Author: sauer@technologists.com

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

Babylon Bee:
Trump Pledges That If Voters Defeat Socialism In November, They Will Each Get An Equal Redistribution Of Wealth From The Government

DALLAS, TX — In his keynote speech at the 2026 RNC Midterm Convention, President Donald Trump pledged that if voters defeat socialism in November, they will each get an equal redistribution of wealth from the government.

Trump detailed his plan to take money from taxpayers, divide it up into equal $5,000 shares, and redistribute it to every citizen if they would simply vote to keep socialism at bay.

“Socialism is so dangerous, it’s terrifying, really. We have to stop it by whatever means necessary, even if it means redistributing everyone’s wealth,” explained Trump.
…

At publishing time, President Trump had also vowed to reward the defeat of socialism by lowering gasoline costs through the federal government seizing control of private oil companies.
(Babylon Bee   more…)

WSJ:
Trump Has a $5,000 Bridge to Sell You

Tom Schaller:
Trumpflation is here

Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – September 10, 2026

We woke up today to news that Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants have taken control of the city and seaport of Mocha and much of the shoreline of the Red Sea near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another chokepoint for world trade including trade in oil. With the Strait of Hormuz largely closed, Saudi Arabia has relied for seagoing transport on the Red Sea route that empties into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
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The price of oil jumped to $109 a barrel, and U.S. gasoline rose to an average of about $4.28 a gallon. GasBuddy said the national average price of diesel had hit $6.00 for the first time in history. Just a year ago, the national average was about $3.70.
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – September 9, 2026

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Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S.-made goods went into effect yesterday, matching Trump’s tariffs on Canada dollar for dollar and rate for rate, covering about $20 billion in U.S. goods. …

The U.S. and Iran are striking at each other again. The U.S. said it attacked and destroyed five Iranian oil tankers on Tuesday; Iran said it targeted two U.S. ships and eight oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday as they tried to traverse an area Iran has said is off-limits. They also said they had fired at a U.S. military base in Jordan. The price of oil has surged as fighting resumed, with the cost of Brent crude rising above $100 a barrel.

Tonight, Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News reported that Iran’s strikes on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan caused damage to “[m]ultiple American military aircraft.” Jacobs also posted that U.S. forces launched more than 30 Patriot missiles in their defense against the Iranian strikes.
…

What is most astonishing about the nation’s economic and military problems is that they are entirely self-inflicted at the whim of one man. On October 19, 2024, the month before Trump was reelected, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.” “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust,” wrote Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr. “Expect that to continue.”
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Meanwhile, reports of corruption in the administration continue to drop.
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The chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, Richard Painter, told the journalists the gifts appear to violate federal law: federal employees can’t receive salary supplements from outside sources.
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Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios reported today that they are hearing from top White House officials and elected Republicans that they are no longer even trying to persuade Trump to do something or not to do something. They are worn out, VandeHei and Allen report. “They know they can’t stop him and they don’t even try.”

“Trump insiders calculate they lived by Trump and so will die by Trump, rather than break with Trump.”
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)

Jennifer Rubin:
Early Voting Plans Are Crucial to Defeating MAGA

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Mitch Jackson:
Congress banned armed federal agents from the polls 161 years ago.

A Tuesday Morning in November
You pull into the parking lot of the elementary school where you have voted for twenty years, you grab your coffee, you walk toward the door with your sample ballot folded in your back pocket, and you see two black SUVs with no plates parked by the entrance and a man in a vest with three letters on the back standing beside them. Your stomach drops. You slow down. You check your phone for a reason to stay in the car. The woman in front of you turns around and walks back to her car.

That is the whole play. Nobody has to arrest a single voter. Fear does the work.
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The Law Has Been Clear Since 1865
A polling place is the one room in America where the government has to wait outside.

Congress wrote this rule in the middle of the Civil War, and it has stayed on the books for 161 years because every generation since understood the danger. Federal law makes it a crime for any officer of the military, or any person in the civil service of the United States, to order, bring, keep, or control troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held. The only exception covers force needed to repel armed enemies of the United States. Break that law and you face up to five years in prison and a permanent ban from holding federal office.

Read those words again. Armed men in the civil service of the United States. That is ICE.

In 1909 Congress went back and removed a second exception that had allowed troops to “keep the peace at the polls.” Lawmakers deleted it because they understood that a president who wants soldiers at the ballot box will always find a disturbance to point at. They closed the loophole on purpose, and it has stayed closed for 117 years.
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• What They Have Said Out Loud …
• It Already Happened Twice …
• Your Rights as a Citizen at the Polls …
• If You Are Undocumented and Standing Near a Polling Place
  You do not have the right to vote in a federal election, and you must never try. …

  You do have the right to be near a polling place. Driving your citizen daughter to vote is legal. Waiting in the car is legal. Standing beside your wife in line is legal. Walking your father with the bad knee to the door is legal, and in most states you are allowed to go inside as an assistant if he needs help reading or marking the ballot, subject to your state’s rules on who qualifies. In California a voter is allowed to bring up to two people into the booth to help, and the only people barred from that role are the voter’s employer and the voter’s union representative. The Constitution protects you on that sidewalk exactly as it protects the citizen next to you. The Fourth Amendment does not check papers.
  …

• Police, Sheriffs, the Guard, and the Military …
• In the Moment …
• Vote Before They Get the Chance

…
The Closing Argument
Every fear tactic depends on the target not knowing the rules, and now you know them. An armed federal agent at a polling place is committing a crime that Congress named in 1865 and sharpened in 1909. A federalized soldier at a polling place is committing that same crime. A president who invokes an emergency to put them there will lose in court, the way he lost in Chicago.

A citizen who stands in line, says four sentences, films from a distance, and calls the hotline has done the real work of protecting this democracy, and a citizen who votes early, checks the registration, brings four people, and saves the hotline number in every phone in the house has already beaten the whole scheme before the first SUV ever pulls into the lot.

The room where you vote is the one room where the government waits outside, and on November 3 you are going to walk into it.
(Mitch Jackson   more…)

Chris Geidner:
Dueling rulings cause chaos over Missouri maps

Jennifer Rubin:
What if the law means what it says?

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Qasim Rashid, Esq.:
9 Facts on Labor Day Legacy Media Won’t Mention

1. Americans are suffering worse economic inequality today than we did prior to The Great Depression.
2. According to the GINI Index, which measures economic inequality, the United States ranks last among developed nation on Earth.
3. The so-called “right to work” laws are not just anti-worker, they’re pro racist.
4. If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation and corporate productivity, it would be at least $27 per hour today.
5. The Reagonomics myth of “trickle-down” economics has been nothing more than a scam that has, since 1980, redistributed an astonishing $79 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
6. we already have a proven way to fix this. From 1940 to 1980, the wealthiest Americans paid marginal tax rates of 70-94%.
7. Wage theft is the largest form of theft in the United States Today.
8. The collapse of unions has enabled the rise of oligarchs.
9. Billionaires don’t create jobs, they exploit workers by driving out small businesses, driving down wages, and driving up their own corporate profits.

(Qasim Rashid, Esq.   more…)
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Paul Krugman:
Who has the power in a trading world?

On Friday Donald Trump threatened to cut off all trade with nations with which the United States runs a trade deficit. His demand, oddly, was directed at the Federal Reserve: He would impose trade embargoes unless the Fed cuts interest rates. I won’t even try to untangle his logic, if there is any, because today’s primer isn’t about Trump. It is, instead, about how to think about a world in which governments — even the government of the United States, which created the rules-based trading system that prevailed until recently — increasingly use threats to cut off international trade as a tool of coercion.

… “weaponized interdependence,” a term coined in 2019 by the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. Farrell and Newman focused mainly on national governments’ efforts to exploit their control of international networks, such as America’s use of the dollar’s central role in the international monetary system to impose sanctions on nations it considers hostile. At this point, however, weaponized interdependence is everywhere: Iran attempting to force the United States to call off its war by closing the Strait of Hormuz, China threatening the West with a cutoff of rare earths, the Trump administration using the threat of tariffs to pressure Canada to remove cultural protections for French — or become the 51st state?

(Paul Krugman   more…)

Dean Baker @ National Memo:
Liberated? Despite Trump Tariffs, Steady Trade Deficit Jumped In July

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Laura Millan @ Bloomberg:
Nepal Glacier Collapse Reveals New Scale of Climate Perils

Once considered outliers, these types of catastrophic incidents are now happening more regularly

Outliers become the norm

The giant wave of rock, ice and debris that swept through 100 kilometers (62 miles) of Nepalese valleys last week is the deadliest illustration yet of how climate change is fueling mountain disasters of epic proportions.

Scientists have long predicted quicker melting of snow and ice and accelerated thawing of permafrost in high mountain areas that are warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. For years they have documented the results: more frequent rockfalls, avalanches, lake outbursts, flash floods and landslides.

Even so, the sheer scale of the disaster in Nepal shocked experts. “There are things that we’re completely unprepared for,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. The floods fall into the category of “things that are just completely outside of our experience.”

The event was triggered on Aug. 26 when the bedrock gave way below a glacier near the Langtang Lirung peak in the Nepalese Himalayas. A huge section of the glacier, measuring between 1 and 1.3 kilometers wide, detached from the mountain. The fast-moving deluge that ensued raised water levels in rivers downstream by as much as 9 meters within just half an hour.

It’s among the catastrophic mountain incidents that climate scientists would have classed as outliers not long ago, but that are now happening more regularly. …
(Laura Millan @ Bloomberg   more…)

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Tony Romm, Colby Smith @ NY Times:
Trump Threatens to Halt Some Trade Unless the Fed Cuts Rates

Robert Reich:
The biggest problem facing the U.S. economy right now is Trump

The Labor Department reported this morning that the United States added 162,000 jobs in August. That’s more than expected, especially given how few jobs the country has added over the last few months.

But I want to let you in on a little secret (which shouldn’t be secret): Monthly jobs reports are now barely worth the paper they’re printed on, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics has so little experience dealing with a labor market suddenly depleted by Trump’s mass deportations and the almost-as-sudden retirement of the giant boomer generation. In other words, much of what the BLS is now trying to do relies on pure guesswork.

But there are three real reasons to be concerned:

1. Wages. Prices continue to rise faster than wages — which means most Americans are getting poorer. …
2. Job stagnation. Another concern I have is that while employers aren’t firing many workers, they’re also not hiring. A low-hire, low-fire labor market doesn’t create opportunities for advancement. It’s also difficult for young people to get into.
3. Trump. He’s interfering in the jobs market and the economy in ways that will make things worse. Bad enough that he’s waging a costly war in Iran and imposing costly tariffs around the world — both of which are driving up prices.

   He’s also making really, really stupid threats. … The very notion of ending trade with all countries from whom we buy more than we sell — a very large portion of the world — is absurd.

(Robert Reich   more…)
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Thom Hartmann:
What Would Trump Be Doing Differently If Putin Were Giving the Orders?

America’s defenses are being drained, Ukraine is being abandoned, and Russia and Iran are growing stronger. At what point does incompetence stop being an explanation?

In one of the most obscene segments ever aired on Fox “News,” yesterday morning our billionaire Treasury Secretary said the inflation Americans are suffering from is Ukraine’s fault because, in response to Putin’s criminal regime daily murdering Ukrainian civilians (a war crime), Zelenskyy has been blowing up Russia’s energy assets.

Stupidity? Hypocrisy? Owned by Putin? Or is something even more sinister at work here?

That same morning, the Financial Times revealed that for the past three years Russia has been helping Iran build a supersonic cruise missile capable of blowing our ships out of the water, and at an Iran/Russia/China summit with Iran’s president, Putin, and Xi in Bishek this week, Putin said he’ll continue to supply Iran with “the necessary goods” that can be used to kill Americans.
(Thom Hartmann   more…)

Chad P. Bown @ Foreign Affairs:
The Real Risk of a Trade War With Canada

America Needs Its Neighbors to Counter China

Alex Ballingall, Mark Ramzy @ Toronto Star:
Donald Trump accuses Mark Carney of making him ‘the enemy’ as PM announces $4.7B Via Rail investment

Hans Christensen:
Norway Seizes Russian Cruise Ship in Svalbard

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Mark Leonard @ Foreign Affairs:
Learning to Live in a Post-American World

Five years ago, the Chinese housing market crashed, leaving thousands of apartment buildings unfinished across the country. A generation of Chinese citizens who had bet all their savings on indefinite expansion suddenly found themselves homeless. Over time, however, some intrepid people moved into the ruins of these edifices, setting up tents on the concrete floors, using bed sheets as walls, cooking on makeshift stoves. The Chinese call these abandoned structures lanwei lou, a phrase that literally means “rotten-tail buildings,” signifying a project gone awry, a plan in suspension. The inhabitants of rotten-tail buildings repurpose the old and improvise to find a way of surviving an economic storm.

The state of the Chinese housing market is a good metaphor for the U.S.-led rules-based international order. After decades of expansion, it, too, is being abandoned. Never fully accepted by China and Russia and resented by newly assertive middle powers, its main financial backers—the American people—have lost interest in underwriting its further development. And as in the case of China’s failed housing projects, no alternative provider is stepping in to take over.

A rotten-tail world is emerging, one in which states will have to adapt cunningly, improvise new uses for elements of the old order that remain valuable, and adjust swiftly to the dramatic decay of others. But too many leaders still act as if the old order can somehow be salvaged or even perfected. …

… For some time, the world will be without any order at all—swept by fragmentation, contagion, and strangulation or the temptation to weaponize a wide variety of geographic, economic, and technological chokepoints. Rather than constructing a grand strategy, states will need to develop far more flexible and artisanal responses.
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Marcy Wheeler:
Iran Destroyed the US Base in Bahrain

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Military Times had this op-ed last week.

Extensive damage to one of our most significant forward bases in the Middle East is likely to have profound tactical and strategic repercussions that are only now coming into focus.

The idea that this broad functioning hub, built over decades, was significantly degraded in the space of a few days by a regional player is unimaginable.
…

That NSA Bahrain is now virtually uninhabitable, with families left in limbo, as described in recent reporting, is difficult to grasp.

The potential loss of NSA Bahrain is effectively the equivalent of losing an aircraft carrier. It could not have come as a surprise that Iran would attack it in retaliation, yet it — and those living and working there — were left exposed and the facilities inadequately protected from Tehran’s ballistic missiles.

(Marcy Wheeler   more…)

Jay Kuo:
Problems at the Pentagon go far beyond the operational issues with the war in Iran. And Pete Hegseth’s leadership is to blame.

(more…)