Author: sauer@technologists.com

curated citations to news sources

Texas Tribune: Texas House Democrats flee the state in bid to block GOP’s proposed congressional map

The lawmakers’ absence means the lower chamber won’t have enough members present to function, stalling passage of a draft map Democrats have condemned as a political power grab.
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“This is not a decision we make lightly, but it is one we make with absolute moral clarity,” state Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said in a statement, in which he accused Gov. Greg Abbott of “using an intentionally racist map to steal the voices of millions of Black and Latino Texans, all to execute a corrupt political deal.”
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“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent,” he said. “As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”
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Texas’ redistricting effort is also poised to set off a broader redistricting arms race, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom telling aides that he will move to redraw his state’s congressional lines to advantage more Democrats if Texas Republicans pass their map, The Tribune previously reported.
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NY Times: Until Trump Fired Her, She Was an Economist With Bipartisan Support

Erika McEntarfer led the agency that produced key data on jobs and inflation. Then July’s report showed a weakening economy, and President Trump accused her of “rigging” the numbers.

Nearly the entire Senate supported Erika McEntarfer in 2024 to lead the agency that produces key data on jobs and inflation. The widely respected economist was confirmed on a bipartisan 86-8 Senate vote, with support from Vice President JD Vance, who was then an Ohio senator, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then a Florida senator.

But Dr. McEntarfer was suddenly caught in the political crossfire on Friday when President Trump lashed out over the agency’s most recent jobs report and fired her for releasing monthly jobs data showing surprisingly weak hiring. He called the data “rigged” without offering any evidence, and he accused Dr. McEntarfer of manipulating the job numbers “for political purposes.”

Dr. McEntarfer was nominated to her most recent post by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Before that, she earned her stripes at the Census Bureau, where she worked for over two decades under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
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Robert Reich: Trump destroys our source of information about jobs. This is beyond irresponsible.

He hates facts. He rejects truth. He doesn’t want the public to know what’s really happening.

I spent much of the 1990s as Secretary of Labor. One unit of the Labor Department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information.

So what does Trump do? With one fell swoop on Friday he essentially destroyed the credibility of the BLS.

Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May.

Well that’s too bad. Revisions in monthly jobs reports are nothing new. They’re made when the Bureau gets more or better information over time, which it often does.

Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Then he ordered her fired and replaced with someone else — presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.

How can anyone in the future trust the information that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot.
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David French: The Boy Who Cried Hoax

President Trump isn’t just trying to change the subject; he’s also trying to rewrite history — or maybe I should say reality.

Earlier this month — while Trump was struggling to answer questions about his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein — Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, released a report purporting to show that senior Obama administration officials participated in a “treasonous conspiracy” in 2016 that was designed to hurt the incoming Trump administration.

Last week the Justice Department piled on. It announced that it was creating a “strike force” to “assess” Gabbard’s evidence and “investigate potential next legal steps.” For his part, Trump reposted a fake video depicting former President Barack Obama’s arrest.

And he’s kept on posting. Days later he reposted a meme that Photoshopped Obama into the infamous white Bronco from O.J. Simpson’s police chase in 1994, with JD Vance and Trump himself Photoshopped into police cars.
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Rebecca Solnit: Epstein Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg: The Trump Protection Machine and the Epidemic of Violence Against Women

On July 2, the jury delivered a guilty verdict on some of the charges against music mogul Sean Combs for his decades of horrific sexual abuse of women with the help of his extensive staff and deep pockets. He’s also accused in many civil suits of sexual abuse of adults and minors. It seems like everyone promptly forgot about Combs when the facts about financier Jeffrey Epstein’s decades of horrific sexual abuse of at least a hundred girls and women, with the help of his extensive staff, deep pockets, banks, and elite connections – including to Donald Trump – became the next front-page ruckus.

In June, movie producer Harvey Weinstein was found guilty in a New York retrial for some of his decades of horrific sexual abuse of women, with the help of his extensive staff, top lawyers, the film industry, some ex-Mossad agents, and of course his deep pockets. In February a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of rapper R. Kelly’s 30-year prison sentence for racketeering and sex trafficking, last year his other 20-year sentence was also upheld, for producing child pornography and enticement of children for sex. Of course his deep pockets and extensive assistance had also been factors in how he too was able to abuse girls for so long.

One of the reasons the epidemic of violence against women is so unacknowledged is because cases like these are talked about individually, and often treated as though they are shocking aberrations rather than part of a pervasive pattern that operates at all levels of society.
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NY Times: There’s a Name for What Trump Is Doing. Juan Crow.

In its merciless pursuit of people without papers — most of them Latino — and its demonization of asylum seekers, refugees, holders of temporary protected status, Muslims and Palestinian rights activists, the Trump administration is accelerating toward a new, modern nadir of Juan Crow, just downstream of Jim and Jane.

When a sitting U.S. senator refers to New York immigrants as “inner-city rats,” when a Florida governor waxes rapturously about the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center, when a presidential administration takes two months to dismantle decades of civil rights law, we must admit that these are acts in a feature presentation of neo-Confederate revanchism targeting brown and Black people. The targeting of the undocumented has a name, after all, based in ugly history and shameful tradition: Juan Crow.

The phrase was popularized by the journalist Roberto Lovato to describe the “matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems” that isolate and control undocumented immigrants. The domestic policies of the Trump administration have taken this legacy to a more dangerous place.
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Isaac Saul: Starvation in Gaza.

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What writers in the Middle East are saying.

• Gazan writers report that suffering runs rampant amid ongoing food shortages.
• Some writers in Israel worry that the government has no strategy to end the war or avert a humanitarian disaster.

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[Isaac Saul] My Take
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• The exaggerated claims of starvation that have persisted since the war began have now become reality.
• Regardless of the justifications, this starvation has been directly caused by Israel’s blockade.
• I am heartbroken to see a country that I love reduced to such acts of inhumanity.

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Politico: Trump’s lawsuit against Wall Street Journal now has a judge — and it’s not Aileen Cannon

President Donald Trump’s bid to take down the Wall Street Journal over its coverage of his connection to Jeffrey Epstein has landed in the courtroom of Darrin Gayles, who is likely experiencing deja vu.

That’s because Gayles, a 2014 appointee of Barack Obama, had another brush with a litigious Trump in 2023, when the then-former president sought to punish his onetime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.

Trump sued Cohen in April 2023 seeking a $500 million payout for claims that Cohen violated his attorney-client relationship with Trump and enriched himself off their relationship. Six months later, Trump abandoned the lawsuit, just before Cohen’s lawyers were set to question him under oath.
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But as with the Cohen case, there’s an open question of whether Trump’s new lawsuit is more of a political stunt than a serious attempt to litigate the issue. If Trump pursues the case, he would open himself up to answering questions under oath about his connection to the disgraced financier who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
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Howard Yu: TSMC posted a $440 million loss at its Arizona factory.

American engineers called it “rigid, brutal, prison-like.” Taiwanese managers complained about “lack of dedication and obedience.”

TSMC’s CEO Morris Chang saw this coming.

“A very expensive exercise in futility,” he called America’s chip push.

Taiwan doesn’t just make chips. It breathes them. Three decades of alignment created something money can’t buy.

In Arizona, Americans clock out after shifts. In Taiwan, engineers sleep in the fab.

In Arizona, decisions need consensus. In Taiwan, orders flow down.

In Arizona, it’s a job. In Taiwan, it’s national service.

Chang knew this at 55 when he started TSMC. The playbook worked because a nation aligned behind it:
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ProPublica: The Drying Planet

As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.
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The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.
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