Wild Wednesday Reads: “Call It Evil”

Posted: September 9, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

There is a lot of news today, as usual. Here are the stories I’ve been looking at. Yesterday was the New Hampshire primary election, and the results could help determine which party wins control of the Senate in November. Trump’s weird midterm convention opens today; his two speeches will air opposite the first two games of the NFL season. Will the event help or hurt Republican office-seekers? Yesterday, Trump unleashed a batch of disgusting lies about 9/11. Speaking of disgusting, what about that mystery meat that Trump is importing from foreign countries?

New Hampshire Primary

Steven Porter at The Boston Globe: John E. Sununu, Chris Pappas win N.H. primary for US Senate.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Chris Pappas and John E. Sununu will face off in the Nov. 3 general election to represent the Granite State in the US Senate, according to the Associated Press.

Pappas, 46, is projected to win the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, defeating progressive rival Karishma Manzur, while Sununu, 61, is projected to defeat Scott Brown in the showdown for the Republican nomination.

Pappas, the current US representative for New Hampshire’s First Congressional District, entered the race in April, three weeks after Senator Jeanne Shaheen announced her retirement, then secured her prompt endorsement. He maintained a lead in the polls, even as Manzur gained ground.

His victory in the primary represents a win for the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, at a time when more progressive candidates have prevailed in other states.

Representative Chris Pappas speaks to supporters after winning the New Hampshire Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday.Credit…John Tully for The New York Times

Pappas, a lifelong Manchester resident whose family has operated the Puritan Backroom Restaurant for decades, would be the first openly gay man to serve in the US Senate. He has been married to lawyer Vann Bentley since 2023.

Sununu is hoping to win back the seat he lost to Shaheen in 2008. His success or failure in the general election could prove pivotal in deciding which party holds the Senate majority for the second half of President Trump’s term.

Trump endorsed Sununu despite their past differences. In the 2024 campaign cycle, Sununu had backed Nikki Haley for the GOP presidential nomination and called Trump a “loser.” Still, the president lent his support in February, solidifying Sununu’s status as the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

‘A win by Pappas could help Democrats win control of the Senate.

Simon Rosenberg at Hopium Chronicles: Pappas Scores A Decisive Win In NH.

Rep. Chris Pappas had a decisive win last night in New Hampshire, winning his Democratic primary 65%-33% (+32) in a state VP Harris won by 3 points in 2024. There are two reasons for us to be a bit more optimistic about Pappas’ chances than we are hearing in the current chatter:

  • Democrats outvoted Republicans in the Senate primary last night 156,000 to 112,000. That’s very encouraging, a sign of the Democratic intensity we’ve seen all over the country these last 20 months.
  • There have been two general election polls in NH n recent days. The St. Anselm poll had Pappas up over John Sununu 48%-41 (+7). A University of New Hampshire poll had Sununu up 45%-43% (+2). Of the two the St. Anselm poll was much closer to the primary result last night as it had Pappas at +31, off by just a point. The UNH poll had Pappas winning the primary by only 13 points, which was off by 19 points.

So I at this point given our strong turnout last night, given the national partisan lean we’ve seen across the country, and given the accuracy of the St. Anselm poll my sense is the the +7 Pappas is closer to being right than the +2 Sununu. But we will be keeping an eye on it in the coming days and for now sticking to our mission here which is to flip seats, states, and legislative chambers and take stuff away from MAGA…….

Emily Davies at The New York Times: Chris Pappas Defeats Progressive Challenger in New Hampshire Senate Primary.

Mr. Pappas, 46, who represents the state’s First District, prevailed over Karishma Manzur, a medical scientist and member of the Southern New Hampshire Democratic Socialists of America, who sought to harness the anti-establishment mood and shifting sentiment against Israel that have upended Democratic primaries nationwide.

“Today New Hampshire’s voters have sent a clear message,” Mr. Pappas said after securing the Democratic nomination. “They’re fed up with what’s happening in our politics, and they’re ready for change.”

His victory sets up a general election contest that could help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. Mr. Pappas will face former Senator John E. Sununu, who easily won the Republican nomination on Tuesday.

John Sununu

A recent poll by the University of New Hampshire showed Mr. Pappas running narrowly behind Mr. Sununu in a general election matchup. The main Republican Senate super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund, has pledged to spend $17 million in the state for the general election; the group’s Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority PAC, has announced initial plans to spend $10.2 million in television advertising.

Mr. Pappas, a moderate Democrat from Manchester, has been among the state’s most successful politicians in recent history, holding onto a House seat in the state’s notably swingy First Congressional District. He had previously served three terms on the state’s five-member Executive Council, a body responsible for approving high-level appointments and state contracts. Before that, he served two terms as treasurer of Hillsborough County and two terms in the State Legislature.

If elected, Mr. Pappas, the grandson of the man credited with inventing chicken tenders, would be the first openly gay male senator. He triumphed over Ms. Manzur with significant support from party leaders and a significant fund-raising advantage. Former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed him; Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mark Kelly of Arizona actively campaigned on his behalf.

As of late August, Mr. Pappas’s campaign had raised more than $15 million, according to campaign finance records.

Trump’s Midterm Convention

Politico Playbook: Adam Wren, Dasha Burns, Will Steakin, and Megan Messerly write:  ‘The vibes are very bad’ in Texas.

We’re here in Dallas for the convention — and we’re already getting a pulse check around the extravaganza before the speeches kick off….

DALLAS — Republicans’ Trump-a-palooza threatens to put the party’s general-election headaches on blast, with candidates finding new ways to keep their distance from President Donald Trump over fears he’ll drag them down in November.

On the ground in Dallas, the early reports aren’t giving Republicans a ton of hope for a turnaround.

“The vibes are very bad,” a Republican lobbyist close to the White House who attended an RNC donor event at the Ritz Carlton last night told us. “Dems are salivating. Our people are debating Israel. Or melting down about this or that. No one is motivated to vote. Only the DSA rise is what’s keeping us in the game.”

For those coming to Texas this week, trepidation reigns about what could transpire on the stage — and what it might mean for lawmakers back home.

In fact, as a person close to the White House told Playbook, the best case scenario might be people tuning out.

“My only hope is that no one watches it since it’s competing versus NFL opening games,” the person said. “Hopefully nobody notices the embarrassing show.”

This person added: “I don’t think it will matter. No one knows about it, no enthusiasm, and it’s during football. Only D.C. people care.”

There’s more at the link.

Will Weissert at The Independent: Anxious Republicans watch from the sidelines as Trump keeps tight grip on cash and spotlight.

Channeling a western persona, President Donald Trump is heading to Dallas for this week’s Republican convention to rescue his party’s prospects ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

The unprecedented gathering begins Wednesday, with Trump aiming to rally his base by transforming the Nov. 3 vote into a direct assessment of his own record. Although his name will not appear on the ballot, he created the event to help GOP candidates.

However, with his approval ratings at record lows, uncertainty remains about whether his presence will energize Republican voters or mobilize the opposition.

The president will dominate the schedule, delivering a keynote speech on Wednesday and returning the next evening to offer final remarks following an address by Vice President JD Vance. The format effectively turns the two-day convention into a showcase centered on Trump, flanked by a lineup that features several of the party’s most at-risk legislators.

“If Trump is in the orbit then everything gets swallowed up into a black hole. It’s just unavoidable,” said Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and a critic of the president….

The American Airlines Center, as preparations are underway for the Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas, U.S., September 7, 2026. REUTERS/Jessica Koscielniak

Networks and NFL ratings threaten to overshadow Trump’s high-stakes Dallas convention.

Republicans familiar with the event’s organization report that the president maintained direct personal oversight of every detail. Indeed, his command of the schedule was so absolute that anyone seeking logistical details in recent weeks was informed that plans were still pending because Trump had not yet finalized his choices.

Despite all the cowboy imagery throughout the gathering, it remains uncertain whether meaningful reinforcements are truly on the way for struggling campaigns, however.

MAGA Inc., the political organization aligned with the president that possesses a war chest of nearly $400 million, announced a $10 million investment in television and digital advertisements focused on the Texas Senate race. Nevertheless, this marks the first time the group has deployed its large financial reserves in a serious way, even as Republicans nationwide urgently seek major funding to help in tight election battles across the country.

Additionally, an outside group called Securing American Greatness has initiated an ad campaign celebrating the president’s record in the lead-up to the midterms. These gauzy promotional videos focus almost entirely on Trump, giving scarcely any attention to candidates running for Congress.

Furthermore, the main broadcast networks have stopped short of committing to air most of the convention each evening. The scheduled proceedings will also face direct competition from the kickoff of the NFL season, with games likely taking place alongside both of Trump’s primary speeches.

Trump’s 9/11 Lies

Judd Legum at Popular Information: Trump’s 9/11 fantasies.

This week is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Trump is marking the occasion by describing his role in heroic terms, claiming he personally went to Ground Zero to aid recovery efforts. On September 6, Trump made the following remarks on Fox News:

And I went down. I was building a building in New York, and I had a lot of construction workers. And I went down there very shortly thereafter the following day, you couldn’t go down the same day, but like the following day, very, very quickly afterwards and we worked long and hard.

Trump relayed a similar story at a White House event on Tuesday:

I was building a big building in New York and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was — it was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it ever.

Although some details change, Trump has made similar claims in interviews for decades, claiming to have sent 100 or more construction workers to Ground Zero. Trump has claimed he “helped“ clear rubble and “spent a lot of time down there.”

There is no evidence any of this is true.

President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a Steel Across America event on September 8, 2026 in Washington, DC. SAUL LOEB AFP via Getty Images

Two Trump-branded buildings were under development in New York at the time — Trump World Tower and Trump Place at Riverside South. But neither Trump nor the Trump Organization employed “a lot of construction workers.” Rather, the construction manager of both developments was Bovis Lend Lease. So any construction workers were employees of Bovis Lend Lease or their subcontractors, not Trump. Journalist Tim O’Brien, who wrote a biography of Trump, noted that in 2001, the Trump Organization as a whole employed around a dozen people. Trump has never identified an employee who worked on emergency response at Ground Zero.

Richard Alles, was a battalion chief of the New York Fire Department in 2001, and supervised “search and rescue units for the entire first two weeks of the operation.” After that, Alles worked at Ground Zero in various capacities for months. “I was in a supervisory role with the fire department at the time,” Alles told PolitiFact in 2019. “I was there for several months — I have no knowledge of his being down there.”

Further, Alles said, if Trump had sent 100 construction workers to Ground Zero, “there would be a record of it” because “[e]verybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services.” In 2019, the New York Times reported that “there is no documented evidence of [Trump] marshaling his resources to aid in the relief effort.” [….]

On Tuesday, Trump also offered a new version of a story involving him being physically carried away from danger by firemen:

United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down.

And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us. And two firemen, big strong guys — and I’m not the smallest guy in the world — they grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.

There’s no evidence for this tale either. Read the rest at Public Information.

Noah Berlatsky at Everything is Horrible: Trump’s 9/11 Lies Are A Moral Failure, Not A Cognitive One.

Donald Trump lies on every day ending with day. Yesterday, he chose to lie about his actions on 9/11 while addressing a gathering of first responders. He claimed he had gone himself with a crew of workers to try to assist on the day of the attack, and that two firemen who thought he was in danger because of a rickety building picked him up and ran with him to safety.

There is no corroboration from witnesses or public records. It sounds like nonsense, and it is nonsense.

Inevitably, Trump’s remarks have led many to reiterate accusations that he is in mental decline due to his advanced age. At 80, the argument goes, he can no longer tell lies from truth. He is senile and therefore makes self-aggrandizing claims, conflating what he wants to have happened with what is true.

Trump does constantly mistake his own inner heroic monologue with truth. But this is not a new phenomenon for him. Mental decline did not create Trump’s moral failures. Rather, his moral failures have destroyed his cognitive capacity. He is a fool because he is evil, not the other way around….

Trump’s claims about his role in 9/11 are an especially good test case. That’s because he has been lying about his role in 9/11 from the moment it happened 25 years ago.

Trump was 55 years old when the towers came down; he was not senile, and no one really believes he was in cognitive decline at that point. Nonetheless, when he was interviewed on the day itself, he rushed to do what he does best, which is tell disgusting self-aggrandizing lies. In a telephone interview just after the attack, Trump boasted that his property at 40 Wall Street was the tallest building still standing in Manhattan. That was a lie; it was the second tallest. And it was an incredibly fucked up thing to say while the bodies were still being counted.

Two days after 9/11, Trump uttered the first version of his lie about being involved in clean-up efforts. He told a German reporter that “I have a lot of men down here right now…over 100 and we have about 125 coming.”

Nor was that Trump’s last falsehood. In 2015, when he was 69 years old and running for President, he claimed that he saw “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheering the fall of the World Trade Center in New Jersey on television. He did not; it never happened. It was just a racist lie.

And in 2016, Trump lied again about being involved in clean up efforts on 9/11, insisting he had “helped clear the rubble.”

Trump, has, then, told multiple lies about 9/11 over 25 years, starting when he was 55, continuing when he was 70, and now, at 80, elaborating further. That doesn’t suggest someone who is in cognitive decline and has suddenly started having trouble telling truth from lies. It suggests someone who has lied consistently, remorselessly, gleefully, for decades.

I strongly agree with Berlatsky that Trump is truly evil. Recently, I came across a book by moral philosopher Susan Neiman. Here is the New York Times Review of her book (gift link): This Philosopher Thinks It’s Time We Call Out Evil in Our World.

Susan Neiman has noticed a paradox. “As the world drifts toward disaster,” she writes in her new book, “our language has become more cautious.” Yet this tentativeness has been remarkably asymmetrical. President Trump loves to use hyperbole (“nasty,” “sleazebag,” “vermin”), while establishment Democrats have, at least until recently, mostly hewed to the language of decorous risk aversion.

In “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Neiman argues that widespread misapprehensions about what evil is make people too reluctant to use the word. Despite her willfully provocative title, she categorically states: “This is not a book about Donald Trump.” An American-born moral philosopher now based in Germany, Neiman wrote an incisive history of evil in modern thought in 2002. Her new book is less a philosophical exploration than a polemical guide to the current moment. She believes that people are so attached to understanding evil in terms of individual monstrousness — the gleeful villain, the depraved sadist — that they lose sight of how evil more typically works.

Susan Neiman

She recalls an interview with a podcast producer who kept asking her about a gruesome case of cannibalism in Florida. Even when she tried to tell him that such incidents distract from evils she considered more common and more dangerous (“making war to stay in power”; cutting aid to lower taxes on the rich), the producer kept returning to the lurid particulars.

Neiman wants readers to think about evil in ways that are less spectacular and more systemic. She cites Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil” as especially useful. The fact that Arendt was denounced for it illustrates our stubborn reluctance to see evil as anything but demonic.

Arendt was writing about Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi organizers of the Holocaust, and her critics excoriated her for depicting him as a desk-murderer marked by “sheer thoughtlessness.” But Arendt insisted that this didn’t make him any less guilty, or any less evil — quite the opposite. What makes such evil so destructive is that it has no depth, Arendt said: “It can overgrow and lay waste to the world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface.”

The consequences of this line of thinking are generative but intensely uncomfortable. Neiman realizes that plenty of anxious liberals may agree with her condemnation of the Trump era but nevertheless blanch at her terminology. “Evil is the most explosive word we have,” she writes. “Used indiscriminately, it can serve to stir up evil itself.” To call something evil marks a limit, and gestures at a terrible realm beyond it. “Crimes are things for which we have procedures,” she says. “Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.”

You can use the gift link to read the rest of the review if you’re interested. The book will be released on September 15.

I’ve been a longtime critic of food-safety practices in the U.S. meatpacking industry. But some of the practices in the 16 countries currently authorized to export raw beef to the United States are worse than any on these shores. During the past year, China rejected two shipping containers of beef from Uruguay after finding residue of an anti-parasitic drug in the meat, and rejected beef from Argentina reportedly because it tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause serious blood disorders.

One of the worst food-safety scandals occurred in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of beef. In 2017, the Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants after allegations that government inspectors and politicians were being bribed to allow the sale of contaminated beef. Rotten meat treated with ascorbic acid and other chemicals to mask the contamination had been sold to hospitals and schools in Brazil and also exported. Executives at the Brazilian company JBS, the largest beef producer in the world, later admitted to bribing inspectors.

I don’t eat much beef, but I think I’m going to avoid it completely for awhile. A bit more from the article:

Why did Mr. Trump come up with this scheme to import hundreds of millions of pounds of beef?

“Regime Change,” the recent book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, contains an interesting clue: a White House meeting last November between President Trump and Joesley Batista, whose family controls JBS.

Mr. Batista had long been considered persona non grata in Washington, having been jailed in Brazil as a result of, among other things, paying $186 million in bribes to almost 2,000 politicians, including three Brazilian presidents, to obtain state financing for his family’s company. In 2019, after JBS bought several American meatpacking companies, Senator Marco Rubio and his colleague Robert Menendez deplored JBS’s “admitted criminal conduct,” its “business relationships with Venezuela’s Maduro regime, as well as its growing reliance on financing from entities aligned with the Chinese government.” The senators argued that allowing JBS to own U.S. companies could endanger America’s food supply and national security.

Mr. Batista gained the White House meeting last November, Ms. Haberman and Mr. Swan wrote, because of his friendship with Melania Trump. In addition, a JBS subsidiary had donated $5 million to Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, the largest gift from any individual or corporation. Not long afterward, JBS got approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a privilege the company had sought for almost a decade.

More examples of pure evil.

Anyway, those are my recommended reads for this wild Wednesday. What other stories have caught your interest today?

 

Tuesday Cartoons: Tis the Season

Posted: September 8, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 8 Comments

Yesterday was the first day, it felt like fall in North Georgia. Don’t know about you all, but I am so ready to say goodbye to summer.

Cartoons via Cagle:

This is an open thread…

Labor Day Reads: Back to the Abyss

Posted: September 7, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: #We are so Fucked, 2026 Elections, Elon Musk, RFK Jr | Tags: , , , , | 8 Comments

No if’s, vote accordingly. Bring oversight of the most corrupt administration ever back, in numbers too big for Elmo and his high-tech bros to manipulate. Make America Great Again By Neutering Trump! John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I hope you’re having a great day with whatever plans you’ve got! Labor Day has always been one of my favorite holidays because it’s really about We, the People. It doesn’t involve spending a bundle just because it’s been hyped into a merchandising event.  It’s about breaking bread with others and just taking a day off.  It’s celebrating the people who do all the work, not gobbling up all the money. There are still many of those gobblers out there that still look for child labor, or hiring or paying people on the basis of something other than their skills.  We have movements now to counteract that, and we need them more than ever.

The first set of suggested reads today has to do with Germany. It’s time to bring up one of the most used quotes ever. That would be this one from 1905 and the great mind of George Santayana. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  There are always people who want to rewrite and blur history. Orange Caligula does this daily. It pains me to read headlines like this in The Guardian today.”The AfD’s win in Germany is a dark day for Europe. Time is running out to stop the far right. This party is among the most extreme in Europe. To protect our democracies, liberal parties must urgently change their tactics.”  Cas Mudde has the report.

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) narrowly failed to secure an outright majority in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt. But nobody should take comfort from that. The party still won by a landslide. Decades of far-right election gains have made them seem normal to the point where only the biggest victories are deemed newsworthy. But 44% of the vote for a party that is officially classified as “extreme right” is not normal. It is a black day for European democracy, even if it occurs in a small east German state.

While Saxony-Anhalt (and Germany itself) may have dodged the worst outcome because the AfD won’t automatically fulfil its ambition of forming the first far-right state government in Germany since the Nazi era, there is no reason to assume it will be so lucky at the next election. Neither will other German states, such as Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in two weeks’ time, or other countries, such as France next year. No country is immune from the far right and, perhaps even more worryingly, no far-right party or politician is too extreme for political success (as the US has shown). We must therefore update our analyses and strategies.

Although Saxony-Anhalt, and east Germany in general, is an extreme case, it reflects similar trends in the rest of Europe. Far-right parties are going from strength to strength, with old dominant parties decimated, and party systems fragmented. Consequently, coalition formation is becoming increasingly complicated, particularly if we want to keep the far right out of power. In many countries, provinces and cities, most democratic parties are having to govern together to exclude the far right. This often leads to inefficient and unstable coalitions, in turn feeding yet more political dissatisfaction and far-right support.

Sunday’s results will only intensify an ongoing debate in Germany about the so-called Brandmauer (a firewall maintained by mainstream parties against cooperating with the AfD). Actually, Germany is one of the few EU countries to still have a far-right cordon sanitaire. Throughout Europe, from Italy to Sweden, far-right parties have been normalised and integrated into the political mainstream. In most cases, the (rightwing) parties that collaborate with the far right claim that the latter have moderated and are now “conservative” – a claim that is factually wrong, but increasingly popular with the electorates and members of these parties, and much of the media.

This will remain almost impossible to claim in Germany. The AfD is among the most extreme parties in Europe, and its most successful branches, including the one in Saxony-Anhalt, are among the AfD’s most extreme. This will not prevent some rightwing politicians from claiming that the AfD is less of a problem than the left, and there is even a fear that some parliamentarians from the conservative CDU in Saxony-Anhalt will defect to give the AfD a majority in the state. On the other side of the political spectrum, calls for an AfD ban will become even louder, and while this might be legally possible, it could create a massive popular backlash, going well beyond Saxony-Anhalt.

Both approaches share a too-limited interpretation of the problem. The idea of maintaining the Brandmauer is that the only (or main) problem is outside the system. Yet the system is falling apart as it is. Yes, the AfD (and the far right in general) is a fundamental threat to liberal democracy, but so is the fact that a sizeable and growing part of the population no longer feels represented by its politicians. While many still come out to vote for democracy, they increasingly vote against a party rather than for one.

As usual, both my degrees and fascination with History and Economics lead my interests. This next one is from Dr. Paul Krugman’s SubStack.   “Neo-Nazis and the Impotence of Trumponomics. Crude economics doesn’t explain what just happened.” Of course, Elon Musk plays a role in this. I’m horrified.

Neo-Nazis — no point in euphemisms — just won big in the rough equivalent of a state-level election in Germany. America’s leading neo-Nazi — again, no point in euphemisms — congratulated the AfD (in German) on the result, and in return received “thanks for your support” from the AfD’s lead candidate.

In the days and weeks ahead there will be many analyses of the results and its implications from people who, unlike me, know something about German politics. For now, let me do something more parochial, and write about what the Sachsen-Anhalt election might teach us about U.S. political economy.

So, about America: Make America Great Again meant different things to different people — racism, of course, being a key component. But in Donald Trump’s mind it also clearly meant trying to bring back “manly” jobs. He would do this by imposing tariffs to eliminate trade deficits, which, in his garbled version of economics, would end huge U.S. “giveaways” to surplus nations. And this would, in turn, lead to a huge revival of U.S. manufacturing employment.

Why is Germany relevant to this story? Because in terms of both trade balances and manufacturing Germany is, in effect, the anti-America. Where we do indeed run large trade deficits, Germany runs huge surpluses. And while Germany, like every other advanced economy, has seen the manufacturing share of employment decline over time, it remains a more industrial nation than the U.S. has been since the 1980s.

Indeed, relative to the size of its economy, Germany runs trade surpluses and retains large-scale manufacturing employment to an extent that lies far beyond the wildest dreams of Trumponomics.

And none of this appears to make a bit of difference to the resentment that underlies right-wing extremism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Take a moment to let that sink in. We know the prior stated grievances of Trump and is ilk have never been the real agenda. However, now, the agenda is flying it’s flag full staff. Just look at the no-good that Pete Hegseth and his Department of War (sic) has been up to. The agenda is could not be more evident in every action. Racist, Sexist, Full on Right-wing Christianity supporting Israel so their rapture fantasy can be fulfilled and ruthless idiotic endless wars. These roads lead back to Elon Musk who has the where withal to change the world, and rewrite history with all his kindred grievance-filled white man.

This is from The Guardian, again and not surprisingly. “Far-right AfD win in Germany is ‘grave moment’ for Europe, politicians warn. Mainstream politicians express alarm while lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt welcomes congratulations from Elon Musk.”

Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, told a party gathering in Madrid on Monday that the result showed that “the extremist threat, largely thanks to the surrender of the traditional right, is gaining ground in Europe and in the world”.

France’s finance minister, Roland Lescure, said it “clearly sends out a very, very worrying signal … This shows that we face a major challenge in the face of ‌a populist wave which is spreading around the world today and which we must ​resist.”

Lescure’s comments echoed similar remarks on Sunday evening by France’s European affairs minister, Benjamin Haddad, who posted on social media: “To see the far right ⁠prevail in the German regional election marks a very ​grave ​moment for Europe.”

Haddad added: “We must listen ​with humility ‌to the ​anger, ​fears and worries and duly respond to these concerns. But nationalism and xenophobia will never be the answer. We cannot forget our history.”

Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, said on Monday the AfD’s win was “a very worrying sign”. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said on Sunday night in Poland: “Only idiots or traitors can rejoice at the triumph of the AfD in Germany.”

Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, described the election result as “terrible news … because it concerns a political force that is antithetical to liberal and western values”.

The reaction was not limited to Europe. Elon Musk congratulated the far-right party on its election victory with a “Well done!” on his social media platform X, prompting Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, to thank the nativist US tech billionaire for his support.

We all know that the last thing Elon Musk would be off doing today is helping his adopted celebrate Labor Day.  This is from The Economist with a shared link. “Elon Musk’s praise for the far right infuriates most of Germany. A controversial op-ed may have set the terms of the election campaign.”  This was what was going on in January of 2025.  We should’ve seen it coming.

Alice Weidel could hardly have hoped for better publicity. With federal elections due on February 23rd, Ms Weidel is running for chancellor as co-head of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. In an op-ed on December 29th in the Sunday edition of Welt, a conservative paper, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a confidant of Donald Trump, called the AfD “the last spark of hope” for Germany. The country, he claimed, is “teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse”. He had a right to speak out about German politics, he said, because he has invested heaps of money in the country. (A multibillion-dollar plant in Brandenburg producing cars and batteries for Tesla, his electric carmaker, opened in 2022.)

The AfD is polling at 19%, putting it second behind the centre-right alliance of the Christian Democratic Union and Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, at about 30%. It is not the first hard-right European party to attract Mr Musk’s support: earlier in 2024 he praised Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister. Mr Musk said she was “even more beautiful on the inside than she is on the outside”. She in turn called him a “precious genius”. He is said to be considering a donation to Britain’s anti-immigrant Reform UK party.

Mr Musk’s love-note to the AfD may have been counterproductive. It certainly incensed Germany’s leaders, already anxious about Mr Trump’s second term in office. “I can’t remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of the Western democracies,” said Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader and chancellor candidate, on December 29th. Olaf Scholz, the current chancellor and candidate for the Social Democrats, noted in his New Year’s Eve speech that Germany’s fate is decided by its citizens, not “by the owners of social media”. Mr Musk owns X, a social-media platform. His recent posts there have been childishly offensive: one called Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, an “anti-democratic tyrant”; another called the chancellor “Oaf Schitz”.

The op-ed editor of Welt, Eva Marie Kogel, quit in protest after Mr Musk’s article was published. The piece had been accompanied by a rebuttal by Jan Philipp Burgard, the paper’s incoming editor-in-chief, calling Mr Musk “fatally wrong”. The rebuttal’s headline calls the AfD “partly xenophobic and antisemitic”; Mr Burgard also blasts its anti-Americanism and its endorsement of leaving the European Union. Yet like Ms Kogel, many Germans found it wrong to have run Mr Musk’s piece at all.

Mr Musk’s op-ed was poorly argued. Yet the furore around its publishing seems unexpectedly to have shaped the early phase of the campaign. In the long run this may not prove terribly important: social-media algorithms, misinformation and Russian influence campaigns could have far more impact, as Michael Hanfeld, a German pundit, argued in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a daily. But for the moment, the affair has had the odd effect of aligning the AfD with an American oligarch, making the Alternative for Germany seem slightly un-German.

Josephine Walker’s latest at Axios truly shines life on life during Orange Caligula’s regime. “America’s expensive groceries are getting less safe to eat.”
Plenty of Americans feel like they’re forking over a fortune for groceries—only to get hit with a recall notice that forces them to throw that expensive food out.

Why it matters: While grocery prices are driven by complex trade and energy costs, the safety net meant to keep them safe to eat is fraying, creating a dual crisis of affordability and safety.

  • The average American household pays more than $10,000 on groceries every year, and two-thirds of Americans think they’re spending too much.
  • Prices have increased by more than 18% since 2022, although some foods have seen sharper or smaller increases.

What they’re saying: “It can be really, really scary out there,” Lauren Borsheim, a food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch, tells Axios.

  • “The Trump administration since 2025 has really just dismantled many of the fundamental protections we need to keep our food supply safe.”
  • “We have people that are really afraid that the U.S. is not doing a good job regulating our food supply. It’s definitely a concern out there that as people are spending more money on their food, they are also fearful that that same food is going to cause them to get sick,” Borsheim says.

By the numbers: Recalls are relatively on par with normal levels this fiscal year, according to FDA data.

  • So far, 5,504 products have been recalled in 2026. That’s up slightly from the 5,461 products recalled last year, but down from the 6,524 products recalled in 2024.

Yes, but: The FDA recently hit a record 19 simultaneous outbreak investigations, covering everything from infant formula to jalapeños.

Between the lines: Mega-corporations and corporate consolidation can turn single-suppliers’ errors into multi-state panics, as seen with the Cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce.

  • “The U.S. food safety system has gotten hit so hard over the last year and a half,” Christopher Barrett, an economist at Cornell University, tells Axios.

Zoom out: Food-safety advocates are concerned about declining federal surveillance after the Trump administration eliminated or pushed out thousands of workers across the CDC, FDA and USDA.

  • Those cuts prompted federal officials to say they plan to do fewer inspections.
  • Barrett says assuming staffing cuts won’t affect food safety is “demonstrably false.”
  • “When you cut corners, and you’re not seeing the inspectors show up very often, then more stuff gets out the door. You get more episodes of foodborne illness. You have expensive recalls. That just adds to companies’ costs, which gets turned into higher prices for us, and it’s a vicious cycle,” Barrett says.
So, this is not the world or country I want to leave to children and animals all over the world. I seriously hope this Labor Day motivates every one to vote like their lives depend on it.  Because, I truly believe it does.
Happy  Labor Day!
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

Sunday Cartoons: Republican Shit Show

Posted: September 6, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 6 Comments

That shit show is literal by the way…

I know about the cyclospora infection personally. I’ve been dealing with it myself for a week now. It has been exhausting.

A few observations:

Good news: he lost.

— Governor Tim Walz (@governorwalz.mn.gov) 2026-09-05T00:39:32.467Z

President Donald Trump called the war in Iran “small potatoes,” the latest comment from a top US leader downplaying the scope of a conflict that has lasted more than six months.

— Bloomberg News (@bloomberg.com) 2026-09-05T05:00:23Z

Trump’s America yukking it up with the biggest mass murderer of the 21st century

— Pat Bagley (@bagleycartoons.bsky.social) 2026-09-05T23:39:04.838Z

oh yeah, I can see it now

— Anonymous (@youranoncentral.bsky.social) 2026-09-05T21:35:40.759Z

It still sickens me this bigot mocked a disabled reporter and millions of Americans said, “No big deal. That’s who I want as president.”

— Steven Beschloss (@stevenbeschloss.bsky.social) 2026-09-05T18:53:09.409Z

It should have ended before this shit. Honestly.

Cartoons via Cagle:

This is an open thread.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: September 5, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Cat Lady, Mary James Ketch

Good Afternoon!!

Two days ago, Gloria Steinem died at age 92. How can we quantify the massive legacy this brilliant woman left us? For those of us women who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, she was a gigantic figure. She helped to change our lives forever. Today those massive changes are threatened by truly evil forces. So I want to pause and take note of her life’s work.

Katharine Q. Seelye at The New York Times (gift link): Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92.

Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader who galvanized the modern women’s movement, helping millions of women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at home, at work and in society at large, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 92….

Calling herself “an entrepreneur of social change,” Ms. Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.

For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

She was an unlikely revolutionary. Growing up a transient in the Midwest, she was 10 when her parents divorced and she was left to mother her mentally anguished mother — a formative experience that reverberated throughout her life. She had scant formal education until sixth grade; her big dream, as a budding tap dancer, was to become a Rockette.

But she read voraciously, graduated from college with honors and believed fiercely that women should be able to live whatever life they chose.

Her own feminist awakening didn’t come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a “speak out” of women discussing their illegal abortions. Charismatic, articulate, media savvy, deeply empathetic and a workaholic, she evolved into a political and cultural force.

She led protests and consciousness-raising sessions, wrote essays and delivered speeches, delved into political organizing, helped establish rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, founded numerous groups that promoted women and had the Midas touch when it came to raising money for their causes.

And she and a cadre of feminists had the audacity to start a publication that flew in the face of traditional women’s magazines, examining topics like abortion, domestic violence and equal pay for equal work. The first glossy national periodical to be created, owned and run entirely by women, Ms. magazine, founded in 1971, sought to capture and channel a rising sense of female empowerment and eradicate the sexist assumptions that permeated the culture.

The magazine served as the movement’s manifesto, an incubator for social transformation and a blueprint for action. As such, it helped embolden women as they fought blatant discrimination and harassment in the workplace and unspoken oppression, and sometimes outright abuse, at home.

“When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” Ms. Steinem often said. “It was just called life.”

Decades after the movement dissipated and progressive women faced renewed setbacks, Ms. Steinem continued to push for their rights and equality. Indefatigable, she wrote essays and lectured into her 90s, and the news media never stopped seeking her opinion. She was the author of nearly a dozen major nonfiction books; her latest, “An Unexpected Life,” is scheduled for publication in late September.

Use the gift link to read the rest. You can also read an excerpt from Steinem’s memoir at The Atlantic (gift link): ‘Everything We Do Matters.’ Gloria Steinem on what older people can teach America.

One more tribute to Steinem by Nina Burleigh at American Freakshow: SIC TRANSIT GLORIA: Ms. Steinem Forever.

To preteen girls of my 1970s junior high, there was no other way to be. Hiphuggers, short skirts, aviators, long swingy hair. A lot of sass. And for many of us, the first post “Women’s Lib” generation, the expectation of an adventure-filled, self-reliant future with marriage and motherhood as options not imminent requirements.

To her peers in the adult public square at the time, she had threaded the needle of sexy and smart in a way that made male detractors look like idiots. The record of their blustering scorn and contumely and the open ridicule heaped on her, and the women she led, is part of history.

Feminazi. Furry Legged fanatic. C-word. B-word. And the perennial favorite: Man-hater.

They couldn’t take it. Her wit and panache drew out their scorn the way certain salves drain boils. The casual insolence and open diminishment toward her and her peers was part of the cultural wallpaper of the era. Among the men engaged in it, the psychological temperature ranged from lightly snide to psychotic.

Reporting on the creation of Ms. Magazine, ABC news anchor Harry Reasoner said on national television, “I give it six months before they run out of things to say.”

By the 1980s, the Viagran Centurions of the media had mobilized. The shock jocks – Limbaugh, Imus Stern – can’t you take a joke? – and their spiritual grandsons the fight club rape propagandist Tate bros and their herd of manosphere sheep. The disappointed entitled, the preternaturally insecure, the incels, and their insidious cousins, the fascist tiki-torch carrying “You Will Not Replace Us” troops.

Gay Talese, revered chronicler of the famously misogyinistic Italian Mafia, sharing a taxi with Steinem and another great 20th Century phallocrat the author Saul Bellow – once famously said: “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”

To her face.

Can’t you take a joke?

Charles Manson, weighing in from prison in a 1970 interview uttered a phrase that decades later is close to an actual slogan dripped from the mouths of men from JD Vance to the Tate brothers: “Gloria Steinem and all those girls’ libbers, they’re taking the manliness out of the man. They want to be the men, but they don’t want to carry the weight.”

Replacement was always the underlying fear.

Millions of men now share the views of a psychotic mass murdering cult leader.: Taking the manliness out of the man.

Steinem saw this coming back in 1972: “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” In later speeches she would add to that: “But too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry.”

She could name the core issues like no one else. Cut to the chase. “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon.”

And: “She will need her sisterhood.”

Where is that sisterhood half a century later?

Read the rest at the link.

And now we’ve lost another feminist icon.

Greg Evans at Deadline: Robin Morgan Dies: Former Ms. Magazine Editor, Women’s Media Center Co-Founder With Jane Fonda & Gloria Steinem Was 85.

Robin Morgan, a former editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine who co-founded the Women’s Media Center with Ms. co-founder Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, died today, September 5, just several days after the passing of her friend and colleague Steinem. Morgan was 85.

Her death was announced by her son Blake Morgan and Julie Burton, president and CEO of the Women’s Media Center. A cause of death was not disclosed, but her son noted that she died peacefully in her sleep. Robin Morgan was in her second decade of living with Parkinson’s Disease.

Girl with a cat (2020) by Olga Gordienok

In a statement, Fonda said, “Robin Morgan was an artist, a poet, an activist, and in my eyes, a living legend — a woman whose anthology series, Sisterhood is Powerful, Sisterhood is Global, and Sisterhood is Forever provided the evidence needed to launch a feminist revolution, and it was part of my feminist education that led to the movie, 9 To 5.”

“I have learned so much from Robin over the years,” Fonda added. “I love her and all that she has brought to the world, the women’s movement, and to me on the most personal levels. I already miss her and my heart is broken.”

The editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine from 1989 to 1994, Morgan, over the last decade, hosted, wrote, and produced the award-winning WMC podcast Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan. The podcast recently produced its 500th episode.

Morgan, Fonda and Steinem co-founded the Women’s Media Center 21 years ago with a mission to give voice to and strengthen democracy for women in media and beyond. “Our job is to make women visible and powerful in the media,” Morgan once told Fox 5 Good Day New York. “And we do that through lots of programs — through training women in media skills, through SheSource, which is the go-to place for experts, through many programs and our radio program [now podcast], Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan.”

And now, sadly, back to the reality of Trump world.

Yesterday, during one of his oval office bull

sessions with the media, Trump revealed his true feelings toward the men and women he has sent to fight and die in his Iran war.

Sarah Ewall-Wice at The Daily Beast: Trump Makes Jaw-Dropping Insult to the Dead of His Own War.

President Donald Trump has dismissed his war in Iran, in which 18 U.S. service members have been killed, as “small potatoes for us.”

The president, 80, was taking questions in the Oval Office on Friday when he was asked how he would describe the conflict with Iran.

The question came after Vice President JD Vance insisted on Thursday it wasn’t a war despite the U.S. carrying out new strikes this week.

“Can you explain to the American people, if this is not a war, what exactly is it?” ABC News’ Rachel Scott asked Trump.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, a lot of people don’t call it a war. I call it a military conflict because it’s, it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing,” Trump said. “We did Venezuela, and we did this.”

But the president did not stop there. He went on to compare war casualties to back up his claim that the conflict in Iran was “small potatoes.”

“In Venezuela, we lost nobody, and this, we lost 18 people,” Trump said. “In Vietnam you lost 100,000 people, and in other conflicts, you lost tens of thousands of people.”

Trump, who himself received five military draft deferments during the Vietnam War, went on to say that he would call the conflict with Iran “intermittent strikes” and agreed with Vance that it was not a war.

“We’re not fighting right now. There’s no fighting,” Trump rambled.

Trump obviously couldn’t care less about the men and women who have died and been injured in his war. And actually, there is fighting.

The Washington Post (gift link): U.S. military says it hit 3 Iranian tankers after Navy ships targeted.

The U.S. military said Saturday it hit three Iranian oil tankers, including one near Kharg Island, the country’s main oil terminal, after Iran launched missiles toward two U.S. Navy warships.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the region, said in a statement that its strikes disabled an oil carrier off the coast of Kharg Island and another off Jask, and it destroyed a third one in the Gulf of Oman.

Blaise, Saint-Louis (1956 – 1995) Haitian artist

“Let the message to the IRGC be clear: If you shoot at two of our ships, we will impose an even higher economic cost — taking out three of yours,” said Adm. Brad Cooper, Centcom commander, referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “We will not hesitate to defend American forces, and if necessary, destroy Iran’s limited and exposed oil fleet.”

Iranian state media earlier in the day reported that an oil tanker was hit by U.S. missiles near Kharg Island.

Iran’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kharg Island, about 15 miles from the Iranian mainland in the Persian Gulf, is the centerpiece of Iran’s oil-based economy, with about 90 percent of the country’s oil exports moving through there.

Since the U.S. and Israel launched the first airstrikes against Iran six months ago, President Donald Trump has been mired in an unpopular war with no end in sight.

No end in sight. And it’s a war.

Meanwhile, back home in the Pentagon, Paranoid Whiskey Pete is hunting for leakers.

Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman, and Eric Schmitt at the New York Times (gift link): In Major Leak Hunt, Pentagon Gives Polygraph Tests to Joint Staff Members.

U.S. government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions, according to officials briefed on the move.

The investigators asked military officers and civilian employees on the Joint Staff if they disclosed classified information to members of the press, and about whether they provided information about diminished U.S. munitions stocks.

The polygraph tests were conducted in August after a flurry of news reports detailed diminished stocks of crucial munitions, including of long-range missiles and Patriot interceptors. The show of force appeared aimed at not just ferreting out anyone who may have shared information, but intimidating others who might do so in the future, according to people with knowledge of the effort.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 officers and officials work for the Joint Staff, which coordinates operations, policy and war plans with combatant commanders around the world….

The scope of the investigation is without parallel. Mass polygraph tests have never been administered to the top ranks of the U.S. military in modern history.

Woman with cat, Tracy Porter

“I’ve never seen polygraphs employed this broadly or at this seniority level,” said Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, a retired top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2000 to 2002. “In my experience, it’s unprecedented.”

The move comes as multiple news organizations have revealed details about how the war with Iran has drained munition stockpiles and reported on concerns inside the administration about the strategic direction of the conflict.

President Trump has pressured administration officials to aggressively hunt for those leaking information. But the president has gone further than merely trying to stop the flow of unauthorized information; he has labeled “treasonous” the media coverage that is critical of the U.S. handling of the war in Iran and the shortages of munitions.

The leaks have intensified an atmosphere of deep distrust and paranoia inside the Pentagon, one that current and former officials say has been fostered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Surrounded by a tight inner circle of loyalists, Mr. Hegseth has pushed out or blocked the promotions of at least 80 generals, admirals and other officials during his tenure. Since early last year, the Pentagon has been conducting a number of leak investigations in response to news coverage about his leadership, even as he faced criticism for sharing sensitive details about strikes in Yemen in a Signal group last year.

The only thing Trump really seems to really care about is building his ballroom and putting his name on everything he can think of. The latest announcement from the administration is that they are going break ground for Trump’s “triumphal” Nazi arch.

Rachel Treisman at NPR: Trump’s arch may break ground without final approval. Veterans are trying to stop it.

The Trump administration plans to break ground on its proposed 250-foot arch near Washington, D.C.’s National Mall in the coming days, without key approvals and despite an ongoing lawsuit.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wrote on social media Thursday that “we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck.”

But the arch is still awaiting final approval from the National Capital Planning Commission, as well as federally mandated reviews regarding aviation safety and historic preservation.

Historic preservation experts have long criticized the Trump administration for seeming to rush the arch approval process, including by moving to weaken protections for historic sites altogether. This latest development raises concerns that the White House seeks to sidestep the process, which it denies.

Cecilia Beaux, Man with the cat

“Work will begin that does not require approval, but rather helps in the process,” the White House told NPR in a statement on Friday. “We will of course continue on our path of seeking final approval from all applicable entities.”

The White House, Department of the Interior and National Park Service did not respond to NPR’s questions about the timeline and extent of the excavations or the addition of the word “military” to the structure’s title.

President Trump told journalists last year that the arch is for “me.” But since then, the administration has said the arch is intended to honor the nation’s 250th anniversary.

“This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World,” Burgum posted this week, alongside renderings of the white-and-gold structure, topped with three large gilded statues.

The administration told the judge something different.

Emily Badger at The New York Times (gift link): Is Work Starting for Trump’s Arch? It Depends Who’s Asking.

The Trump administration told a federal judge that it was not preparing to start construction on the president’s planned triumphal arch in Washington, a day after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced that excavation work for the project would begin within the next two weeks.

The work the government plans to do, the Department of Justice said in a court filing on Friday, consists of archaeological excavation of the site necessary for the required historic review of the project. And it stated, despite President Trump’s frequent promotion of the project, that no final decision had been made to begin building the arch, which would stand near Arlington National Cemetery.

That starkly different message follows a pattern across other cases in which the administration has made one pronouncement in public and another in court.

Responding to the conflicting messages, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the administration late Friday night to give her at least 48 hours’ notice if it proceeds with anything other than the limited archaeological work. And she reminded the administration that it is under an existing order to give the court 14 days notice before beginning construction on the arch.

The flurry of filings on Friday followed Mr. Burgum’s surprise announcement that excavation work for the arch would begin, even before it receives final approvals.

The Language of Care, by Kateryna Kolesnykova

“We are pleased to announce that after a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch,” Mr. Burgum wrote on social media.

The Department of Justice put things differently, after a group of veterans suing to block the arch sought a temporary restraining order on Friday. “This activity is not construction, or demolition in preparation for construction, of an arch,” the department said.

Judge Chutkan appeared to tread a middle path, allowing the limited work the government said in court it was pursuing, while warning it against going any further at this point.

My guess is that Trump will go ahead with the construction regardless of what the judge says. Remember, he has immunity for anything he does as president.

One more from Josh Fiallo at The Daily Beast: Trump Admits Real Reason He’s Building Monuments to Himself.

President Donald Trump has made a stunning admission while revealing why he’s obsessed with remodeling Washington.

Trump, 80, has candidly told New York magazine that he is building monuments for himself and slapping his name everywhere because he knows that nobody else will do so when he is gone.

Reporter Ben Terris shared with Trump an attack line from Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, who says that Trump’s obsession with vanity projects stems from knowing he is the only person willing to memorialize him.

“That’s true,” Trump responded. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

That is just pathetic.

That’s it for me today. Have a great long weekend, Sky Dancers!

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