Loose Tabs [Draft File]

On [07-25] I moved previous contents moved to here, which will eventually be renumbered to post.

This is a safe space for collecting items that may eventually go into a Loose Tabs post.

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 new 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 28 days ago, on May 12.

I have a little-used option of selecting bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

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. Here's a list of recent ones, plus a couple of oldies I've pinned because they still seem relevant here, in LIFO order:

  • [06-26]: Arafat and Abbas on Violence: Reflections from Tomorrow Is Yesterday.

  • [06-22]: After Iran: A funny thing happened on the way to the apocalypse.

  • [05-29]: But Reality Is Unscripted: Disturbing thoughts on Trump.

  • [05-05]: The Real Road to Serfdom: Tim Wu explains how monopoly power leads to fascism.

  • [05-02]: Lookback: Iraq 2003: Why does the Iran war story sound familiar? (with allowances for tragedy repeating as farce)?

  • [04-27]: Explaining Inflation: AI treats us like 5-year-olds. They leave out a few things.

  • [04-05]: Iran War: The Big Question: How does it end? Or does it end at all?

  • [04-03]: Iran War: The Three Questions: Why is this happening?

  • [03-13]: Days of Infamy: "Franklin Roosevelt knew how to sell a war." Donald Trump doesn't. He only knows how to start one.

  • [2025-10-21]: Making Peace in Gaza and Beyond: "Looking beyond the Trump points toward a peace we can all live with."

  • [2025-10-17]: Gaza War Peace Plan: "Twenty Trump points, for better or worse."

  • [2025-08-10]: Four Stories: My first post, which sets out the basic ideas behind my effort, and takes its title from a very wrong-headed Vox piece that offered some teachable moments. One sample quote I buried in parentheses:

    There is no problem that Trump is the solution to. But his slogan, "Trump will fix it," suggests that some people thought we had problems he could fix. I think Trump's slogan was very effective, especially as Harris made little or no effort to show how very ridiculous the boast was.

I also have a Notes feed there. While I've done very little with it so far, it occurs to me that I might be able to use it to publish Loose Tabs items and Music Week reviews as I write them, instead of having to wait for a long compilation post.

Table of Contents:

New Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following sections, or vanish altogether.

Last time: David Warsh and the Fed; AI Goes to trial; Trump Goes to China; The Hantavirus Outbreak; Cuba; SpaceX IPO; The Trump Slush Fund

Major Threads

War on Iran:

  • 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:

    • [08-05]: Will Trump meet his Suez moment & seize Hormuz deal on the table? "Oman and Iran appear close to a temporary arrangement to reopen the Strait — which Washington should welcome if it keeps traffic open and free." Actually, at this point open and expensive would be a bargain. Economically, the impact is on the Gulf States. The US and Israel care about them only insofar as they represent a pretext for continuing a war that ultimately could harm them most of all.

  • 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."

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

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

  • 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?"

Israel:

Israel-American-World Relations: I used to try to separate out Israel-related pieces into several bins. The Iran war has its own news section. The Israel section above pertains to security operations in Gaza, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon, as well as internal Israeli political affairs. This one deals with America's relationship to Israel, and possibly with the world's.

  • 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?"

  • 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.

  • 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 think coherently, much less force anything on Israel. Trump will never cross Israel. Europe doesn't dare challenge Trump. Same for the Arab or other Muslim states. China understands the virtues of minding their own business. The Left everywhere is pinned up against the wall. One might sympathize, but acting on solidarity is impossible. 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. This would still be genocide (or "ethnic cleansing" if you prefer that fundamentally obscene term), but it would 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. On the other hand, it's possible that the rulers of Israel would reject even this. 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 until the US and EU propose such a deal, and the latter 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 (Corcodylus 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.

Ukraine, Other Hot Spots, and World Politics:

Trump's War Department: 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 invesgitation, 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."

Trump vs. Law:

  • Ian Millhiser:

  • Caitlin Dewey [08-03]: Trump still really wants a slush fund: "The $1.8 billion 'anti-weaponization fund' appears dead. Trump's bigger push to personally control federal money is not." Dewey notes other examples of the slush fund idea, like: Venezuelan oil accounts, The Board of Peace, a US sovereign wealth fund. Not mentioned include the deals with law firms that promised Trump direction of millions of dollars in pro bono work, or his fundraising for the inaugural and the ballroom.

  • Elie Honig:

  • James Baratta [08-14]: Trump makes crime legal: For him. For you, it mostly depends on whether you are for or against him. "If you're a liberal activist or union member, the Trump administration wants to know everything about you. But if you're a foreign oligarch laundering money, you can count on it looking the other way."

  • Zachary Groz [08-14]: Trump's planned landlord bailout would cost billions: "A Justice Department settlement for the COVID eviction moratorium won't just go to mom-and-pop owners."

  • Madiba K Dennie [08-18]: How the Supreme Court kicked off America's sports betting addiction crisis: "In 2017, Americans legally wagered $4.9 billion on sporting events. Last year, they bet over $165 billion. And the true cost of their bets were even higher." This goes on to talk about addiction and uncontrollable gambling, but the general moral rot of corruption strikes me as even worse. This isn't a problem that can be controlled by moderation. The very notion that you can get rich for nothing is intrinsically, profoundly wrong.

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):

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

Donald Trump:

  • 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."

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

  • 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."

Other Republicans:

  • 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.'"

Democrats:

  • Andrew Prokop:

  • 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."

  • 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.

The Economy (and Economists):

  • Jeffrey Sklansky [08-06]: The class struggle in your wallet: "A new book about the meaning of money argues for how to use finance to create a more equitable economy." The book is Against Money, by JW Mason and Arjun Jayadev.

  • Troy Farah [08-12]: The entire US economy is basically a giant betting app: "Senators oppose gambling on wildfire outcomes, but the financial sector rewards amoral wagers." While Kalshi and Polymarket are especially flagrant in their monetizing of moral hazard, the author is right that the whole economy is structured as a casino. It occurs to me that some of this problem could be limited by levying surtaxes on bets (err, "investments") where rates increase for shorter time frames. I'm thinking mostly about stocks, where this would limit speed buying and other quick turnovers, and pure bets would get the highest rate. If this kills the industry, good riddance.

  • James K Galbraith [08-14]: Mainstream economic myths are disastrous for US policy: Interview by Ana G Perez. Galbraith has a new book, The Power to Destroy: How Bad Economics Drove America's Decline.

Technology (Including AI):

Media:

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.

Dean Baker:

  • [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 enefits, 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."

Tom Carson:

Current Affairs: Including interviews by Nathan J Robinson.

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [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 teh 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.

Tom Engelhardt/TomDispatch:

Paywalled Articles: I clicked on these, but couldn't read them. Organized by publication:

Miscellaneous Pieces

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

Books:

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

    • Ian Lustick/Eli Clifton [08-02]: The pro-Israel lobby has swayed US presidents since Truman. It must end with Trump: An excerpt from their book, which "tracks the growth over nearly eight decades, of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in US history."

      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."

    • 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 comment:

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

    • [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." This 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.

Other media:

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 May 12:

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.

Current count: #^c