curated news excerpts & citations
NY Times: To Address Farm Labor Shortage, Trump Administration Turns to Migrant Workers
As the president’s immigration policies squeeze an already tight supply of farm labor, the Trump administration is making it cheaper to hire foreign farmworkers.
For years, the agricultural sector has faced a tight labor market as farmworkers age and fewer new immigrants and younger Americans are willing to toil in the fields. Top Trump administration officials vowed that mass deportations would help, leading to “higher wages with better benefits” and a “100 percent American work force.”
But the administration has quietly acknowledged in recent months that its immigration raids and crackdown on the border have aggravated the issue. So it has instead turned to an alternative source, making it cheaper for farmers to hire immigrant farmworkers on temporary visas.
(NY Times more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 15, 2026
Today, as the country enters its third week of war against Iran, President Donald J. Trump was on the golf course, illustrating the observation of journalist E.J. Dionne in the New York Times that “from the very beginning of this war, we got a sense that there wasn’t a great deal of serious thought put into it by the president of the United States about how it might end, what our objectives were, what needed to be done to protect Americans who are in the Middle East, what might happen to oil in the Strait of Hormuz.”
Although the administration appears to be trying to convince Americans that the U.S. military’s destruction of the Iranian military means the U.S. has won the war, Iranian leadership needed simply to continue in power to declare victory. Then, blocking the 20% of the world’s oil that flows through the Strait of Hormuz would give them leverage over the war’s outcome.
…That the White House is in turmoil showed this morning first of all in the fact that one of the people making the administration’s case on the talk shows was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, the man who added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal messaging app on which members of the administration were making plans to strike Houthi militants in Yemen, a chat that would hide administration discussions from the record-keeping required by public records laws.
…On Face the Nation, another odd salesperson for Trump’s war, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett, told host Margaret Brennan that “you have to understand that America is not going to have its economy harmed by what the Iranians are doing.”
…The administration appears to be taking the position that the problem is not Trump’s launching an ill-thought-out war, but rather the media outlets’ reporting on that war. Although Trump has been conversing freely with reporters by cell phone since the war broke out, yesterday morning he posted on social media: “The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (in particular), and other Lowlife “Papers” and Media actually want us to lose the War. …
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Gil Duran: Curtis Yarvin Compares Africans to Cattle, Cuddles A Soros
”How should Africa be governed? First, it has to be re-governed. First, you know, the anarchy has to be eliminated, there has to be…Imagine a futurist Africa, Africa in 2100 and there’s a computer…that knows how many Africans there are, down to a single digit, where they are in terms of position—just the way, you know, if you’re, like, a rancher in Wyoming, you know where all your cattle are thanks to modern whatever—you know where all these people are, you know what they’re doing and your goal is for them to thrive as human beings without breeding too much. Like, you know, what a vision right? You know, like, imagine restoring order to South Africa. You don’t need to make South Africa all white to restore order to South Africa. You just need governance.”
(Gil Duran more…)
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Minnah Arshad @ zeteo: Here’s What Trump’s Iran War Money Could Fund Instead
The price tag from Trump’s war on Iran is enough to reconstruct Gaza, provide healthcare to millions in the US, or end homelessness here at home for years.
Donald Trump is burning through US taxpayer dollars to fund his illegal war abroad after he slashed funding for American public services in every zip code.
According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, Trump’s war on Iran will directly cost American taxpayers an estimated $65 billion – more if it continues for longer than two months – for military operations and replacement of equipment, munitions, and other supplies. The estimated economic loss on top of direct costs ranges from $50 billion to $210 billion, according to the budget model.
(Minnah Arshad @ zeteo more…)
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Malcolm Nance: Lindsey Graham Just Told the Iranians: The Marines Will Land at Kharg Island
Survive the SOH First, Then We Can Talk About Kharg
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The problem is that Middle East Force commanders gamed this out 40 years ago and estimated we’d need 6,000 Marines, plus all their amphibious equipment, spread across multiple islands. The plan was to first take Larak, Hormuz, and Qeshem (the Shark-shaped one)/Hengam to box in Bandar Abbas. Break through the denied SOH, then small landing parties to raid, Greater/Lesser Tunb, Abu Musa, Sirri, and then Kish. It would have a HUGE, detectable signature.Although Iran has likely lost its surface search radars, men sitting on a 3,000-ft mountain above the SOH with binoculars can see as far as 70 miles on a clear day. All he would have to look for is the helicopters sweeping mines ahead of an invasion convoy.
Why didn’t we do this in 1988 when they tried to sink our ships with mines?
Because President George H.W. Bush, a combat veteran of World War II, knew invading Iran would come with unacceptable losses and consequences. This was confirmed in 2002 when General Paul K. Van Riper simulated the Iranian forces in a US Futures Command exercise called Millennium Challenge 2002.General Van Riper savaged the “Blue” force using a wild mélange of small suicide boats, drones, hidden missiles, and loads of sea mines. The exercise saw American forces defeated in 24 hours. The Exercise had to be reset, and the rules changed so that the good guys could win.
(Malcolm Nance more…)
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Inside Climate News: Is the FBI Investigating Climate Activists?
Go behind the scenes with managing editor Jamie Smith Hopkins and reporter Nick Kusnetz as they discuss how a recent visit by an FBI agent to a climate activist hints at a broadening Trump administration effort to target political opponents.
(Inside Climate News more…)
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Jim Acosta: Trump Put Me on His Media Hit List
Living “rent free” in the mind of a wannabe dictator
(Jim Acosta more…)
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Jonathan Cohn @ Bulwark: Meet the Horrified Grandparents Fighting for Vaccines
They remember what diseases like measles are really like—and want the rest of America to know before it’s too late.
MOST AMERICANS HAVE no firsthand knowledge of what measles can do to people, because it has been half a century since the disease was circulating widely in the United States. But there are exceptions—like Therese Vogel, whose older sister Nancy got the disease when she was 4.
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… The damage to Nancy’s brain was permanent, as it was in about 20 to 40 percent of cases of measles-induced encephalitis. She would never be able to read past a sixth-grade level, and once she got to the eighth grade the administrators at the Catholic school the two sisters attended told their parents that Nancy didn’t have the ability to keep going on a standard education track.Nancy still had a life full of joy and meaning, Therese says—whether as part of a Girl Scout troop that made her an honorary member, even though she couldn’t complete the badges, or alongside other people with impairments at a “sheltered workplace” where she held down a job heat-sealing small manufactured goods inside of plastic bags. But as Therese went off to college, settled into a professional life, and started a family of her own, she found herself thinking constantly about what might have been for her sister.
“Sometimes she would say, I wish I could go to college,” Therese said of Nancy. “She knew that she wasn’t able to do the things that I did.”
(Jonathan Cohn @ Bulwark more…)
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Ruth Ann Crystal MD: Dr. Ruth Report, 3/15/26
(Ruth Ann Crystal MD more…)
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
ICE deaths 2026 – They deserve remembrance and justice.
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
- January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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