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Patricia J Wentzel: Sounding the Alarm Part 1

Lock them all up!

This week I’m giving you something a little different: three posts in response to the President’s Executive Order “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” which offers a barbaric solution to homelessness: lock them all up.

To understand the implications of the order, it is helpful to know a few things about homelessness especially in regards to people with mental health and substance use disorders among the homeless. California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness, a landmark study of homeless people by UCSF’s Margot Kushel in 2021, conducted interviews with people living on the streets throughout California. The study found that “Even if the cause of homelessness was multifactorial, participants believed financial support could have prevented it. Seventy percent believed that a monthly rental subsidy of $300-$500 would have prevented their homelessness for a sustained period.” This points to the unsustainability of rents in California that are driving poor people into homelessness.
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Adam Kinzinger: How Trump Is Undermining the National Guard—and America

As a former Guardsman, I’ve seen the damage this kind of abuse can do—both to the soldiers and to the country.
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I served in the National Guard. I know what it means when that activation call comes in. It’s not just a change in plans for the weekend—it upends lives. Guardsmen are citizen-soldiers. They have civilian jobs, family responsibilities, and community commitments. Many are single parents who must suddenly scramble to find childcare, miss paychecks, or rely on friends and family to hold their lives together while they are away. When they answer the call for a hurricane, a wildfire, a flood, or a war zone overseas, they do it because those missions serve the public good. They put their personal lives on hold for something larger than themselves. But when they are ordered to stand on street corners in American cities to serve the political optics of a president looking to project strength and dominance, that is an abuse of their service and their oath.

These deployments don’t just disrupt the lives of those currently serving; they corrode the very foundation of the National Guard’s relationship with the public. Recruitment in the Guard is already facing serious challenges. The next generation of young Americans is not looking to enlist in order to confront peaceful protesters or to patrol neighborhoods at the whim of a president’s political calculations. When service becomes synonymous with suppressing dissent, the pipeline of willing and capable recruits will dry up even faster. And once lost, rebuilding that trust—and those ranks—will take decades, if it happens at all.
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James Eagle: What’s going on with US jobs data

The US added just 73,000 jobs in July, missing expectations of 100,000. But the real shock came in the revisions: May and June were slashed by a combined 258,000 jobs, marking the steepest two-month downward revision on record outside the pandemic. The three-month average collapsed to 35,000 – less than one-third the pace of a year ago.

Trump’s response? Fire the commissioner and claim, without evidence, that the numbers were “rigged”. Here’s the reality: revisions are normal. Early job reports rely on large firms that respond quickly. Smaller businesses report later, and they’re the ones suffering most. When their data arrives, numbers get revised down. That’s statistics, not conspiracy.

The underlying data is grim. Health care and social assistance accounted for 94% of July’s job growth. Average weeks unemployed hit 24.1, the highest since April 2022. The US economy has just slowed, and the jobs numbers reflect this.
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Justin Glawe: Crime is down. But Trump’s authoritarian power grabs are escalating.

Random street crimes are being used as pretexts for repression.

The White House has seized on two unrelated incidents of street crime as a pretext for a federal government power grab at a time when violent crime has in fact dropped across the country.

The attempted carjacking of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine in Washington DC and a street brawl in Cincinnati are the latest cause célebrè on the American right, which has long supported Donald Trump’s plans for military and law enforcement crackdowns in largely Democratic cities. Both incidents are being used as anecdotal evidence of out-of-control crime across the country — a narrative that is necessary for Trump and Republicans to maintain their grip of fear on their MAGA base.

And it’s worked: a Gallup poll in October found that 64 percent of Americans believed crime had gone up in 2024, but new data from the FBI shows that is not the case. In fact, 2024 saw the lowest levels of violent crime since 1969, with violent crime down 4.5 percent across the country, including a 14.9 percent drop in murders.
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Anne Applebaum: How to end the war in Ukraine

The war will be over when Putin understands that he can’t win

Next week, maybe, there might be a meeting between President Putin and President Trump. Once again, many people are speculating about the end of the war, what it would take for both sides to stop fighting. As it happens, this was the subject of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a Russian journalist, Konstantin Eggert, who works for Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international media company. When I first met him, Konstantin worked for Kommersant, which used to be one of Russia’s best newspapers. Now, like so many other Russians I know, he’s in exile. The interview was made for DW’s Russian-language audience, but it’s been posted in English as well.

The most important argument is worth repeating, now, before the speculation grows more intense: This is not a war for territory. Putin doesn’t need another hundred square kilometers of Donetsk province. His goals are ideological. He wants to to destroy all of Ukraine, to make Ukraine part of a new Russian empire or sphere of influence and to use that victory to undermine NATO and the European Union. As recently as June 20, he said that “all of Ukraine” belongs to Russia. Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti, published two articles on July 30 arguing that “no one should remain alive in Ukraine” and “Ukraine will end very soon.” Right now, Putin still thinks he can achieve those goals. Until he is convinced otherwise, he will continue fighting.
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NY Times: These Are Drug Cartels Designated as Terrorists by the U.S.

President Trump has signed an order telling the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain criminal gangs that the United States has named terror organizations.

President Trump’s directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American gangs and cartels has turned a spotlight on those groups and raised a host of questions about legal issues, U.S. intervention abroad and which organization might be targeted.

It remains unclear what plans the Pentagon is drawing up for possible action, and where any potential military operations might take place. Mexico’s president said on Friday that U.S. military action in her country is “absolutely ruled out.”
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BBC: Israel’s Gaza City plan means more misery for Palestinians and big risk for Netanyahu

News of the Israeli government’s decision to take over Gaza City is being met not surprisingly with despair in Gaza. Gaza City, its capital, is on a countdown to oblivion.

Assuming that Hamas does not capitulate in the coming weeks – and there are currently few signs of this happening – then the Israeli military is set to embark on a devastating new phase of the war.

For Gaza City, where an estimated one million civilians still live, the prospects are bleak.

Hundreds of thousands are people who were forced to flee during the early months of the war but who returned in January when a ceasefire raised hopes of an end to the fighting.

They spent more than a year away from their homes, driven from one location to another, living in increasingly desperate conditions.

When they returned to the north, many found their homes destroyed and their neighbourhoods erased. But they settled down where they could, believing the war might finally be over.

But life in the city, hard enough already, deteriorated rapidly after Israel broke the ceasefire in mid-March and cut off aid supplies, triggering the worst humanitarian crisis of the conflict.

Now it seems a new cycle is about to unfold.
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James Eagle: Chart Dump: US Tariffs

President Trump’s latest tariff salvo has gone into effect. We’ve seen a doubling of India’s rate to 50% for buying Russian oil that the US once begged them to purchase. Swiss diplomats are in emergency sessions after a random 39% shock that makes no sense to fair trade and competition. Meanwhile Toyota just announced it’s suspending new model launches.

We are witnessing the most radical reshaping of global trade since the 1930s, compressed into seven chaotic months of Trump’s presidency. The numbers are staggering: effective tariff rates have sextupled from 2.5% to over 18%, the highest since Smoot-Hawley helped trigger the Great Depression.

I’ve done a chart dump for you. These 18 charts show how $108 billion in tariff revenue is costing trillions in economic destruction, why China is winning by losing this trade war, and how Trump’s fiscal fantasy is colliding with mathematical reality.
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Today’s effective tariff rate almost match the Depression-era Smoot-Hawley tariffs that helped collapse global trade by two-thirds, providing the historical context for Chart 1’s alarming numbers. But unlike the 1930s gradual descent, we’ve speedrun to Depression-level protectionism in just seven months.
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Michael Thomas: Trump’s Latest Policy Could Threaten Every Wind Project in America

President Trump has been a vocal opponent of wind energy for more than a decade. But up until recently, his policies have never matched his rhetoric.
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Shortly before he took office in January, Trump told reporters in Mar-a-Lago that his second administration would take a very different approach to wind energy. “We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” he said.

The growth of wind energy and the legal guardrails that should make such policy impossible made it easy to dismiss this early warning sign. Since then, it’s become clear that the administration is willing to break laws and pursue unprecedented policies to stop wind energy development entirely.

A new escalation that could threaten every wind project

This week, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman broke a story about the administration’s latest attack on wind energy:

The Transportation Department last Tuesday declared that it would now call for a national 1.2-mile property setback — that is, a mandatory distance requirement — for all wind facilities near railroads and highways.

A 1.2-mile setback in a country with as many highways and railroads as ours would restrict development on a huge swatch of the country’s land. But it was a single sentence buried in the same release that signaled a threat that could be much larger.

DOT said that it would instruct the Federal Aviation Administration to “thoroughly evaluate proposed wind turbines to ensure they do not pose a danger to aviation” — a signal that a once-routine FAA height clearance required for almost every wind turbine could now become a hurdle for the entire sector.

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William Kristol: Maybe the American Experiment Isn’t Dead Yet

Death by a thousand cuts still requires a thousand cuts.
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On the one hand, the first couple hundred days of this presidency have featured truly striking and dramatic advances by the forces of authoritarianism. The dangers to our free political institutions are clear, present, and increasing in strength. The situation is grim. One fears that “American exceptionalism” will culminate in an exceptional demonstration of a nation frittering away the privileges of freedom in as feckless a way as possible.

On the other hand, while authoritarianism is winning right now, and night is more visible on the horizon than dawn—there are countervailing forces.

Perhaps the most hopeful is that it’s clear the Trump presidency is unpopular, and is becoming more so. Several recent polls show Donald Trump with a job approval rating among the American people down around 40 percent. A new poll released yesterday by UMass Amherst has Trump at 38 percent approval, 58 percent disapproval—down from 44 percent approval, 53 percent disapproval three months ago.

What’s more, Trump’s weakest issues seem likely to be among the topics that remain front and center for voters, at least for the foreseeable future. He is at 18 percent approval, 70 percent disapproval on his handling of the Epstein matter. He’s also at 31 percent approval, 63 percent disapproval, on the issue of tariffs and on that of inflation—our old friend from the Biden presidency which may well bedevil Trump, too.
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