This is another of those “where do I even start” days. So let’s start with a story that’s not getting much front-page attention: Lutnick Family Angling To Make Astronomical Sums Off Court Nixing Tariffs by Josh Marshall at TPM.

Here’s the synopsis: A couple of days ago an appeals court backed up the U.S. Court of International Trade and found that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. But the tariffs are staying in place for a while, pending more appeals. If someday the SCOTUS determines once and for all that the tariffs are illegal, the Trump Administration is going to have to refund importing companies a whole lot of money.

Josh Marshall heard that some Wall Street firms are actually buying up the rights to these maybe some day refunds. For example, a Wall Street firm might offer an importer $2 million now for the right to claim $10 million down the road. One of the firms that is going whole hog on these deals is Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor Fitzgerald, until very recently, was headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Now it’s being run by  Lutnick’s sons. Brandon Lutnick, age 27, is the current chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald. Does anyone really believe his old man is not still involved in running the company? And does Trump know his commerce secretary is set up to make a nice profit if Trump’s tariff policy is tossed out by the courts?

Paul Krugman mentioned this little conflict of interest in a column today, and also noted that the White House made a Labor Day proclamation that the United States has taken in $8 trillion in tariff revenue! “Raising $8 trillion in tariff revenue would be quite a trick, given that total U.S. imports last year were only $3.3 trillion,” Krugman said.

In another small step, a U.S. district judge in California ruled that Trump’s deployment of National Guard and Marines to California was a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. The judge blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to California again, but put the ruling on hold for ten days to give Trump time to appeal. The White House has already announced it will ignore the ruling. And this afternoon Trump announced he would order “federal intervention” in Chicago and Baltimore, but he didn’t say when.

In other legal news, there is a U.S. District Judge In Washington DC named Sparkle Sooknanan. That’s not really the news, but it did make me want to meet her. Judge Sooknanan is the one who stopped the Trump Administration from deporting a number of unaccompanied children to Guatemala. Exactly how many children were being prepared for deportation isn’t clear. I believe I saw 800 in one story, and 600 in anther, and it may not have been that many. But it was some. To condense this story quite a bit, the judge was alerted to the deportations at 1 a.m. Sunday morning and worked 20 hours straight, without sleep, to be sure all children were returned to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.  It appears one plane full of children was already in the air when the Judge began issues orders, but this time the plane came back.

In the This Is Rich department, Trump is upset that the CDC is being ripped apart by disputes over whether covid products, vaccines and treatments, actually work. You might notice that there were no such disputes until Trump put a brain-damaged wackadoo who doesn’t know science from his ass in charge of the nation’s health. I liked this bit from STAT.

Drug companies have long shared findings with government regulators and the public showing that their Covid-19 products are overwhelmingly safe and effective. In his post, Trump said he has been shown data demonstrating the vaccines and drugs are effective and have saved millions of lives, but he accused the companies behind the products of not sharing that information publicly — or with officials at the CDC.

Trump used the post, which comes five days after the ouster of Susan Monarez as director of the CDC and resignation of several other top officials, to urge companies to “clear up this MESS, one way or the other.”

So he’s being shown data that was shared to the government — how else would he have seen it? — and the public, and he’s demanding this data be shared with the government and the public. Genius. And the onus is entirely on the medical/pharmaceutical companies to prove to the wackadoos that science is right and their conspiracy theories are crap. Yeah, that will so not happen. You can’t tell those people anything. They are impervious to reason and logic and facts that don’t fit their cherished biases.

Trump has been teasing a big announcement today, which got a lot of people really excited. A cryptocurrency prediction market was taking bets he was going to announce his resignation. That was a stupid bet; that man is not going to resign. We’ll be lucky if he agrees to move out of the White House when his term is over. When he had a colonoscopy during his first term he refused anesthesia so he wouldn’t have to temporarily turn the presidency over to Mike Pence. This is not a man who is preparing a graceful exit. No matter what.

Oh, and the big announcement was that the military’s US Space Command will be moved from Colorado Spring, Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama. There’s already a bunch of space/military stuff in Huntsville. But Trump seems to be mostly doing this because there are too many Democrats in Colorado.