraud, but the administration that pardons billion-dollar fraudsters loves citing peons for fraud and according to Dr. Oz, anyone who hasn’t filed an insurance claim obviously doesn’t exist. Apparently the multi-homed wealthy Oz doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to understand that healthy people without vast financial resources frequently view health insurance, particularly policies with high deductibles, as something they only use when facing expensive health crises. In other health news, at least for now the White House has shelved a plan for Trump issue an executive order that would have established a commission with the power to block government funded research grants if the work funded by those plans didn’t align with Trump’s political agenda, not because Trump and Budget Director Russel Vought who would have had a prominent role on the commission don’t want to move forward with the order but because there was intense bipartisan pushback.

Midterm Madness: Despite Trump’s efforts to gerrymander away a midterm loss of the House through aggressive redistricting something that is still playing out in Missouri where the 9^th District Court is fighting with SCOTUS, it’s likely that the Democrats will regain control of the House, assuming of course that Trump and his MAGA abettors at the Department of Homeland Security and the DOJ don’t send troops to the polls, otherwise disrupt the elections and/or refuse to swear in the winners.  The Senate is a different story.  For most of this year the assumption has been that while it might be possible to hold Jon Ossoff’s Georgia seat while picking up North Carolina and/or Maine, it would be near impossible for them to regain control.  However, something appears to be happening in more than a few Senate races in reliably red states perhaps because voters are growing increasingly concerned about inflation and rising energy prices and maybe, just maybe are beginning to realize that their Orange MAGA god is more interested in enriching himself and his family than improving their lives.  If the blue wave is big some races that are close or shouldn’t even be close might go blue or independent.  Offsetting that, a lot of Republican billionaire and PAC money is now being thrown into the mix. In no particular order, these are the states to watch:

Georgia: Incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff appears to be leading his Republican competitor Congressman Mike Collins by anywhere from 5 to 10 points.  Ossoff is the Democrats newest darling.  Collins hasn’t been helped by a scandal involving a former senior staff member who was into all things Nazi.      

North Carolina:  North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis is not running for reelection in part because he lost Trump’s support and in part because it didn’t look like he could win reelection against former Governor Roy Cooper who is the Democrat’s candidate for the seat he’s now vacating.  The popular Cooper is facing off against former RNC chair Michael Whatley.  Polls indicate that Cooper is leading by 5 to 15 points.  North Carolina will be a Democratic pick-up unless the midterms go haywire.

Iowa: Current Senator Joni Ernst announced she wouldn’t be running for reelection shortly after dismissing her constituents concerns about Medicaid cuts by saying “everyone dies.” The Iowa race is between Republican Congresswoman Ashley Hinson and Democrat State Representative/Para Olympian Josh Turek.  Iowa hasn’t gone for a Democrat since Obama but as of now Turek is polling as much as 8 points ahead of Hinson. That’s good news but there was that infamous Iowa poll that showed Kamala Harris trouncing Trump in 2024 so while optimism maybe warranted it’s too soon to put Iowa in the category of Georgia or North Carolina.

Kansas:  Kansas, a reliably red state isn’t supposed to be in play. However, recent reports about incumbent Senator/OB-GYN Doctor Roger Marshall’s history of sending his patients’ accounts to collection agencies for debts as low as $100 appear to be hurting his brand.  While he is still leading, the Cook Political Report has shifted his race against Democrat Adam Hamilton from solid Republican to lean Republican. Ricketts will probably win but Republicans now have to allocate some money to holding Kansas.

Alaska:  Former Democratic Congressman/native Alaskan Mary Peltola is leading incumbent Senator Republican Dan Sullivan in quite a few though not all of the polls.  Alaska uses ranked choice voting, and the other Dan Sullivan is still on the ballot so it’s hard to tell who is really leading but Peltola stands a good chance of coming out on top.   

Ohio:  Ohio is another one of those states that has become increasing red over the years.  Former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown who lost in 2024 to current Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, father-in-law to wife abuser/Congressman Max Miller,  is making a comeback bid.  He’s currently polling 3 to 4 points ahead of incumbent Republican Jon Husted who replaced JD Vance when he became VP.  If any Democrat can pick up a Senate seat in Ohio, it’s Brown, a populist whose appeal historically has crossed party lines.   

Maine:  Maine is supposed to be one of the Democrats’ best pick-up opportunities.  However, incumbent Senator Susan Collins is well liked in the state and has a history of outperforming polls. It doesn’t help Democrats that her opponent Troy Jackson got off to a slow start after their first choice, Graham Platner, the Nazi tattooed oyster farmer and accused rapist, was ousted. Depending on the poll, Collins, despite a lot of people not forgiving her support of Justice Brett (Beer) Kavanaugh’s confirmation, is running neck and neck with Jackson.  Yesterday, ProPublica published an article detailing how, through her PAC, Collins received a campaign contribution from Novatek, a Hawaii based defense company in what looks a lot like a payoff for her support for them getting a lucrative government contract. The grift was being investigated by the DOJ’s anti-corruption unit but the investigation was called off after Trump took office. Of course, Collins denies everything.  Given the timing of the story and Collin’s habit of winning it’s not clear that voters who should care will care but maybe they will helped by rising energy costs and the Canada mess.  

Michigan:  Michigan has an open seat because Democratic Senator Gary Peters is retiring.  The race in the state is between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers.  Senator Peters won his last election by only 1.7 points and Michigan’s other Senator Elissa Slotkin, who ran against Rogers in 2024, won by only 0.5 points so holding the Michigan seat was never going to be easy.  At first it appeared that El-Sayed who eked out his primary win despite polling that had indicated he would easily win would be the underdog against the relatively normal for a Republican Rogers.  However, Michigan is one of the states most affected by Trump’s Canada shenanigans and rising fuel prices.  Sayed is now polling ahead of Rogers in most polls. 

Nebraska:  Nebraska is another reliably Republican state and incumbent Senator Pete Ricketts who is facing Independent Dan Osborn will probably hold his seat, but the state has lots of disgruntled farmers who have been hurt by Trump’s tariffs and rising energy costs.  Polling has been all over the place with some polls showing Osborn leading.  There’s a chance, albeit a small one that Osborn ekes out a victory even though he shouldn’t be able to.

New Hampshire:  New Hamphsire is another one of those states where the Democratic incumbent, this time Senator Jeanne Shaheen, is retiring.  The race is now between former Senator John Sununu, not to be confused with the more popular former Governor Chris Sununu, and Democratic Congressman Chris Pappas.  Pappas who only recently won his primary got off to a slow start and had been lagging Sununu in the polls, but he now appears to be in the lead.  New Hampshire is another state where high energy bills could sway voters blue.

Texas: Texas’s Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton has repeatedly cheated on his wife; he’s an awful person and is so corrupt that he was impeached by Texas’ Republican House.  He won his primary against incumbent Senator John Cornyn only because he got a huge lift from the corrupt guy in Washington.  Paxton is running against squeaky clean Democrat, State Representative James Talarico who is up by a few points in most of the recent polls but it’s Texas and Texas rarely fails to disappoint.  As proof of that yesterday, Paxton’s estranged wife who is suing him for divorce on biblical grounds urged voters to stick with him because she’d rather a flawed Republican than any Democrat. Still, hope or as political guru Tim Miller calls it “hopium” abounds so maybe just maybe this time Texas Democrats, buoyed by some disgruntled Hispanic voters who didn’t realize that Trump’s aggressive anti-immigrant push would put targets on their backs and some ranchers who are suffering will vote for Talarico or stay home.   

 

Gold Kryptonite 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢

Pressing Buttons:   The Houthis have ramped up their attacks, interest rates are up, gas and food prices are rising, and recent polls indicate that Trump’s approval rating is down with Reuters/Ipsos showing it at 32% and the American Research Group showing him breaking through 30% to 29%.  Egged on by surrogate wife/binkie Natalie, Trump’s solution to all the bad news was to announce on Friday that he would be banning CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House and from participating in his traveling press pool.  Over the weekend, he implemented his ban while also asserting that no one is more of an advocate for free speech than him; his definition of free speech, including speech that reports his greatness rather than the “fake” news reported by the outlets he banned and some others like the NY Times and the Washington Post who he threatened to add to his “no White House for you” list. Trump’s impetuous announcement came as a surprise to most of his staff, or so they say, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles but then again, most who aren’t his binkie, including Wiles actually go home at night.  CNN, MSNOW, and Politico are now suing to get their access back.  Their case has been assigned to District Court judge Timothy Kelly,  the same Trump appointed Judge who previously ordered that then CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials be reinstated after Trump stripped his away so it’s likely that theirs will be reinstated too.  The judge who Trump is already badmouthing, scheduled a preliminary hearing for Wednesday morning. CNN was due to run the White House press pool this week meaning that their cameras were supposed to provide and share live footage with the rest of the White House pool, however since they’ve lost, or at the very least temporarily lost their credentials, their camera teams were also subjected to Trump’s ban. In an unusual show of solidarity, ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC, the other four networks that make-up the White House’s camera pool, all refused to assume CNN’s spot in the pool rotation.  The White House and Trump still have press coverage but that coverage including the first flight into and out of Trump’s new toy, his White House heli pad, went off without professional video coverage and an audible feed because though Trump tried to fill the void with Trump TV, his network wasn’t up to the task. Though Trump’s schedule of United Nations meetings will be covered by the press, with the exception of his General Assembly speech which will be broadcast by the UN, most won’t have the level of camera and audio coverage that he feeds off of, kind of like “Superman” Trump is now traveling with his own form of kryptonite.  Although his Tuesday afternoon meeting with NYC’s Mayor Mamdani was broadcast cleanly, that was only because Mamdani invited the “banned” outlets to participate at their meeting which was held on his Gracie Manson turf.  Score one for Mamdani who at 5’11” appeared to be the same height as the 6’3” Trump.  🤷‍♀️ 🤷‍♀️

The AI Conundrum:  Hugging Face 🤗 🧸 which was acquired by chip maven Nvidia in September, isn’t just an emoji, it’s the name of an online platform and community where developers and researchers build, share, and collaborate on artificial intelligence and machine learning models.  Over the summer it was reported that in May and June OpenAI models running a Hugging Face cybersecurity evaluation started communicating among themselves making changes that were not initiated by humans.  As a result of what is now being called the Huggy Bear incident, the fear of AI running amok is now being taken seriously.  That fear which has been percolating within the tech community was further heightened after Jacob Coxon, a researcher who previously worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation from Anthropic, accusing top AI labs of racing toward self-improving superintelligence and "gambling with our lives.” As a result of Coxon’s warning and the Huggy Bear incident, which was just the tip of the iceberg, there’s been increasing pressure to slow down AI development until some guard rails, possibly in the form of a national and/or international regulatory agency can be put in place, something along the lines of the way that the proliferation of atomic weapons has been limited, or somewhat limited.  Trump’s first response, likely influenced by some of his tech bro donators and chip manufacturers is that no outside regulator is necessary because he’s a genius and anyway we need to stay ahead of China, to whom he as chief genius sold the advanced chips that they need to advance their AI aspirations. He’s now saying that he’ll create an AI force with an AI czar whatever that means.  What to do about AI development is now a political football, one with lots of anti-regulation money being thrown into the midterm elections. That Trump thinks he’s the genius who can determine what is and isn’t allowed, should scare all of us into believing that some rational framework and regulation is required.  Will we get there before AI gets us, maybe we should ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot?  Then again, maybe they like Trump aren’t the right decisionmakers. 🤷‍♀️ 🤷‍♀️.  

More 💩:  Trump announced that his planned Arc d’Trump will be a “top grade military complex” that will include drone and sniper capability. That is utterly ridiculous however, by saying that his triumphal arch is a military installation, he believes that he’ll be able to get the courts, especially his SCOTUS abettors, to sign off on it much the way that they signed off on his East Wing project when he added an assertion that his ballroom was a military installation in drag. On the subject of drag, Secretary of War and Beer Hegseth appears to be back to ensuring “his” male troops really are male and that they have adequate levels of testosterone.  To that end, in addition to checking that their waist measurements conform to his standards, he’s asked troops over 30 to report on their “spontaneous morning erections.”  Hegseth hasn’t weighed in on bestiality, but FBI Director Kash Patel has. Kash who needs to hire more FBI Agents to replace the ones he fired wants to eliminate a history of engaging in bestiality as an automatic disqualifier because sometimes the bestiality is the beast’s fault? He’s also okay if new recruits have engaged in prostitution or hired a prostitute as long they only did so three times more than ten years ago. On the subject of stupid acts, reports are that Don Jr has agreed to reimburse the oligarch who paid for some of his wedding festivities. That sounds like the right thing to do but there is no proof that he actually has paid him back or plans to do so.  Lastly, Trump has declared victory in his war with Denmark over Greenland, but what he’s really accomplished is the updating of a pre-existing long-term arrangement, something that could have been accomplished without offending allies and scaring Greenland into believing they were about to be invaded.