Author: sauer@technologists.com

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

Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – August 1, 2026

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The disparity between the fantasy Trump and his cronies sold to their supporters and the reality of the situation when they were forced to prove their allegations in court matters. Administration officials insisted before the media that the project had been a great success, hurt only by “Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country.” In order to prove their lie, administration officials used the power of the government to harass, indict, and threaten a random individual whom they could blame for their own failures. Then, when forced to prove their allegations in a court of law, they withdrew the claim entirely.

This has always been the pattern of Trump and his cronies: weave a fantasy story in front of friendly media cameras, a fantasy of their own great success undercut by haters, then abandon—or lose—the legal cases based on the fantasy.

For all the bluster before the cameras of Trump cronies insisting the 2020 election was stolen, Trump’s attorneys backed away from the claims. They either withdrew or lost all but one of the 60 lawsuits they brought over the election. As a headline in the Wall Street Journal put it in 2020: “Trump Cries Voter Fraud. In Court, His Lawyers Don’t.”

The one case Trump’s lawyers won found that the Pennsylvania secretary of state overstepped by allowing voters extra time to provide missing identification for mail-in ballots. Even with that ruling, Daniel Barnes of NBC News reported, Biden still won the state by more than 80,000 votes.

Even as reality makes it clear that his claims are a fantasy, Trump continues to spin his yarns, seeming to have little else to convince voters to support him. Today he doubled down on his insistence that vandals caused the problems with the reflecting pool. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM…. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT”
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)

Chris Geidner: Jeanine Pirro’s motion to dismiss the Reflecting Pool case is going to have ripple effects

The decision to end the case against former Olympian David Hearn is already making a big splash — and this is likely just the beginning, not the end, of the matter.
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Ajit Niranjan @ Guardian:
‘We can’t make it better again’: what Europe’s wildfires tell us about the climate crisis

 
When Stefan Rahmstorf walked through the ruined streets of Dresden after the river Elbe flooded in 2002, and again when severe heat killed 70,000 people in Europe the following summer, the German climatologist wondered if worsening weather would make the political world “wake up and do something really decisively” to cut emissions.

But two decades and 750bn tons of atmospheric carbon pollution later, Rahmstorf is still wondering when the wake-up call will come. Last week, as he was surfing off France’s Atlantic coast with his partner, he watched towering smoke plumes darken the sky as a ferocious inferno raged outside Bordeaux.

“The sun through the smoke was looking really blood red, and it put the whole landscape into an eerie orange-coloured tint, like being on Mars or in some dystopian sci-fi movie,” says Rahmstorf. “It felt totally surreal.”
(Ajit Niranjan @ Guardian   more…)

Nayla Razzouk, Clara Hernanz Lizarraga, Sabrina Nelson Garcinuño, Olivia Rudgard, Joe Wertz, Raeedah Wahid, Vivien Ngo, Alastair Marsh @ Bloomberg:
Europe’s Summer of Blazes Heralds the Era of Global Megafires

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Harriet Torry @ WSJ:
U.S. Economic Growth Slowed to 1.5% in Second Quarter

U.S. economic growth slowed in the second quarter, weighed down by strong imports to fuel the artificial-intelligence boom.

The AI surge has become such a huge part of the economy that it’s a big growth driver and also affects trade in a way that can offset some of that growth. Specifically, high demand for imported components like semiconductors weighs against the U.S. growth calculation because the products aren’t made in the U.S.

Robert Reich: The Incredibly Shrinking American Workforce

This month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the labor participation rate — the percentage of people of working age who are working or actively looking for work — is now down to 61.5 percent. That’s 0.6 percentage points lower than it was at the first of the year.

In other words, the U.S. economy has lost 1 million workers since January.

It’s the lowest level of labor participation in 50 years outside the pandemic.
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Rebecca Solnit:
Lifeguards and Angels

I have lived a long time but I have never lived through such a time of destruction, of nature, of human lives, of truth, fact, science, journalism, the rule of law. … It is often overwhelming, and it feels like more than any one of us can respond to.

But we can. We might need to take breaks or pace ourselves or find our niche and our people to do it. People are doing the work, often in undramatic ways — meetings, court filings, fundraisings, investigations, forms of support and solidarity that are not high-profile. But let me talk for a moment about a high-profile incident that riveted people across the country and the world. A few days ago, I watched a novice lifeguard, age sixteen, pull a younger boy out of the surf that threatened to sweep him away, on a Santa Cruz beach where the waves had suddenly become far larger and more dangerous. …

Even so, there are parallels. Many are caught up in the violence of Trump’s unregulated militias, the ICE stormtroopers, and many are trying to pull them back out to safety, to the solid ground of the lives they were leading in the places they lived. … Such lifeguards … do not always succeed but they go into the surf to try. Perhaps another lesson from that riveting video of rescue is that the waves may crash over you repeatedly before you get to safety. The process may not be simple and the outcome may not be certain while things unfold, which I say because I too often hear the lack of immediate victory interpreted as defeat.

In a way this is a terrible metaphor. The harm is not being done by a vast and ancient natural force or even by a majority; it’s being done by an unpopular regime that is plummeting in the polls and seems almost frantic to do as much as it can while it can (because they seem likely to lose the midterms, because they are losing popularity fast, because Trump seems to be in a phase of rapid decay, and because the courts– thanks to the lifeguards of the law–keep overturning their overreach and other transgressions). …
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Ryan Kennedy
@ pv magazine:
FCC bans foreign-produced solar inverters

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This means any solar or battery storage project relying on an inverter made outside the United States that has not already received an official FCC ID cannot legally turn on or interconnect. Because there is no phase-in period, grandfather clause, or grace window, the regulatory pipeline is frozen today, forcing developers to halt active procurements and find new hardware vendors. Crucially, this applies strictly to new inverter model filings rather than an absolute freeze on all foreign-built components. Find a fact sheet from FCC here.
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The action effectively overrides the Department of Energy analysis from January 2026, which inspected 30 Chinese inverters and found zero evidence of malicious hardware. …

The immediate practical result is a massive equipment shortage that will delay upcoming commercial and utility projects. Department of Energy data shows that domestic manufacturers supply only seven percent of the U.S. solar inverter market, leaving a 93% deficit that cannot be filled by local factories anytime soon. This impact will primarily materialize down the line as manufacturers introduce new product refreshes or next-generation hardware designs that require fresh FCC grants.

The hardware blockade hits right as developers plan to connect more than 58,000 MW of new solar and storage over the next year. Without certified inverters, fully built solar farms will sit dark and unable to feed electricity to the grid.

Osmond Chia @ BBC: Trump administration bans new Chinese humanoid robots

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Chance Meeting:
Entering an American Concentration Camp

My Visit with Martin Soto at the Elizabeth NJ Concentration Camp

For almost two months, Martin Soto has been in solitary confinement in the Elizabeth Concentration Camp in New Jersey. Before being transferred there, he led a hunger and labor strike in Delaney Hall so effective, it made national news and spawned weeks of large-scale protests. For it, they punished him and painted him a criminal.

When Gabriela asked me if I wanted to join her during visitation and speak to Martin, I immediately said yes.

I had my doubts they’d let me in. Just the night before I had been outside taking pictures of the facility with Matthew Wagner and some others when a guard resembling a human rendering of Jabba the Hutt started yelling at us that we were on private property and had to leave. I asked where the signs were and what ensued was an argument turned lobbing of insults between me and Jabba before the police came to mediate.
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Laerke Christensen @ Snopes:
Did anti-migration buoys close port in Laredo, Texas?

Claim: In July 2026, anti-migration buoys broke loose as the Rio Grande flooded in Texas, closing the port in Laredo.

What’s True
Floodwaters did sweep away a number of anti-migration buoys on the Rio Grande, leading to Port Laredo temporarily closing its bridge for commercial traffic, the World Trade Bridge.

What’s False
This did not lead to the full closure of Port Laredo. City officials redirected commercial traffic to the Colombia Solidarity Bridge.

What’s Undetermined
It was unclear how the temporary closure of the World Trade Bridge affected trade at the port.

Sandra Sanchez @ Border Wall: Border buoys and wall will hasten flooding in Rio Grande in Laredo area

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Heather Delaney Reese:
Things are going to get better

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Dear MAGA,

I am not writing this to mock you or ridicule you. I am writing this because somewhere underneath all the chaos, I believe most of you still care about this country the same way I do. So I am asking you to stop for a moment. Not to listen to me. To listen to yourself. Look at your own life. Not the entertainment the other side is bringing you. Just your life.

Is it better? …

If you are starting to see what is really happening to our country, you do not have to go public or post about it or even tell a single person. You don’t have to admit anything to anyone. But when you look at what is in front of you and decide whether this is really what you want, it’s okay to know it isn’t. This country is headed somewhere very dark. But it does not have to keep going there. We still have a Constitution and elections. And the midterms are less than four months away. That can be your moment to let your voice be heard.

And if you are the one who has been quietly questioning, who has been wondering whether this is what you signed up for, you are not alone. More people are stepping back from this than any of us can see. Many are doing it the same way you are: quietly to themselves or to a small group of others who are also deciding this has gone too far. Every single person who decides they do not want to take the country on the path Donald Trump is taking us changes the math in the next elections and the trajectory of our country after.
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Tony Romm,Brad Plumer: Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – July 24, 2026

Tony Romm and Brad Plumer of the New York Times reported this afternoon that the Trump administration’s claim last October that it was cutting programs in order to protect taxpayers against waste was, in fact, a lie. In court filings, federal officials admitted that the $7.5 billion in cuts from clean energy projects begun under former president Joe Biden were “based solely” on whether states had voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought announced the cuts by saying, “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.” But, in fact, a government lawyer told the court that none of the cancellations were “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

In contrast, the administration funded grants for states that had backed Trump in 2024, even though the Energy Department had recommended they be cancelled.

The admission calls into question the administration’s claims that it is making cuts to combat “waste, fraud, and abuse,” especially as Vought is working to finalize rules that would make political appointees the final arbiters of how the government would award more than $1 trillion in annual grants. Rather than combatting waste, it appears Trump and his cronies are trying to take control of the United States government, using the power of the American people for their own ends.
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The record of the Trump administration on July 24, 2026, shows a White House focused on the goals of Trump alone. It’s a striking contrast to a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio on July 24, 1933. In that talk, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took stock of what he had accomplished in his first 100 days in office.

He explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.

FDR urged Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy. He explained: “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”
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Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – July 23, 2026

… In early March 1953, soon after Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower took office, Soviet leader Josef Stalin died, giving the president a chance to reset the rising militarization of the United States. In mid-April, in a speech to newspaper editors that he insisted on delivering although he was suffering acutely from inflammatory bowel disease, Eisenhower warned of diverting the nation’s tax dollars to war at the expense of the people.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.

“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Eisenhower’s speech has been on my mind as the Trump administration slashes Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, foreign aid, scientific and medical research, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and yet is demanding more money for the Defense Department, bled out by Trump’s foreign adventures in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, the Caribbean, Venezuela, and, of course, Iran.
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)

Omar Abdel-Baqui, Stephen Kalin, Saleh al-Batati @ WSJ: The Houthis Have Opened a New Front in the U.S.-Iran War

Yemeni militants set up standoff in one of the world’s most vital waterways with threats against Red Sea oil shipments

Sam Sifton @ NY Times: Photographic Evidence

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