Eating leftover donut holes after the Democratic Socialist Association ended their meeting in Winston Salem, NC.

Last Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts put her foot down and stopped Trump’s Republican toadies on the Postal Board of Governors from seizing control of your mail-in ballot this fall. She noted that neither the Constitution nor Congress gives him or them that power and, besides that, there’s no time for states to comply with their demands.

They’re still trying, though, and if they’re unsuccessful, we can fully expect this scheme to reappear in the presidential election in 2 years with even greater intensity.

I’ve seen up-close-and-personal how this plays out when corrupt leaders driven by sex, money, and revenge take over a nation. It ain’t pretty.

*IDI AMIN and UGANDA:

Thanksgiving Day of 1980, I was the guest of host Sanford Ungar on NPR’s “All Things Considered” show, live from the famine zone of Kampala, Uganda, describing what I’d seen in the preceding days. Both times he asked me about soldiers (the country was militarily occupied by Tanzania at the time, them having evicted Idi Amin). The military cut the phone line and we had to re-dial.

I told him how Kampala, built on seven hills like Rome, was once one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but we’d been walking through burned-out buildings, broken glass, and confronted tens of thousands of hungry faces.

The city had no running water, and when the Commissioner of the Ministry of Rehabilitation met with Herr Müller and me, I apologized for arriving filthy in 4-day-old clothes; he told me not to worry about it as he hadn’t had a bath or shower in the two years the city had been “dry” since the war started. On one short morning walk, Herr Müller and I counted nine bodies.

We spent an afternoon at the Namalu “Detention Center” prison farm, one of Amin’s favorite torture sites, that was then a feeding station run by an Irish volunteer named Ann who gave each starving child a single bowl of ground corn and powdered milk every day. A few months after we met, Ann was shot dead by a sniper as she was feeding those kids.

Amin had fled the country in April of 1979 as the Tanzanians joined the opposition forces; he’d been gone almost two years when I got there, and the water still wasn’t running. The lesson for me was that bad men leading nations invariably corrupt or even destroy their institutions of government both to stay in charge and to enrich themselves and their families. And once the process starts, it begins to compound on itself until there’s little but wreckage left.

There’s a word for this, and a phrase that describes it.

*DONALD TRUMP AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

Louise and I have been binge-watching a British crime series, “The Chelsea Detective,” and on the show we watched Sunday, one of the characters said to another that her cop grandfather had told her to “always watch for the holy trinity: sex, money, and revenge.”

Not only was she describing how to sort types of criminals, but she was also describing Donald Trump: there’s almost nothing in his public record for the past 50 years that doesn’t fall into one of those three categories.

In Idi Amin and Donald Trump’s cases, though, what separates them from run-of-the-mill criminals and abusers is that they weren’t concerned about the law restraining their worst impulses. If anything, once they seized power, the law protected those impulses and facilitated their acting them out.

The name for this type of government — where the leader is both a psychopath and has seized so much power he faces few or no legal or political restraints — is called “personalism.” It refers to the concentration of all decision-making and appointment-making power in a single man’s hands at the expense of everybody else except those in his inner circle (typically his family).

Democracy researchers Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Eric Frantz have put together what’s probably the world’s most comprehensive data set on this, detailing roughly 200 dictatorships since WWII. Titled “How dictatorships work,” it details how what I saw in Kampala (and roughly a dozen other countries in the years I did international relief work) comes about, and has deep lessons for us in today’s Trump and oligarch-run America.

Personalist rulers invariably — always, really — leave the countries they’ve ruled worse off than when they started and their damage typically long outlives them. Social scientist Max Weber called this patriomonialism: it’s when a ruler treats the nation, its commons, and its collective wealth as his own personal property to loot and share with his closest relatives and cronies.

Like:

«< converting the Department of Justice into your own personal instrument for revenge «<blinding the IRS to your crimes, «< tearing down the East Wing without asking anybody’s permission or advice, «< taking a country to war without congressional authorization, «<giving away federal lands to major donors, «< killing regulations to enhance their profits. «<Or his kids becoming defense contractors.

Once a country is essentially converted into the personalist property of one man, his family, and his billionaire cronies, his private lusts and grudges become public policy and the line defining the difference between his desires and the nation’s interests vanishes.

*VLADIMIR PUTING AND RUSSIA:

Putin, who appears to be tutoring Trump with their regular hour-long phone calls, ran this exact same sequence in Russia even though they still have elections and still claim that nation is a republic.

«< His prosecutors went after the richest man in Russia when he started to defy Putin, then took apart his company and gave its pieces to Putin’s cronies.

«< The Russian equivalent of the FCC broke the back of independent media; the press in Russia was brought to heel in fewer than two years with the help of a handful of loyal oligarchs who bought up the nation’s largest private media properties.

«< Then came the “foreign agent” laws that, like Trump’s NSPM-7 categorized civil society organizations and dissenters as national security threats. And his illegal war to steal the wealth of Ukraine.

»> Instead of suspending the Russian constitution, Putin simply seized control of every one of the government’s agencies and their resources and redirected them all to supporting his iron-fisted rule while turning a blind eye to his looting the country.

*TRUMP — THE PARALLEL WITH WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE

Trump is doing the same thing here, from the IRS to the FBI to ICE to the Pentagon. For example, he replaced a real prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia with his personal attorney, Lindsey Halligan, who had no prosecutorial experience in her life, and within three weeks she’d come up with an indictment for Letitia James, the NY attorney general who’d won a half-billion-dollar fraud judgment against Trump.

When a federal judge blocked that for being illegal, Trump’s Justice Department tried to reindict James twice, in two different districts. So far only the refusal of grand juries to go along has prevented him from going full Putin, although the case is now in front of the Fourth Circuit appeals court dominated by Republican-appointed hard-right judges.

Now his DOJ has opened an investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the writer he sexually abused in New York, according to two juries who ordered him to pay her millions in damages. Again, right out of Putin’s and Amin’s playbook: SEX and REVENGE and all of his harassment of Carroll is paid for with our tax dollars.

Which brings us to the MONEY. Trump’s net worth has tripled since he took office, mostly based on crypto scams that his own administration’s regulatory agencies legalized and authorized for him.

At the same time, billionaires Trump and Musk gutted the IRS by firing about a third of its enforcement staff. Yale’s budget lab says the 2025 DOGE personnel cuts alone will let billionaire tax cheats screw us out of at least $600 billion, all against the background of a current estimated $700 billion a year in routine tax cheating by the Epstein class.

The IRS under Trump is now auditing low-income families claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit at a rate 35 times higher than they audit the morbidly rich. Dwight Eisenhower and my Republican father are both rolling over in their graves.

Following Amin’s and Putin’s script, Poynter has documented more than a hundred federal actions against journalists and news outlets, with Trump personally responsible for roughly a fifth of them.

FBI agents raided a Washington Post reporter’s home in January, two independent journalists (including Don Lemon) were arrested for covering a protest in Minnesota, and now we discover the Pentagon is compiling a blacklist of reporters.

Trump’s NSPM-7 executive order categorized anybody who disagrees with his ideas of what patriotism, capitalism, or Christianity mean as a “potential terrorist,” leading now to Putin-like FBI and IRS investigations of nonprofits across the country. Instead of going after morbidly rich tax cheats, they’re now going after good-government organizations that personalist leader Trump considers a threat to his family’s and his cronies’ power and ability to loot our nation’s wealth.

Like in Uganda and Russia, too, the very rich are tossing in to support this personalist leader because it can mean billions of our tax dollars flowing into their money bins.

Republicans in Congress are cowering, as are their spokespeople on TV and in the press, while billionaires (both American and foreign) line up to shower Trump with gold bars and jet airplanes in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses.

Elon Musk has revived his America PAC for the midterms and, according to independent writer Lalisa Stands, is harvesting voter data in Texas in a way that’s, shall we say, less than transparent. Her article is worth a careful read and I’m looking forward to more corroboration as details continue to come out.

Which brings us to this November. History shows us that once the prosecutors have been captured, the tax collectors neutered, the reporters cowed, and the protesters labeled as terrorists, the only way to get a personalist leader out of power short of physical violence is with an election.

So, like with Amin and Putin before him, Trump and his lickspittles are doing everything they can to corrupt or even seize control of this fall’s and the 2028 elections. That’s on the docket of Judge Indira Talwani (who is dealing with the mail-in ballots issue) this coming week, along with multiple other efforts by state attorneys general and folks like Marc Elias. But they’re going up against the formidable power of the entire executive branch that possesses a functionally unlimited budget and has the power to imprison and even kill their “enemies” with impunity.

This is how former spy-chief Vladimir Putin became one of the richest men on the planet, having played the game Trump started last year, and as I was feeding starving refugees in Uganda, Idi Amin was living it up in a massive mansion in Jeddah with maids, cars, drivers, cooks, and concubines, all paid for by the same Saudi government that gave Jared Kushner billions. This is simply how personalist governance works.

In Federalist 51, James Madison notes that if men were angels we’d have no need for the checks on presidential power that he and his colleagues had written into the Constitution. They thought they’d built a system that could survive a bad president and, for the first 250 years, they appeared to be right.

Now, with Amin as a role model and Putin as a mentor, Trump is testing that system and the entire world is watching, aghast. Republicans in Congress and the states, who have the tools Madison gave them to stop our slide from democracy into personalist authoritarian rule, are simply standing around terrified while making up excuses and rationalizations for doing nothing or collecting their own shares of the loot.

Trump’s obsession with sex, money, and revenge is tearing America apart at the seams while it guts both our soft and hard power around the world, just as Putin had hoped.

At least until this November. The GOP‘s cowardice means only you and I can stop this insanity and we’ll have to do it at the polling places this fall.

Fears that President Donald Trump could freeze foreign assets are driving billions in gold out of New York’s vaults, an economics journalist warned.

In a Thursday article for The Bulwark, economics editor and columnist Catherine Rampell described the gold retreat as a signal of Trump triggers “frightening sign” as billions in gold flee New York vaults: expert

“In a frightening sign of just how much trust has been lost between the United States and its erstwhile allies, billions of dollars of gold reserves are being repatriated or otherwise moved out of Trump’s reach,” Rampell wrote.

The Dutch central bank announced on Wednesday that it had moved roughly $12 billion in gold, most of it held in New York, to vaults in London, Rampell noted. France’s central bank recently sold about $15 billion in bullion stored in New York and replaced it with bars kept in Paris. Germany and Italy, which are the second- and third-largest holders of gold reserves behind the U.S., have spent the past year weighing whether to bring theirs home too, Rampell added.

The concern is less that Trump would seize the gold than that he might freeze it, Rampell explained. Washington and its allies did the same with Russia’s reserves after the invasion of Ukraine, she pointed out.

A German member of the European Parliament, Markus Ferber, warned that the risk is impossible to dismiss, she noted.

“Trump is erratic, and one cannot rule out that someday he will come up with creative ideas how to treat foreign gold reserves,” Ferber said, per Rampell.

Rampell admitted the scale of the fear caught her off guard.

“It hadn’t really occurred to me that investors might be diversifying away from U.S. dollar-denominated assets because they also feared losing access to them,” she wrote.

The nervousness has built during a string of Trump moves, including his “Liberation Day” tariffs, his threats to annex Greenland, his push to take “golden share” stakes in private companies, and his stated wish to personally inspect Fort Knox, according to Rampell.

Because gold sits inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Trump’s campaign to control the Federal Reserve feeds fears that foreign reserves could be next, Rampell wrote. A representative of Germany’s Taxpayers Federation put it bluntly, she noted.

“It’s our money,” the representative said. “It should be brought back.”

President Donald Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to give the US Postal Service sweeping power to withhold delivery of mail ballots, setting up an extraordinary showdown over voting at the high court less than two months before the November midterm election.

The emergency appeal, which leapfrogged lower courts still considering the case, is the culmination of a monthslong legal fight over an executive order the president signed in March that gave federal agencies an unprecedented role in elections. Voter advocacy groups and a coalition of 23 Democratic-led states challenged that order in federal court, arguing that neither the president nor the post office should have a role in choosing which mail ballots reach voters.

With the midterm elections nearing, and the first ballots entering the mail this week, the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court will be under enormous pressure to decide the case on an unusually speedy timeline. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to step in immediately with a short-term order that would allow the Postal Service to implement its new regulations.

The administration described its rules as “only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements.” Throughout its appeal, the administration framed its effort as having more to do with its power to regulate the mail than anything to do with elections.

“The rule thus plainly does not seize control of states’ administration of elections,” the administration told the high court. “It simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”

Since the justices last reviewed the issue in August — siding with the Trump administration — USPS has provided more detail about how it intends to implement Trump’s order. Many election officials have warned that it’s already too late to upend their mail ballot systems. And a whistleblower report asserted that the USPS is rushing to complete a complicated plan that could potentially disenfranchise millions of Americans. [Rigging, indeed.]

“USPS’s mail ballot rule is an unconstitutional attempt to upend mail voting on the eve of an election,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, part of the legal team representing the voting rights groups. “The district court temporarily blocked the rule’s key provision while it decides the request for preliminary relief through an order set to expire within days. Yet President Trump’s administration is running to the Supreme Court anyway. The only emergency here is the one the administration created.”

The road ahead as states prepare for midterms

The court requested a response in the case by Tuesday morning, a sign that it is unlikely to decide the administration’s request immediately.

The Trump administration will need to clear a procedural hurdle before it can get the court to look at the USPS regulation closely. A lower court had blocked the USPS rule with a temporary order that is not normally appealable. However, the high court has sometimes allowed such appeals in the past, and Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the top appellate attorney for the administration, said it should do so in this case. [Effing SOB!!!]

Trump, and several Republican states that support him, have framed the executive order as a minimal series of changes in postal rules to ensure a more secure election. In its appeal Thursday, the administration leaned into the idea that the changes are necessary to prevent fraud, echoing the president’s long stated false assertions of widespread voter fraud. [As we have long known, this regime will NEVER tell the truth about ANYTHING.]

Without intervention, the Justice Department wrote, the lower court order blocking the administration “partially nullifies the Postal Service’s efforts to address the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud — a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters.”

But critics describe the order as a power grab over state-run mail ballots, which the president has repeatedly and baselessly blamed for his loss to former President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Under the regulations, states must submit lists of their eligible mail voters to USPS via an online portal in order to send ballots through the mail. If a name doesn’t appear on that list, the Postal Service would decline to deliver a mail ballot to them. The USPS rule would also require that election mail envelopes carry unique bar codes for each voter. States fear that adopting an entirely new mail ballot system weeks before the election could lead to systemic breakdowns in ballots reaching voters.

North Carolina is set to begin sending out its mail ballots on Friday.

It was a point the administration repeatedly stressed in its appeal as it attempted to arouse a sense of urgency from the court. It warned that as lower courts continued to work on the case, more and more states would begin sending ballots for this year’s election.

The emergency appeal requires the Supreme Court to resolve one of the most significant election-related questions it has been asked to take up in years. Last month, a divided court allowed the administration to continue working to implement its executive order, though it did so on technical grounds that offered little insight into how the conservative majority views the legality of Trump’s underlying order. The court’s three liberal justices dissented from that decision.

Days later, a federal court in Boston temporarily blocked the administration from carrying out the plan.

Democratic state officials and voting rights groups challenging the order note that the Constitution gives the power to run elections to the states, not the president, and they argue that Congress has given USPS no authority to police state mail ballot programs. But the Justice Department has countered that USPS has broad authority to change protocols for the mail. It has called attention to two examples where it has done so in the past: the delivery of cremated remains and replica explosives, such as dummy grenades. [WHAT THE ACTUAL F*CK?!!!!!!]

The recent whistleblower report alleged that the agency was preparing to reject entire batches of ballots — which in some jurisdictions would delay the sending of tens of thousands ballots — if USPS found that just a single envelope in the batch did not align with the information within the portal.

On September 1, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin publicly said that ICE could be present at polling places in November. He said ICE would not patrol polling locations, but gave two circumstances in which agents could go there: an active threat to the polling place or to serve an arrest warrant on someone ICE had been tracking.

That second category is significant. Earlier DHS assurances had been considerably stronger: in February, a senior DHS election official told state election officials, “There will be no ICE presence at polling locations.” DHS subsequently qualified that by allowing for an active public-safety threat. Mullin has now explicitly added ordinary immigration/law-enforcement activity—executing a warrant—as another reason ICE agents might appear at a polling place.

This is not an announcement that ICE will be stationed at polling places, and DHS continues to say that ICE has no planned operation targeting them. But it is a material retreat from the categorical assurance you and I discussed.

There is also a separate development today: reporting says ICE plans to spend up to $5 million creating a national database of voter-registration and voting-history information, drawing on data from all 50 states. That is about voter records rather than agents physically stationed at polls, but it represents another substantial expansion of ICE into the election sphere.

I stopped this particular alert because the condition you asked me to watch for—a meaningful development materially advancing the possibility of ICE presence at polling places—has now occurred.

[This message was sent, along with the information above. “I stopped this particular alert because the condition you asked me to watch for—a meaningful development materially advancing the possibility of ICE presence at polling places—has now occurred.” (from my ChatGPT)]

“The fear is palpable inside federal agencies,” Miles Taylor wrote in a Tuesday essay for his anti-Trump group Defiance, which has partnered with the nonprofit representing the whistleblower. Taylor himself blew the whistle on Trump years ago, and said the disclosure is already bolstering the legal fight against the mail voting order.

He pointed to a Partnership for Public Service survey in which the share of federal employees confident they could report wrongdoing without retaliation fell from about 75% to roughly 22% since Trump returned to office. Taylor also noted the administration has fired at least 17 inspectors general and floated a governmentwide gag rule that critics have said would silence potential whistleblowers.

“Somewhere out there in America, a public servant looked at a plan to sabotage your vote. Over their own self-doubt and the daunting consequences of self-sacrifice, he or she decided their oath to the Constitution mattered more than their own safety. That’s what saving a democracy actually looks like, friends. It’s rarely the famous people swinging their fists at the dictator. It’s almost always someone like this,” he concluded.

Benjamin Netanyahu has spent decades pushing U.S. presidents to attack Iran. He asked four presidents point-blank to do so. Three refused, over and over. With Donald Trump, Netanyahu’s luck finally changed. Now, as the Israeli prime minister scrambles to hold onto his job in election season, he is going around Israel bragging about how exactly he convinced the world’s most powerful military to bend to his will.

On Sunday, Netanyahu sat for an interview with the genocide-inciting Israeli TV network, Channel 14. There, he appealed to Israeli voters about why they ought to continue supporting him.

“I’ve been against Iran for almost 40 years,” Netanyahu said, adding that “it took a long time to bring the United States to its senses.”

He was able to do it, Netanyahu said, because he had “close to 1,000 hours on American television with the ability to influence the United States – with the intimate knowledge of all its leaders, both those who support us and those who don’t support us – the ability to navigate this field, through it.”

The gall. In English, Netanyahu lavishes praise on U.S. leaders. In Hebrew, he boasts of how he manipulated them.

That’s not all of it, though.

Some of you may not remember, but the following is forever seared in my memory. On my first day at Zeteo, two years ago, Netanyahu came to Washington. While he delivered a speech that had members of both parties applauding with a level of zeal they don’t show even for a U.S. president, the Israeli prime minister also attacked Americans protesting his visit outside.

I want to underline this: A foreign leader, whose entire project benefits from billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars each year, came to U.S. soil, and slandered U.S. citizens – and U.S. representatives clapped like seals in response.

There is a straight line between that moment – and the U.S. continuing to unconditionally fund Israel ever since, despite it killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and several Americans – and today, when Netanyahu feels so comfortable bragging about how he asserted his will over the U.S.

Think what an indictment this is.

»>Netanyahu explicitly cites how the U.S. media has served as a compliant springboard, a vessel for his influence operation on, if not the populace, at least the consultants and members of Congress who engage with cable news more than their actual constituents.

»>And as for the American leadership class: You have unconditionally given this man more than $20 billion, at a conservative estimate, in the past three years. Even as he and his soldiers and his terrorist settlers have killed and brutalized and bullied a double-digit number of Americans, you have given him more and more. And anytime someone has gained enough momentum to criticize that dynamic with enough gusto to resonate with the people you’re supposed to represent, you either willingly or reluctantly scramble to defame them.

And as for the rest of us, the collective “we”: Do we have an ounce of self-respect? As the polls have shown, definitively, American public sentiment towards Israel has plummeted. Despite mainstream media’s insistence, it’s not even a question of divides over Israel in the Democratic Party – it’s nearly unanimous opposition. And independents are not far behind. Even in the Republican Party – home to the Christian Zionists and the Trump-First MAGA movement – opinion on Israel has become split, with no sure sign of it firming up again.

Still, one may hope that the level of condescension, power concentration, and weaponization expressed by the U.S. political class in order to shield its undying support for Israel will prompt something beyond earth-shaking public opinion.

Yes, pro-Israel politicians are beginning to pay the price, particularly in the Democratic primaries. And yes, tens of thousands of Americans, particularly young people, have put themselves on the line and protested against the parasitic U.S.-Israeli relationship and in support of human rights for Palestinians – and subsequently, of course, been viciously targeted by the ruling party, and smeared by some members of the “opposition” party and their mainstream media allies.

Howard Lutnick has spent the last week doing what Howard Lutnick does best: standing on a sidewalk in Washington, yelling confidently incorrect things at reporters, and hoping nobody checks.

Since Mark Carney walked away from trade talks and told Washington their last-minute terms were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal,” Lutnick has been on a full media assault. Canada blew up the greatest trade deal in history. Carney did it for politics. Alberta wants to leave. Quebec wants to leave. Poor honest Howard just wanted to shake hands.

Every piece of that is either a lie, a distortion, or a projection by an inveterate liar who’s making bank off of destroying America’s standing in the world. They all are. But Howard is the fucking worst. The projection part is the fun part, because while Howard screams about Carney’s political motives, Howard’s own family has a nine-figure financial motive to keep this tariff circus running as long as humanly possible.

Let’s take his bullshit apart one claim at a time, then follow the money. Because the money explains everything.

The “greatest deal in the world” that Canada supposedly torched

Here’s Lutnick’s version: Canada had a handshake deal, Trump announced it, everybody was thrilled, and then Carney nuked it. “Canada made the decision for political purposes,” he told reporters. “This is politics only.”

Here’s what actually happened, according to Canadian officials and reporting on both sides of the border. In the final stretch, the American side started backtracking. They yanked provisions that would have meaningfully lowered US tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum and autos, the entire point of the exercise for Canada. CNN reported that Lutnick himself, who parachuted into the talks at the last minute in what sources described as a disruptive way, strongly opposed those tariff reductions.

Trump and Lutnick also demanded- not wanted- a say over which countries Canada could sign trade agreements with, first right of refusal on all our natural resources, veto power on any and all military and security partnerships, turning Canada into a vassal state.

Think about what that actually means. A sovereign G7 country asking Washington’s permission before it trades with anyone else. That’s not a trade deal. That’s a leash. After a year and a half of Trump openly musing about annexation, calling the border an “arbitrary demarcation,” and telling Carney to his face in the Oval Office that a union was “meant to be,” Canada was handed terms that effectively amounted to annexation with extra paperwork. Carney said no. Of course he said no.

So when Lutnick says Canada walked away from the greatest deal ever “for political purposes,” he means Canada declined to sign a deal that kept getting worse every time Howard touched it. The deal died because Lutnick and his boss couldn’t stop themselves from squeezing, and now he’s mad the mark left the table.

The Alberta and Quebec fairy tale

Lutnick’s second act was telling reporters Carney killed the deal to shore himself up ahead of Alberta’s preliminary independence vote in October and elections in Quebec.

Quick primer for American readers, since Howard clearly needed one too. Yes, Alberta has a separatist fringe that Premier Danielle Smith has spent two years feeding, and yes, there’s a preliminary vote coming in October. Yes, Quebec has an election, and the Parti Québécois has been polling well on its eternal sovereignty project. These movements are real, they are decades old in Quebec’s case, and they predate Mark Carney’s entire political career.

Here’s what Lutnick gets exactly backwards. Nothing has unified this country like Trump’s tariffs and talk of annexation. Carney won the election running against Trump. Elbows up wasn’t a slogan about domestic politics; it was a national mood. The idea that Carney needed to manufacture a fight with Washington to look tough is hilarious, because Washington has been manufacturing the fight for free since January 2025. Trump threatening to swallow Canada did more for Canadian unity than a hundred years of Heritage Minutes.

And the Quebec part is even dumber. Part of what Canada fought for in these talks was the protection of French-language content and cultural rules. Lutnick’s response was to sneer at reporters about it: “I mean, what could matter less to America?” Cool, Howard. You just told Quebec their culture matters less than nothing while accusing Carney of playing Quebec politics. The self-awareness of a parking bollard.

Now the part Howard really doesn’t want you reading

Everything above is standard Lutnick: loud, wrong, forgettable. This part isn’t.

In July 2025, Wired reported that Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm that Howard Lutnick ran for decades before handing it to his sons, Brandon and Kyle, when he joined Trump’s cabinet, was pitching a very specific trade. Cantor would buy the rights to companies’ potential tariff refunds at 20 to 30 cents on the dollar. You paid $10 million in Trump’s tariffs? Cantor offers you $2 to $3 million in cash today, and if the courts strike down the tariffs, Cantor collects the full $10 million refund. A three- to five-times return, according to the congressional letter that later cited the reporting. An internal Cantor letter reviewed by Wired even bragged the firm had already put a trade through representing roughly $10 million in refund rights, with capacity to scale to several hundred million. He was asked about it today and put a little shit in his Epstein-Cuck Pants.

The mechanics of that trade are the whole story.

That trade only prints money if two things happen. One, the courts kill the tariffs. Two, and this is the greasy part, the tariffs stay in place as long as possible before that happens, because every additional month of collection grows the refund pool Cantor bought claims against. The longer the illegal tariffs run, the bigger the eventual payout on every discounted claim.

Now recall what Howard Lutnick, Commerce Secretary and self-appointed cheerleader in chief of the tariff regime, was telling the public that entire time: rest assured, tariffs are not going away. He was the loudest voice in the administration insisting the tariffs were permanent, legal and glorious, while the family firm was reportedly positioning to profit from the exact opposite outcome.

Then in February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that Trump never had the authority to impose the IEEPA tariffs in the first place. Illegal since inception. Estimates put the refund pool between $165 and $175 billion, and the Court of International Trade has since ordered Customs to build a system to pay it back. Fortune has described hedge funds building a $100 billion secondary market in these refund claims, a market that got national attention specifically because of the allegation that the Commerce Secretary’s own son was in it early, with a better view of the board than anyone alive.

Cantor’s defence is that its salespeople merely “explored” the trades and never executed any, which sits awkwardly alongside its own internal letter boasting about a trade it had already put through. Congress noticed the gap. Jamie Raskin opened an investigation and demanded records from both Lutnicks. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden sent their own letters. Those questions are still open, and nobody has been charged with anything. But you don’t need a conviction to see the shape of it.

So why is Howard screaming at Canada?

Because the tariff machine is the family business now, and Canada threatened to turn part of it off.

The Supreme Court killed the IEEPA tariffs, but the tariffs still choking Canadian steel, aluminum and autos live under a different law, Section 232, and those survived. Those are the exact tariffs the collapsed deal would have lowered. Those are the exact provisions Lutnick personally fought to strip out at the eleventh hour.

A man whose family fortune is now tangled up in tariff revenue, tariff refunds and tariff litigation was the man who blew up tariff relief for Canada, and he’s spending his week blaming the Canadian Prime Minister for it. The rhetoric isn’t analysis. It’s cover. Every day the tariff regime grinds on in chaos, with importers paying, courts fighting and refund claims piling up, is a good day for the people who bought the claims at a quarter on the dollar.

Carney figured out what he was dealing with and walked. Lutnick’s tantrum since then isn’t the sound of a negotiator who lost a deal. It’s the sound of a salesman who lost a customer he’d already borrowed against.

Canada didn’t walk away from the greatest deal in the world. Canada walked away from Howard Nutlick. Those are very different things, and one of them is the smartest trade anyone’s made all year.

Hami Ami, 8/31/26

“The 40 iconic Kennedy Center weeping willows trees of the south and west terraces on the Potomac riverfront of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts which stood as a powerful living symbol of a nation in mourning following President Kennedy's 1963 assassination. leaving only stumps and sparking significant public sadness and debate among Washington, D.C. residents and visitors.”

[This destruction apparently occurred last Fall. It just didn’t get much (any?) press.]

It should surprise nobody that the president who tried to overturn the 2020 election based on lies — and didn’t seem to mind his supporters rising up violently on January 6, 2021 — might try to monkey with the 2026 midterm elections.

It remains to be seen whether President Donald Trump’s efforts to interfere in the 2026 election will actually work.

But recent developments should serve as a reality check that he’s trying, with potentially ugly results.

(I) First, CNN reported exclusively that the Department of Homeland Security is surging efforts to find supposed voter fraud in a handful of states.

While that might not sound shocking in and of itself, there is plenty about it that’s irregular.

The effort involves using an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement called Homeland Security Investigations, which typically handles other crimes like human trafficking and drug smuggling.

But mostly, the reason it should raise eyebrows is because of the proximity to the 2026 election, now just a little more than two months away. As CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, Tierney Sneed and Gabe Cohen note, the federal government typically avoids such “overt” investigatory actions so close to an election. The reason is that mere allegations that haven’t been thoroughly examined could influence the election.

But when it comes to Trump and alleged voter fraud, that’s a feature rather than a bug.

Trump has spent a decade trying and failing to substantiate his claims of widespread fraud. In his first term, he launched a voter fraud commission that folded with little to show. His campaign paid people to find widespread fraud after the 2020 election, to no avail.

What the administration has produced of late is a lot of manufactured smoke.

That includes its bogus claim about 250,000 noncitizens being registered to vote in just four states. It also includes a highly unorthodox unsigned report from the US Census Bureau last month claiming tens of thousands of noncitizens voted in the 2020 presidential election. (Experts have decried both claims.)

The DHS effort would seem to be geared toward promoting such claims, given the department’s purview.

But if other efforts to find widespread voter fraud didn’t produce anything substantive, the odds would appear slim that DHS will change that in just two months.

Of course, producing ironclad evidence of fraud probably isn’t the point. The Trump administration’s goal appears to be seeding more doubt — and possibly even creating a pretext for more federal intervention in the election (which we’ll get to).

(II) The other big development this week was an unnamed federal whistleblower issuing a major warning about the Trump administration’s new system for verifying mail ballots. The system has devolved into what workers describe as a “sh*t show” that could lead to mass disenfranchisement of mail voters, the whistleblower says

The whistleblower report, released by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, builds on concerns previously expressed by election officials that the system has not been sufficiently tested ahead of the 2026 midterms.

According to the whistleblower, if even a single ballot envelope scan in a large batch of ballots doesn’t comport with the information in the system, the US Postal Service won’t deliver the entire batch until the discrepancy is resolved.

It remains to be seen whether the system will actually be used; the issue is the subject extensive litigation. But Trump — who has himself voted by mail in Florida — has long decried mail voting. And because of that, it skews substantially toward Democrats.

In other words, if mail voters are disenfranchised, it could disproportionately hurt Democrats.

These developments only add to the warning signs about what might lay ahead.

Trump in March signed the executive order giving the USPS an unprecedented role in screening mail ballots. By June, CNN reported that the administration was planning to threaten not to deliver mail ballots for states that failed to turn over their voter lists to the federal government.

Even some red states have resisted turning over those voter lists.

By July, Trump delivered a primetime speech that provided no new evidence of widespread fraud, but did exaggerate China’s supposed efforts and baselessly claimed it had been covered up. That turned heads because it invoked national security, and courts generally give presidents greater latitude to take unilateral actions if national security is at stake.

And a few weeks later, Trump declined to rule out precisely such a scenario. In an interview, he left open the possibility of declaring a national security emergency to institute a series of voting changes that the GOP-controlled Congress has failed to pass, including limiting mail voting.

And last week brought a particularly striking scene.

Amid longstanding concerns that the Trump administration might overzealously insert itself into the voting process, the Republican governor of a dark-red state accused Justice Department election monitors of “aggressive” behavior while observing that state’s primary election.

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon asked his state’s attorney general to investigate, while adding: “I don’t like the federal government coming in and taking our votes.”

Trump has previously expressed regret for not seizing voting machines after the 2020 election.

It’s impossible to say which of these developments might lead to concrete action or problems ahead of the 2026 election. Trump tends to throw things at the wall, and sometimes he backs off when they prove impractical. Other times, his and his team’s efforts prove half-baked or ham-handed. The courts could get in his way on things like his plans for mail ballots.

But as CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf wrote this weekend, there are a bevy of potential nightmare scenarios in play ahead of this fall’s midterms.

And with Trump’s party staring down a difficult election that could give Democrats at least one chamber of Congress — and thus could sap Trump of power over his final two years as president — it’s worth taking those possibilities seriously.

History and recent developments suggest Trump is capable of plenty.

The US Postal Service effort to develop a sweeping new system for verifying mail ballots has invited a host of IT concerns among agency officials, with some describing the process internally as a “sh*t show,” according to a new whistleblower report released Tuesday by a Democratic senator.

The unnamed whistleblower is alleging that some of the procedures USPS is planning – under mandates put forward by President Donald Trump – have been hidden from the public. Those procedures will make an already complicated and risky plan even more vulnerable to potential mass disenfranchisement, the whistleblower says.

The new report – which was assembled by the whistleblowers’ lawyers and released by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal – comes as multiple courts are considering the legality of the proposal, which would require that states submit to USPS lists of their mail-in voters. The agency will not deliver ballots for states if there are any discrepancies between the voter information in the USPS system and what’s picked up by agency scanners on the envelopes of the ballots.

“USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation - raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” said the report.

CNN has reached out to USPS for comment.

Trump signed an executive order in March that gave the USPS an unprecedented role in screening states’ mail ballot programs. Election officials have already expressed deep concerns about having to use a system that has not gone through extensive testing and training procedures.

Internally, according to the whistleblower, USPS’ IT teams were going to be given less than a week to test the system once it was finished, due to the time crunch of the electoral calendar; North Carolina begins sending ballots this week and other states join it later this month.

It’s not clear whether the portal is ready to be launched on Tuesday, as was the goal, according to the whistleblower report. A judge last week froze the mandates that the states use the system if they want USPS to deliver their ballots, but said USPS could still offer the portal to states that voluntarily want to upload the mail voter information. The Justice Department is appealing that ruling.

“The Postal Service used to be a great partner of ours in helping us ensure that Americans had a voice in our electoral process, but I’m also not surprised to hear what they’re doing. This president is tearing a trusted organization that was loved by Americans apart,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar told CNN’s Dana Bash on Tuesday.

“The Constitution is very clear that states run elections, not the federal government, not the United States Postal Service, and it is disheartening that the Postal Service is doing what they’re doing, but we’re going to hold them accountable,” the Democrat said on “Inside Politics.”

Haphazard development and testing process

In the final week of testing, the phrase “sh*t show” was used by multiple people to describe the process, the whistleblower alleges in the report, which identifies other examples of USPS barreling through the process of creating the system. The plans the IT staff were shown for the system were “constantly changing” from the beginning, and systems’ requirements were not clearly put in writing for the development staff, the whistleblower says.

USPS leadership was dismissive of concerns, and, according to the report “insisted that it was easy to understand what was needed and also that there was no time to write down the requirements.” [!!!}

The report describes a haphazard effort to test the parts of the system as they became ready. Under the timeline sketched out to meet the September 1 deadline, there would only be four days allotted for it to go through a stage in the development process in which potential users of the system can test it out.

“For a system that manages something as important as handling voting and ballots, 4 days of user testing is entirely unreasonable,” the whistleblower report said.

The concerns about the untested nature of the system are particularly acute because if there are any discrepancies between the voter lists that election officials have submitted and the ballots they’re seeking to send, USPS could reject the entire batches of ballots – meaning tens of thousands of ballots could go unsent at a time – until the discrepancy is fixed.

The whistleblower says that there will be a first round of verification – in a process not spelled out in the public regulations – comparing the voter information in the portal with “manifests” election officials must also submit for each batch of ballots they intend to drop off. The information on the manifests – including unique bar codes election officials are required, under the rules, to assign each voter – must match perfectly with the information in the portal before election officials are allowed drop off the ballots, the report says.

When election officials bring ballots to their USPS site for delivery, either the entire batch of ballot envelopes or a sampling will be physically scanned – depending on where the ballots are being dropped, according to the whistleblower. If just a single ballot envelope scan does not align with the information in the portal, USPS will refuse to deliver the entire batch of ballots while the discrepancy is being sorted out.

“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving. It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles - and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots,” the report says.

This statement has not been verified yet:

“DOGE hunted federal grants for the word ‘climate’ and defunded whatever came up. One of the things that came up was a USAID and NASA satellite program that mapped dangerous glacial lakes, predicted floods, and ran early warning systems across the globe. Including Nepal.”

Urban Odyssey

Trump: What's the Deal? (Full 1991 BANNED Documentary)

Listen now

a year ago · 72221 likes · 4 comments · Urban (Josh)

Why was this not headlined prior to the 2016 election?!

Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah said last week’s flooding in the country’s north and neighboring China was “one of the largest disasters in this region,” while highlighting the region’s vulnerability to climate change.

“The flood in the Bhotekoshi River in Rasuwa was not an ordinary flood. It was one of the largest disasters in this region, triggered by a glacial avalanche involving ice and rock in the Himalayan area,” Shah said in a statement Monday.

The deadly flooding indicates that “the risks we face in the Himalayan region are increasing alongside climate change,” Shah said, adding that Nepal plans to raise the issue of climate change with the international community.

The Himalayan nation – home to thousands of glaciers which are melting and becoming increasingly unstable as the region rapidly warms – is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

It is also an emerging climate leader with ambitious environmental targets, despite barely contributing to the climate crisis, accounting for less than 0.1% of global planet-warming gases.

This information was posted by L.D. Michaels in his comment below. Thanks L.D.!

I submitted the following question to and received the subsequent response from my account with CharGPT:

There are apparently reports of an “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Task Force” at the DOJ Do you have any information on this?

Yes. It is quite real, and it is considerably more substantial than the shorthand phrase “DOJ anti-Christian bias task force” might suggest.

President Trump created the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias by Executive Order 14202 on February 6, 2025. It is formally housed in the Department of Justice, but it is actually a government-wide interagency task force, not merely a DOJ committee. The Attorney General chairs it, and its designated membership includes the Departments of State, Treasury, Defense, Labor, HHS, HUD, Education, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security, as well as OMB, FBI, FEMA, EEOC and others.

Its assigned mission is unusually broad. The Executive Order directs it to review the activities of federal agencies during the Biden administration for what it describes as unlawful “anti-Christian policies, practices, or conduct”; recommend that such policies be revoked; identify deficiencies in federal law and enforcement relating to anti-Christian hostility; solicit complaints and information from affected Christians and religious organizations; and recommend additional executive or legislative action.

The task force held its first publicized meeting at DOJ on April 22, 2025, chaired by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi. Among the matters highlighted were the FBI Richmond memorandum concerning certain traditionalist Catholics, prosecutions of anti-abortion demonstrators under the FACE Act, IRS treatment of churches, and other instances the administration characterized as discriminatory treatment of Christians.

There have now been two substantial reports. An initial report was dated June 6, 2025 and subsequently released publicly. More significantly, on April 30, 2026, the task force issued an approximately 200-page report, supported by more than 1,100 footnotes and hundreds of pages of exhibits, setting out its findings concerning seventeen federal agencies. DOJ says the investigation included reviews of internal discussions, case files and prosecutorial decisions and meetings with more than 100 purported victims and other stakeholders.

The April 2026 report’s central contention is that the Biden administration did not generally prohibit Christians from holding religious beliefs, but allegedly penalized people when they attempted to act in accordance with traditional Christian beliefs, particularly in disputes involving abortion, sexual orientation, gender identity, marriage, education, medical treatment and conscience rights. One of its principal findings is that Biden’s DOJ allegedly pursued pro-life demonstrators aggressively under the FACE Act while responding less aggressively to attacks upon pregnancy-resource centers.

There is an important legal distinction here, however. Protecting Christians against religious discrimination is unquestionably a legitimate governmental objective. Protecting religious liberty generally is constitutionally required. The much more difficult constitutional issue is whether the federal government may create an enforcement structure expressly devoted to one religion—Christianity—rather than religious discrimination generally.

That raises at least two different First Amendment considerations. Under the Free Exercise Clause, government certainly may correct discrimination against Christians. But under the Establishment Clause, government ordinarily may not confer preferential governmental status upon Christianity merely because it is Christianity. Thus, a task force that investigates actual discrimination against Christians may be entirely defensible; a task force that begins treating Christian religious interests more favorably than comparable Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist or other religious interests would present a much more serious constitutional problem.

That tension is reflected in the controversy surrounding the task force. The administration characterizes it as restoring equal religious liberty after discriminatory enforcement. Critics characterize the same program as potentially turning the Civil Rights Division from an institution protecting religious liberty irrespective of faith into one advancing a particular set of Christian social-policy positions. Reporting in 2025 documented substantial changes in the Civil Rights Division’s priorities under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, including an increased emphasis on anti-Christian bias alongside antisemitism and transgender-related issues.

[L.D.] One other point may interest you particularly: the task force is not finished. Executive Order 14202 contemplated three stages—an initial report, the 2026 report, and a final report when the task force terminates. The April 2026 report expressly says that its work will continue until that final report.

[L.D.] I think there is a particularly interesting constitutional question lurking here: could a President constitutionally create, for example, a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Jewish Bias” or “Anti-Muslim Bias,” and if so, does that necessarily make this Christian-specific task force permissible—or does the Establishment Clause require the government instead to police religious discrimination on a religion-neutral basis?

Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, who in May vowed to “eliminate waste, fraud and abuse,” was exposed Sunday for having pitched foreign nationals a real estate investment opportunity with the promise of green cards and access to “America’s Comprehensive Welfare” for their entire families.

The revelation was unearthed in a report from Popular Information, which details two trips Sonderling took to China in 2015 before joining the Trump administration.

Working at the time with the Florida law firm Gunster, Sonderling delivered multiple presentations on behalf of Premier Capital Group, an international real estate consulting and investment company.

One presentation promised Chinese nationals, in exchange for investing in a U.S. resort hotel condominium project, that they could “get a green card in a short time,” and that after “one person applies, the whole family immigrates,” according to banners at the event reviewed by Popular Information. Once immigrated, the Chinese nationals and their families were promised access to U.S. welfare, including “unemployment benefits,” “food stamps,” “low-cost public housing,” “Medicaid” and “retirement benefits.”

“The China trips were documented extensively by Sonderling in hundreds of photos reviewed by Popular Information that were published to two public Flickr accounts,” Popular Information’s report reads.

The pitch to Chinese nationals would utilize the United States’ EB-5 visa program, a program that grants foreign nationals green cards for foreign investors. That same program has been criticized by the Trump administration, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick calling it “full of nonsense, make believe and fraud” in 2025. [FOTFLMAO!]

“The photos document that Sonderling participated in at least five speaking engagements touting EB-5 visas in China,” Popular Information’s report reads. “Most of these seem to be connected to the same hotel and condo project.”

Sonderling was tapped by Trump to lead the Labor Department in June, and also sits as a member of the White HouseTask Force to Eliminate Fraud. [more FOTF] He did not respond to a request for comment from Popular Information, the outlet reported.

POPULAR INFORMATION, 8/31/26
https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/484149

The number of settlers participating in these riots has grown, according to the officers, who also believe RABBIS ARE ENCOURAGING SETTLERS TO BREAK THE SHABBAT AND DRIVE INTO PALESTINIAN VILLAGES, as happened in the village of Qusra over the weekend. The officers also warned that Palestinians may start confronting the attacking settlers, possibly with gunfire, amid a lack of protection from either the IDF or the Palestinian Authority.

“Haaretz” (Israeli newspaper), 8/29/26 (edited)

Under Jewish religious law, DRIVING AND OTHER FORMS OF MOTORIZED TRANSPORT ARE PROHIBITED ON THE SABBATH, which runs from sunset Friday to nightfall Saturday. Secular Israelis commonly use their cars during those hours

A mixed neighborhood in the predominantly ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak was effectively sealed off on Friday evening.

A group of ultra-Orthodox residents had been illegally barricading the street for months, but residents said the situation worsened when the municipality decided to block a central bridge which connects the neighborhood to one of the city’s main arteries. Friday marked the first time containers were placed in the entrances to the neighborhood.