Trump has been trying to bust federal workers’ unions since his inauguration. Back in January a court blocked him and protected the unions. However, about a week ago the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Trump and gave him a green light to union-bust. Now ProPublica is reporting that while this drama has been playing out, VA hospitals are losing staff and are struggling to replace them.

Veterans hospitals are struggling to replace hundreds of doctors and nurses who have left the health care system this year as the Trump administration pursues its pledge to simultaneously slash Department of Veterans Affairs staff and improve care.

Many job applicants are turning down offers, worried that the positions are not stable and uneasy with the overall direction of the agency, according to internal documents examined by ProPublica. The records show nearly 4 in 10 of the roughly 2,000 doctors offered jobs from January through March of this year turned them down. That is quadruple the rate of doctors rejecting offers during the same time period last year.

I don’t know about doctors, but I can’t imagine RNs or LPNs taking a job in a non-union facility. There are plenty of jobs for them elsewhere. The quality of VA care is going to drop like a rock.

In other news, Trump has fired Billy Long as IRS commissioner less than two months after the Senate had confirmed him. The utterly unqualified Long was the sixth person to head the IRS this year, NBC says. Long is being made ambassador to Iceland as a consolation prize. It’s not clear what happened. And if there is a television sitcom producer somewhere looking for someone to fill a role of a stupid, corrupt small town hayseed, just ask Billy Long to play himself. Keep the dialogue very simple, though.

In Texas, Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton are still trying to get the absent House Democrats kicked out of the Texas House. The Justice Department has convened a grand jury to investigate New York Attorney General Letitia James. This was after Pam Bondi convened another grand jury to probe into “whether Obama administration officials committed federal crimes when they assessed Russia’s actions during the 2016 election,” says NBC News. And on and on. Just about everyone who has ever challenged Trump’s almighty gloriousness is being investigated.

But see Politico, MAGA world swallows a difficult truth: Arresting Trump’s opponents is easier said than done by Kyle Cheney. It begins:

He was Commander of Apollo 13. Those were different time4s, weren’t they?

Houston, we have a bigger problem now …

When I want to understand whatever is going on in Texas I check the Texas Tribune. So go there and see Abbott’s bid to expel the House Democratic leader goes to a court filled with his appointees by Eleanor Klibanoff. It very clearly explains the current mess.

In brief, there is all kinds of precedence for members of the Texas legislature to be absent to deny a quorum and stop some legislation from passing. It’s been done several times over many yeas. In fact, the Texas Supreme Court said in 2021 the state Constitution allows members to thwart legislation by leaving the state. But Gov. Abbott thinks otherwise. From the Texas Tribune:

Texas Democrats had been out of state for less than 48 hours when Gov. Greg Abbott moved to have their seats declared vacant.

The emergency legal filing represents an unprecedented escalation of Abbott’s effort to pass a new congressional map that adds additional GOP seats, as demanded by President Donald Trump. It flies in the face of Texas’ own founding documents, centuries of legal precedent and a recent Supreme Court of Texas ruling, legal experts say.

Even Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fellow Republican, threw cold water on Abbott’s strategy, filing his own brief saying that while he “appreciates the Governor’s passion,” he does not have the authority to bring this type of case.

But just because legal precedent is not on his side doesn’t mean Abbott’s case is doomed. The long-shot filing is before the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, where Abbott has appointed six of nine justices. Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock was Abbott’s former general counsel, as was Justice James Sullivan.

Abbott’s petition seeks to unseat the House Democratic leader, Rep. James Wu. This is a test case. If the Court allows Wu to be removed from the Texas House, the rest of the Dems in exile will be removed also. Note that Rep. Wu has been the target of many anti-Asian insults and accusations that he is working for China or a Communist. These insults and accusations are coming from Republican members of the legislature.  Rep. Wu’s family suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution, Wu says, and left China to get away from Communism. Wu was still an infant when he came to the U.S.

So it’s up to the Texas Supreme Court. I have no idea how most Texans would react if Abbot replaced all House Democrats with Republican appointees. I don’t believe that’s something that’s ever happened before, in any state.

U.S. Senator from Texas John Cornyn says FBI director Kash Patel has granted his request to help locate the lawmakers. I’m not sure it’s any big secret where they are. It isn’t clear if the FBI will try to take them into custody. If so, that’s not something that’s ever happened before, either.

And Trump wants a new census to be taken asap, He’s ordered the Commerce Department to begin working on a new census immediately. He wants the census to be taken leaving out undocumented immigrants because he believes this will result in apportionments more favorable to Republicans. He wanted this to be done in the 2020 census, and the courts stopped him. And he may think this can all happen before the 2026 midterms. I doubt that, but the Constitution calls for a census and re-apportionments every ten years, not whenever somebody thinks there ought to be one. The next census is 2030.

Trump obviously is desperate to ensure the House keeps a Republican majority. All his thrashing around may not get him there, though.

Trump has started a redistricting war. On Trump’s orders, Texas redrew its districts to pick up more seats in the House.. Then nearly every Democrat in the Texas House left the4 state to deny the Texas legislature a quorum. Most of them took refuge in Illinois, where Gov. J.D. Pritzker says he will protect every Texas Democrat in his state from arrest by Texas authorities. Some others are in New York, and some are in Massachusetts. Texas Gov. Abbott is threatening to declare the seats vacated so he can appoint Republicans to fill them. But there’s a big question whether he has the legal authority to do that. That is something that probably will have to be decided by courts. Which could take a while. And the redistricting has to be approved by the end of the year to be valid in the 2026 midterms.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is pushing to get New York redistricted to pick up Democratic seats. I understand this easily would nullify any GOP pickups in Texas. However, as I understand it, if the usual New York procedures are followed the redistricting won’t be official until 2028.

A number of other states, both red and blue, are considering redistricting also. The blue or blue-ish states include California, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Oregon, Washington, and the previously mentioned New York. Republican states include Florida and Missouri. And I question whether it’s possible to squeeze more Republican seats out of Missouri. Louisiana and Georgia have redrawn maps that have been stuck stuck in court-approval limbo for a while already. But it seems to me that if all the states considering a gerrymander to impact 2026 do so, Dems might have an advantage. They have more BIG states. .

Further, the Texas Tribune is reporting that the new Texas map assumes that Latinos will turn out and vote Republican next year. The Texas Tribune is skeptical that’s going to work. It’s not completely impossible that the redrawn Texas map won’t pick up seats for Republicans as well as advertised.

See also Josh Marshall, On Redistricting. Yes, it has to be done. The old norms are shattered. Once Trump is gone, we’ll need new norms.

But see also Paul Krugman, Trump Is Getting Desperate. He warns that Trump and his cult followers are likely to get a lot more extreme and dangerous going forward.

The important point is that right now Trump has immense power, thanks in large part to the cowardice of many of the institutions that should be holding him in check. But he’s also rapidly bleeding support, in large part because he’s completely failing to deliver on his economic promises.

That combination makes this an extremely dangerous moment. And if authoritarianism does come to America, don’t count on it being soft.

A fellow named Steven Rattner writes in the New York Times that Our President Is Economically Illiterate. Yes, but it would have been nice if more people had pointed this out last year. Like, before the election.

A few hours ago I saw that Trump is making new promises to bring down prescription drug prices by as much as 1500 percent! Which suggests extreme math illiteracy also. This was in Forbes:

Would you like a reduction in the prices that you pay for medications? How about a 30% to 40% reduction? Or maybe a 50% to 60% reduction? Why stop there? U.S. President Donald Trump has promised an even greater reduction, a 500% to 1500% reduction. Yes, you heard that correctly. How that specifically is going to happen is unclear. But on Thursday, Trump did send letters to the heads of 17 major pharmaceutical companies pushing them to cut the prescription medication prices that Americans face down to the levels that people in other countries pay, which by the way would be around a 66% reduction.

Trump mentioned those, umm, interesting percentages in a July reception with members of Congress, when he declared, “This is something that nobody else can do. We’re gonna get the drug prices down. Not 30 or 40% which would be great, not 50 or 60, no. We’re gonna get ‘em down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%.” You can see him saying this in a video that’s posted on what used to be Twitter:

The video clip is actually amusing, if you want to watch it.

Trump: This is somebody nobody else can do. I can get the drug prices down… 1000% 600% 500% 1500%. Numbers that are not even thought to be achievable. pic.twitter.com/NPMMdEZIot

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 23, 2025

He seems to think he has already gotten the drug companies to agree to cut their prices because he asked. And here are Trump’s four easy steps to lower drug prices:

• “Calling on manufacturers to provide MFN prices to every single Medicaid patient.
• Requiring manufacturers to stipulate that they will not offer other developed nations better prices for new drugs than prices offered in the United States.
• Providing manufacturers with an avenue to cut out middlemen and sell medicines directly to patients, provided they do so at a price no higher than the best price available in developed nations.
• Using trade policy to support manufacturers in raising prices internationally provided that increased revenues abroad are reinvested directly into lowering prices for American patients and taxpayers.”

The last one is a problem, because the big reason our drug costs are higher here is that all those other countries have some kind of national health care system, and included in the laws of first-world countries I know anything about are provisions that place limits on how much of a profit markup prescription drug companies can charge patients. Trump just can’t demand drug companies raise their prices elsewhere.  And the rest of it is pretty much fantasy also. Big Pharma is not about to cut its prices on Trump’s say-so.

I wanted to say just a little more about yesterday’s disastrous economic report. In the past few days I had noticed a lt of “the sky is not falling” stories in news media. Some of these discussed why the economy wasn’t a lot worse yet. But more were like this July 27  bit in the New York Post headlined Wall Street economist who ripped Trump admits prez may have ‘outsmarted all of us’ on tariffs. And while I don’t pay attention to Bill Maher, I’m reading now that on July 28 he came out with a podcast saying that Trump’s economy is doing surprisingly well.

And then we found out it was all a mirage. The economy isn’t doing well at all. And this takes me to this Atlantic article, The Mystery of the Strong Economy Has Finally Been Solved.

The Trump economy doesn’t look so hot after all. This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released revised data showing that, over the past three months, the U.S. labor market experienced its worst quarter since 2010, other than during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. The timing was awkward. Hours earlier, President Donald Trump had announced a huge new slate of tariffs, set to take effect next week. He’d been emboldened by the fact that the economy had remained strong until now despite economists’ warnings—a fact that turned out not to be a fact at all.

No wonder Trump lost it. The numbers must have hit his inflated but fragile ego like a ton of lead bricks. Gilded, of course.

Reaction to the firing of the BLS commissioner has seemed to me to be subdued. But the investor class must be feeling pretty bleak right now realizing that there will be nothing but fake data about the U.S. economy from now on. Time to invest somewhere else, maybe.

Paul Krugman has an I told you so column up that points to a prediction Trump would cook the data books. The jobs report, Krugman says, “was presumably especially disturbing for Trump and those around him, who have been boasting about how hot the economy is and sneering at critics pointing to the harm being done by chaotic policy.”

I’ve also been trying to find out what will happen to PBS and NPR stations without the Center for Public Broadcasting. This AP story provides some clues. It’s likely stations in rural areas will have to close. Stations in cities may be able to find alternate funding. The programming may be hit and miss.

Today the news is about the economy. And it ain’t good. Job growth is down, unemployment numbers are stagnant, a “key economic indicator” of inflation is “hot.” I think that means inflation is up.

The jobs report isn’t just kinda bad. It turns out that the last two jobs reports muchly overstated the number of jobs actually created and had to be revised down.

Payrolls have now averaged just 35,000 over the last three months — the weakest pace of job growth since the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

Jobs reports always contain revisions to previous months’ reports, with sizable revisions rare but not entirely uncommon. Last August, under the Biden administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said 818,000 fewer jobs had been created over a 12-month period than initially thought.

Maybe Trump’s Golden Age is being postponed.

“Not only was this a much weaker than forecast payrolls number, the monster downward revisions to the past two months inflicts a major blow to the picture of labor market robustness,” Seema Shah, chief strategist with Principal Asset Management, said in a note following the release. “What’s more concerning is that with negative impact of tariffs only just starting to be felt, the coming months are likely to see even clearer evidence of a labor market slowdown.”

See Paul Krurman, The Meaning of a Weak Jobs Report. Most likely, he says, the employment numbers resulted from uncertainty, as Trump’s tariff numbers changed from day to day. However,

These numbers don’t show the long-run damage from Trump’s tariffs, which are really a completely different story. In fact, the short-run jobs picture may improve now that it’s clear that there won’t be any real trade deals, just Smoot-Hawley redux as far as the eye can see.

One thing is clear: The previously reported good numbers were proof of Trump’s brilliance. Now that they’ve been revised away, the bad numbers are clearly Biden’s fault, or maybe Jerome Powell’s, or Barack Obama’s.

Actually, Trump blames the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whom Trump has promised to fire because of the July report. So these may be the last honest jobs numbers we’ll see for a while.

In other news: I have just read that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be shutting down at the end of September. They’ve decided they can’t survive Trump’s cuts. I’m not sure what this will do to PBS and NPR stations around the country.

See also Ghislaine Maxwell moved to federal prison camp in Texas. Her status as a sex offender got waived and she was moved into the same minimum security facility as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and some woman who used to be on “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.” I guess we can assume this is a somewhat cushier place than where she was. And I guess we can assume some quid pro quo was involved.

And see also The FBI Redacted Trump’s Name in the Epstein Files at Bloomberg. Of course they did.

And I want to go back to the new White House ballroom Trump plans to build. One detail I missed yesterday is that said ballroom will take up 90,000 square feet. A regulation football field, including end zones, is 57,600 square feet. Is Trump planning to hold conventions and rock concerts in said ballroom?

This behemoth is not going to be part of the current White House but next to it.  Like this:

And my next question is, where is the estimated $200 million (which seems low to me) coming from? Congress didn’t appropriate it. According to CBS, “The approximately $200 million project will be funded by President Trump and other private donors, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said.” We aren’t being told who the private donors are. And construction will begin in September.

If we ever get our country back, one of the new rules should be that presidents may not remodel the White House or add new buildings or make changes to the grounds without permission from Congress. They can redecorate to their heart’s content,  But this is ridiculous. And America really needs to know who the private donors are. That’s not something that should remain secret.

And let’s not forget what he’s done to the Rose Garden. Here’s a recent Before and After. I have no idea where they’re going with the blue lines and little canopy things.

But it’s going to be a really great look for Trump to be building a whopper fancy ballroom with secret money while the U.S. economy tanks. And read all about how Trump is getting played on his tariff deals.

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley has released a … document? — headlined Newly Declassified Appendix to Durham Report Sheds Additional Light on Clinton Campaign Plan to Falsely Tie Trump to Russia and FBI’s Failure to Investigate. It’s even got a George Soros tie, which makes it even better.

I’m sure you remember the Durham Report, the Republican investigation to the Russia-Trump investigation. And if you do, you’ll remember it was a fizzle. Well, today the Department of Justice sent Sen. Grassley some “annex” of the Durham investigation that has been “newly declassified” and purports to show that someone connected to George Soros conspired with Hillary Clinton to create the Trump-Russia “hoax,” and the FBI investigation began as a result.

And if this were such a smoking gun, one wonders why Durham didn’t bring it to light himself. It’s kind of a puzzle to me why it was even “classified,” assuming that it was. If you can wade through all the biased framing and name-dropping, it sounds as if Leonard Benardo, Senior Vice President of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and Hillary Clinton exchanged one or more emails in July 2016 that discussed the already growing appearance of Russian manipulation in the campaign. But Grassley’s document is presenting this as the instigation of the Trump-Russia “hoax.”

If you need a review of what happened when, I found a good timeline at Politico. Before July  2016 a lot of hinky things had already happened, like the Russian hacking of John Podesta’s and the DNC’s emails, which happened in March 2016. And an internet agency connected to Russia began running Web ads in April 2016 saying things like “JOIN our #HillaryClintonForPrison2016.” And there’s a lot more that happened before July 2016. Note that  Trump had enough pledged delegates to clinch the nomination by late May.

The point is that by July there already was growing suspicion, even some suspicions being expressed publicly, that Russia was somehow helping the Trump campaign. And what conversation might have gone on between Leonard Benardo and Hillary Clinton sound to me about “how can we use this in the campaign?”

Oh, and remember the famous “Russia, if you’re listening” quote?

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” Trump said in a July 27, 2016 news conference.

On or around that same day, Russian hackers targeted Hillary Clinton’s account. It was shortly after this that the FBI investigation called “crossfire hurricane” began. But my point is that there already was much public buzz about the Russian hacking and whether Russia was trying to manipulate U.S. public opinion to help Trump.

Another bizarre statement in Grassley’s download is that President Obama considered squashing the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. And maybe he did consider doing that, but he didn’t, did he? So why is this being boldfaced as if it’s a shocking revelation? There also was a memo about linking Trump to the Russian mafia. Allegations about the Russian mob using Trump for money laundering go back three decades.  Trump also had well-known ties to the more traditional New York mafia; here’s a Politico article about it published in May 2016.

In other words, you’d have to be fairly dim to believe any of this amounts to anything, but we’re talking about righties here. At least for some of them this will probably take their attention away from Epsteingate. Mission accomplished, I suppose.

Stuff to read: Here is an excellent critique of the Democratic party by Antonio Delgado, New York’s lieutenant governor. See This Is the Moment Democrats Have Been Talking About for Years. Here’s just a bit —

If you want to understand why New York — and virtually every other state — is drifting to the right, observe how so many in the Democratic establishment confuse triangulation with leadership and treat stability as a virtue in and of itself. There’s a chasm between what we say and what we deliver. We continue asking voters to show up while we refuse to show up for them.

Some of them do try to show up for their voters, but too many are just too damn cautious.

Worst news I’ve seen today — Trump plans massive renovation of White House. He wants to spend $200 million to make the East Wing look at tacky and nouveau riche as the Oval Office. Stop him before he gilds again! Future administrations will just have to undo all that crap. What a waste.

And to reflect on the worse damage Trump is doing see Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End by Ross Andersen at The Atlantic.

So yesterday the Senate confirmed the positively evil and corrupt Emil Bove to a lifetime appointment as a judge on U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, which has jurisdiction over cases in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and the Virgin Islands.

I was surprised to read that Bove is only 44 years old. In some photos he looks like something that’s been kept in a crypt for a couple of centuries and still needs airing out. I believe there is already a case for impeaching and removing him, so maybe he won’t be on the bench for the next thirty or more years. Let’s hope.

For the record, every Democrat plus Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted no.

It might be good to remember why this particular seat was even open. A fellow named Jay Willis reminds us that “Senate Democrats could have confirmed Biden nominee Adeel Mangi to the Third Circuit last year. They caved to a disgraceful right-wing smear campaign instead.”

Last year, Democrats could have used their Senate majority to confirm someone very different to fill the seat: Adeel Mangi, a law firm partner whom President Joe Biden nominated in November 2023. But in the months that followed, as Republicans pushed an unhinged narrative that Mangi, who would have been the first-ever Muslim federal appeals court judge, was a cop-hating terrorist sympathizer, a handful of Democratic senators began to waver. The nomination then hung in procedural limbo for nearly a year until Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, which effectively killed Mangi’s chances at confirmation. As a result, the judgeship that could have been Adeel Mangi’s is now occupied by Bove, a smirking bootlicker whose primary qualification for the job is his willingness to do whatever Mister Trump wants.

See also The Allegory of Would-Be Federal Judge Adeel Mangi. Of course, most of the Democrats were not spinless. It took only three, who let it be known they would not vote to confirm Mangi. These were now ex-Senator Joe Manchin, naturally. He wasn’t even running for re-election. The other two Dems who killed the nomination were Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, both of Nevada. These two are still in the Senate. Rosen was re-elected last year. We need to keep an eye on them.

There was no Senate confirmation vote; Mangi’s nomination was withdrawn. And that was Chuck Schumer’s doing. A couple of weeks after the November election, knowing that Trump was getting another term, Chuck made a deal with Senate Republicans to withhold floor votes on Mangi and three other Biden appellate nominees in exchange for allowing several district court judges’ nominations go forward. I don’t know how many of those judges were confirmed.

Shifting gears — I’d like to call your attention to a couple of recent posts by Paul Krugman. These are I Coulda Made a Better Deal and Fossil Fool. Trump’s recent “deals” with Japan and the EU, of which he is very proud, actually put the U.S. at a huge trade disadvantage and will hurt, not help, U.S. manufacturing. Trump got nothin’. In fact, the EU actually can’t deliver on what Trump thinks he got from them. Trump doesn’t understand how the EU works. But the EU also realizes Trump is an idiot and wouldn’t know he was being fooled. This is from Fossil Fool:

The EU made two sort-of pledges to Trump. First, that it would invest $600 billion in the United States. Second, that it would buy $750 billion worth of U.S. energy, mainly oil and gas, over the next three years. The first promise was empty, while the second was nonsense.

About those investments: European governments aren’t like China, which can tell companies where to put their money. And the European Commission, which made the trade deal, isn’t even a government — it can negotiate tariffs but otherwise has little power….

…The pledge to increase U.S. energy exports was a lot more specific and gave a timeframe. But it’s not going to happen. In fact, it’s going to not happen on three levels.

First, the European Commission, which can’t tell the private sector where to invest, is equally unable to tell the private sector where to buy oil and gas. How would that even work?

Second, the promised level of EU imports is probably physically impossible. Shipping liquefied natural gas (LNG), in particular, requires specialized infrastructure at both ends. On the US side, LNG terminals are already operating at capacity, while Europe’s LNG facilities are “stretched to their limits.” The EU just promised to vastly increase energy imports from America over the next three years, but it’s doubtful whether Europe could build any of the infrastructure needed before the end of that period, even with a crash investment program.

And why would anyone undertake such an investment program in a continent that is rapidly shifting toward renewable energy? 

Another point, which Krugman explains better than I can, is that now there is a higher tariff on autos imported from Canada than there is on autos imported from Europe. But cars assembled in Canada use a lot of parts made in the U.S. European cars do not. So Trump’s tariffs are putting U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage.

There’s a lot more. See also Transcript: Krugman Wrecks Trump’s Europe Deal: “Scam on His Voters” with Greg Sargent at The New Republic

The most surprising thing about yesterday’s tragic shooting in Manhattan is that the right-wing media bubble didn’t immediately churn out claims about the shooter being a liberal or a Democrat or a Trump hater. Which is what nearly always happens after a highly publicized shooting. For example, righties did their best to link the recent Minnesota shooter to Gov. Tim Walz. But this time they’ve been relatively subdued, possibly because it made no sense even to them that a leftie would drive from Nevada to NYC to shoot random people over politics. Although I did not read the Breitbart comment section, so I can’t say what’s going on there..

But never fear; Laura Loomer came through with the crazy.

Loomer initially claimed the shooter was “described by witnesses as a Middle Eastern man with an AR-15 rifle.” She also claimed the shooter supported the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, and the “Free Palestine movement.”

After the identity of the suspected shooter was released, Loomer doubled down on claims that he was a “Free Palestine” activist, writing, “So let me get this straight. A Free Palestine low IQ black jihadi killed a Muslim police officer in his rampage on a building in NYC with a Jewish CEO while he was screaming Free Palestine?”

Loomer then lashed out against the media for not pushing baseless claims about the shooter’s motives: “Now the media is running to cover up another act of Islamic terrorism by the FREE PALESTINE crowd.”

The voices in Loomer’s head have active imaginations.  Loomer lives in Florida, I believe, and I’m assuming she’s not an eyewitness. I’ve seen no reporting anywhere saying that the shooter even spoke. Trump also is confused. “I trust our Law Enforcement Agencies to get to the bottom of why this crazed lunatic committed such a senseless act of violence,” he posted somewhere. No, Loomer is the crazed lunatic. The shooter probably had a psychiatric disorder.

The shooter, Shane Devon Tamura, apparently was gunning for the National Football League, which has offices in 345 Park Avenue, where the shootings took place. Police found a note in the shooter’s pocket blaming the NFL for brain injuries. The shooter imagined that he had a degenerative brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which be believed he got from playing high school football. (CTE can’t be definitively diagnosed until a person has died.)

345 Park Ave. is a 44-story building that takes up a whole city block; it’s massive. I understand it has its own zip code. Many sorts of businesses have space in it. The perpetrator began shooting in the lobby, and then he looked for an elevator. Like a lot of big buildings in Manhattan, that building has many elevators, and its elevators don’t all stop on every floor. Before getting on one, you have to pay attention to which floors that elevator goes to. Apparently the gunman was planning to shoot up the NFL offices but got on the wrong elevator. The one he got on didn’t go to the NFL’s floor, which I understand is the 5th floor. He got out on the 33rd floor (which may have been that elevator’s fifth stop), and began firing rounds. He killed one person on the 33rd floor. And then he may  have realized he was lost and not finding the NFL offices. And then he shot himself in the chest.

I notice that no two news stories agree on what firearm the man used. This one says it was a “modified Palmetto State Armory PA-15 rifle.” Okay. I’m also hearing that this was the deadliest shooting in New York City in 25 years. In many other American cities, four people killed would just be Monday.

What might have shut the righties up a bit was that one of those killed was Didarul Islam, 36, a Muslim NYPD officer who immigrated from Bangladesh. This doesn’t fit the anti-immigrant narrative. Another was Wesley LePatner, a woman executive in the real estate division of Blackstone investments. One was Aland Etienne, a security guard,  The fourth, the one killed on the 33rd floor, was an employee of Rudin Management, which owns the building. That person’s name has not been released at the family’s request.

In other news: There will be many more senseless deaths caused by the mass lunacy known as the “Trump Administration.” For example, “EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Tuesday he’s issuing draft plans to overturn the agency’s 2009 scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare — a move guaranteed to spark litigation..” I guess we’re going with “climate change is a hoax.” And now I see that “The U.S. Navy will permanently cut its stream of data from three weather satellites essential to hurricane forecasters this Thursday, with the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season just weeks away.” If you live in a hurricane-prone area you might want to be prepared to evacuate on very short notice.

First off, I want everyone to read The Real Reason for Zohran’s Success Should Rattle National Democrats by Greg Sargent at The New Republic. And be sure to watch the vidoes. X won’t let me embed them, but here’s one I found on YouTube.

He appears to crank out a lot of these, and they’re all going viral. As in millions of views. Here’s another one:

Not everyone has the personality to pull this off as well, but it seems to me the formula is very do-able. Zero in in a very specific real-world problem, show the folks why it’s a problem, and then explain precisely what you will do to address the problem. And then make videos like this about a lot of problems.

And then there’s the more centrist approach, embodied by the seriously annoying Elissa Slotkin. I picked this up from Oliver Willis on Bluesky.

this clip is a master class in doing a pro-immigration  message that actually reinforces right-wing frames on immigration. its cold, makes immigrants sound like chum for the capitalism machine, and stresses the fake “security” narrative. bad, bad, and bad.

[image or embed]

— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) July 28, 2025 at 9:42 AM

In principle I don’t disagree with her main theme, but who is she talking to? Who is she persuading? If you weren’t already in favor of immigration reform, would this change your mind? And what is she proposing to do, specifically? Politicians have been talking about “immigration reform” for decades now, and nothing seems to change.

Of course, national problems are often more complicated than why the chicken rice combo costs $10. How would you make “immigration reform” more specific? Maybe feature just one migrant and show that the system she is working with is slow and ineffectual. Then promise to do a specific thing to make it better. We need X number more immigration judges to process migrants! Trump has been firing immigration judges (and he has)!  There aren’t enough judges to process people quickly, and there are too many people to detain for as long as they need to be detained waiting for a judge. Etc.

I’ve complained about this before, but I’m tired of Democrats running for office who say little beyond “I will reach across the aisles to get things done.” What things?  Instead of speaking in generalities, talk about real-world situations that people can relate to and say specifically what you want to do about them.

Okay, next topic — you may not have noticed, but a mini-war broke out between Thailand and Cambodia over the weekend. This war involved bombs dropping from planes and soldiers shooting at each other, so it was serious. The issue was an old border dispute, and this wasn’t the first time the two countries fought over it. The warfare started on Thursday. On Saturday, Trump declared that he had gotten both countries to agree to an immediate cease fire. However, both countries ignored him and kept fighting, through Saturday and into Sunday.  I didn’t even see any acknowledgments from them they had spoken to Trump. Possibly they hadn’t.

Other Asian nations jumped in to try to calm things down. Most visible was Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who is also chair of the regional ASEAN forum. The PM got both parties to agree to meet in Malaysia today, and a cease fire agreement came quickly. Trump’s only involvement was to let it be known he wouldn’t make any trade-tariff deals with them until they’d stopped fighting. And now, of course, he’s claiming credit for the real cease fire. He’s bragging that the Cambodia-Thailand altercation is the sixth major war he has prevented.

It would be fun of someone in media were to ask him what Cambodia and Thailand were fighting about, since he won’t know. But no one will. For the record, I explained the reasons behind the border disagreement in my Patheos column. It’s all about national pride and politics and cultural heritage and stuff.

Update: Ghislaine Maxwell is asking the Supreme Court to overturn her conviction.

Maxwell’s appeal revolves around a highly controversial 2007 plea agreement Epstein negotiated with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida.

“The United States,” the plea agreement stated, “agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including but not limited to” four other suspects.

Maxwell was not listed as one of those suspects — but her lawyers argue she didn’t need to be.

That was the infamous Alex Acosta deal, I believe. If someone else wants to try to wrap their heads around this, be my guest. But if her conviction is overturned by SCOTUS, that would make the court an instrument of the quid pro quo negotiated by Todd Blanche, would it not?