We begin today with Heather Cox Richardson writing for her “Letters from an American” Substack about the seeming avalanche of challenges to the Trump regime from the Republican Party.
In the wake of yesterday’s report from Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Special Operations to kill the survivors of a September 2 strike on a small boat off Venezuela, the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees have announced they intend to conduct “vigorous oversight” and “gather a full accounting” of the operation. The two committees referred to the Department of Defense by that name, rather than by the “Department of War” rebrand Hegseth and Trump have pushed. [...]
Congress appears to be stepping up on this issue, and that willingness to cross Trump suggests members are recalculating Trump’s power relative to their own. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted: “This is genuinely big news…. Republicans are challenging Trump now because he seems weak. No one wants to back a weak horse.”
A Gallup poll released yesterday shows President Donald J. Trump’s job approval rating at 36% with disapproval at 60%. Since last month, Trump’s approval has plummeted 11 points. Republicans’ approval of Trump has fallen seven points to a second-term low, while approval among Independents has fallen eight points to its lowest point in either term. Only 3% of Democrats approve of his job performance. Although war conditions usually help a president’s popularity, Trump’s threat to attack Venezuela attracts the support of only 30% of Americans. Seventy percent oppose such military action.
There are signs that the MAGA coalition is fracturing. A Politico poll released yesterday shows that just 55% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 see themselves as MAGA. While the MAGA 55% remain largely loyal to Trump, 38% do not consider themselves as MAGA and are less enamored of him than are his MAGA loyalists.
More on the challenges to various actions of the Trump regime’s murderous actions in the Caribbean Sea and, more specifically, Trump’s declaration that Venezuelan airspace was “closed” from Aoife Walsh of BBC News.
The US does not legally have the authority to close another country's airspace, but Trump's online post could lead to travel uncertainty and deter airlines from operating there.
The US has been building its military presence in the Caribbean, which officials say is to combat drug smuggling. Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro has dismissed US claims of drug trafficking as an attempt to oust him. [...]
With Trump ratcheting up his threats, Democrat and Republican members of US Congress have expressed anger that he has not sought legislative approval.
"President Trump's reckless actions towards Venezuela are pushing America closer and closer to another costly foreign war," top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer posted on X on Sunday.
"Under our Constitution, Congress has the sole power to declare war," he added.
Joyce Vance writes on her “Civil Discourse” Substack that the players in the tacky shoe salesman’s deadly ventures in the Caribbean will have to pick sides.
Earlier this month, The Guardian reported that Britain had stopped sharing intelligence on Caribbean drug running with the United States “amid concerns information supplied may be used to engage in lethal military strikes by American forces.” They specified that the cooperation was “paused shortly after the US began a campaign of lethal strikes in September,” but there was no explicit mention of the order Hegseth issued as the cause. [...]
By Saturday night, there was a growing call for, if not accountability, investigation, including by both House and Senate Republicans. The Washington Post wrote, “In a rare split with the Trump administration, GOP-led panels in the House and Senate say they want a full accounting in the September military attack.” Saturday night, Democratic Senator Ed Markey tweeted, “Pete Hegseth is a war criminal and should be fired immediately.”
There is a price to be paid for confirming a man as the Secretary of Defense who fails to understand the role he is being called upon to serve in, instead, relishing the title “Secretary of War.” Hegseth received a Bachelor of Arts in politics from Princeton in 2003 and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2013. He joined the Army National Guard as an infantry officer afterward. Nowhere along the road does he seem to have learned the fundamental lessons any Secretary of Defense should have known: The lesson of the Peleus trial.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo discusses some polling that suggests that there is widespread dissatisfaction with AI.
A few days ago, I was looking at one of the many recent (post-shutdown) polls that show an increasingly dark mood toward the GOP and favorable signs for the Democrats. There was something else in those polls that surprised me: people are really, really down on AI. Now, to be clear, this is sort of cardinal assumption almost bordering on a prejudice in the world I live in: a fairly educated, generally left-leaning world. Everyone’s down on AI in various ways in that world and for many good reasons, even as many also incorporate AI into aspects of their professional lives. (This is a pervasive dichotomy: we’re generally AI skeptic; AI is also allowing our programmers to be vastly more productive.) What struck me though is how widespread the skepticism or hostility is. It goes across demographics and age, political persuasions. [...]
What I didn’t fully understand is how deeply this anti-ness appears to have seeped through society. It’s always important to remember — keep reminding yourself to remember — that the people who are TPM’s core audience are pretty steeped in news, tend to have a spectrum of certain educational and ideological characteristics. There’s a whole world of America where news, and political news, is an occasional thing at best. Indeed there are many discrete worlds of America like that. Those are different worlds where people focus on different things, have different views. Not like opposite necessarily, or opposed. Just different. On wavelengths that are hard for you or I to imagine just as ours is inscrutable to them. It’s so easy to forget just how large and variegated America is, in geography, population, diversities of all sorts. So what got my attention is how widespread and seemingly deep-seated this skepticism or hostility is. I think I would have assumed that there’s a lot of America for whom AI is still goofing around on ChatGPT or teens and college students using it to write their term papers. But these polls suggest that’s not the case.
Davina Hurt and Ann Skeet of Salon writes about one of the reasons to be dissatisfied with AI: the distortion of “democratic discourse.”
While political cartoonists have long created derogatory or lampoonish images of elected officials and candidates for public office, the political imagery that can be created by artificial intelligence blurs truth and fiction in unprecedented ways. AI can make falsehoods look authentic and, when used by politicians themselves, it becomes particularly harmful. AI use that started as experimentation by campaigns has evolved into something far more troubling: It now merges satire, disinformation and official messaging that misleads voters and distorts democratic discourse.
In New York City’s recent mayoral race, former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo‘s campaign released an ad on social media, which was later deleted, featuring purported “criminals for Zohran Mamdani” — a parade of racist caricatures that included a pimp in a purple suit, along with a drunk driver, shoplifter and domestic abuser endorsing the Democratic nominee. In one sequence, a Black man shoplifts from a bodega, his face visibly morphing mid-clip as he puts on a keffiyeh and mask before robbing the store. As AI tools grow more sophisticated, Mamdani’s election may serve as both a warning and a testament: A warning of how easily political imagery can be weaponized, and a testament to the electorate’s enduring capacity to look beyond manipulation. [...]
...political operatives are generating disinformation and misleading the public at a time when confidence in the government to protect the common good is low and shaken by the recent government shutdown. When AI-generated videos portray something that never happened with such realism, it stops being satire and is instead a false representation. Voters encountering these images have no way to know they’re fabricated — and that’s precisely the point.
Paul Krugman writes that MAGA wants to roll the financial clocks back to September 2008.
The MAGA war on financial stability is being waged largely on two fronts. First, there’s an ongoing effort within some parts of the Federal Reserve to drastically weaken bank supervision — oversight of banks to prevent them from taking risks that could threaten the financial system.
The Fed has multiple roles: in addition to setting interest rates, it also has primary responsibility for bank supervision.
The Fed is supposed to be quasi-independent, and so far it has preserved its interest-rate-setting independence in the face of intense pressure by Trump to cut rates. Yet a Trumpian agenda is attempting to overtake the Fed’s bank supervision operations. In June, Michelle Bowman, a Trump appointee, became the Fed’s vice-chair of supervision. She is in the process of reducing staffing at the Fed’s supervisory and regulatory unit by 30 percent, while hiring new staffers drawn from the banking industry. [...]
The second front of MAGA’s war on financial stability is on behalf of the crypto industry. The Trump administration and its allies in Congress — including, I’m sorry to say, a number of Democrats in this case — are moving to promote wider use of crypto. In particular, the GENIUS Act (gag me with an acronym), passed in July, aims to promote stablecoins. And the fact is that stablecoins are effectively an alternative, weakly regulated and poorly supervised form of banking.
Tim Balk of The New York Times writes about various burgeoning challenges to a law passed by New York State to protect consumers from “algorithmic pricing.”
This month, New York became the first state to enact a law targeting a practice, typically called personalized pricing or surveillance pricing, in which retailers use artificial intelligence and customers’ personal data to set prices online.
The law aims to prevent retailers from ripping off unwitting customers by abusing their data: jacking up the price of jeans for a shopper with a history of buying expensive pants, say, or lifting hotel prices for a traveler who already splurged on airline tickets. [...]
The law attracted criticism and litigation from the start. Some business interests say it is far too broad and will cause confusion. And some consumers’ rights groups, who sought an outright ban of the practice, which is also called algorithmic pricing, worry the law is too narrow to meaningfully protect all shoppers from price-gouging.
But just about everyone seems to agree that the law, which last month survived a challenge in federal court, is a significant step in the nationwide push to regulate how businesses use their customers’ data.
Finally today...well, it was fun while it lasted...heck it was even funny at times. Now for maximum chaos, we have to turn to the Atlantic Coast Conference but...in order for maximum chaos to be achieved I have to cheer for Duke? Really? I mean, I know this is football and not basketball but still…
Everyone have the best possible day that you can!
