Thursday, August 27, 2026

Loose Tabs

The decision as to when to publish a Loose Tabs is pretty arbitrary. It's a neverending project, with no clear breakpoints. But after collecting a fair number of links over the first three weeks of August, I started to focus on wrapping this up after my August 22 Music Week (on Substack that's: (8:3)), and Wednesday night, I got to the end of my usual sources list. I did a bit of cleanup on Thursday: compiled the Table of Contents, made sure the internal anchors were set, added a couple pieces where categories seemed thin, but didn't make the rounds. So I don't have much that actually happened today. I'll move on to Music Week next. I may add a few things here (look for red change bars), or I may not. I expect it to be hot here for another 3-4 weeks, so I can't quite say that summer is done, but I'm running out of time to get many things done before the Jazz Critics Poll runs again — assuming it does.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically (12 times from April-December 2025, not much more often in 2026). My previous one appeared 26 days ago, on August 1.

By the way, I've been trying to write some more in-depth pieces on major issues (and/or personal peccadillos), using Substack as an email agent. I call this series Notes on Everyday Life. I used to have a pinned list of pieces here, but as they've grown, I've moved them into separate index. While I think they are all likely to be useful, the peace plan pieces on Iran and Israel are especially relevant today.

Table of Contents:

New Stories

Most stories fit into well-established categories, organized below as Major Threads. Some sources I lean on so regularly they have their own Regular Columnists section. I also have an End Matter section for dealing with regular occurrences like books, obituaries, and tweets. Stories that don't fit into any regular category appear under Miscellaneous Stories. However, occasionally a short-term story blows up to where it needs extra attention, in which case I included it here.

Examples from last time: The World Cup; Lindsey Graham; Trump's Nuclear Proliferation Deal with Saudi Arabia.

Trump's War on Canada: Wasn't this a South Park story?

Data Centers: I knew something was brewing when my most fascist cousin posted an anti meme about data centers. Cindy Holscher won the KS Democratic primary for governor riding the issue, as it works well against her Democratic opponent (endorsed by the current KS governor) and her future Republican opponent (who never saw a corporate graft he didn't like). I filed the first article under Electoral Politics, as it's not exclusively a Democratic issue, but when I found more, I moved them here.

  • Perry Bacon [06-16]: How opposing data centers can save democracy: "Author and organizer Astra Taylor explains why Democrats should capitalize on the growing opposition to AI data centers." I wasn't inclined to see data centers as an important political issue, but I've learned better than to argue tactics with Taylor. They are visible targets for several much deeper problems.

  • Boston Review [08-20]: The AI data center backlash: "Robinson Meyer, Nicholas Rabb, and Astra Taylor on the groundwell of local organizing and the movement's political shockwaves." Moderated by Lily Hu.

  • Dylan Scott [08-21]: The week the data center backlash exploded: "Politicians on the left and right are suddenly jumping aboard the anti-data center bandwagon."

  • Gabby Miller/Owen Dahlkamp [08-24]: Data centers' 'oh s--t' moment: "Some industry leaders fear voter backlash is turning into a lasting political crisis."

  • Nia Prater [08-24]: Politicians are suddenly competing to hate data centers the most: This is becoming a bipartisan issue, which means it's gotten a lot of negative attention. Trump remains clueless, but you knew that.

  • Astead Herndon [08-25]: The real reason voters hate data centers so much: "How the tech buildout became a defining midterm issue."

  • John Herrman [08-26]: The data-center backlash looms large ahead of the midterm elections: "The playbook for Democrats was already easy. Trump is making it even easier."

    If Republicans think you can't sell data centers in Texas, a deregulatory paradise with, for example, more visible oil infrastructure than anywhere else in the country, it's reasonable to wonder how they might be sold elsewhere. And it's easy to imagine how Trump circa 2016 would have weaponized an issue like this: with low conviction about the underlying issue but a strong instinct for which way the wind was blowing. They are building data centers and taking jobs from you; "big tech" is steamrolling real America to build its censorship/disemployment/cultural-influence machine.

    Instead, today everyone but the president is finding their place in the backlash.

  • Andrew Howard [08-26]: Everyone is making a U-turn on data centers as public support craters: "Democrats and Republicans, including those in battlegrounds, have rushed to take a more skeptical tone on the issue."

  • Aaron Regunberg [04-29]: Stop the AI build-out, start the fight: "Across the country, working-class communities are rising up against Big Tech's data center boom. A moratorium isn't the end goal — it's the only leverage we have to force real democratic control over artificial intelligence."

Major Threads

War on Iran: The war seems to have entered its absurdist, "waiting for Godot" phase. Trump started the war, based on Netanyahu's assurances and his own legendary "gut" instinct, that Iran had a glass jaw, and one punch would knock them out. He was wrong, as anyone who knew anything about Iran since 1979 could have told him, but evidently one of the qualifications when you only hire "the best people" is that they never talk back. Since then, neither Trump nor Iran particularly want to slug it out, but neither side will surrender, or settle for less, so we're stuck in this endless cycle where Trump makes insane threats, Iran calls his bluff, and the Gulf States quietly, behind the scenes, ease Trump down. Meanwhile, Netanyahu is happy as a clam, having secured cover for his slow-moving but systematic genocide.

  • Nolan Denaro [08-03]: Fox News screaming desperately into wind as Trump loses grip: "The popular rightwing network spent months building a case for the Iran War. Now they are invested in keeping up support, even if hosts have to skirt the truth."

  • Trita Parsi:

  • Jonah Shepp [08-05]: Trump needs to choose how to lose the Iran War: "It's time to accept strategic defeat and find the least bad way out." By the way, the "least bad way out" is the one that turns Iran into our closest possible buddy. Otherwise, both sides will just stew in resentments, which will lead to further conflicts, which will be as self-defeating as this one. Trump is actually blessed in this regard, as he's so mercurial he can spin on a dime and claim he was dancing. The problem is that he's allowed himself to be surrounded by hawks, who know that the easiest way to scuttle any peace overture is to flatter his self-concept as being a tough guy.

  • Kori Schake [08-06]: Why we should fight: "And where Trump went wrong."

  • Nahal Toosi [08-12]: The Iran War is a whole new level of quagmire for the US. The first statement here is laughably wrong: "The situation is reminiscent of the darkest days of the Iraq war, in the mid-2000s, when the US seemed unable to pull that country back from insurgency and civil war." The biggest difference is that the US isn't fighting in Iran now, like it was in Iraq. But if it was, the situation wouldn't be "reminiscent": it would be a whole lot worse, because the numbers would be worse, and the logistics would be worse. But also the US had a solution in Iraq: that was to turn the insurgency into a civil war, playing both sides against one another. It was kind of like trying to put out a wildfire with dynamite. It was ugly, and did America no credit, but it worked well enough that US forces were able to make a slightly more graceful exit then they did in Vietnam or Afghanistan. That, by the way, is not an option with Iran, as they don't have the sort of social fissures that the US can exploit like in Iraq. (Afghanistan arguably did, but the US wasn't able to exploit them there.) Quagmire in those cases was caused by inserting US troops into the middle of a population that didn't want them in the first place, and really hated them once they were there. So if there are no US troops in Iran, what kind of quagmire can there be? Well, it's the one in Trump's mind. He's trapped, not just by Iran but by his own allies, by his own subordinates, and above all by his own ego, especially his self-conception as a tough-guy leader.

  • Ryan Cooper [08-12]: Donald Trump invented a new forever war: "In Iran, he can't win and he can't lose either."

  • David Klion [08-12]: Trump's Iran disaster is making all his cronies look like fools: "Two foreign-policy camps are claiming Trump for themselves, while the Middle East fiasco humiliates every single one of them." Most prominently, Vance ("restrainers") and Rubio ("neocons"). "The restrainers see the neocons as Israel firsters and warmongers, while the neocons see the restrainers as antisemites and isolationists." The problem with this distinction is that while the neocons have been true-to-form since the 1990s, with antecedents among Cold War hawks, the "restrainers" have little in common with others outside of the administration that use that label and actually, you know, try to restrain America's hawkish impulses. Whatever Vance's beliefs may be, and sure, it's never been clear that he actually has any, his effectiveness has been nil. He is, more than anything else, a guy who's willing to go along for the ride. As for Tucker Carlson, and others critical of the neocons, he's simply out in the cold, having no effect at all. I am tempted, however, to identify a third group within the administration, mostly Kushner and Witkoff. While they are deeply tied to Israel, they're less wedded to its cult of power, and more inclined to view foreign policy as an auction game, with the spoils going to the highest bidder. Thus they can broker a deal that Netanyahu doesn't like, but only if the grift is worth the effort. In this they're closer to Trump than either of the ideological camps. Unfortunately, the problem with all three is that they have no concern whatsoever for justice, decency, or even propriety. Which means that they have no real chance of making a deal that any other side will be willing to live up to.

  • Cameron Peters [08-13]: The Iran war's mental toll on US sailors: "Sailors are sounding the alarm about conditions on the USS Lincoln."

  • Noah Berlatsky:

    • [08-17]: "Suckers and losers" as policy: "The plight of the USS Lincoln lays bare Trump's disdain for the troops." I think it also shows that for much of the post-Vietnam era, soldiers could sign up for the perks, knowing they'd be exposed to little danger or hardship, safe in the belief that their mere existence would deter war, and that their officers wouldn't risk starting one. That started to change with the neocons insisting on making shows of "shock and awe." What's new with Trump are three things: his war gamesmanship is completely unhinged; he's purged and reoriented the officer core so they support him over their troops; and the corruptness of the supply chain has reached the point where everything is breaking down, not that much of it ever worked in the first place.

    • [05-28]: Trump as no way out on Iran: "He can't win; he won't say he's lost. So he dithers." I was surprised by the date after I started adding this, as it could just as well have been written this week.

  • Djavad Salehi-Isfahani [08-18]: How Iran has staved off economic collapse despite the US-Israeli war: "Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has promised 'unprecedented' squeeze on Tehran. Why hasn't this worked already?"

  • Andrew M Leonard [08-24]: US can huff & puff, but without a political fix Iran won't come down: "Military force — and even economic pressure — without clearly defined outcomes has been the downfall of US war policy for decades."

  • Sam Fraser [08-25]: After 6 months of war, why aren't oil prices even higher? Interview with markets analyst Rory Johnston. It's mostly been China stabilizing the system: having bought up substantial reserves before the war, they've been able to cut back demand since the war ended. How long this will last isn't clear.

Israel: The focus here is on Israel's wars, especially against their own people, and on internal Israeli politics. A second section will address Israel's relations with the world, especially the US.

  • Qassam Muaddi:

  • Saleh Abbas [08-08]: How Palestinians have resisted weaponized 'development' from the British Mandate to the Gaza Board of Peace: "The Gaza Board of Peace is the latest attempt by colonial powers to use 'development' plans to manage, fragment, and dispossess Palestinians. Palestinians have resisted these plans in the past and continue to do so today."

  • Aseel Mafarjeh [08-10]: 'Is this how our story ends?' Palestinian refugees live in fear as Israel takes aim at West Bank camps: "Amid escalating raids and statements by Israeli officials promising a massive military operation against refugee camps in the West Bank, Palestinians in Ramallah-area camps say it's not a question of whether their turn will come, but when."

  • Majd Jawad [08-11]: The struggle to save the Palestinian wheat fields on the front lines of Israeli settler violence: "For generations, Palestinian farmers timed the wheat harvest by the stars and the rain. Now, Israeli settlers set the harvest instead, as their cows graze freely in Palestinian wheat fields across the West Bank after displacing Bedouin herders."

  • Jamal Kanj [08-14]: The Gaza peace Trump announced, and the rejection Netanyahu delivered: "Since the ceasefire of October 10, 2025, Israel has violated it more than 4,000 times, murdering 1,300 Palestinians — more than all the Israelis, soldiers and civilians, killed on October 7. The territory Israel was supposed to withdraw from has instead expanded from 53% to 70%."

  • Connor Echols [08-18]: US cries foul as Israel bombs Turkey-linked airbase in Syria: "Tel Aviv's quest to portray Ankara as the 'new Iran' is leading to tensions with the Trump administration."

  • Seamus Malekafzali [08-20]: The Mossad suffers a crushing defeat entirely of its own making: "High profile firings show that none of the Israeli spy agency's promises about the war with Iran have come to pass."

  • Ghada Majadli [08-24]: What's behind Israel's growing assault on West Bank healthcare: "Seeking to push Palestinians off their land, Israel is targeting the infrastructure that sustains life — and the institutions long tied to the anti-colonial struggle."

  • Janet Abou-Elias [08-25]: Forest fires just the beginning of Israel's destruction of Lebanon: "US aid is allowing IDF to systematically blow up villages, spray herbicide, shoot white phosphorus — making the land uninhabitable in the south."

    In early 2026, Israel added a third tactic: aerial spraying of glyphosate, a controversial herbicide, across roughly 11 miles of the southern border. Israeli officials described this to Lebanon's U.N. peacekeeping mission as routine vegetation management using "approved substances," intended to clear dense brush that could conceal infiltration. Lebanon's agriculture ministry found levels 20 to 50 times higher than normal agricultural use, which could sterilize soil and prevent regrowth for years. Independent Dutch research organization PAX estimated between 1,000 and 1,600 acres of land affected on the Syrian side of the border alone, with additional spraying on the Lebanese side that satellite imagery did not fully capture. . . .

    The herbicide is blanketing land already stressed by years of phosphorus and heavy-metal contamination, compounding damage to soil, pollinators, and an agricultural economy that roughly 80% of southern Lebanon depends on.

  • Jason Ditz [08-25]: UNIFIL reports Israel wiping out entire neighborhoods in Lebanon: "Systematic not selective."

    This is not incidental damage done in the course of an invasion. Rather there is substantial evidence that this destruction is broadly the point of the invasion and occupation, with Israel displacing well over a million civilians from southern Lebanon and Defense Minister Israel Katz saying in June that certain villages, which Israeli troops were actively burning to the ground at the time, "must disappear."

    How much of Lebanon is being made to "disappear" remains a matter of substantial contention rhetorically, but Israeli forces persistently are attacking civilian targets across Lebanon's south and setting fires in towns and even forests in the area.

    A more substantial concern is that occupied southern Lebanon seems to be facing a more or less permanent Israeli occupation, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry published a map earlier this month, on a totally unrelated issue, which showed Lebanon as a substantially smaller country and much of the south as effectively Israeli territory.

    Demolitions continued today, and the Israeli military set fire to olive groves in the area of Bint Jbeil. That area, like much of southern Lebanon, is heavily dependent on an agriculture economy, and the invasion has focused its attention in part on destroying farmlands and orchards.

  • Inès Abdel Razek [08-25]: Why we shouldn't call colonial Israeli settlers 'terrorists': "We need to collectively rethink describing Israeli settlers as "terrorists." The label was designed to serve imperial interests, and it implies that settler violence is an aberration, not a systemic part of Zionist settler colonialism."

  • Ioannis Vlahos [08-25]: Israel developing offensive space capabilities: "Israel is currently prepared to begin development of offensive space capabilities, including systems designed to defend Isareli satellites from hostile spacecraft, and weapons (including lasers) capable of striking targets from space." Quotes Netanyahu: "As of today, no country has the ability to mount attacks in space. We must be the leading country in the world with this capability." Why?

  • Sami Sawalmeh [08-25]: Under Israel's watch, Palestinian gangs are sowing chaos in the West Bank: "By turning a blind eye to armed criminals while constraining Palestinian police, Israel is 'engineering lawlessness' to deepen its control over the territory."

  • Aharon Porath/Roei Kleitman [08-26]: Armed Israeli settler 'hikes' aren't new — but they're becoming deadly: "A spate of recent killings have resulted from settlers trekking the West Bank under military escort, expanding Jewish presence at Palestinians' expense."

  • Meron Rapoport [08-27]: Netanyahu's 'total victory' vow kept him in power. Now it may be his undoing: "With the coalition trailing in the polls, it seems the severe costs and unattainable goals of Israel's ever-expanding wars are coming back to bite."

Israel-American-World Relations: This section deals with Israel's relations with the world, especially the US, both at the state level and regarding public opinion.

  • Shaul Magid [07-28]: The hate at the "united against hate" Jewish anti-Mamdani rally, NYC, Sunday July 26: A first-hand reflection. One note here is how the pro-Israel demonstrators directed their hatred at anti-zionist haredim counter-demonstrators. I'm not surprised by any part of that, but I imagine many people will be.

  • Shaiel Ben-Ephraim [07-28]: The disastrous Bibi-Trump meeting: July 28, 2026 insider briefing: "Bibi had to pay a price to get this meeting, but Trump gave him nothing but a photo. Trump is angry now. Will anything change?"

  • Michael Arria:

  • Mitchell Plitnick:

    • [08-07]: Trump and Israel are demanding that Palestinians disarm. Here is why that is wrong and unjust. "Demands that Hamas disarm follow decades of international calls for a 'demilitarized Palestinian state.' These demands insist that Palestinians surrender their right to self-defense, a right no people should relinquish." I've run out of patience with anyone's "right to self-defense," as it's very hard for anyone armed to recognize limits in real time. Sure, self-defense is sometimes an acceptable excuse. But to call it a right invites abuse, especially when one side has such disproportionate power that no one dares to hold them accountable: Israel, most obviously. And aren't rights, by definition and necessity, universal? Israel never admits as much. They insist on their right to self-defense, but deny that right to anyone else. Why should anyone respect a "right" that is denied to oneself and others? Still, the more you scratch, the more problems arise here. One is whether arms are always useful for self-defense? I'd argue that often they are not. There is considerable historical evidence that Palestinians are even more vulnerable when they are armed than when they are not, and that their self-defense has made their situation more precarious, not more secure. But that's not do the arms. That's due to living in an area where powerful groups are able to inflict violence without fear of consequences (again, like in Israel). But while I would like to see everyone disarm, I don't normally lose much sleep about it. I live in a state where lots of adults own guns (Google says 48.9%) yet very few of them ever shoot anyone (Google says "a tiny fraction of 1%" but admits nobody's really counting). Arms are certainly more dangerous in Israel, and especially in the Occupied Territories, but the same number of arms would be much less dangerous if there was a system of justice that worked to protect everyone, as opposed to the current one where only some people have rights, including the right to kill others with impunity, and others have none.

    • [08-13]: The Mecca Pact is the latest sign of US's declining influence in the Middle East: "The new defense agreement among Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan highlights how Israeli aggression is compelling the region to reconfigure its alliances and serves as the latest evidence of the United States' declining global influence." I'm not making much sense out of this, beyond the obvious point that the more aggressive states in the region (including the UAE as well as Israel, Iran, and the US) are not to be trusted, but the three states still overly rate their own militaries.

    • [08-23]: The real reason Netanyahu added Mamdani to his 'enemies list': "Netanyahu's campaign billboard lumps Zohran Mamdani with Iran and Hezbollah as an 'enemy,' an admission that he's losing America, and that no successor will fix Israel's underlying apartheid problem." Netanyahu's campaign billboard, proclaiming "They want Netanyahu to lose. Don't let them succeed", pictures Mamdani along with the heads of Iran, Türkiye, and Hezbollah. Is it worth noting that Israel has already murdered the predecessors of two of those?

  • Caitlin Dewey [08-10]: Israel can afford to lose US aid: "Ending military aid would mark a real break with Israel. But it may not change Israeli policy toward Palestinians." This is a rather bogus argument. Israel's behavior after a cutoff of US military aid could get more restrained, or it could get even more murderous. In theory, the US would lose whatever leverage the aid offered, but the US has rarely tried to exercise any leverage: last time I recall was when Bush II threatened a hold to get Sharon to pay him more lip service, but the move ultimately had no effect. One problem here is that when pundits look at this, they assume everything else stays the same. If the US wanted to restrain Israel, there's lots more they can do: like cutting economic aid, and stopping diplomatic cover in the UN. But Trump doesn't want to restrain Israel — at least not as long as war returns profits to him.

    • Eric Levitz [08-10]: What would actually happen if the US cut off aid to Israel? "The left is winning the debate on military aid. But changing Israel's behavior likely requires going further." If "changing Israel's behavior" is the standard, we're doomed. I'm not quite saying that nobody ever changes behavior, but it's really difficult. Israel is an intensely racist, intensely violent society, and those traits go very deep in their psyches. US policy isn't going to change all that. About the best the US can do is to stop reinforcing that. As long as they think that America will always have their back, it's only natural that they'll push their limits, just to see how much they can get away with. That goes all the way back to 1948, and very rarely have they had to back down (e.g., to Eisenhower over Suez in 1956, to Carter over Lebanon in 1978, to Bush over Iraq in 1990; is there a more recent example?). It may be true that without American aid, Israel could become even more unhinged. (While they've been charged with genocide, they haven't fired up the oven yet.) But cutting off American aid would reduce American complicity in everything they do, which would be good for how the world views America, and for how we think of ourselves. It might push Americans to look for peace via diplomacy elsewhere — a good thing, given that we've pretty clearly demonstrated that peace based on deterrence is a completely bankrupt theory.

  • Ramzy Baroud [08-14]: Solidarity is not enough: Why the world must force accountability on Gaza now: But there is no world. At least there's no world that thinks coherently, much less can force anything on Israel. Trump will never cross Israel. Europe doesn't dare challenge Trump. Same for the Arab or other Muslim states, where the notion that the US has gone insane in love of Israel has been normalized. China understands the virtues of minding their own business. The Left everywhere is pinned up against the wall. One might sympathize, but feeling solidarity is easy; acting on it is impossible. Even sympathy is being treated as criminal by out-of-touch prosecutors in the US, UK, and Germany. It's not like no one knows or feels better. If public shame could budge Israel, wouldn't it have at least registered by now? I find myself contemplating an essay which asks, "Is It Possible to Negotiate a Gentler Genocide?" The deal is that the UN ("the world") would agree to facilitate the transfer of most Palestinians, provided that Israel pulls back and restrains its military and civilian groups. I say "most" because I'm assuming that there is a minimal number of Palestinians that most Israeli will find tolerable (30%? 20%? 10%?), and that once that level has been reached everyone left can enjoy equal rights. Sure, there are Israelis for whom the only answer can be 0%, much as there were racists who invented the one-drop rule (which even Hitler found ridiculous). I will be clear that this would still be genocide (or "ethnic cleansing" if you prefer that fundamentally obscene term), but it could be more tolerable if one could rig incentives so that most Palestinians would want to leave, and feel like they had a degree of free choice in doing so. My belief is that perpetual war and resistance only makes matters worse. Still, one has to suspend conscience to propose such a thing, and Palestinian leaders, whose careers depend on conflict, will be unhappy. And even conceding so much, it's probable that the rulers of Israel would still reject. At least some of them seem to crave the sense of power that comes with killing, capturing, torturing, razing, crippling, and otherwise harassing Palestinians. I doubt they would even take such a prospect seriously unless the US and EU signed on to such a deal, and backed it up with the threat of sanctions. And they have their own reasons for avoiding the subject: those who still hope for international law, where opposition to genocide is fundamental, don't want to admit how badly they have failed, and those (like the US) who have built up an irrational belief in pure power politics see peace and diplomacy as signs of weakness.

  • Thomas S Karat [08-14]: The two terrorists: Britain jails tweets while the West crowns al-Qaeda's man in Damascus.

    Next Monday, at Kingston Crown Court in London, a 72-year-old grandfather goes on trial for terrorism; the evidence is a tweet of seven words, and the maximum sentence is 14 years. . . .

    Take the pensioner first, and take his record in full, because the prosecution will. Greenstein was expelled from the Labour Party in 2018; he lost a libel action against the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which had called him a "notorious antisemite," the court finding the phrase protected as honest opinion; he accepted a suspended sentence over a Palestine Action attack on an Elbit arms factory. He is abrasive, litigious and unrepentant — a Jewish socialist from Brighton, a carer, the son of an Orthodox rabbi who marched against Mosley's Blackshirts. None of that is the charge. The charge is that in November 2023, goaded by an anonymous account demanding he declare himself, he posted: "I support Hamas against the Israeli army." Five weeks later, at 6:30 in the morning, counter-terrorism officers took his computers and phones, held him for nine hours, and released him under conditions that banned him from posting about the war at all.

    Much more in the article about the prosecution of Greenstein and others caught up in the trap of not saying the right things about Israel. As for the guy in Syria, I don't much care about him. Things change, and it's easy to move from "terrorist" to upright citizen. (If Menachem Begin isn't a very good example, then Nelson Mandela.)

  • Yoav Litvin [08-14]: The crocodilian logic of Zionism: "The latest example of this dynamic came when Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir proposed surrounding Ketziot prison with a moat of Nile Crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus) to guard Palestinian prisoners" — an echo of Trump's "Alligator Alcatraz" proposal. Author is a psychologist, with a book coming out, co-authored by historian Ilan Pappé: Wired to Steal: Zionism and the Shaping of the Western Mind.

  • Ali Abunimah [08-14]: US judge tosses Harvard case branding Gaza solidarity as anti-Jewish terror.

  • Blaise Malley:

    • [08-14]: The road to Trump's heart goes through Israel: "String of newly elected governments in Latin America strengthen ties with Tel Aviv, in hopes of currying favor with Washington." Wasn't that also the rationale when most Latin American nations voted for the UN partition of Palestine in 1947? Still, with Trump and Netanyahu, this time is more of an ideological tell. And while it's unclear what America gets from the deal, fascists in Latin America should be good customers for Israel's advanced police-state tech.

  • Nick Cleveland-Stout [08-17]: Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots: "In just over a week, the Hanover Institute has published at least 100 articles that appear tailor-made to influence chatbots."

    The organization churns out think-tank style reports on questions such as "Does AIPAC Use 'Dark Money' in Elections?" and "Is Israel Carrying out a Deliberate Campaign of Starvation in Gaza?" . . . A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc. . . . The institute's "data reports" have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini. Piro's website says that it "author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility," describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as "LLM poisoning." . . .

    Israel has also contracted former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale to create pro-Israel websites engineered to influence chatbots as part of a $46.5 million contract. A Drop Site investigation last month found that many chatbots, particularly Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, had been successfully trained on data from those websites. Other chatbots frequently cite those websites without flagging them as part of an Israeli influence operation.

Ukraine, Other Hot Spots, and World Politics: A catch-all, where the focus is away from, but not unaffected by, Trump's wars.

  • Stephen Crowley [07-31]: Russia, Ukraine, and the danger of escalation: The essential fact is that the Ukraine war is a stalemate. That should mean some kind of settlement based on current lines, but neither leader feels they can settle for that, so the temptation to escalate on some other plane may seem like the only way out. An example of this was the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, which after the lines froze turned into a missile war. We're already seeing examples of that. I don't care to speculate on how bad it might get, but both sides are already way beyond what we should accept.

  • Giorgio Cafiero [08-12]: When US left Afghanistan, China moved in. So how's it going? "Five years on, Beijing's relations with the Taliban are a study in pragmatism and patience, but not exactly as expected."

  • Vijay Prashad:

    • [08-14]: Cuba after six months of the oil blockade: Crisis and the road to recovery.

    • [08-21]: The ugliness of Latin America's angry tide: "Of the twenty states generally thought of as being part of Latin America, eleven now have governments of the far-right." I'm surprised at this, especially given that many of these same nations had left-leaning governments in recent years. This suggests to me that power in those countries is so deeply entrenched that it tends to survive mere electoral change. Or that typical leftist policies are so limited in their reforms that they are unable to build up any mass constituency. Either way is a shame, as the right has nothing but violence and corruption to offer.

  • Stephen Costello [08-17]: US diplomatic incompetence is tanking hopes for Korean peace: "It's time for South Korea to take the lead in seeking detente with the North." Actually, there has been detente since 1953. The problem is that the US and/or South Korea have never felt the need to take the next step and normalize relations. The relationship between the US and the South has helped the South grow prosperous, while the sanctions and isolation against the North has made them poor and bitter. The gap has grown so enormous that bridging it, like the Germans did in 1990, is inconceivable. It's not like it actually worked very well in Germany. We have many more examples of former communist economies collapsing after liberalization, so the sort of triumphal march Washington has been dreaming of is probably the worst-case scenario. The best-case is probably just to let the South take baby steps toward opening the North up: increase trade, acting as a gateway, while holding the US military at bay, with mutual measures to reduce security anxiety. I doubt Trump's gang can or will do anything to help here, but maybe a bribe can ease them out of the way?

  • Branko Marcetic [08-18]: The never-ending myth of a looming Ukrainian 'breakthrough': "For years, hawks have used rosy analysis of Kyiv's military momentum to make the case against real negotiations."

  • Anatol Lieven [08-20]: "A decent respect to the opinions of mankind" mandates a search for peace in Ukraine: "Why the new American left should take up the quest for peace if the Democratic Party wins control of Contress this November, and of the presidency in 2028." I don't see how winning in 2026 will make much difference here. Where cutting aid to Israel may slow down their warmaking, peace in Ukraine depends on Putin coming to an agreement with Trump and/or Zelensky and/or Europe, none of which depends much on US appropriations. A new president would be a different manner.

Trump's World of War: I set this section up to deal with Trump's threats of war. We're obviously beyond that now, so see the section on Iran for more on that.

  • Ariana Aspuru/Noel King [08-01]: Why Trump is at war with the International Criminal Court: "Secretary of State Marco Rubio has promised to 'dismantle the ICC.'" I have a lot of problems with the way the ICC was designed, and with how it is run. I don't mind their focus on individuals, but they should also be able to target states, and non-state organizations. They should investigate charges, and issue findings of fact based on the best available evidence. Those findings should be reopened and revised as new evidence becomes available. They should seek out all views, but shouldn't depend on cooperation of those charged. They may be tried in absentia. On the other hand, they shouldn't have powers of enforcement, or of incarceration. Their findings may be used in evidence by various state courts that choose to prosecute such things. I think it proper that this only be done in one's own state, so it is up to Russia to prosecute Putin, Israel to prosecute Netanyahu, the US to prosecute Trump. Prosecuting other nation's leaders is improper interference and unnecessary hostility. In any case, I believe that there should be a global right to exile, which would severely curtail the ability of any nation to prosecute its former leaders. (However, if someone is charged by the ICC, any state that wanted to do so could lay claim to that person's property, which may cramp the style of some such criminals.) On the other hand, the need for something like the ICC is pretty clear: people and organizations that start wars and commit crimes against humanity should be clearly identified, with their crimes fully detailed. The problem that Trump, Rubio, Netanyahu, etc., have with the ICC is that they wish to be exempt from investigation, and free to commit their crimes with impunity.

  • Jennifer Kavanagh [08-04]: US is the real loser if Senate passes virtue signaling Russia sanctions: "Lawmakers will feel good voting for Lindsey Graham's 'passion project' but ti won't end the war and if anything hurts American economic and political interests."

  • Khaled Elgindy [08-05]: Bored of Peace: Why is Trump undermining his own Gaza plan? "For a few fleeting days, there was a deal that would have disarmed Hamas and secured an Israeli withdrawal from the strip."

  • Dave DeCamp:

  • Dan Grazier [08-11]: Trump's $23 billion ship will be outdated before it even hits water: "In an era of cheap drones, the new battleship is overly reliant on expensive and highly vulnerable technology."

    The U.S. Navy has a poor shipbuilding record in the 21st century. The Zumwalt-class destroyer, the Littoral Combat Ship, and the Constellation-class frigate have been complete failures. The final verdict of the Ford-class aircraft carrier is not yet in, but when the ship's crew can't even rely on the sewage system to work properly, the case isn't looking too good.

    It becomes clear reading through the CBO's report that Navy officials in Washington have learned nothing over the past 25 years from their shipbuilding mistakes. In typical Washington fashion, the new ship is being touted as "the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built," as President Donald Trump put it. In practical terms, the ship will be armed with "antiair, land-attack, and antiship missiles, hypersonic missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, large lasers, and a rail gun (a weapon that uses electromagnetic energy to fire nonexplosive projectiles at hypersonic speeds)," according to the CBO.

    All of these systems will require a tremendous amount of electrical power to operate. To meet this challenge, the new ship will also be nuclear-powered. The addition of a nuclear reactor will dramatically increase both the cost and complexity of the ship's construction.

    The original sin of all the Navy's 21st century shipbuilding failures is a lack of design discipline. The architects of each program attempted to incorporate every gadget the technologists could imagine, several of which (including cutting-edge rail guns) remain unproven to this day. Excess complexity drives up costs and delays delivery, often by years.

    Of course, it's not just the Navy that's been designing overly expensive "cutting edge" weapons systems that rarely live up to their billing. Like the F-35.

  • Mark Thompson [08-13]: US looking for 'new creative' ways to fight a war it's already 'won': "Trump attempts to spend his way out of a politically disastrous conflict with Iran, while the Air Force and Navy grapple with the usual production problems."

  • Andre Pagliarini [08-15]: Trump gets real about US dominance of Latin America: One thing I've found curious is how rarely the Monroe Doctrine has been tested, let alone invoked. Granted, it suggested an imperial sphere of influence, but both US corporate penetration of Latin America in the 19th century and the gunboat diplomacy and Cold War exploits of the 20th followed their own logic, regardless of Monroe. Same for Trump today, but Monroe doesn't offer any legitimacy for what is basically just gangster culture.

  • Cameron Peters [08-17]: The Trump-Kim Jong Un bromance comes roaring back: "A new test for the US-South Korea relationship as Trump curtails joint military exercise." I wonder which of Trump's idiot-sycophants thought this would be a good idea. I don't doubt that there is a deal to be had here, but it's basically the same one Trump is denying in Iran: give them normal relations and the imagined threat will wither away, but don't expect them to disarm while you continue to treat them as an enemy. But Trump couldn't do that when he had the chance — sure, Bolton and Pompeo, who sabotaged every move he made, are no longer there, but their replacements are little better, and he's proven to be utterly untrustworthy.

  • Austin Campbell [08-19]: Officials says 'America-hating' media to blame for USS Lincoln outrage: "Yet upon request, the Pentagon won't say whether reports of dire conditions on the aircraft carrier, at sea since 2025, are inaccurate."

  • Jesse Coburn/Ruth Talbot [08-20]: The $trillion black box: "The US military budget is vast and opaque. Projects end up facing delays and ballooning costs." This doesn't even go into the real beauty of defense procurement: you're buying stuff that doesn't do anything useful, so you'll never know whether it works or not (at least until it doesn't).

  • Jason Linkins [08-22]: Trump hates the troops. The troops are taking notice. "The administration is desperately trying to spin the hopeless war in Iran as a success, but our service members and their families are telling a different story."

  • Stavroula Pabst [08-25]: A trillion budget but military can't 'afford' to attack mold on bases? "New GAO report says there is a $285 billion repair backlog behind toxic conditions in housing and facilities across the country."

Trump vs. Law and/or Law vs. America: From ICE to the Supreme Court and the assault on democracy.

Trump's Administration: Trump can't remake America in his own image (i.e., destroy the country, culture, and civilization) just by himself. He needs help, and having largely purged the government of civil servants and replaced them with his own minions, this is what they are doing — whether he's paying attention or not, and that it's mostly not is no excuse: he sets the tone, then distracts the media with his own insanity.

  • Julian Scoffield [05-22]: Who died when Elon Musk killed USAID?: "Nicholas Enrich's new memoir details the human toll of the agency's dismantling." The book is Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID (with a foreword by Atul Gawande).

    The memoir also documents something more deliberate than incompetence. Mark Lloyd, whom Trump tapped as USAID's assistant administrator for global health, for example, was not ignorant of the agency's work; he was contemptuous of it. Enrich recalls how Lloyd's "eyes lit up" at the opportunity to enact vengeance on the "list" of agency employees that had apparently wronged him.

    It was a combination of administrative incompetence and malice, and the book illustrates the grim process by which dull bureaucratic procedures can end up killing human beings en masse. Meetings are held, emails are sent, phone calls are made, and something like 520,000 children die of malnutrition, diarrhea, tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV. As the book goes on, it becomes clear it was more the second explanation rather than the first — DOGE's destruction of the agency was driven primarily by animosity rather than ignorance.

    The death toll continues to grow, as in this report, at 762,000.

  • Tomy Romm/Brad Plumer [07-24]: Trump administration admits canceling grants to states that did not vote for him: "Federal officials said in court documents that they halted billions of dollars in funding for energy projects to states 'based solely' on whether they backed President Trump in the 2024 election."

  • Martin Austermuhle [08-03]: Let's talk about the massive parking garage Trump wants to build at Dulles: "The 32,000-spot deck would surpass both existing parking capacity and what airport officials have said is needed."

  • Cameron Peters [08-10]: Trump takes aim at childhood vaccines: "Fewer vaccines, more uncertainty: What to know about Trump's vaccines order."

  • Anat Shenker-Osorio [08-13]: Stephen Miller's secret campaign against helpless kids: "That it's happening in the shadows doesn't make it less of a moral blight."

  • Mike Young [08-13]: The registry is dead: "The treasury just made permanent the deletion of a shell-company ownership database the first Trump administration once praised. The stated reason was paperwork burden." Quotes Casey Michel as saying: "Creating this new shell company registry a couple years ago was the single-greatest anti-corruption step the US had taken in decades." Just in case you wonder why Trump would want to get rid of it.

  • Brian Karem [08-14]: The worst White House press secretary of all time: "Karoline Leavitt is leaving the White House. She won't be missed by the media she mocked and despised." More on Leavitt:

  • Sasha Abramsky [08-14]: Trump is trying to sabotage the health of all our kids: "His executive order on vaccines is classic Trump: authoritarian, nonsensical, and deadly."

  • Kristin Collier [08-14]: What happens when 8 million people lose their student loan repayment play: "As the Biden-era SAVE plan ends, borrowers are facing unaffordable bills, lost payment records, and errors that have falsely put some into default."

  • J David Goodman [08-15]: Trump backed away from a wall at Big Bend. But the bulldozers are here: "Over the objections of environmentalists, local sheriffs and some state leaders, the Trump administration appears to be moving ahead with border infrastructure in one of Texas' most beloved parks."

  • Bess Levin [08-17]: Trump admin gave the Trump family's crypto company the okay to start a bank: Sen. Elizabeth Warren: "This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen."

  • Cameron Peters [08-17]: Trump's latest assault on public lands: "Why the Trump administration wants to build roads through protected forests."

  • Elie Mystal:

    • [08-19]: The Trump plan to cook the census books: "From adding a citizenship question to not tracking race and ethnicity, the administration wants to minimize Black and brown political power."

    • [08-21]: Trump's ballroom isn't just a farce anymore — it's a threat: "how the ballroom could gut key environmental protections." By the way:

      In other terrible environmental news, the Trump administration has authorized the sale of a 31 million-acre tract of seafloor off American Samoa for deep-sea oil mining. The planned sale, which represents yet another depressing first (the first time this country has opened its waters for deep-sea plunder), threatens the precious and vulnerable ecosystem off the Rose Atoll.

  • Anne Kim:

    • [08-23]: DOGE has made Americans less safe: "Hurricanes. Terrorism. Identity theft. DOGE's year-long campaign of destruction has left all of us more vulnerable to threats." Or just ordinary predation.

    • [07-29]: Businesses should step up to defend democracy: "The business community's silence could accelerate America's slide into autocracy, warns the founder of the pro-democracy business coalition Leadership Now." Shouldn't she be using the past, or at least the present, tense? Interview with Daniella Ballou-Aares. My impression is that most businesses heaved a giant sigh when Trump give up all their Woke/DEI efforts.

  • Ryan Cooper [08-24]: Why Scott Bessent can't fix the bond market: "Every Trump lackey must indulge his whims, no matter how stupid."

  • Eric Katz/Anna Kramer [08-25]: 'They want us all to leave': Interior reassigns dozens of senior staff: "Around 30 top staffers have been reshuffled, with some people moving to teams outside their area of expertise."

  • Melody Schreiber [08-26]: Meningitis is a horrible way to die. Trump will make it more common. "Mothers who have lost children to the disease are sharing their stories to warn the public about Trump's recent anti-vaccine executive order."

  • Mike Bader [08-27]: Five horsemen of the envrionmental apocalypse:

    1. The Department of the Interior redefined "harm" under the Endangered Species Act so that habitat destruction is no longer considered harmful to threatened and endangered species.
    2. The US Fish & Wildlife Service proposed to remove Endangered Species Act protection for grizzly bears less than 2 years after concluding that a host of cumulative threats puts the species at increased risk of extinction.
    3. The Fish & Wildlife Service proposed an expanded "4(d) rule" that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says turns grizzly bear management over to the states that want trophy hunting and to kill them whenever near livestock, even on public lands.
    4. The Department of Agriculture proposed canceling the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Tens of millions of acres of the wildest National Forests would be opened to new roads, logging, motorized use and other development.
    5. The Department of Agriculture has proposed to shred National Travel Management Planning on National Forests, opening the way to off-trail cross-country travel by ATVs, snowmobiles and four-by-fours.

Just Trump: The cult (or should I say sinkhole?) of personality. While most of the bad things he has done and is doing are the work of his administration, and many of their bad ideas are deeply ingrained in the Republican Party, he hogs the spotlight, giving off the uniquely pungent odor that we notice first. Much of this is petty. Some of it is probably meant as distraction.

  • Margaret Hartmann:

  • Maxine Joselow/David A Fahrenthold/Tyler Pager/Clarence Williams [08-07]: How the reflecting pool came to mirror Trump's Washington: "A hospitality manager for the Trump Organization traveled to Las Vegas to find a solution to problems at a national landmark. This is the untold back story of the fallout."

  • Tom Carson [08-10]: Drunk history in the making: "No, Trump isn't an alcoholic. He just might as well be, and that goes double for the Trumpified GOP." Quotes Trump as saying "I never had alcohol, for whatever reason. Can you imagine if I had? What a mess I would be." To which Carson replies, "We don't have to imagine it anymore."

    Some alcoholics — and some mental patients, too — exhibit completely altered personalities when the fit is on them. In many cases, though, we get an unhinged exaggeration of what they were like all along. That's Trump's crass cross to bear. Always prone to focus on inessentials, he now has a drunk's fixation on them, seemingly for the same reason: an escape from reality.

    He can barely muster interest in his war with Iran even when it comes to figuring out how to conceal that we've lost it. (The Pentagon recently invited any interested military personnel to chip in with inventive ideas.) But don't get him started on Reflecting Pool "vandalism" or his idiot ballroom or how do you solve a problem like Melania or how he got cheated in 2020 or how he might run again in 2028. He'll talk his own wounded-warrior ear off.

  • Cameron Peters [08-11]: Does Trump even have an agenda anymore? "The president's August doldrums, briefly explained." He never really had an agenda, at least as regards governing. Aside from his decorating projects, which do appear to be near and dear to his heart, most of what he's done has been to allow his flunkees to implement their agendas without the least regard for how it would work out, or he whether he'd be blamed for the results. Much of this stuff is rooted in standard Republican moral and mental rot, especially their media cess pool, but not even they could have thought bringing back measles was a good idea. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I miss the days when Trump had actual strategists, like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, to impose some discipline on his evil impulses. Lacking any progress on the Iran war or the SAVE America Act, Peters does point to Trump's enduring interest in "zombie priorities — previously dead Trump agenda items that are coming back to haunt the news cycle," like:

    • The Reflecting Pool
    • Birthright citizenship
    • Fed independence
    • The slush fund

  • Jeet Heer [08-14]: Jared Kushner finds trouble in a gangster's paradise: "The Trump princeling's deal with alleged mobsters illustrates the depth of MAGA corruption."

  • Jonathan O'Connell/Sarah Blaskey [08-14]: Trump administration set to spend at least $900 million on White House construction: "The price tag is much larger than what has been previously reported, according to a Post review of confidential contracts, and taxpayers would cover most of it."

  • Hannah Furnell [08-19]: Donald Trump's staffers claim maintaining MAGA beauty standards is 'exhausting' for top aides: "Several anonymous employees in President Trump's administration are reportedly not shocked that Karoline Leavitt is leaving her role as White House Press Secretary this month."

  • Amanda Marcotte [08-19]: Trump aide Natalie Harp nurses his decline: "The president's defensive reaction to rampant speculation reveals his fear of aging." Maggie Haberman has dubbed her Trump's "human binky."

  • Robert Kuttner [08-26]: How Trump is destroying Detroit: "His takedown of the US auto industry can't be good for Republicans in Michigan either."

Electoral Politics: Pieces on US elections (recent and future) and, more generally, inter-party politicking. Party-specific pieces in following sections.

  • Anna Wiederkehr [05-09]: Poll: Republicans and Democrats agree on 1 big election issue: The question is agreement with "There is too much money in American politics." 80% of Harris voters agree. 77% of Trump voters agree. 72% of Americans overall agree. Disagree doesn't exceed 5% for any group. Neither party has an answer to this, probably because the candidates they field are the ones most adept at raising money, and the bipartisan struggle for dollars keeps the oligarchy in power. Republicans, including their Supreme Court, are proud apologists for this system. Democrats are more likely to question it, but not when they have a chance to outspend Republicans (as Obama, Clinton, and Harris did, without extending any real coattails to their party). When you hear centrist Dems complain about the left, what they're really worried about is losing their big-money funding. They see keeping the left bottled up and powerless as a big part of the value proposition they present to wealthy donors, and they'd rather lose elections than funding.

  • Ed Kilgore:

    • [08-05]: Kansas primaries give Democrats a shot at a big upset: I'm generally pleased with the results, but I'm skeptical for November. The big win, not mentioned here, was a resounding vote to save abortion rights. But even though Democrats were motivated and organized around that issue, the Republican primary still drew more voters than the Democratic. But all the major race Democratic primaries were contested, which suggests much more interest (and hope) than usual, and most were won by pretty good people. Hamilton is still a long-shot for Senate, as is Tyndell in KS-4. The governor's race is more up for grabs. Holscher should be a good campaigner. Masterson is one of the worst ogres the Republicans have nominated, with a lot of baggage to defend. And a critical number of Kansans are getting used to the advantages of divided rule in Topeka.

    • [08-07]: Trump's grip on GOP slips again with Tennessee loss: Trump fave Rep. Andy Ogles lost his Republican primary.

    • [08-09]: What happens if Democrats blow the midterms? "It's also entirely possible that Democrats will be all over the place in their reaction to an unexpected defeat." In other words, that they will wind up where they started. But the centrists have the most to lose by losing: a big part of their pitch is the assertion that they are more electable than the leftists. Losing, especially to Republicans as offensive as Trump, is really inexcusable. Left-democrats have their reasons for thinking their approach is better. For one thing, they have better ideas of how to handle problems. A big problem with the centrists is that even when their programs get implemented, and even when those programs help (as with ACA), they still don't solve the problems. The other problem is that centrists are so preoccupied with compromise, and with catering to business interests, that it's hard to see them as really committed to most Democratic voters. It's not clear to me how anyone fell for the line that "Trump will fix it," but at least he said it. People desperate for a leader to fix things may more easily jump from Trump to someone like Sanders, who actually promises things, and identifies the opponents he's up against, than to any of the DNC centrists.

    • [08-17]: Polls show Trump's MAGA base is all he has left: "Trump's job-approval numbers are awful any way you slice it. And there's little chance that will change before the midterms."

    • [08-20]: Midterm-convention Trump-fest may backfire on GOP: On September 9-10, in Dallas, "Republicans are putting their unpopular president at the center of their midterms pitch. Democrats should enjoy the show."

    • [08-26]: Darline Graham fumbled debate, won Senate primary anyway: "South Carolina GOP voters cared more about President Trump's endorsement than the interim senator's gaffe." By the way:

Other Republicans:

  • Carlyn Beccia [07-02]: Has America crossed the asshole threshold? "Civilizations can carry a surprising number of parasites and live. But there's a line — Rome crossed it, the Gilden Age toed it, and for the first time in history, we can measure it." This characterization of the Gilded Age, and the reform movements that pulled America back from the abyss, is pretty good, although it omits a few major recessions/depressions that helped discredit the oligarchy. Rome and Greece I'll have to take on faith. The measurements involve things like Peter Turchin's End Times theory of the overproduction of elites, which I don't like but can't totally dismiss. More promising is: "Cooperators survive by clustering, finding one another, and repeatedly dealing with one another, so honesty compounds." I think we're seeing more and more of that. I'm not wild about data centers as an issue, but we're seeing good people coming together to fight them for good reasons that can reach out to tie together more good causes, so I have to see that as a net positive.

  • Sarah Jones [08-07]: The GOP's missing moral compass: I resisted the sub here — "Republicans' refusal to condemn Max Miller reflects the party's history of dismissing abuse claims" — possibly because I don't care much about such claims. But the title is true, and of much more than just abuse cases.

  • Pedro Gonzalez [08-14]: The new right's toxic addiction to racial conflict: "A former fellow with the Claremont Institute explains how white nationalist dogma sets the terms of political belonging on the MAGA right."

  • Norman J Ornstein [08-16]: The Republicans are going to kill people — but not until after they vote: "In the Big Beautiful Bill, the GOP put off Medicaid cuts until after the midterms. America is about to find out why."

    Bad as the first Trump term was, it was nothing compared to this one. And the key components of the anti-science, anti-government nihilism, combined with willful ignorance about the consequences of their actions, and the interrelationship across policy areas, is about to play out big time starting next year, with health care and policy on the front lines. Three components of horrible policies across disparate areas will interact to engender a catastrophe in an already stressed health ecosystem. . . .

    Now comes the biggest problem. When the Republican Congress enacted Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025, it included massive cuts in the Medicaid program, totaling around $1 trillion over 10 years — but made sure to postpone them until 2027, conveniently after the midterm elections. The cuts focused on adding onerous work and paperwork requirements, all designed to force recipients off the rolls, and will remove somewhere between 10 and 15 million people from the program, leaving them without any health coverage. That is in addition to the millions losing coverage or facing huge premium increases with the erasure of subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. But the impact will go far beyond those directly losing their health insurance. Medicaid money does not go to Medicaid recipients. It goes to the providers. The loss of a major chunk of the money going out to them will have big reverberations.

  • Zach Beauchamp [08-18]: The worst primary in America just ended: "An Islamophobic Congress member beat an antisemitic influencer. It may be a sign of the GOP to come." The former is Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL). The latter is Dan Bilzerian, "an open antisemite and Holocaust denier with millions of social media followers who has said that 'most of the problems today are caused by Jewish supremacy.'"

  • Troy Farah [08-19]: Mike Lindell refuses to accept he's an election loser: "On Wednesday, he offered to fund a recount in the Minnesota governor primary." He lost by 11 points, but at least he's "on brand."

  • Branko Marcetic [08-21]: If Woke 1 was crazy, MAGA Woke is absolutely insane: "Much of the Left has been debating 'Woke 1' recently. Less discussed has been the Right's own version of wokeness, characterized by censorship, attacks on free speech, and even jailing and deporting critics." Look, moves to suppress free speech, and to control what you are allowed to think, almost always come from the right. If anyone on the left got too pushy, or too worked up, disapproving of your racism, I'm sorry. Most of us respect your right to dumb and even evil thoughts, both privately held and publicly expressed. Granted, we aren't happy about your nonsense. And sometimes we wish you would just shut up and go away. But we're not used to having the power to shut you up or banish you. Not only are we not used to having any power at all, we're pretty skeptical of people who do have power. It's important for people with power to use a substantial measure of tolerance, so as not to abuse that power. But since we don't have that kind of power, we may also feel it is personally important not to simply acquiesce to your racism or other malevolence. One might argue here that the solution is mutual respect. That would be more credible if the right exhibited any, but so far their only response to the charge of "you're not woke" has been to turn "woke" into a slur, assign it to everyone who disagrees with them, and attempt to use their considerable power to stomp it out. The irony is that many of Trump's complaints, like weaponization of the Justice Department and "cancel culture" would resonate with the left if they were applied at all fairly. But Trump only opposes such things when he imagines they are arrayed against him. If he can use them for his own purposes, he's more than happy to do so.

Democrats: Prog Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won the Senate primary in Michigan over an AIPAC favorite. Francesca Wong lost the Governor primary in Wisconsin after leading in the polls. Both margins were very close, with huge money advantages for the centrist candidates. In both cases, the decision hinged on electability, which is to say the fear that a great many Democrats, including many who lean toward more progressive positions, have of losing close races to Republicans. Some of this debate inevitably shows up below, but I'm not terribly interested in it, except to note that the credibility of the centrists is on pretty thin ice after losing two elections to Trump, and that if they sabotage this year's elections just because they think Democrats have moved left, they will never be trusted again. Well, also that I think the people with real answers to most problems are on the left, so if Democrats ever get a chance to govern again, and want to actually accomplish something for their voters — something Clinton and Obama didn't seem to be very concerned about — they're going to have to move left. But I also think that ideology has very little to do with electability. It's quite possible that the Michigan-Wisconsin split was just a matter of Wong fumbling some questions near the wire, while El-Sayed handled them with aplomb. Perhaps it's more important to be a skilled campaigner than to have the right positions? Other Senate primaries seem to bear this out; Kansas went to the better heeled and more "electable" centrist, while the progressive won in Florida, beating a DNC/AIPAC darling. By the way, for Governor KS Democrats bucked their party leadership pick in favor of a much more progressive candidate, in a race which well may be winnable — not least because Cindy Holscher won her race by campaigning harder and better.

  • Andrew Prokop:

  • Zeeshan Aleem [08-06]: A new study finds the advantage of moderation in elections has vanished. That's a huge deal. This came out after the El-Sayed win, but isn't really based on it. The needle has been moving steadily left since Bernie Sanders launched his 2016 campaign. He's won two general elections since then, vs. zero for Clinton and Harris. And people forget that before him, Vermont was so heavily Republican that it was one of only two states to vote for Alf Landon in 1936 (and Kansas, where Landon was governor, was not the other one).

  • Astead Herndon:

    • [08-11]: Why progressives are backing off "Woke 1": "The Democrats aren't the same party they were in 2020." Well, Trump made sure of that. But "Woke" in any iteration was never a political program. It was at best a self-help program, a set of meditations that might help you become a less hurtful person. It only became a political program for the right, which sensed they could exploit it to get folks riled up over the left blaming them for social problems. Here's a rule of thumb: political programs shouldn't try to get people to change — nobody wants to change, especially under duress; political programs should seek to shift power toward better, or less bad, outcomes. So why is anyone on the left talking about "woke," even in an imagined past tense?

    • [08-18]: The real "electability" question is about Donald Trump: "Democratic infighting is distracting from the top story of the midterms."

  • Jason Linkins [08-15]: Third Way doesn't care about the Democratic Party: "The centrist organization is spending millions of dollars of corporate money on a campaign to manufacture right-wing talking points to flood the media."

    Third Way's donor base is a "Trojan horse" packed to the gills with scoundrels: Wall Street cretins and private equity goons; "members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council," best known for producing cookie-cutter right-wing legislation that is diametrically at odds with just about every Democratic Party policy priority; and supporters of the Republican Attorneys General Association, "which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations." In addition, [Robert] Reich points out that two of the organization's former honorary co-chairs are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said!

  • Jared Abbott/Joan C Williams [08-17]: Donald Trump's coalition is coming apart: "The working-class voters who delivered Donald Trump's 2024 victory have steadily slipped away in 2026 according to new polling. But few of them are switching to the Democrats." Their main complaint about the Democrats is "corruption and self-interest": "The biggest obstacle for the Democatic Party is a question of trust and competence — whether the party can be trusted to act for people like them." Williams, by the way, has written several books on this. One I've read and recommend was White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (2020). There's a more recent one: Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. The latter book starts out with 14 chapters phrased as questions. They're worth listing:

    1. Is there really a diploma divide?
    2. Isn't it just the white working class?
    3. Isn't it bizarre when the left denies the impact of inequality on politics?
    4. Why are rural and rust belts red?
    5. Is the solution to move to the center?
    6. Why does the culture wars formula work so well?
    7. Isn't it ironic that red "family values" states have weaker families than blue states?
    8. Can't people see through Trump's truculent retro masculinity?
    9. Doesn't the diploma divide just reflect "grievance politics"?
    10. Smart people get ahead; isn't that just the reality?
    11. It's a battle between sophisticated global citizens and parochial ethno-nationalists, right?
    12. Aren't the college-educated just more enlightened?
    13. Aren't elites just less racist?

    The first chunk of these are under the Part I title of "Aren't you sick of losing elections or just scraping by?" The others are "What's the matter with Kansas?" and "What's the matter with Cambridge?" The rest of the book promises "The path past far-right populism." Lots of stuff there, but here's the basic pitch:

    My message to liberals is that we will lose elections, or scrape by so narrowly we can't implement progressive changes, unless we can secure more votes from these middle-status voters in routine jobs feeling left behind. So if you care about climate change or abortion rights or defending democracy, you need to care about these lower-middle-class voters.

    One thing I'd add is that a distinguishing characteristic of Trump voters in 2016 and 2024 was that they were mad as hell. Those people have even more to be made about right now. And that makes them more accessible than the comfortable white suburban women that were the holy grail for Clinton and Harris. Even Biden got enough of them in 2020. Scanning further down the book, I'll leave you with one more line: "Precarity, not poverty, drives far-right support."

  • Bill Scher [08-18]: Americans like moderate politicians and progressive policies, but not socialism: "If Democrats focus on the vast terrain where liberals and moderates agree, they can build a durable center-left coalition." Scher seems to have a lot of trouble understanding words, which is a real problem for him because he's so hung up on what he thinks they mean. I don't want to go deep here, but let's briefly examine some of these (by the way, I'm avoiding quote marks here, even though they're very tempting):

    1. Moderate Politicians: There is no evidence that Republicans, who make up 35-40% of all Americans, like moderate candidates. They've shown repeatedly that they prefer candidates who promise to fight for their principles, even when they're flat out nuts. There is some evidence that Democrats, a similar-sized group, can be cajoled or panicked into voting for moderate candidates, but those who have won have a very poor track record of delivering the progressive policies that even middling Democrats want, so even Democrats who once could have been persuaded that moderation are responding to candidates who actually show some conviction and principles. As for independents, they're not really in the center, but are variable according to which side they hate most at any given moment. My guess is that there's a sizable chunk of people who voted for Trump against Harris who also would have voted for Sanders against Romney. It's just plain dumb to call those people centrists or moderates.

    2. Progressive Policies: It's hard to decide where to start carving here. I'd just as soon drop the allusion to progress altogether: for many people, progress no longer seems to be beneficial and/or inevitable, at least to the extent it seemed 100-125 years ago. As for policies, there is a big disconnect between what people actually want (peace, freedom from surveillance, equal opportunity, protection from predatory capitalism, public service safe from corruption, public support for recovering from if not preventing disasters) and policies as offered by "the vast terrain where liberals and moderates agree" — which isn't that vast, given that the moderates will veto any policies that aren't acceptable to their corporate sponsors.

    3. Liberals: Liberalism is an honorable political philosophy which helped broaden the definition of "we the people" to extend beyond the powdered-wigs who wrote the US Constitution to virtually everyone. On the other hand, liberalism excessively focuses on individuals, which helps explain why so many liberals, having achieved their own liberation, became conservative, and conspired to deny others their freedom. Those few liberals who do believe in universal equal rights have merged into the left, where the drive for equality started with class consciousness and expanded from there. Scher performs a switcheroo here, substituting liberals for left, because he doesn't want to deal with the left on its own terms. Either that, or he imagines a Democratic Party that offers little or nothing to the vast majority of people left out of the two-party oligarchy system.

    4. Center-left: Not sure if this is a token gesture toward the left, or simply meant to give the center a little credibility as opposed to the right, reflecting the claim that centrists are the only realistic alternative. But the key for Scher is that the center runs the show, setting direction and vetoing anything that might discomfit their wealthy patrons.

    5. Socialism: Still a taboo word for centrist Democrats, even long after the New Deal/Great Society programs they claim to love have been routinely derided as socialist by generation after generation of Republicans — to the point where most Americans react either with "what?" or "duh!" I am personally dubious about the value of embracing the word — as, for instance, DSA does. (I doubt they can build a majority around it, but they can easily build a following, which may be all the current leaders really want.) I doubt that Scher has any idea what socialism means in an American context. He may be thinking of socialism as it claimed to exist in Russia, China, or Cuba, but those systems were built on the ruins of their distinct societies, and no American socialist wants to go back to their pre-revolution states just to duplicate their later failures. Rather, in America, you start from where we are not, and work to improve the situation for everyone. A real socialist program probably involves some combination of:

      1. Shifting effective control over firms from capitalists (owners of capital, which these days are mostly financiers) to workers.
      2. Regulating businesses and markets to prevent monopolies and fraud, to establish standards and ensure compliance, and to reduce and manage externalities.
      3. Using government for public service, to direct investment, to compensate for market failures and other disasters, to make sure that all people have rights to a decent level of support, and to establish justice.

      To some extent, we're already doing these things (unions help on 1, but actual employee ownership would be better). But there is lots of room for improvement, piecemeal as well as systematically.

  • Rachel Cohen Booth [08-21]: Why this year's Medicare-for-all debate is different: "Democrats never resolved their health care war, but they may have found a way around it." Why is this so hard for some people to understand? Problems don't go away until they are solved. The solution to health care — specifically, runaway costs, which goes hand-in-hand with non-coverage and/or bankruptcy — is comprehensive universal health insurance, with investments to make sure that supply meets demand. You can make the system slightly less bad with reforms like ACA, and Democrats have long been willing to go for whatever they can get, but the problem remains until you solve it. Medicare for All is a sales pitch which may or may not solve the problem, depending on the details of its implementation. For instance, Medicare itself has various carve-outs and co-payments that fall short of universal and comprehensive, so simply extending current Medicare to everyone doesn't quite meet the requirement. One way people deal with the shortcomings of Medicare is by buying supplemental insurance. The Sanders plan not only extends Medicare, but it fixes it. If you don't fix it, you still wind up with problems — albeit fewer than you have right now. So the details matter, not just the slogan. One more thing to note here: one reason Medicare for All is becoming even more urgent is that ACA is failing, partly due to its design, but also due to Republican sabotage. That didn't have to happen, but the design of ACA certainly made it easier to blow up.

  • Robert Kuttner [08-21]: That stunning Florida Senate win: "A democratic socialist manages to build the coalition that has long eluded the left." Angie Nixon, a state rep from Jacksonville, beat Alex Vindman by 12 points, after Vindman had a 19-to-1 campaign finance advantage. Vindman is remembered from the Trump I impeachment hearings as a Ukrainian staunchly allied against Putin. He seems to have been completely tone-deaf during the campaign, relying on AIPAC money and his "national security" cred.

  • David Sirota [08-24]: Bernie Sanders reminds me of this conservative giant: "Democratic socialism's ascent mirrors Barry Goldwater's rise." That's a point, but a pretty narrow one. For starters, it gives Goldwater much too much credit for the later rise of Nixon and Reagan. The Vietnam War delivered the White House to Nixon, and Reagan won largely due to the Volcker Recession and the Iran Fiasco, both major Carter blunders. Goldwater was no giant. He was totally out of touch, mired so deep in his anti-communism he was willing and eager to destroy the world to purify it. What few votes he did get in 1964 were mostly due to his hypocritical opposition to civil rights — his "devotion to freedom" was pretty sharply circumscribed. Sanders may well be followed by even more successful leftist candidates, but his runs in 2016 and 2020 stood much stronger than Goldwater's in 1964. He would likely have won if chickenshit Democrats hadn't blocked his path, not just saving us from Trump but paving the way for a much brighter future.

Economists and the Economy: Also see Dean Baker, below.

Technology (Including AI): Also see the section on data centers, which is the political flashpoint, but based not just on immediate concerns like environmental impact but on the public's profound unease with how hugely-valued companies plan to deploy AI and the inordinate amount of influence such companies wield in our currently very corrupt political system.

  • Stacy Mitchell [04-20]: How Amazon's AI algorithms raise the prices you pay: "Online price swings look like fierce competition. In reality, they're part of an invisible strategy that steers the entire market upward."

  • David Dayen/Matt Stoller [06-30]: Organized Money: How to think about AI (with Cory Doctorow): "AI might just be useful once we get through the huckster phase." An interview. I've read, and recommend, Doctorow's book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before It's Too Late.

  • Grace Blakeley [08-05]: Nobody asked for AI: "We tend to think that markets reflect consumer choice. But the artificial-intelligence boom has been powered by the investment decisions of concentrated capital rather than by consumer demand."

  • Marina Bolotnikova [08-11]: Everybody needs a personal AI policy. Just ask Hank Green. "How can we reap AI's benefits without melting our brains in the process?" I don't know. I haven't been there/done that, at least yet. I'm just circling around the problem/opportunity.

  • John Herrman [08-20]: ChatGPT is a huge snitch: "Never say anything to AI that you wouldn't want read aloud in a court of law."

  • Ron Knox [08-25]: Amazon's monopoly problem is growing: "Three years after Amazon caught a federal monopoly lawsuit, sellers say the company's fees and policies are even worse."

    With nearly 50 percent of every sale going out in fees, sellers must raise prices to maintain their margins and turn a profit. Earlier this month, the group Million Dollar Sellers found that 60 percent of the nearly 200 Amazon sellers it polled had raised their prices in response to Amazon's fees and policy changes.

Climate and Environment:

Regular Columnists

Sometimes an interesting columnist writes often enough that it makes sense to collect their work in one place, rather than scatter it about (especially if they cover a range of topics).

Dean Baker: Look for links here. They are all worth reading.

  • [08-11]: Trump grift vs. the "Biden Crime Family": "Trump and his family have used the presidency to generate vastly greater financial gains than the Biden family ever did, revealing the extraordinary scale of Trump-era corruption."

  • [08-12]: First, they took our wages; now they want our Social Security: "Social Security can afford to pay full benefits, but decades of policies that shifted income from workers to the wealthy have undermined the program's finances."

  • [08-14]: The price of gas: Trump and Biden: "Gas prices are now above $4 a gallon under Trump, rapidly eroding his advantage over Biden and potentially leaving Americans paying more at the pump."

  • [08-15]: Trump's war sends interest rates soaring: "Trump's war with Iran has pushed up long-term interest rates, raising borrowing costs for homeowners, businesses, and governments while increasing the cost of massive federal deficits."

  • [08-19]: Iran War sends housing starts tumbling: "Higher interest rates and Trump's immigration policies are slowing housing construction, making a major decline in home prices less likely."

  • [08-21]: The $40 trillion debt and Trump corruption: "The $40 trillion national debt is not the biggest threat to the US economy; Trump's corruption and attacks on the rule of law pose a far greater danger to investors and the dollar."

  • [08-22]: Hey Donnie, where's the beef? "Trump's plan to allow more tariff-free beef imports may lower prices somewhat, but it is unlikely to deliver his promised 25 percent price cut." He figures you might get to 5%, but I'm skeptical of even that. I was surprised to find that the US imports about 17-18% of its beef, but it's mostly trimmings that are further processed to make less valuable products like hamburger. On the other hand, more expensive cuts are likely to be exported. Related here:

  • [08-26]: The rich own the media. They want to take your Social Security: "Wealthy media owners are using the national debt to justify cutting Social Security and Medicare instead of taxing the rich or addressing excessive health care costs."

Branko Milanovic:

  • [08-18]: The spirit of the nineties and the malaise of today. Economist, focuses on global inequality, sees the 1990s as a pivot point, perhaps better explained in his recent book, The Great Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order. I'm not sure there is an order anymore, or that that's a bad thing.

  • [07-14]: Don't ask me about my profits, but let's talk about your wages: "How Western capitalists use China-bashing to deflect attention from their soaring profits."

  • [08-26]: On European hypocrisy and warmongering. This seems to be blaming the Ukraine war on the warmongering of a "Nordic-Baltic alliance." I don't really see this, although the Baltic countries were critical to irritating Russia by NATO expansion, and Finland and Sweden joined NATO after the invasion, adding some fuel to the fire. The historical examples of Serbia dragging Germany and Russia into WWI, and Israel goading Trump into war with Iran are more convincing.

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [07-31]: Roaming Charges: History hurts: Starts with a pan of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. In other news:

    + Trump and Hegseth have launched at least 67 airstrikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 221 people, without any proof they are drug traffickers and, as the Washington Post reported, no evidence that the illegal killings have slowed the flow of drugs, especially cocaine, into the US.

    + Since the Trump-blessed "ceasefire" in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 1,209 Palestinians (including two children this week) in Gaza and wounded 3,943.

    + House Democrats who opposed cutting aid to Israel had pocketed three times as much money from pro-Israel donors . . .

    + Mark Zuckerberg has struck a deal with Chris Ruddy to train Meta's AI apps on Ruddy's right-wing media site, Newsmax.

  • [08-12]: Gaza Diary: Netanyahu calling.

  • [08-14]: Roaming Charges: Footprints dressed in red: Starts with a Gilles Delueze quote: "A tyrant institutionalizes stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it." Then he declares "the best story of the summer so far is Trump fleeing the NATO summit in a catering cart."

    + France has enacted a new law banning unsolicited telemarketing calls. Someone could be elected president of the US if they ran solely on this issue and reelected if they actually succeeded in doing it. [I've said this more than once. I'd go so far as to add a button to your phone so you can report abuses. It would be easy enough to sort the real abusers out from the occasional mistaken numbers.]

    + It's only August 14, with three months left in the fire season, and Oregon has already broken the all-time record for total acreage burned, at more than 2.3 million acres and counting, surpassing the previous record of 1.93 million acres set in 2024.

    + While the Trump administration denied emergency aid to two of the largest wildfires in Oregon history, both scorching hundreds of thousands of acres, Michael Boren, the tech billionaire Trump appointee overseeing the Forest Service, directed agency air tankers to divert themselves from fighting larger fires in order to douse out the tiny 7-acre fire on his own Idaho ranch . . .

    + The Trump crowd wants the fires to burn all summer, so that they can "salvage" log them without even pretending to adhere to environmental laws. That may be one reason MAGA ranchers in eastern Oregon and western Idaho have been harassing and threatening firefighters on the frontlines of big conflagrations in the Wallowa-Whitman and Boise National Forests.

    + According to the Wall Street Journal, auto insurance companies refused to pay out 45% of claims last year . . . yet, most states require you to buy insurance in order to drive legally.

    + According to Schroders, the London-based asset management company, 1 in 3 working adults in the US has more credit card debt than retirement savings.

    + ICE can't spend all of the money Trump and Congress kept dumping on it. For years, ICE's budget hovered around $10 billion. Then Trump opened the budgetary floodgates, hoping to create his own domestic police force, armed with more lethal weapons than 90 percent of the world's military. But after two reconciliation bills and nationwide raids, ICE has only managed to spend 12% of what Congress has given the agency. It's still got $100 billion in reserves. Is this what Trump plans to use to police polling places in November?

    + According to Border Patrol statistics, there's more fentanyl being trafficked out of the US into Canada than from Canada into the US.

    + The New Yorker's Jia Tolentino on re-reading Gone With the Wind:

    "Gone with the Wind" is evil, and far more interesting for being evil. (Scarlett, one of the finest comic characters ever written in literature, is, terrifyingly and amazingly, a lot like Donald Trump.) The novel registered to me as a paragon depiction of American political consciousness, or lack thereof. Scarlett's world is constructed through immeasurable exploitation; it implodes in war and reconstitutes itself in hideous struggle. It all happens about a half-inch away from her face, and yet all she really thinks about is her wardrobe, her dinner options, her love life, her bank account. Plenty among us, as our country commits atrocities across the globe, might relate.

  • [08-21]: Israel finally admits to killing Hind Rajab, her family and the paramedics who tried to save her. Not exactly news.

Tom Engelhardt/TomDispatch: Editor Tom Engelhardt has retired, which ironically gives him more time for writing. Meanwhile, former intern Nick Turse has taken over, while remaining The Intercept's primary critic of American militarism.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors may have collected pieces, and some entries may have related articles underneath.

Alfred Soto [08-13]: Criticism in an age of discontent: Reaction to:

Eric Levitz [08-24]: Want to tax the rich? Start with the dead. Amen. I don't care for his subhed ("The rich are dying to avoid taxation"). Conventional thought is that taxes disincentivize whatever it is they're taxing, but death is a pretty obvious exception. People won't stop dying just because the estate tax rate is increased. (Maybe heirs will stop murdering them, but how would that be a problem?) The notion is overrated anyway: people don't stop earning, investing, or consuming just because the taxes go up. The Laffer Curve theory doesn't kick in until tax rates go very high (much higher than Laffer thought). And if we could deter some levels of profit-taking by taxing them away, that sounds like a pretty good idea to me. As for estates, I don't mind letting small ones slip through, not least because the hassle isn't worth the loot, but liquidating large estates would be a social, political, and economic blessing. (I could see allowing some beneficiaries, like spouses and minor children, annuities based on the estate, up to some limit.) Of course, confiscatory estate taxes would encourage people to tax evasion through whatever schemes are available. But that's a technical problem. Understanding the principle comes first.

End Matter

Books: Multiple reviews are grouped under book; other pieces by author.

  • JA Cohen [04-16]: The limits of diasporism: "Despite effectively displacing Israel as the center of left Jewish identity, diasporism might sap substance from our anti-Zionism." A review of two books: Benjamin Balthaser: Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left (2025), and David Kraemer: Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora (2025). I have, but haven't yet read, the former, which caught my attention because I have many friends who are anti-Zionist leftist Jews. Whether their leftism came from initial Judaism or more secular sources is not something I can tell or much care about. I could make a case that my leftism is rooted in the Protestantism I was initially exposed to, but the more salient fact is that the ethics survived the end of religious belief. So, too, with most of my friends. On the other hand, it's clearly possible for believers in Judaism to reject Zionism, basing their rejection on their religious beliefs — Yakov B Rabkin's What Is Modern Israel? is jam packed with examples. I doubt they believe in diasporism so much as they accept diaspora as the shape of their universe. Elevating it to a distinct belief system may strike them as unnecessary, as sort of a back door to rejecting Zionism, which they've already done. Cohen draws this distinction between the two books: "Kraemer embraces diaspora out of pure bourgeois self-concern, while Balthaser argues for a solidaristic diasporism driven by material struggle." Cohen thinks this difference matters. I'm not so sure.

  • Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick: Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power:

    • Ian Lustick/Eli Clifton: Excerpts from the book.

    • Trita Parsi [08-11]: The most important book of 2026: Clifton and Lustick's Israel's Lobby:

      Israel's Lobby is neither a sequel to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's groundbreaking 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, not simply an update of it. It does something different.

      Eli and Ian provide a systematic history of the moments when, in their telling, Israel and its American supporters have worked against U.S. interests. But they also add a dimension that Mearsheimer and Walt did not explore at length: money — and, specifically, the financial machinery behind efforts to put Israel's interests ahead of America's.

      They follow that money.

      Of course, we already knew about the money. Maybe some of the details were sketchy, but the Adelsons weren't what you'd call subtle, and it shouldn't have taken Ida Tarbell to connect these dots. Still, I suspect that the real difference viz. Mearsheimer & Walt does amount to a sequel: what's new is the amount and flagrancy of the crimes against humanity that today's lobby is tasked with sweeping under the rug. And possibly how they do it, as the old explanations have frayed and torn. The other thing I'm curious about here is what it exposes about the inherent corruption of American politics.

      I'd like to second this quote from a comment:

      The tipping point has been reached. It is no longer possible to support Israel and still be considered a civilized, decent human being.

    • Socialist Worker [08-14]: The Zionist lobby, the left and the far right: Don't let imperialism off the hook: "The movement should reject the idea that US imperialism backs Israel because of a Zionist lobby." Long, unsigned article, starts by attacking the Clifton-Lustick book, so we'll file it here. Argues "it lets imperialism off the hook and opens the door to conspiracy theories that weaken and undermine the movement." I fail to see why we should focus on an abstract noun ("imperialism") when simpler, stupider, and more specific alternatives exist. American foreign policy has long been rooted in notions of hegemony that are only rarely classically imperialist. On the other hand, foreign policy plays a very small role in US politics, which makes it vulnerable to well-targeted lobbies, especially ones that often run unopposed. This, of course, is predicated on how open the US system is to corruption. You may not like the idea of conspiracy theories, but when the system is built from thousands of discrete bribes, you're bound to find conspiracies.

    • By the way, Guardian used this essay to lead to several older articles still worth noting:

      • Noam Sheizaf [2025-09-14]: How to burst the Israeli bubble: "Recognizing a Palestinian state is a limited but welcome step that addresses an enduring blind spot: Palestinian rights cannot be conditioned on Israeli interests." Refers extensively to the Hussein Agha/Robert Malley book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday

      • Diana Buttu [2025-10-05]: A 'magic pill' made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it: "For years, I pressed Palestinian interests in peace talks. The response to Trump's plan proves the international community hasn't learned from catastrophe." Magic pill? "The 'peace process' became a magic pill rendering the occupation invisible to the west."

      • Moustafa Bayoumi [2025-07-06]: The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world: "The rules of the institutions that define our lives bend like reeds when it comes to Israel — so much that the whole global order is on verge of collapse." Quote from Colin Jones: Gaza "is a test of the American public's tolerance for the levels of death that such kinds of warfare entail."

      • Naomi Klein [2024-10-05]: How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war: "A year later, memorials to the 7 October attacks use art, virtual reality and dark tourism to stir support for limitless violence."

    • Blaise Malley [08-24]: Israel's lobby: More powerful and more unpopular than ever: Interview with Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick.

    • John B Judis [08-26]: How Citizens United supercharged 'Israel's lobby': "In their new book, Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick chart the evolution of this powerful special interest and its unmatched influence in the US."

  • Gregory P Williams [08-20]: Immanuel Wallerstein predicted the fall of the US Empire: "Soon after 9/11, world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein warned that US imperial decline was inevitable. But US leaders didn't want to hear that their glory days were in the past, and they've managed that decline in the worst possible way." The article cites other essays, but his 2003 book The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World seems to sum up the case. As I recall, Kevin Phillips had much of this, including the "wind-fired Dutch and the coal-fired British" eras of hegemony before the US rode the oil boom to world power, with each declining in an orgy of financialization. See his books American Theocracy (2006) and Bad Money (2008). I might also point out that my own blog compilations were started with the title, The Last Days of the American Empire: 2000-2009, followed by two volumes of Last Days With Obama (2009-2013 and 2013-2017) and Last Days with Trump: 2017-2020. (I haven't updated those "books" since 2020, but obviously there is more material available.) Needless to say, the decline has been fitful, where most of the fits come from trying to cling onto the waning sense of superiority. Williams writes:

    Decline did not mean catastrophe. Historically, hegemonic powers do not fall very far. They land among the other great powers, albeit with greater material comfort than most (just look at the Netherlands or the United Kingdom today).

    Furthermore, as Wallerstein wrote in that 1992 essay, decline could be "the greatest blessing of all." The United States had an opportunity to embrace morality. It "was Abraham Lincoln who sounded the moral note: 'As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.'"

    In the early 1990s, Wallerstein saw two possible futures for America. One would involve neofascism, characterized by social conflict, with the lower strata subject to brutality and prejudice. The second, more hopeful scenario would be a form of national solidarity through social democracy and the movement toward egalitarianism.

    It's no surprise that the latter would never occur to right-wingers like Bush and Trump. That Democrats, especially Biden, have found it equally onerous to support a more equitable world order suggests that they aren't really democrats. I'll note that French Socialists and British Labourites have a comparably bad record. Perhaps the reason the left fails repeatedly in Latin America is that they keep trying to prop up the old order, rather than tearing it down?

  • Yotam Marom [08-12]: How Occupy Wall Street still explains politics today: "It sowed the seeds for a new era of social movements — but its politics of powerlessness should act as a cautionary tale." Author has a book on leftist political strategy: For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness, which has been touted as "the essential guide to establishing an effective opposition movement in the age of Trump, from the leading activist and organizer."

  • Sarah Jones [08-21]: The communist conspiracy theory consuming the right: "For conservatives, 'cultural Marxism' is a shape-shifting, decades-old bogeyman." Interview with Aja Woods, author of The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. I doubt this book is very useful. Much of it is about Lyndon Larouche and his followers. I ran into them occasionally in the 1970s, and they were imbeciles. That they moved so easily from left to right just shows how little understanding they had of either. Beyond them, you also get more recent right-wing "thinkers" like Christopher Rufo, who see the Frankfurt School as the source of Critical Race Theory, which they don't like because its analysts are good at uncovering racism where the right thinks they have it buried. "Cultural Marxism" is a term only its opponents would use, because it links something they think everyone hates (Marxism) with something they really hate (Culture). They hate Culture because it reflects lived experience, and that tends to reflect capitalism and its order in an unflattering light. But the word we always used to summarize the thought of the various Frankfurt School thinkers was Critical Theory. Where Marx and his followers had focused on economics and political power, Critical Theorists extended their scope to include culture. And not to designate some preferred culture as Marxist: there is no such thing, nor is such a thing possible. Rather, what Critical Theory did was to uncover how economic and power relations permeate art, life, and culture. It is a powerful tool, and I came to see everything through it, almost too reflexively. (I read a lot of Adorno and Benjamin in the 1970s, but not much Marcuse, and my one attempt at Habermas was a dismal failure.) One point I should stress here is that Adorno focused almost exclusively on fascism. I'm not sure how relevant that makes him now, but probably more than 30-50 years ago. But if reading Critical Theory makes young people think like I do — and that seems to be the gist of the right-wing critiques — that strikes me as a good idea, not a bad one.

Other Media:

  • Alex Galbraith [08-21]: Columbia House closure sparks nostalgia for a bygone music scam: "Americans are fondly remembering the kinder, gentler music club swindles of decades past." I remember evaluating their offerings, but I'm pretty sure I never fell for one. (I did for a paperback book club once, which was a somewhat better deal.) Even in the '70s I hated the idea of signing up to pay more later. I didn't know they were still around, but even in the 1980s, I used to say that the only boom industry in America was fraud. I always credited that to Reagan.

    Nowadays, the taboo around scamming has fallen out of fashion with Gen Z, who see devious business models as a way to get ahead in a rigged economy. . . . The internet-savvy and unscrupulous were quick to cash in. . . . Americans lose more than $100 billion to scams every single year. As more and more of the country's citizens feel like they're being had, the Trump administration doesn't seem to be rushing to stop the con. In fact, there's plenty of evidence that they could be in on it.

    I was going to leave it at that, perhaps mentioning that few policy moves would be more popular than one that came down hard on unsavory business practices. But then I read the next paragraph, and had to include it:

    White House insiders are reportedly using privileged information to place wagers on grey-area betting platforms. Nine accounts on the platform Polymarket made millions on U.S. military actions in Iran, winning nearly all of their 80 wagers on U.S. strikes and ceasefire negotiations. The former White House teleprompter operator allegedly made tens of thousands placing bets on what words Donald Trump might use in his speeches. The president himself has spent much of his second term accepting luxurious gifts and donations that sure read like bribes in the right light. Trump has increased his net worth by more than $2 billion in his second term, largely through the launch of a crypto firm operated by his sons. He accepted a $400 million jet from the royal family of Qatar and has pardoned multiple people after their families made large donations to his campaign. Former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen told the Washington Post that Trump had "fully monetize[d] the Oval Office" and was carrying out "corruption on a scale that . . . has few rivals in world history."

    The only thing I have to add to that is that I've seen other sources put the haul above $4 billion.

Obituaries: I had been using the New York Times, but they're giving me aggravation these days, so I'll switch over to Wikipedia August), which is probably better anyway. Roughly speaking, since my last report on August 1:

Some other names I recognize:

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas.

  • Corey Robin: [07-31:

    Maggie Haberman, chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, "says 70 percent of the president's mind is dedicated to White House renovations." And they say I got Trump wrong. Pff.

    Robin goes on to offer a quote from his book, The Reactionary Mind:

    The attention to external detail, to the surface of things, is not confined to Trump's business career; it informs his political judgments as well. One of Trump's most heartfelt criticisms of Obama was that rather than hosting a celebration of foreign dignitaries in a lavish ballroom, he served dinner to them in "an old, broken, rotten-looking tent" on the White House lawn. "That's no way for America to host important meetings and dinners with world leaders and dignitaries. We should project our nation's power and beauty with a proper facility and ballroom." So enraged was Trump at this failed aesthetics of power that he called the White House and, patched through to Obama senior strategist David Axelrod, offered to build a ballroom there for free: "If there's one thing I know how to build, it's a grand ballroom." Axelrod never got back to him on his offer — yet one more sign, wrote a bitter Trump, of "what's wrong with this country."

    Now in office, Trump has set things right. . . . [quote clipped off scan]

  • Kim, Bestie of Bunzy [08-13]:

    I have a working hypothesis that 98% of people feel incredibly lonely because it's inherently the safest position in an aggressively predatory society.

  • The Onion [08-26]: "Trump pushes to rename sexual attraction to children 'Americaphilia'."

Current count: 330 links, 20766 words (25990 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.