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.
