Dolly Parton, actress, entrepreneur, and singer extraordinaire, passed away at the age of 80 on August 25, 2026. She rose from poverty in Appalachia to global fame and a loyal following.

Tributes have been pouring in and rightly so. I admired Parton not so much for singing, like millions did globally, but for something else: her literacy promotion. Let me explain.

Parton donated some 200 million books in her lifetime. Think about that. Reading is a key process to self-discovery in an increasingly confused and confusing world.

As a youth growing up in a vanilla neighborhood attending an integrated middle school, reading Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown, was an eye-opener. Brown’s autobiography of growing up in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s was unlike anything else that I had read.

Parton actively facilitated reading and one of its outcomes. I mean critical thinking. That’s never been more important.

My parents had union jobs, and the schools I attended had libraries. My fortune in life is increasingly rare in America now, where 1,000 billionaires rent politicians to get government contracts and favorable laws and policies to accumulate more wealth, as ordinary people struggle to pay for food, fuel, and rent—the affordability crisis.

Later as a young adult, I learned that my father was in Harlem during an uprising against police brutality and economic marginality, of March 19-20, 1935, a history that deepened my appreciation for Brown’s work. Harlem “was where the action was,” my father shared with me. I began to grasp a bigger picture of personal and national history, encompassing Brown's autobiography.

Parton actively facilitated reading and one of its outcomes. I mean critical thinking. That’s never been more important in the current post-truth moment of online disinformation about domestic and foreign affairs, of, by, and for the benefit of billionaires and corporations, a symptom of the overall rot in US economics and politics.

Further, in a nation built with the stolen labor of enslaved Africans that in part relied upon depriving them of learning to read, Parton’s gift of 200 million books to poor and working people is, I argue, a revolutionary act. That she hailed from a community of poor whites long susceptible to the ideology of anti-blackness, a centuries-long ruling class divide-and-conquer strategy, speaks volumes of her revolutionary devotion to humanity.

Parton appeared to be electorally independent of the two-party duopoly, a great thing. Meanwhile, she publicly endorsed the movements of African Americans (Black Lives Matter) and LGBT folks for full recognition of their human rights. In a racist and warrior nation such as the US, where buying a gun is easier than receiving healthcare, her support of the maligned and oppressed via the promotion of reading books should be emulated.

An extreme position does not become less extreme just because someone can put forward one that’s even more extreme. Massacring 100 children doesn’t become a moderate position just because someone is advocating killing 200 children.

This is how we should view the line being pushed by “moderate” voices that we have to deal with the $40 trillion debt with both spending cuts and tax hikes. The reality is that, apart from the military and Homeland Security, there is little fat in spending to be cut, as even Elon Musk inadvertently acknowledged. Insofar as we have a deficit problem, the issue is on the tax side, as can be easily shown. The rich have been taking an ever-larger share of national income over the last half-century, and they don’t feel like paying taxes on their winnings.

The major media outlets, which are all controlled by rich people, are pretending to be moderate by saying that we need to both raise taxes and cut spending. But there is nothing moderate about saying that we have to cut programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because Republicans have given big tax breaks to their campaign contributors.

Republicans pushed these tax cuts, knowing they would increase the deficit, but did not make any corresponding cuts in spending because the cuts would be incredibly unpopular. Now they are using their control over the media to insist that these cuts are now absolutely necessary to offset all the lost tax revenue from tax cuts put in place by Reagan, Bush II, and Trump.

The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post gave us a great example of this fake moderate position in its editorial, “To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state.” The piece makes its case by taking the example of a two-earner couple, with average earnings of $100,000 a year. It shows that the couple, turning 65 in 2025, can expect lifetime Social Security benefits of $739k compared with tax contributions of just $597k. A couple with the same income retiring in 2045 can expect lifetime benefits of $987k compared to tax contributions of $735k.

After laying out this disparity for Social Security (it has a similar story for Medicare, which I’ll come to), it then makes an argument for reducing Social Security for high-income people. This is three-card Monte level deception.

If the idea is that we should reduce the benefits of high-income workers, honest people would look at the relative taxes and benefits for high-income workers. Social Security is explicitly designed to have a progressive payback structure, which means that relatively moderate-income workers, like the ones highlighted in the WaPo editorial, have higher paybacks relative to their taxes.

If the editors were interested in doing an apples- to-apples comparison, here’s what the picture would look like. (This is taken from the exact same source.)

As can be seen, high-income people pay considerably more in taxes than they get back in benefits. For a high-income woman retiring in 2025, the gap is $263k. For a high-income man, the gap is $336k. (The gap is larger for men than women because their life expectancy is shorter.) For a high-income woman retiring in 2045, the gap is $259k. For a high-income man, the gap is $346k.

If the point is to make an argument for reducing the benefits of high-income retirees, then show the taxes and benefits for high-income retirees. No one disputes that Social Security looks like a pretty good deal for more moderate-income retirees, but these people don’t typically have much income in retirement. I guess Jeff Bezos’ paper would have been too embarrassed to argue that we have to reduce the average monthly Social Security benefit of $2,071.

The Post’s editorial makes the push that while cutting Social Security, we should expect people to be more reliant on private 401(k)s. In addition to increasing risk, this is also enormously inefficient. Private 401(k)s cost more than 40 times as much to administer per dollar of benefits as Social Security. It is understandable that Mr. Bezos would be happy to see more money going to his rich friends in the financial industry, but most of us would rather see the money going to ordinary workers.

Medicare Benefits: Big Bucks to Hospitals and Drug Companies Are Not Benefits to Workers

The Post’s graphs do show a huge imbalance between the taxes paid out for Medicare and the cost of the benefits received. This is also deceptive.

In the United States, we pay almost twice as much per person for healthcare as the average for other wealthy countries. This is not because we get more or better healthcare. Our life expectancy ranks near the bottom for wealthy countries.

The big bucks for healthcare go to the income of drug companies, insurers, hospitals, medical equipment makers, and doctors. In each case, we pay two times as much, or more, than people in other wealthy countries. A paper that was not answerable to one of the richest people in the world would suggest bringing our payments in line with the rest of the world. But instead, the WaPo wants to beat up on the country’s retirees.

No one should be confused: cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits to reduce the deficit is not a moderate position. It’s one that attacks hundreds of millions of ordinary workers to avoid taxing the rich or reducing waste in our health care system. That is extreme, but the rich media owners pushing this position will do everything they can to convince us they are being fair and balanced.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• Canadian trade officials acknowledge that their retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on $20 billion in American goods are intended to exert pressure on key U.S. states. The tariffs could hit states in the Midwest and Northeast particularly hard.

• Meta reaches a landmark settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and make major changes to its products over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms. The settlement effectively ends a bellwether federal trial in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, where California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were seeking roughly $200 billion over accusations that Meta harmed children. Meta’s stock rose on the news, closing up just over 1 percent. The company is valued at $1.47 trillion and most recently generated $60.8 billion in quarterly revenue. The full value of Meta’s payout depends on whether other social media companies also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes. Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. It will pay an additional $5 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.

• The massive expenditure of U.S. munitions in the Middle East is worrying Asian allies and frustrating Pentagon officials overseeing the Indo-Pacific, who fear that the prolonged war with Iran could undermine U.S. readiness for a conflict with China. One Taiwanese official said they expect “significant delays” of Pac-3 Patriot missiles due to the drain on supplies as the Pentagon has depleted most of its interceptor stockpile in the Middle East. Japan has been warned by the Pentagon of possible delays in defense shipments, including Tomahawk cruise missiles.

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The post Canada Retaliates Against U.S. with 50% Tariffs | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, whose mission is to protect public health and safety regarding nuclear energy, has now transformed into an agency, as so many have under the current administration, to support the nuclear industry and its billionaire backers. Following other captured federal agencies like the Department of Energy, which is variably led by individuals from the very industries it is intended to regulate, the NRC is under pressure from the president to facilitate the quadrupling of nuclear energy production by 2050. This is to be accomplished by fast-tracking the licensure and building of reactors while discarding the nuclear radiation exposure safety measures in place for decades as these are seen to be onerous and financially burdensome to the industry.

The current safety standard for nuclear exposure comes from the BEIR VII (Biologic Effects of Ionizing Radiation) study. This was produced by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and concluded that there is no safe level of ionizing radiation exposure above background, noting that any excess exposure above background increases the risk to human health of cancer, and other diseases associated with nuclear exposure. This is the so-called Linear No Threshold, LNT, theory. This theory is the basis for the core precautionary safety principle and risk management approach used in the fields of ionizing radiation exposure from medicine and dentistry to nuclear energy referred to as “ALARA,” or "As Low As Reasonably Achievable.”

The problem that exists, even with current standards of radiation exposure allowance, is that they are based on the “Reference Man,” which is a 25-to-30-year-old 70 kilogram man. This androcentric standard totally disregards the fact that the majority of humanity is not represented by this standard, and that children, females, pregnant women, and the elderly are more sensitive to radioactivity exposure. In addition workers involved throughout the entire nuclear cycle are at increased risk from exposure. Furthermore, a recent Harvard study demonstrated increased cancer rates in the communities surrounding nuclear power plants within ~18.5 miles.

The current NRC proposal plans to do away with ALARA while purportedly supporting the LNT. This flies in the face of reason and is duplicitous as LNT is the basis of ALARA. Their plan is to substitute an unproven “graded approach” allowing workers to be exposed to near the regulatory limits and then taking added measures so as not to exceed it. They propose allowing the exceeding of exposure limits under “certain circumstances” setting up a banking system from subsequent year allowances amortizing over five years. They have even invoked the controversial unproven hypothesis of “Radiation Hormesis,” which proposes that a small amount of radiation causing cellular damage will stimulate cellular repair, as though to say what does not kill you, is good for you. Remember LNT.

The current proposal does just the opposite unless we stop it from moving forward. The NRC is providing a limited public comment period on this proposal which ends at midnight on August 31.

Furthermore, when implemented, these new regulations will most likely be used to reduce the already weak cleanup standards, further increasing the health risks to impacted communities contaminated from our nuclear legacy and history. These include communities such as the South Carolina Savannah River Site and New Mexico Los Alamos Nuclear Lab and Trinity Test Site to the Navajo Nation mining sites, Hanford Washington site, Nevada Test Site, St Louis Cold Water Creek, Parks Township (Pennsylvani), Rocky Flats Site near Denver, and the Santa Susana Field Lab near Los Angeles, among others.

The rationale for this current proposal is to facilitate the fast-tracking of nuclear power for the uncontrolled growth of data centers (with 1,500 new data centers currently in development), artificial intelligence, additional large commercial nuclear power plants, and new plutonium pits that are the nuclear trigger of nuclear weapons, reminding us that nuclear power remains the cover story for nuclear weapons.

The potential health risks of cancer, heart disease, birth defects, cognitive defects, thyroid and endocrine disorders, genetic mutations, and infertility are all related to ionizing radiation exposure. These are risks lasting for generations, passed on from one generation to the next. Yet, these health effects do not have to be and can be prevented if we demand the strengthening of current radiation exposure guidelines. The current proposal does just the opposite unless we stop it from moving forward. The NRC is providing a limited public comment period on this proposal which ends at midnight on August 31. Your comment is critical and can be submitted at federalregister.gov. More information can be found at www.protectbetter.org.

In our political life, reality hardly matters any more. On Tuesday the president of the United States, in a fit of pique, proposed renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” He hides in a food cart and sends journalists out as decoys to be killed on his behalf. His winsome aide hands him an endless stream of flattering tweets. And yet the world stumbles on. People die, obviously, as a result of this folly—in the Middle East, and in middle America, where suddenly measles is a serious threat again. (Hell, the deaths attributable to Elon Musk’s decision to destroy the US Agency for International Development put him in the Stalin and Mao category for negligent manslaughter.) But human societies are for a while resilient; we assume that there’s always a chance for a reset. After the next election normal service will resume. If you start with a rich country like the US, it can absorb a lot of decline.

But that’s not how physical systems work. You push them and then past a certain point things change. If the temperature drops below 32°F water freezes, and if it rises above 212°F then it boils, more or less. This newsletter spends a lot of time in the world of politics, because that’s where we need to make changes. But sometimes we need to remind ourselves that ultimately that political world is a subset of the physical one, simply because that’s how things work.

And we’re now reaching, I think, the point where that physical system is running out of margin.

Take a look at this graph. It shows the temperature of the global sea surface, averaged on a daily basis. Since our planet is 70% ocean, it’s a pretty good gauge of how hot the planet is getting. And what it shows is that in all the decades we’ve been measuring, it’s never been hotter. Given what we know about climate history, it’s almost certainly never been hotter in the history of our species. (Handily, by the way, that 21.1°C line is just about exactly 70°F.) As a Canadian professor wrote, “August 21st likely marked the warmest Sea Surface Temperatures have been for the entire Holocene period, and possibly even as far back as the last Interglacial 125,000 years ago.”

As Damian Carrington chronicled Monday:

The new ocean heat record being set in August is especially remarkable as global sea temperatures are typically highest in March and April, after the austral summer. The Southern Hemisphere has significantly more ocean area than the Northern.

“The record is another clear signal of an ocean under growing stress,” said Dr Samantha Burgess, at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which produced the new data. “El Niño is adding heat to the system, but it is doing so on top of decades of human-driven warming. The consequences are already visible: The number of marine heatwave days globally has more than tripled since the early 1990s.”

That means many things. Among them, as Ben Noll laid out Monday:

The unusual ocean warmth has fueled powerful storms in the Pacific, such as Hurricane Lala near Hawaii, helped create a reservoir of extra moisture that has contributed to recent rainfall extremes across the United States, and boosted summer heat across Europe.

This is a system that’s being pushed much too hard and much too fast, and it’s breaking.

Forty two percent of the world’s ocean area is now experiencing a “marine heatwave.” This means that wide swaths of coral are already “bleaching,” turning a deadly shade of pale; we don’t have the numbers yet, but it’s entirely predictable. We learned earlier this summer that the last huge coral bleaching event, the fourth this century, ran from 2023 to 2025 and

impacted 84% of the world’s coral reef area in all three coral reef-containing ocean basins (Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans). Mass bleaching was documented in at least 83 countries and territories.

It’s not just that coral reefs are one of the wildest corners of God’s brain; it’s that they provide food for 500 million human beings and keep waves from destroying shorelines. But still—they’re underwater. We don’t actually see them on a daily basis. It’s hard for us to imagine the damage.

Trees are easier for us to see; think of them as coral reefs but on land. And here’s a completely remarkable account from Eric Niiler on how the hot new wildfires bred by our hot new atmosphere are degrading them in the most obvious possible ways:

On a gentle slope on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where a towering green canopy of ponderosa pines had stood for centuries, wildfires have transformed roughly 1,700 acres into brown, bare shrubland.

That forest is gone for good, scientists say. Spiky shrubs and poison oak have replaced the majestic trees. All that is left of the pines are burned logs and dead branches.

It’s part of a wider transformation that’s taking place across the Western United States, from Oregon to New Mexico, as bigger and hotter wildfires sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate. Recent studies estimate that as much as 40% of Western conifer forests will turn into shrubland by 2100 as a result.

These trees help define the American West. (Google the Oregon license plate). But they also function as part of an ecosystem. To wit:

Researchers say that as trees disappear, winter and spring snow will melt faster, affecting wildlife as well as communities that are already struggling with water shortages. Some Western states get as much as 75% of their water from snowmelt.

“When you remove the forest, that snow is more susceptible to melting earlier,” said Benjamin Hatchett, an interdisciplinary scientist at Colorado State University. And he noted that a warmer, more arid climate dries out soil and pulls moisture from plants, making them more susceptible to wildfire. “That thirstier atmosphere is a big concern,” he said.

Oh, and:

Forests also absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Bigger, older trees store more carbon than younger trees and shrubs. The loss of conifer forests today means a hotter tomorrow.

But again, much of that is invisible—CO2, sadly, can’t be seen. (If it turned the sky smog-brown like carbon monoxide we’d have done something decades ago). And even forests are far away from where most people live as to seem almost unreal. (Once, a visitor looking at the Vermont foliage near my home asked me if we collected the colored leaves when they fell and put them back up next year, as if they were a kind of Christmas decoration).

So let’s think about that water for a moment, the snowmelt that’s disappearing ever faster. Here’s another remarkable account of the American West, this time from Reis Thebault. It begins in the control room of the Central Arizona Project, the vast canal project that supplies water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and its surrounds, which are some of the fastest growing communities in America. The Colorado, though, is drying up, and so big cutbacks are coming:

Short-term reductions, announced by the federal government on Friday, will cost Arizona roughly one-third of its share of river water over the next two years. But beyond that, a range of cutbacks remain possible.

Under the most severe outcome, the system would be cut off entirely during the driest years, setting off a social and economic meltdown Arizonans shudder to even imagine.

“They are threatening to shut down the Southwest,” said Brenda Burman, the project’s general manager. “It’s not possible to picture it.”

There’s a certain poetic justice here, perhaps—communities that have built their identity on the myth of the ruggedly independent Western man overcoming the hostile elements, only to find themselves entirely dependent on the socialized distribution of limited water.

Cave Creek, a picturesque burg steeped in cowboy kitsch in the foothills north of Phoenix, gets 95% of its water from the aqueduct system.

“Without Colorado River water, we would be a dusty little town with dirt roads,” Mayor Robert Morris said.

The town’s leaders have been scrambling to find backup plans. Cave Creek has hired a water consultant and struck deals with neighboring municipalities, cobbling together enough supply for the next five years, Mr. Morris said.

He has sought to prepare residents for higher bills and stricter conservation, working to undo a foundational part of the state’s philosophy in the process.

“The biggest thing for people to overcome is the idea of unlimited, cheap water,” Mr. Morris said.

But even that blow to identity is small compared to the blow that comes when you run out. And not just of affordable water, but of affordable food. And we seem to be nearing that point. We’ve long known, for instance, that yields of staple crops are rising more slowly than they would otherwise, because of higher temperatures. But a new study this week put some fairly remarkable numbers on the future: “Severe water scarcity” events due to global warming could easily triple the price of wheat:

Looking ahead, climate model projections suggest that water scarcity will expand under continued warming. Our results indicate that a temperature increase of about 3°C could triple average global wheat prices relative to 2010.

But we don’t have to wait. As Somini Sengupta pointed out this weekend, in four paragraphs that may set some kind of record for condensed reality, that future is more or less now:

Wheat is at the heart of the modern diet, and this year, it is facing an accumulation of modern dangers. The breadbaskets of the world are getting pummeled by drone strikes and devilish weather, nudging prices higher amid already soaring food costs in the wake of the Iran war.

Heat and drought have diminished harvests in some of the biggest wheat-producing countries, including the United States, which is expected to have its worst wheat harvest in a half-century, spiking prices. Poor countries that agreed to buy American wheat under the threat of Trump tariffs could be stuck paying abnormally high prices.

The Black Sea, a crucial passage for the global wheat trade, is an active theater of the Russia-Ukraine war, while the Houthi militia’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have already forced grain shipments to take a longer, more expensive route around South Africa.

Beyond that, a supercharged El Niño further threatens water levels in the Panama Canal, while drought has reduced water levels to perilously low levels in transit routes like the Rhine and Danube rivers in Europe, raising transportation costs. All this at a time when the global atmosphere is hotter than normal because of a century of fossil fuel burning, threatening the livelihoods of small farmers in poor countries.

All of this is down to fossil fuels—the oil we’re fighting over in the Strait of Hormuz, the gas and coal whose methane and carbon emissions have sent temperatures soaring and river levels dropping. It’s reality.

Just to repeat the numbers, this time from Neal Burnette-Irwin and Marion Kilpatrick:

Mark Jankowski with USDA’s Outlook Board is still crunching the numbers for the year, but says the crop is set to break all the wrong records.

“On our balance sheet, we didn’t make any changes to our export or other use forecasts, so all that essentially did was tighten up ending stocks by six million bushels from where we were last month. Now we’re looking at US ending stocks of 717 million bushels, down 203 million bushels from last year, reflecting the fact that this wheat crop is a small crop. It’s historically small.”

US wheat growers can point to a number of challenges this year, but Jankowski says the issues aren’t limited to domestic wheat production. The crop is also suffering globally.

“A fairly sharp reduction in the European Union production estimate. We lowered it by 1.8 million tons this month, reflecting very hot, dry weather that spread across the entire EU region over the summer. Much of that extreme heat hit during the grain-filling stage for wheat, so it is showing up as reduced yield potential. With a 1.8-million-ton reduction in the forecast this month, that would bring the EU’s wheat production forecast down to 134.2 million tons, down just about 11 million tons from last year.”

It’s not just wheat. In Europe, knocked to its knees by an endless stream of heatwaves this summer, we have reports of vegetable harvests collapsing by double digits—60% of France’s broccoli crop, for instance, is gone. Britain could face food shortages within months, one excited newspaper report warns; in Ireland, they’re calling for an emergency food stockpile as harvests run low. The UK government has refused to release an unredacted copy of a report from the country’s intelligence agencies about ecosystem collapse amid rising temperatures, but we do know that it predicts the very real possibility of widespread food shortages by 2030, resulting in “price rises, migration, political destabilisation, and possible war… fueled by the human-induced climate crisis.”

What I’m trying to say is, we are running up against limits. We have made it hot enough on this planet that things are going very wrong. This is not like politics, where you get to say something dumb and change the subject. As I’m writing this, for instance, word has emerged of a court filing where the Trump-appointed board of the Kennedy Center has threatened to tear the building down unless President Donald Trump’s name is carved on the wall. That’s not real; it’s a game, one designed to distract. But wheat is real.

Because we’ve pushed so hard into this new hot world, our margin has been substantially reduced, in some cases to nothing. As one scientist quoted in that excellent article on Western trees and fire said:

“Forests do have innate resilience and under normal circumstances, they can take a hit or two and bounce back,” Dr. Coop said. “But circumstances just aren’t normal anymore.”

Still, there are things we could do. When it comes to forests we could at least not knock more roads into the middle of them, as the Trump administration decided to do last week. (If you want to read a bang-up piece of writing about the Peavine Fire currently devastating Reno, I recommend this from my beloved Third Act colleague B Fulkerson).

When it comes to the Colorado River, we could—as conservationists have suggested for decades—demolish Glen Canyon Dam and let Lake Powell drain downstream to Lake Mead. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would give us a little more margin.

And we could deploy lots and lots of solar panels to desalinate enough water to supply some of the needs of places like Phoenix (solar panels that, by the way, shade the desert and conserve some moisture). And we could, you know, stop building water-intensive data centers. (Big victory in New Mexico yesterday, where activists included my Third Act colleagues managed to win a temporary halt to the giant Jupiter project, “in part due to recent revelations about the use of millions of gallons of fresh water for the data center’s construction in recent months.”)

When it comes to food, we may have more margin yet. America’s fertile cropland is filled to an astonishing extent growing corn syrup, feed for cattle, and gasoline—an area the size of Indiana is devoted solely to producing ethanol, an absurd boondoggle. So we’re not without options. Using it to produce solar power and, you know, food people eat would take off some of the pressure.

Above all, of course, we can rapidly deploy renewable energy. At this point it won’t lower the temperature rapidly, but it could keep it from climbing rapidly. And it’s within our technical capacity—the planet possesses the factories capable of turning out solar panels three times as fast as we’re currently going.

I will return next time to politics, because politics is unavoidable. It’s how we will or won’t rise to these challenges. But for now I just want to drive home the reality, the sheer inescapable reality of life on our rapidly overheating planet.

Because we’re pushing the margins, and we’re doing it right now. One of the more remarkable essays I’ve read in recent months comes from Aruna Chandrasekhar, describing modern-day Mumbai as a “city of sweat.” This relates directly to the elevated sea temperatures with which I began this account—Mumbai, as anyone who has had the privilege of visiting the Gateway of India will recall, sits on the edge of the Arabian Sea. The city’s seawalls are already overtopped in storms, but the constant danger is the humidity. Here’s Chandrasekhar (and the whole article is very much worth reading):

In summer, Mumbai’s air holds up to 90% of all the water it can possibly contain, leaving almost no room for sweat to evaporate—which in turn leads to rapid dehydration, exhaustion, and fatal heatstrokes. On a 38°C day in April 2023, 14 people died in an outdoor rally attended by India’s home minister. What has come to be expected of millions upon millions of Mumbaikars, no matter how bad it gets, is resilience. But that resilience is coming up against hard limits of survivability.

Jari Mari is a crazy mosaic of the city’s extremes. Migrant, working-class Muslim and Dalit families live in tin sheds and one-bedroom concrete blocks stacked behind the high-security walls that seal off runway 27. The housing is so dense that the narrow lanes see no sun and feel no wind. But the heat still gets through, and the kids are always sick, many of the mothers in these houses told us: Everyone has to sleep with their doors open, mosquitoes be damned. No one we spoke to could afford air conditioning.

In Sabiya and Sameer Khan’s one-room house, temperatures touch 49°C. When we tell Sameer we’re not here to shoot planes, but to take thermal pictures of his asbestos roof, he looks at us like we’re mad. We show Sabiya how the fan above her stove is pushing hot air back down on her. A couple of blocks away, kids play cricket on concrete that shows a reading of 58.7°C.

58.7°C is 137.66°F. No more need be said.

Which is the "All War, All the Time" party that impoverishes your family and makes us less safe? Which party lies to get us into wars, lies after they get caught, and then just issues additional lies as they are now doing in Iran and as they once did in Iraq?

This question is now playing out in Michigan in the Senate race. However, there is an out-of-state person who could definitively answer that question.

While the epic battle between Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers wages in Michigan, the most dangerous man to one of the candidates resides in Cleveland, Ohio. His name is Dennis Kucinich. He was a 16-year member of the House of Representatives overlapping with Mike Rogers for a number of those years, especially when the Authorization for Military Force in the Iraq War was being debated in late 2002.

Kucinich is dangerous because no one interested in the welfare of American families, its soldiers, our national security, and personal liberties could vote for Rogers if they knew the evidence Kucinich produced before the War.

Did Mike Rogers call out: Let’s stop and more carefully look at the shaky and inconclusive evidence before we send our kids off to die and to kill hundreds of thousands?

Evidence that Mike Rogers and 214 other Republicans ignored. In fact, the All War, All the Time party only had six GOP members vote against the war. Unfortunately, Democrats have an All War, All the Time faction as well. These AIPAC-bred and -fed types are now mumbling how they can’t in good conscience support El-Sayed.

The Greedy Oil Party {GOP), of course, continues to vote the same war-mongering way as shown with their support of the Gaza genocide and the Israel-First War on Iran.

In 2002 Kucinich masterfully destroyed the Bush-Cheney web of lies justifying the illegal and immoral war. His evidence-packed memo pointed out that we were going to war against a country that did not attack us, had no means to do so, and had never expressed a desire to do so.

The fact that Iraq was not an imminent threat is not just my jaundiced opinion as a 40-year adviser to Dennis. Six artificial intelligence (AI) platforms—ChatGPT. Claude, Saner, Gemini, Deep Seek and Grok—were presented with a simple question:

Do you agree or disagree with the following conclusion: On Oct. 2, 2002 when Dennis Kucinich presented his eight-page memo against the Authorization for Use of Military Force there was already enough contradictory and qualifying intelligence available to Congress that the Bush administration's presentation of Iraq as an established, urgent WMD threat was not justified by the underlying evidence?

They all agreed that Dennis and other sources had already raised enough questions to halt the rush to folly. Certainly, no prudent, patriotic official would send 4,418 of our brave men and women to die violently in a foreign land.

But Mike Rogers did.

Over a million Iraqis likely died as a result. We wasted trillions of precious dollars as the Greed Only Party filled the pockets of the Military-Industrial Complex and their donor-owners.

But Mike Rogers’ culpability gets worse. When Hussein Kamel—Saddam’s son-in-law in charge of WMD concealment—was interviewed by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in 1995 after defecting, he disclosed that all the WMDs had been destroyed.

This devastating disclosure came out in late February 2003. The Newsweek article continued the shredding of the Greedy Oil Party web of lies which forced the Bush-Cheney administration to accelerate their war plans. While they had stenographers at The New York Times and other major media, Americans were getting queasy.

But the mainstream corporate media continued the pro-war propaganda. In one two-week period the media accuracy group FAIR noted that of 393 guests discussing the war, only 1 was from an anti-war group. A stunning 75% were current or former government or military officials.

Meanwhile Kucinich was making hundreds of speeches on the House floor and giving as many media interviews as possible in an effort to stop the war.

Did Mike Rogers call out: Let’s stop and more carefully look at the shaky and inconclusive evidence before we send our kids off to die and to kill hundreds of thousands? He didn’t speak out then, and he hasn’t spoken out now about the Gaza genocide or the wild WMD lies being used again by the All War, All the Time party.

Kucinich could clarify that Michiganders can elect Mike Rogers who will remain silent as our soldiers die, as family finances deteriorate, and we become more hated around the world. You can’t kill all the girls and teachers in a school and expect the world to like or respect us. In one recent United Nations General Assembly only 1% of the rest of the world’s population outside the Unites States and Israel voted with us.

Or they can elect Dr. Sayed who recognizes that the proposed 2027 National Defense Authorization Act budget for the war and surveillance is bloated with waste, fraud, and abuse. The average family of four in our society will see over $30,000 expended annually in our national budget going forward. This figure comes from the Chalmers Johnson logic that the official Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion may be as much as double that figure.

If one conservatively uses $2.5 trillion as the accurate budget, one arrives at the $30,000 yearly figure for American families of four. Most Americans don’t know, for example, that the $488.2 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs is not included nor the hundreds of billions we will spend to pay the interest on previous war borrowings.

My modest proposal is for Mike Rogers to send Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich halfway around the world on a two-month all-expenses paid vacation to the Maldives. Considering the damage Dennis could do to his campaign, it would be money well spent.

Dollar for dollar it would be far more effective than the Islamophobia and fear-of-immigrants ads that the GOP is currently peddling across the country.

This week, the argument over Lebanese sovereignty became concrete on a ridge overlooking Nabatieh. The New Arab reported on August 24 that Washington is pressing for the strategic Ali al-Taher ridge, where Hezbollah fighters are present, to be transferred to the Lebanese Army in exchange for Israeli withdrawal. The same area has been subjected to repeated Israeli shelling. In one small patch of southern Lebanon, the larger problem is suddenly hard to hide: Beirut is being asked to move first, while the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanese territory remains the inducement offered in return.

That pressure did not begin this week. Reuters reported in July 2025 that Washington was pressing Lebanon to make a formal cabinet commitment to disarm Hezbollah before talks could continue on halting Israeli military operations. Lebanese officials were told that without such a commitment, the United States would stop sending its envoy and would no longer press Israel to halt airstrikes or withdraw troops. Even the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which strongly favors disarmament, later described Lebanon's policy shift as having been adopted “under duress.”

Call it diplomacy if you like. It is still leverage. And it is being applied unevenly. Lebanon is expected to reduce its own side's military leverage first, while Israeli withdrawal is treated as something Lebanon must earn through compliance. If sovereignty means anything, it should not mean that a weaker country first dismantles its deterrent while a stronger military power keeps troops on its land.

None of this requires pretending Hezbollah has made no miscalculations. In March, after Hezbollah fired on Israel during the US-Israeli war with Iran, Lebanon's cabinet prohibited Hezbollah's military and security activities and ordered it to surrender its weapons to the state. The principle behind that decision is legitimate. A political movement, however rooted or powerful, should not be able to decide by itself when an entire country goes to war.

That is what real sovereignty would look like: not simply fewer Hezbollah weapons, but a Lebanese state strong enough that people no longer feel they need Hezbollah for protection, reconstruction, or basic support.

But sovereignty cannot stop at Hezbollah's weapons. It also has to mean that Israeli troops leave Lebanese territory and that Israeli strikes do not become a permanent feature of Lebanese life. Washington itself warned Israel this month that a permanent military presence in southern Lebanon would conflict with the US-backed framework. Yet the practical sequence still asks Beirut to show progress first. For many Lebanese in the south, that does not feel like state building. It feels like being told to surrender under fire.

There is another reality that is often flattened out of the American debate: Hezbollah is more than an arsenal. Its institutions became deeply rooted because they stepped into places where the Lebanese state was weak, slow, or absent. CNN reported as far back as 2006 that Hezbollah was providing water, helping pay medical costs, running schools, and collecting garbage in communities where government capacity was thin. The Council on Foreign Relations still describes a broad network of Hezbollah-linked healthcare, schools, infrastructure, and youth programs.

Calling that a “state within a state” is not far-fetched. But the phrase contains an uncomfortable admission: There was space for a parallel state because the official one repeatedly left a vacuum.

After the 2006 war, NPR found Hezbollah moving into reconstruction within hours of the ceasefire, assessing damage and distributing assistance while the government struggled to respond. For families standing in front of rubble, that was not an abstract debate about militias. It was help arriving when they needed it. People remember that.

The pattern returned after the 2024 war. The World Bank estimated Lebanon's reconstruction and recovery needs at $11 billion. While Lebanon searched for financing, Hezbollah's Jihad al-Bina network was already surveying damaged communities and paying compensation. Le Monde reported in early 2025 that Hezbollah had paid about $400 million to roughly 140,000 people. The effort was imperfect, and residents complained about delays. But it was there, visible on the ground, while the state had nothing comparable at that scale.

The same failure of formal institutions helped the Hezbollah-linked Al-Qard al-Hassan network grow during Lebanon's banking collapse. Families turned to it because ordinary depositors had been locked out of their savings. The United States has sanctioned Al-Qard al-Hassan officials and says the institution helps Hezbollah evade sanctions and move money. That allegation belongs in the picture. So does the reason such an institution became useful to ordinary people: The formal banking system had failed them.

This is the part a disarmament order cannot solve. Remove the weapons, and then what? Who fills the security gap along the border? Who rebuilds the next damaged neighborhood? Who replaces the clinics, schools, relief networks, and financial lifelines people have relied on for years? Lebanon's army can and should become the country's sole military authority. But it cannot also become a nationwide welfare system and reconstruction agency overnight.

There is a path out, but the order matters. Hezbollah should ultimately give up its military role and function as a political and social organization. Israel should withdraw fully from Lebanese territory, with an enforceable mechanism to stop renewed attacks and violations. At the same time, Lebanon and its international partners need to build institutions strong enough to replace the civilian functions that helped Hezbollah become indispensable to many communities.

That is what real sovereignty would look like: not simply fewer Hezbollah weapons, but a Lebanese state strong enough that people no longer feel they need Hezbollah for protection, reconstruction, or basic support.

The Ali al-Taher dispute shows why sequencing is not an academic concern. When Washington asks Beirut to take control of a strategic position in exchange for Israeli withdrawal, it reinforces the very perception that has sustained Hezbollah's argument for decades: that Lebanon is expected to prove its sovereignty by satisfying conditions imposed from outside. You cannot build a sovereign state by removing structures people rely on and promising that the state will catch up later. Build the security, capacity, and trust first. Then disarmament becomes a transfer of responsibility to a functioning state rather than an act of surrender to someone else's timetable.

Amidst the tragifarce of President Donald Trump’s apparently off-the-top-of-his-head war on Iran may lie a silver lining for the 2028 presidential election—a silver lining that comes with two big ifs. One, of course, is the if that goes with everything involved with the race: If there is a fair election. The if specific to the hoped-for silver lining is if there is a candidate willing and able to make use of it.

Ever since Gallup started public opinion polls, when it has come to questions of war, they’ve shown the American public favoring every one at the start—until now, with Donald Trump launching the first war to encounter immediate objection from a majority of the American public. A man who exults in doing things that no president has ever done before has certainly done it up proud with this one—ending a more than 85-year stretch when the American people gave the government the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of every military action, no matter how much they may have come to regret it later.

War. What Is It Good For?

Not surprisingly, the Second World War—the first one ever polled—enjoyed the broadest support, with 97% backing the declaration of war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. And all these years later, World War II is still widely thought of as the “good war.” Not so much with the war that was the next most broadly supported at the outset—the Afghanistan War then enjoyed 92% support from a population that could never have imagined it dragging on for two decades. Eighty-two percent supported the first George Bush’s Iraq War, now remembered as the Gulf War. And even though Americans would eventually turn against all three of them, the (Second) Iraq War, Korean War, and Vietnam War started out with76%, 75%, and 65% support respectively. (Public polling only on the Vietnam War began in 1965, as America started coming to grips with the fact that we were actually in a war there.)

Much less remembered conflicts that also found initial approval included Bush's 1989 Panama invasion, with 82%favorable; Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo War bombing of Yugoslavia, at 58 percent; and 53 percent for Reagan’s 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. In fact, the only American military operation not enjoying majority support from the start was Obama’s 2011 bombing of Libya, favored by only 47 percent. But even then, only 37 percent outright opposed it—You others perhaps not even considering us to be at war (a stance that the Administration would subsequently adopt in arguing that it did not qualify as war under the War Powers Act.)

So far as Trump’s current Iran War, Gallup encountered only 34 percent immediate support. This then, would seem to qualify as what political scientists might call, “a really big deal.” Despite a solid history of uniting behind the flag first and asking questions later, the American people have decided to believe their own eyes, seeing a president aid and abet the Israeli assassination a foreign head of state; bomb a population half a world away, threatening that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again;" and deploy the American military seemingly at whim, with little apparent concern as to cause or effect—all this in a war that he has several times claimed to have already won. In short, for the first time in living memory, the American people have concluded that a Commander-in-Chief—and his Department of War—has betrayed their trust. If there’s been a better opportunity in the entire post-World War II era to chart a course away from our permanent war footing, I can’t think of it. That is, if we can find the right candidate.

The Right Candidate?

We can probably safely assume that all 2028 Democratic presidential candidates will have opposed the Iran War and will in some sense claim title to any “silver lining” that may come with public rejection of that war. Not all, however, will be able to credibly argue that they offer the prospect of any real change in this arena, should they become president. After all, opposing a war entered into by “the other party’s” president may not be the norm, but it is common enough; opposing “your own party’s” president’s war is, however, quite another thing. That type of opposition, which would seem reasonable evidence of intent to buck the everlasting-war trend, is virtually non-existent among Republicans and rare among Democrats. For the latter, their foreign policy stances during the Biden Administration would logically seem more telling as to how they might operate in the White House.

The obvious touchstone in this realm is Israel’s Gaza War, continuous through both Biden and Trump Administrations. The questions for many Democratic primary voters will probably run along the lines of: “When did you recognize that the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attrocity—1,200 Israelis killed, 250 hostages—had become a campaign of destruction of just the sort that Trump threatened Iran with? And what did you do when you came to that realization—assuming you ever did?”

From that vantage point, the field currently in the 2028 presidential discussion mix seems to run the full gamut of plausibly in regard to taking advantage of any Iran War “silver lining.” On the less plausible end, we have Kamala Harris. The most recent Democratic nominee, now said to be considering another run, comes with a Biden Administration record that seems to offer scant ground to argue that a vote for her would be a vote for a significant foreign policy shift: As Vice President she supported arming the Israeli military through the end of her term, as the estimated Palestinian death toll reached 48,000 (out of a current total of 74,000), with the overwhelming majority being civilian, and a substantial portion children.

At the other end, we have Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who says she hasn’t ruled out a presidential run. By late October, 2023, with the Palestinian death toll already at 7,000, Ocasio-Cortez was one of only nine House Democrats both sponsoring an immediate cease fire resolution and voting against support of continued Israeli military action. At the moment, the only other currently chatted-about potential candidate to stake out a firm anti-Gaza War position that dates back to the Democratic Biden administration is Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).

While these wars, and foreign policy in general, may not command center stage in the next presidential election, it’s been generally recognized that—Pete Hegseth notwithstanding—one facet of Trump’s appeal to some has been the belief that he was less committed to continual overseas wars than his recent predecessors—of both parties. While he arguably was no worse than they during his first term, his Iran War has shattered any illusion of that—both for him and the Republican Party that has backed him all the way. The challenge will be to produce a Democratic nominee who can credibly appeal to the antiwar sentiment within the Trump electorate. Although we are in no position to say exactly how the presidential primary field will ultimately shake out, the current snapshot does give us a sense of the hard reckoning we will have make as to which candidate would actually pursue altering our course of continuous conflict and spiraling military expenditure.

Just a Small Part

Foreign wars are, of course, neither the only, nor even the principal cause of Donald Trump’s disapproval ratings now running over 60 percent. So, given that no prominent Republican has bucked Trump in any significant way during his second Administration – and politically survived to talk about it—any imaginable 2028 Republican presidential candidate will likely have plenty of unpopular positions to talk their way around. All of which may eventually make it conventional wisdom that the race for the White House is the Democrats’ to lose—again if we assume a fair election.

But these foreign policy questions do provide an early, clear example of the type of choices that lie in front of us. More broadly, will the next Democratic presidential campaign be largely confined to—rightly—attacking the Republican Party for its support of a corrupt and stupid administration, on the assumption that simply being not-Trump will be good enough? Or will it attempt to deliver a candidate capable of credibly addressing the growing economic inequality, the unaffordabilty of healthcare, the concentration of corporate power, and the host of other issues closer to home that have sent a significant part of the American working class looking for love in all the wrong places?

The biggest Medicaid fight today isn't happening in Congress—it's happening inside the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Now, a year after H.R. 1’s passage (the 2025 federal reconciliation bill enacting significant cuts and changes to Medicaid), CMS’ recently issued interim final rule (IFR) implementing the law’s work-reporting requirements in the program narrows the very protections Congress included to prevent vulnerable people nationwide from losing the health coverage they need.

The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that more than 5 million people will lose Medicaid coverage because of these requirements. Already a conservative estimate as other organizations estimated over 10 million people are at risk of losing coverage, the number will surely be higher given CMS' IFR goes beyond the statutory language of the law.

The clearest example of this is the IFR's treatment of the medically frail exemption.

If the goal is really healthier communities and greater workforce participation, making it harder for medically vulnerable people to keep their health insurance is exactly the wrong approach.

Congress recognized that people living with complex medical conditions, disabilities, and chronic illnesses, including substance use disorder (SUD), should be protected from burdensome work-reporting requirements. As such, H.R. 1 specifically includes “medically frail” individuals among those exempt from the new requirements.

Yet CMS has added a new hurdle, putting millions of eligible Americans at dire risk of losing access to essential healthcare.

Under the IFR, people with SUD and other qualifying health conditions must also demonstrate that their condition "significantly impairs" their ability to satisfy the requirement before they can qualify for the exemption. This additional standard does not appear in the statute and will inevitably reduce the number of people who can secure the exemption.

For people living with SUD, the consequences could be profound.

While SUD is a chronic but treatable medical condition, pervasive stigma and discriminatory barriers have led to fewer than 1 in 5 people who need treatment actually receiving it. Amid persistent addiction and overdose crises, we should be making it easier for people to access the services and supports they need to become and stay well, not erecting additional barriers to lifesaving care.

Moreover, while CMS' rule relies heavily on Medicaid claims data and provider documentation to identify individuals who qualify as medically frail, the administration’s approach overlooks the reality that many people with SUD have never entered treatment due to the above-mentioned stigma and discrimination. Requiring additional documentation will not "motivate" people to seek care, as CMS suggests. Instead, it creates yet another barrier for people who are already among the hardest to reach.

When people are deprived of Medicaid access, their ability to engage in preventive care, behavioral health services, medications, and treatment that keep chronic conditions under control is also lost. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand how untreated health conditions can not just impede a person’s capacity to work but quickly lead to costly emergency services.

These are not only personal tragedies—they are costly public policy failures.

Taking away health coverage does not eliminate health needs. It just shifts and raises costs while undermining public health and safety. Access to healthcare is precisely what enables many people to work, care for their families, and be productive community members, so why are we erecting so many barriers?

If the goal is really healthier communities and greater workforce participation, making it harder for medically vulnerable people to keep their health insurance is exactly the wrong approach.

Last month, both our organizations, along with many other leading advocates nationwide, explicitly articulated these concerns and submitted comments urging the agency to reverse course and faithfully reinforce the protections Congress included in the law. While CMS' public comment period on the IFR is now closed, all those who share the same perspective can still take action by calling their members of Congress to share their concerns about the impact of H.R. 1 and specifically, how the administration is planning to implement the law.

A year after H.R. 1’s passage, the question is no longer simply about what Congress enacted—it is whether the regulations that make the law real will preserve purposeful protections or quietly erode them through administrative action.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• At least one in four NFL players will probably get chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Should football be banned? At least 215 of 878 players who died from 2016 to 2021 — 24.5% — had CTE. The actual prevalence could be far higher. This does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Studies have shown that the rate of CTE in people who have not sustained repeated impacts to the head is nearly zero. Professional football’s rate of brain disease is an occupational safety hazard with little comparison in the American workplace: asbestos workers and coal miners. Symptoms include memory loss, confusion and uncharacteristic mood swings, decreases in executive function and increases in erratic and impulsive behavior, including addiction.

Should we ban other sports with high rates of CTE, like boxing, ice hockey, rugby, soccer and wrestling?

• Huge mudslides sweep through villages in Nepal and Tibet, and China’s Gyirong port. Hundreds are missing and feared dead. Nepal’s foreign minister said an earthquake triggered a large landslide, which in turn blocked a river, sending a torrent of water downstream. Could Central Asia’s “Sword of Damocles”—Lake Sarez—be next?

• CIA Director John Ratcliffe quietly flew to Russia, where he met with his FSB intelligence counterparts. The topic of discussion, however, was probably not the Russo-Ukrainian War.

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The post Should Football Be Banned? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

A year ago we warned that President Donald Trump had a concerted strategy to undermine the midterm elections.

Here’s news you can use: That effort is failing so far. For every move, there’s a countermove from voting rights groups, local and state governments, and more. In November, we should be able to have elections that are free, fair, and secure. But it will take a lot of work between now and then.

We saw that for sure this week. On Monday, the Supreme Court made headlines and sowed confusion, but it did not change much. Here’s what you should know.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order to upend mail voting. That is the way 1 in 3 Americans vote. Trump purported to order the US Postal Service to refuse to deliver lawfully cast ballots unless the voter is on a list—which doesn’t exist yet—created by each state and sent to the post office for checking against mail ballots. It’s absurd. And, no surprise, it’s illegal.

Trump’s executive order is not in effect. Mail voting continues as before. There have been no changes to the Postal Service practices.

Earlier this summer, in a lawsuit brought by 23 states, a federal court blocked the executive order in part of the country. The judge also blocked the order nationwide in a lawsuit the Brennan Center and others brought on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts.

On August 24, the US Supreme Court jumped into the states’ case. It issued an unsigned order holding that the states did not yet have legal standing to sue. In particular, it concluded the states had not suffered an injury, because the Postal Service had not implemented the policy. In other words, the trial court had ruled too early.

This made big news, understandably, but those headlines confused matters a bit.

This was a procedural vote that let the Trump administration continue working on its plan to have the Postal Service decide who receives a ballot.

As the court itself explained, “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful.”

And in fact, late last Friday, under pressure from the administration, the Postal Service published a “Final Rule” to implement Trump’s scheme. The agency explained that it had the power to set rules for mail ballot delivery because ballots are like “animal remains” or “replica explosives” and deserve special treatment.

Both the states’ case and the case brought by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups remain ongoing. The Supreme Court’s Monday ruling is not the final word. Our attorneys are assessing next steps, and things will no doubt move quickly in this complex legal back-and-forth.

But a few things are as true today as they were before the court’s order.

This executive order is still illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution’s Elections Clause is clear, as courts have ruled over and over: States run elections. Congress has a legitimate role in passing national legislation and can override states. You know who has no role in elections, under the Constitution? The president.

And the Supreme Court? This is the “shadow docket” at work. Rather than letting the legal process unfold, the justices jumped into the litigation to help Trump. Justices like Samuel Alito bristle at the ominous phrase “shadow docket” and complain it should be called an “emergency” order instead. Here, the only “emergency” would be that Trump could not move forward with his push to restrict voting, just weeks before an election.

It’s hard to avoid noticing that, while the order is unsigned, it was backed by the Republican-appointed justices. Democratic-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote dissents. Trump has repeatedly said, as he wrote in June about the SAVE Act, that without voting restrictions, “The Republican Party will never win another Election.” The Supreme Court, already at record lows in public trust, will further bleed credibility if it is seen as a partisan electoral actor.

And as for voters—what should we know?

This legal fracas is happening so close to the election that, however it turns out, it is highly unlikely that changes will affect voting this year. Federal law requires that the first mail ballots be sent to military voters starting September 4. We cannot let chaos engulf our elections.

All of which means that, in one sense, this is a lot of noise and manufactured chaos. Trump’s executive order is not in effect. Mail voting continues as before. There have been no changes to the Postal Service practices.

You know who knows that? Someone who voted by mail this month from his house in Mar-a-Lago: Donald Trump.

His campaign to undermine the midterm elections is losing. The only way it wins is if people stay home.

The USS Abraham Lincoln is on its way home. This is welcome news after hearing of its abhorrent conditions. Yet, the situation lived by sailors and Marines aboard the carrier over the last nine months, the continued threats that troops still deployed in this unpopular war face, and the unpatriotic negligence both the president and members of his own party have demonstrated paint a grim, but unsurprising picture of how servicemembers are treated under this administration.

Donald Trump is the most hostile president to troops and veterans in modern American history. Look no further than his comments about the service members who have been at sea for more than 250 days—that they have not been deployed “nearly long enough”—or House Republicans parroting that line back to reporters. That’s how this administration treats its military members, and it should be a wake-up call for every American.

Yes, the USS Abraham Lincoln is on its way home, but with the USS George Washington replacing it, how many more troops must suffer until we end this forever war? That is why veterans of Common Defense, like myself, are demanding a full-scale congressional investigation into this case. More than 4,000 of our members and their families agree: This can never happen again, and the war against Iran needs to end.

The war these carriers are supporting has already killed at least 18 US service members and wounded roughly 500 more, alongside thousands of Iranian civilians killed. As an Iraq veteran, I’ve come to understand the costs of war begin long before the first shot is fired. Diplomacy is what keeps the world safe, and certainly not bombs that pad shareholder value at the expense of service members, and military families, who have everything to lose.

If a foreign adversary starved its own troops, kept them at sea for nearly a year, and left them in cramped showers and broken toilets, how would Washington react?

The USS Lincoln is carrying 5,000 sailors and Marines, 5,000 souls who have touched communities far and wide throughout our nation. They’ve played in our little leagues, attended school dances, walked college campuses, and have full lives waiting for them at home. Whatever reason each of them had for raising their right hand, that oath reflects a rare kind of commitment—to a mission, and to a country they intend to keep giving back to. War is the price many military families pay, and veterans carry its scars, visible and invisible, long after they take off the uniform. It is time for this administration to uphold its end of that bargain.

Instead, this White House has gutted the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA); sent troops to a highly unpopular, illegal, unjust war; and used the military as a political prop. None of that improves troops’ or veterans’ lives. What would actually improve their lives? Ending the war, investigating what happened on the USS Lincoln, expanding the VA instead of hollowing it out, and making sure military and working families can actually thrive.

As the USS Lincoln returns home, it’s worth remembering what most Americans already sense: War doesn’t accomplish what makes a life worth living. It doesn’t keep your family safe, cover your healthcare, give you a good-paying job, or protect the freedoms our Constitution promises. That’s why most Americans oppose the war with Iran. Yet, we’re all paying for it—in a cost of living already at historic highs, in gas prices, and in the roughly $1,000 per household experts say Trump’s decision to go to war has cost every one of us. The more hawkish members of his party will argue that this is part of the mission: to spread freedom and to contain Iran’s power. So ask them if a foreign adversary starved its own troops, kept them at sea for nearly a year, and left them in cramped showers and broken toilets, how would Washington react? We already know the answer. These very politicians would be first in line, demanding that America intervene. What our service members experienced on the USS Lincoln is abysmal and should infuriate every single American whose tax dollars are funding Donald Trump’s war.

Let’s not forget this was a choice made by Donald Trump’s hostile administration and enabled by its congressional allies. Lawmakers must demand a full-scale investigation into what happened aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln so it never happens again. Veterans and military families see clearly how failed leaders and politicians who carry every whim of the president’s disastrous war put our troops in danger. We must demand an investigation now—and we won’t stop until this country ends its forever wars.

Most people probably think that global warming will cause problems for their children and grandchildren, but not for themselves. I used to assume that those of us who are older need not worry.

But recent personal experience suggests that global warming can lead to financial disaster in the very short run. Even those of us in our mid 80s are not immune.

Several months ago, our house caught fire, forcing us into temporary accommodations. Only one room suffered major damage, but smoke permeated the whole house, requiring extensive remediation and destroying lots of furniture and clothing.

Fortunately, we had good insurance, which included coverage for contents and temporary housing as well as the cost of the repairs themselves.

If Dante were writing today, he could appropriately reserve a specially unpleasant level of his hell for the energy managers and politicians who are trying to stop the development of green energy.

Temporary housing is not cheap. We probably ran up $20,000 in hotel bills during the nearly two months before we could find more adequate housing. And temporary furnished housing itself is not cheap, easily amounting to thousands of dollars a month.

To state the obvious, owning a house without insuring it is highly risky. But what does this fact have to do with global warming?

Global warming has been setting off an increasing number of floods, fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes, damaging or destroying more and more homes. Up until now typical homes have been insured, which—as in our own case—has protected their owners from financial ruin.

But the money insurance companies pay for repairs or replacements has to be obtained through the premiums charged to homeowners. When the percentage of homes damaged by extreme weather increases, the insurance companies must increase what they charge for their coverage. If they do not do this, they will not be able to stay in business.

As a result, it is getting much more expensive to insure houses in many states, especially in California and some southeastern states. But the higher insurance premiums are making it more and more difficult for people to afford property insurance in the first place.

Some people may be forced to get no insurance, in effect self-insuring themselves. Since houses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are often the principal assets of families, those without insurance risk being wiped out financially.

And people cannot escape from this problem by renting a place to live instead of buying one. Landlords from whom people rent apartments and houses must increase rents in order to pay for the insurance they need.

Anybody following the news cannot help but be aware that floods, heat domes, hurricanes, and tornadoes are becoming more frequent and more devastating. And although climate has been always changing, the size and speed of the current changes cannot be explained away as just more of the same historical pattern.

A lot of future global heating is already “baked into” the world by carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal, oil, and gas during the last 200 years. But there is no reason why the human race should continue fouling its own nest now that we understand why climate change is accelerating.

At some point, people are going to stop falling for the propaganda emitted by coal, oil, and gas corporations; by political leaders these companies have bought; and by media organizations like Fox News catering to these wealthy and powerful interests.

Fortunately, new solar energy facilities are now cheaper than new atomic, coal, oil, or gas generators. And solar’s local intermittency, the principal weakness cited by anti-green spin doctors, will disappear when the already expanding distribution systems are united into a single worldwide high voltage direct current (HVDC) grid.

In recent decades we have seen similar movements to worldwide systems with telephones and computer networks. The technical and economic advantages of a worldwide electrical grid are so huge that it will be built.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote about nine different “levels” of hell in "Inferno," the first part of his long narrative poem, The Divine Comedy. If Dante were writing today, he could appropriately reserve a specially unpleasant level of his hell for the energy managers and politicians who are trying to stop the development of green energy.

Hell has generally been considered a hot place. The longer these folks are allowed to continue putting their own interests over the general welfare, the more Earth itself may become like hell for its inhabitants.

"Whereas mankind owes to the child the best it has to give…"—United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, 1959

There were Iraqi children before Gaza, before Hind. Before Iran and the Minab School bombing. Iraqi children dying by the thousands, as many as 500,000 as a result of US-supported UN economic sanctions and wars in Iraq. Governments expressed “concern.” International scholars and lawyers called it a genocide. Former Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, called it a price worth paying.

Who are we; what universe is this where one writes again and again in support of children, of “the child” as if they were some political cause. It’s the new abnormal, where everyday brings news of children suffering, injured and dying, in Iraq, in Ukraine, and Sudan. In Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, in Iran and Lebanon to name a few.

The child is trapped in a car, shot dead; they are buried under the rubble of their bombed-out house, of their school or the hospital where they have just been born. They’re wounded, missing eyes, arms, and legs; missing parents and siblings, aunts and uncles.They’re missing all the little as well as the significant “stuff” that is, that should be, a child's life. They’re sick and there are no doctors or medicines; they’re hungry and there’s no food or clean water. There’s no school, no mosque, no church, and no more neighborhood. Out of a house, in a tent or on the street, forcibly moved from here to there. What sort of world is this, what kind of culture. What heart refuses to protect and even worse, intentionally targets “the child” along with the people and institutions that provide the care and protection necessary to sustain the child’s life?

We know, everyone knows this is not the world “fit for Children” promised by global leaders at the UN some 30 years ago, yet it continues.

While instinct—some call it maternal—helps insure the future of a species, caring about and for one’s own offspring doesn’t necessarily translate to caring about all children. This enormous responsibility has been taken up by governments and international organizations; children need guaranteed special protections because they are “…innocent, vulnerable, and dependent.” The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1990), the most widely endorsed human rights document in history, committed world leaders to giving children the “first call” on human and financial resources and know-how to address critical issues such as: poverty, education, child and maternal health, and protection during armed conflicts. With great fanfare, they reaffirmed these aspirations, calling for a world “fit” for children in 2002 at the UN Special Session on Children, the largest ever gathering for a UN Special Session.

The disconnect of words to actions and to the actual situation for children in 2002, as the Special Session convened, was not lost on those of us who cared about Iraq and Iraqi children. An estimated half million had died. The alarming increase in birth defects and childhood cancers was stressing a medical system under siege. The overall health of Iraqi children as measured by the Under 5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) “…the single most significant indicator of the state of a nation’s children…” had declined by 160% in the decade since the CRC. It was the largest decline in well-being by far for children in any country in the world. And this, like the overall destruction of Iraq and Iraqi society was brought on by war and sustained by the severe US-supported UN economic sanctions imposed by the very agency pledging to take responsibility for the world’s children.

International law failed to protect Iraqi children; it has failed Palestinian children for decades despite their well-documented fragility under Israeli occupation. And now, we watch as the already precarious “child” in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank suffers unimaginable atrocities.“Atrocity in the ordinary sense of the term, as evoking simply the shock and horror that most would feel in the face of such enormous and gratuitous human damage; a circumstance in which we would be hard-pressed not to disparage the justifications” (Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, 2010).

UN and human rights organizations wring their hands and issue condemnations. Some do not call this a genocide. The majority that might help to end this catastrophe has stood by—including women, mothers, and global health and human rights organizations—and watched the occupation and genocide kill and maim thousands and thousands of Palestinian children and their extended families. Watched as the very country is rendered uninhabitable. Stood silently by as the very ones seeking to protect Palestinian children are treated and prosecuted as terrorists.

The moving promises of UN declarations and their aspirations on behalf of children have come to nothing. We’re being subjected to a form of global violence Joy Gordon warned about, that of "a single nation," or in today’s world, two nations—the US and Israel—"hijacking an institution of international governance, substituting their own agenda in place of the interests and will of the international community.” This should not stand.

According to the Ministry of Health, 73,386 Palestinians—including 21,000 children—were killed in the Gaza Strip and another 174,256 were injured between October 7, 2023 and August 9, 2026. This includes 1,258 fatalities and 4,295 injuries between the announcement of a ceasefire agreement on October 10, 2025 and August 9, 2026. We know, everyone knows this is not the world “fit for Children” promised by global leaders at the UN some 30 years ago, yet it continues. I’m at a loss. What can be said that hasn’t been said, or written that hasn’t been written. What poem or investigative article, what personal narrative could possibly bring an end to this carnage.

In 1915 Henry James declared, “The war has used up words, they have weakened, they have deteriorated…” Dr. Salma Al-Hadad, head of the pediatric oncology unit at Children’s Welfare Teaching Hospital in Baghdad since 1992, shared his view. After years of interviews revealing the struggles to save increasing numbers of patients with increasingly difficult cancers without even the most basic medicines and technology, she went silent. “The very hard times I’ve experienced over these years,” she wrote sometime in a mid-2000 email, “have rendered me silent. I find no comment.”

The moral universe owes a deep debt to the people of Palestine who have not gone silent, or ceased to document the atrocities against them. They pay for this every day with their lives, and in many cases the lives of other family members. I urge myself on. We have to repay that debt by breaking the silence even when we feel there is nothing more to say. Silence cannot be an option for those who are suffering under the weight of the atrocities being committed against children.

"All people,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, “live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.” If we truly care about “the child,” we have to increase our efforts on their behalf.

Many professional women complain that they can’t find “quality men,” which means those who are financially and professionally successful. Seventy years into feminism, however, female advancement has largely come at the expense of men, who cannot reasonably be expected to continue to be dominant providers as women advance in a zero-sum workplace.

The post No Love for the Defeated appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

For once, let me write about something I know almost literally (and rest assured that I don’t mean literarily) nothing about. This ancient fellow—I’m now 82 years old and, like all of us, growing older by the day—is thinking—and you probably won’t be surprised to learn that, even at my age, I can still think less than artificially—about artificial intelligence, which has, of course, been reduced to AI by those who suspect that they already know all too much about it.

What brought this up for me? Well, one of my political favorites (or maybe he’s just a favorite, plain and simple), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has called for a moratorium on data center construction across this country and only recently took on AI directly, writing a letter to the CEOs of three of the country’s leading AI companies, asking them: “Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei, and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development... It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control.”

Of course, I couldn’t agree more with him, though I wonder if it isn’t already too late.

Let me start by telling you this: I made a decision that I would never purposely use AI in my lifetime. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all too aware that, if I last another decade or so, I will undoubtedly be in a fully AI-ified world, whatever that might prove to mean. And I already know that, if I ask my computer to look for something online for me, AI instantly lends me a hand (if you can even say that AI has a hand), responding to my desires, whether I like it or not, with a pile of information and an “AI Overview,” and there’s not a damn thing that I can do about that.

AI already uses energy as if there were—gulp!—no tomorrow (or perhaps as if tomorrow were indeed going to burn us humans off Planet Earth).

Obviously, I have what I do (and don’t) know about this ever-changing world of ours on my mind right now. As a start, if you think about it for a moment (I mean really think about it), just calling it artificial intelligence is weirder than anyone seems to let on. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the word “artificial” above all else as “made, produced, or done by humans especially to seem like something natural” and, of course, as it notes, it can also mean “fake.” In fact, what about renaming it Unnatural Machine Intelligence (UMI), or Strange Machine Intelligence (SMI), or even Eerie Machine Intelligence (EMI)? Or what about just Ificial Intelligence (II), since this old guy at least can’t see any “art” in it at all?

And as you might imagine, there’s still a fair amount that I can figure out for myself with only the slightest helping hand from AI (if at all). I don’t need artificial intelligence, for instance, just my very own limited version of intelligence, to know that Donald Trump is the most disturbingly artificial president in our history, period. And it’s all too clear to me that, whatever else AI may do (or undo), its data centers are going to use energy in a staggering fashion and so, undoubtedly, continue to pour fossil fuels into the atmosphere for the foreseeable future, lending us humans a distinct helping hand in overheating this planet in a big-time fashion.

In short (or do I mean in all too long?), artificial intelligence is guaranteed to add immeasurably to the Anything But Artificial Heat (ABAH) on this already Distinctly Overheating Planetary Environment (DOPE) of ours. After all, we already know that this July was the hottest month (no, not just the hottest July, but the hottest month!) in the recorded history of weather in the United States. In fact, as far as we know, as long as humans have been on this continent, ever.

And, honestly, how intelligent is a result like that, artificially or otherwise? Truly, I don’t need artificial intelligence, just my very own limited version of intelligence, to know that that’s anything but good news for my children and grandchildren, no less everyone else on this world of—I was going to say “ours,” but I can’t help wondering whether that’s faintly accurate anymore. Maybe I have to start saying, “of AI’s.” And, of course, above all else, AI already uses energy as if there were—gulp!—no tomorrow (or perhaps as if tomorrow were indeed going to burn us humans off Planet Earth).

And of course (yes, again!), if I needed any confirmation of such fears, all I’d have to do is turn to You Know Who (and crew). After all, as Tony Romm wrote at The New York Times recently:

To the administration, AI can do little wrong. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump and his top aides have dismissed the suggestion that widespread automation could carry real negative consequences for families, businesses, and the broader US economy. Even as the electorate grows uneasy about the technology—and the data centers that power it—the president has only hardened in his view that AI will supercharge everything from medical research to military action.

After all, Trump has already claimed that AI is “bigger than anybody ever thought possible.” And he’s also said, “The way you look at AI, whoever wins AI just wins. It’s that big. It’s bigger than the internet by many times.”

Our DAUI President

As Prabhjote Gill pointed out at Yahoo-Finance recently, our president is AI all the way (to the bank). “The way you look at AI,” he’s said, “whoever wins, AI just wins. It’s that big. It’s bigger than the internet by many times.” And on the subject of this country and AI, he just couldn’t be prouder: “So, we are leading with AI on China. Nobody thought that was possible. The reason was energy. China can create unbelievable amounts of energy, and they use coal, and they use oil, and gas, and they make a lot of windmills, but they don’t use too many windmills because they’re smart. Because wind is a disaster.”

Yep, in case you didn’t realize it, while wind (power) may be a disaster for our president, the same isn’t true of AI. In fact, I’m anything but surprised to learn that the people handling his money have evidently already invested it in the AI universe in a significant fashion. No surprise there, since he’s already claimed that, in the end, it could prove “bigger than oil.” (And according to a headline at Yahoo-Finance, “President Donald Trump owns roughly $5M in surging AI stock”—and in case you wondered, that’s five million dollars!)

And to put AI in a Trumpian context, once upon a time, for our windy president, you couldn’t have gotten bigger than oil.

And believe me, I don’t need artificial intelligence, just my very own limited version of intelligence to know that it’s anything but good news that (as I mentioned) this July was indeed the hottest month ever recorded in this country. And that our all too windy president, while milling around at the White House or, for that matter, at his estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, is clearly exhibiting his own remarkable version of DAUI when it comes to this planet. No, that isn’t a Hawaiian word but—in case you’re not up on your acronyms—it is short (at least in my own personal dictionary) for Distinctly Artificial UnIntelligence.

Perhaps the whole phenomenon should indeed be renamed Ificial Intelligence or II. After all, there can be no question, with Donald Trump in the White House, that the art part of it is distinctly from another era, given his own version of Artifishy Intelligence.

Now, excuse me if I take a moment to myself just to think (anything but artificially) about this ever-stranger world of ours.

There is a remarkably simple test for whether the AI boom is actually as economically transformative as its boosters say it is: Make the companies building it pay their own damn electricity bill.

Not just the meter at the server warehouse. The whole bill.

If a hyperscale data center requires a new power plant, transmission line, substation, distribution upgrade, water system, or grid-reliability backstop, put that cost on the project that caused it. If the economics still work, excellent. Build it. If they don't, then the public has just learned something extremely important about the business model.

Pennsylvania moved sharply in that direction on August 18. Gov. Josh Shapiro's new executive order requires data-center developers seeking state permits to meet Responsible Infrastructure Development standards. Among them: Developers must cover the cost of new generation, transmission, distribution, and related infrastructure needed for their projects without shifting those costs to households and businesses.

If the AI boom is real, it can survive a full-cost test.

The order also requires local approval, ends the use of nondisclosure agreements for data-center projects, demands energy and water reporting, and ties state tax benefits to compliance. Pennsylvania's special counsel for energy affordability is also supposed to work with utility regulators so data centers, rather than ordinary customers, absorb the cost of reliability measures created by their demand.

This shouldn't be treated as an anti-AI policy. It's a pro-accounting policy.

The AI industry has been allowed to narrate electricity as though it were weather: Demand is "surging," capacity is "tight," the grid is "strained," and somehow billions of dollars of wires, turbines, transformers, and land just need to appear around the technology.

But demand isn't weather. Somebody made a decision.

And there is another reason to force the accounting now: A lot of the supposed demand isn't load yet. It's proposals. Pennsylvania says more than 100 data-center projects have approached the state, while the governor says only a handful currently look viable enough to have the necessary permits. Across the country, regulators have worried about speculative projects showing up in multiple interconnection queues and inflating forecasts before anybody has proved the customer, financing, or power plan is real.

That matters because utilities build decades-long assets against forecasts. If a speculative 500-megawatt project gets counted as inevitable, everybody can end up paying for infrastructure long after the spreadsheet that justified it has disappeared.

So add another rule: Prove you're real before the public builds around you. Put down financial security. Identify the end user. Show the power source. Accept a minimum bill that covers infrastructure reserved for you. And if you walk away, you don't get to leave a transformer-shaped hole in everybody else's rates.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported in April that electricity consumption by data centers jumped 17% in 2025, while electricity use at AI-focused facilities rose even faster. Its 2026 outlook still sees total data-center consumption roughly doubling by 2030 and AI-focused consumption tripling.

In the United States, data centers accounted for roughly half of total electricity-demand growth in 2025, according to the IEA. The Department of Energy had already estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of US electricity in 2023 and could reach 6.7-12% by 2028.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about using that much power. Aluminum smelters use enormous amounts of electricity. Steel mills use enormous amounts of electricity. Electrifying transportation and heating will use enormous amounts of electricity too. A serious industrial society needs to know how to build power.

The illegitimate part begins when one customer's expansion becomes everyone else's compulsory investment.

That risk isn't theoretical. In Virginia, the world's largest data-center market, Reuters reported this month that Dominion's fuel costs have risen nearly 90% in five years as data-center growth leaves the utility more exposed to expensive wholesale electricity. Across PJM, which serves 67 million people, the grid operator is now proposing rules that would put some new data centers first in line for curtailment during shortages unless they bring adequate power with them.

Good.

If an AI company wants the upside of scale, it can own the downside of scale too.

That means at least five things.

Make large-load customers pay for the incremental grid infrastructure they cause. Require financial security so households aren't stuck with stranded assets if a project disappears. Make large-load forecasts public enough to detect speculative projects being counted multiple times. Give communities access to energy, water, and ownership information before approvals. And establish emergency curtailment rules before the emergency arrives.

This is what mature industrial policy looks like. It doesn't worship growth, and it doesn't panic about growth. It prices the actual machine.

The alternative is a familiar political trick: Call the upside private innovation and the downside public infrastructure.

No.

If the AI boom is real, it can survive a full-cost test.

If a company needs a new power plant, let it pay for the whole damn thing.

On August 18, President Donald Trump said no talks with Iran were underway or scheduled, while the US naval blockade remained in force and Tehran insisted the Strait of Hormuz would stay closed until Washington met the terms of the June interim agreement. The impasse sharpens the most consequential question surrounding Trump’s legacy: not whether he wins or loses this war, but whether he leaves behind expanded presidential power, weakened constitutional checks on war making, and a diminished commitment to a rules-based international order. A president can leave office. A war can outlive him.

That is increasingly the danger confronting the United States. Trump’s confrontation with Iran has evolved from a military campaign into a constitutional and institutional test: Can an American president initiate and sustain major hostilities without explicit congressional authorization, and can Congress still meaningfully restrain him once the fighting has begun? The answer will shape far more than the remainder of Trump’s presidency. It will establish a precedent for every administration that follows.

The central issue is therefore not simply Trump’s foreign policy. It is the emergence of unchecked presidential power in the conduct of war. The United States entered the Iran conflict without a specific congressional authorization. Since then, the administration has advanced expansive interpretations of executive authority while Congress has struggled to reassert its constitutional prerogatives. The War Powers Resolution remains an important, if imperfect, mechanism for limiting the executive branch’s ability to sustain hostilities without congressional consent.

The danger becomes particularly acute when an administration can redefine the status of a conflict without ending the underlying military posture. The War Powers framework was designed to prevent presidents from converting temporary military action into an open-ended commitment: Absent congressional authorization, the law generally requires the president to terminate the use of US armed forces after 60 days. Yet the Trump administration has challenged the idea that this statutory clock should operate as an automatic constraint on presidential authority.

If lawmakers fail to reassert their authority, Trump’s most consequential legacy may be the normalization of a presidency capable of committing the United States to war without meaningful congressional authorization and leaving later administrations to deal with the consequences.

That creates a dangerous precedent. If a president can initiate hostilities, characterize them as limited or defensive, reinterpret the statutory clock, and then continue military operations without explicit authorization, the constitutional allocation of war powers becomes increasingly theoretical. The consequences are no longer hypothetical.

Congress has repeatedly attempted to invoke its war powers over Iran. In June, the House passed a measure directing the president to remove US forces from hostilities with Iran, and the Senate later adopted it. In July, the House again approved a war-powers resolution by 214-208, while the Senate rejected its own measure, 47-49. These votes expose the political problem: Congress is being asked to choose between institutional loyalty to the presidency and constitutional loyalty to the republic. For Republican lawmakers, the choice is especially consequential. Allowing a Republican president to expand executive authority without meaningful resistance establishes powers that a future Democratic president—or another Republican—could inherit in very different circumstances.

The question, therefore, is not whether Congress likes Trump. It is whether Congress is willing to allow presidential power to become self-expanding. Trump’s legacy also extends beyond the domestic constitutional order. His approach has placed pressure on the foundations of the liberal international system: predictable alliances, institutional constraints, multilateral diplomacy, and the assumption that American power operates within rules rather than merely according to presidential preference.

The Iran conflict demonstrates the problem with extraordinary clarity. The June agreement was intended to extend a ceasefire and create a pathway toward a permanent settlement, including negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. That framework has effectively collapsed. Trump has ruled out extending it; the confrontation around the Strait of Hormuz continues; and he has threatened military action against Oman, a US partner involved in efforts surrounding the strait. A mechanism meant to create a pathway out of war has become another stage in an unresolved confrontation.

Washington has even declared that it can maintain its naval blockade of Iran indefinitely. This is how wars acquire a life of their own. Once forces are deployed, enemies mobilize, allies become involved, economic interests are affected, and political credibility becomes attached to the outcome, withdrawal grows more difficult. The president who starts the war may eventually discover that ending it is politically more dangerous than continuing it.

And the president who inherits it may discover that he has inherited not merely a conflict, but an entire strategic architecture: deployed forces, military commitments, sanctions regimes, regional alliances, adversaries with incentives to retaliate, and political expectations that make disengagement appear equivalent to defeat.

Trump may therefore leave office, but the war may remain. This is the deeper paradox of his “America First” approach. A doctrine supposedly designed to reduce unnecessary foreign entanglements can instead produce new and potentially durable ones. The more Washington relies on military coercion without a clearly defined political end state, the more difficult it becomes to determine what victory actually means—and therefore what conditions would permit the United States to leave.

The consequences for American democracy are equally serious. Democracy does not depend solely on elections. It depends on institutions capable of constraining whoever wins those elections. If Congress becomes unwilling or unable to prevent reckless escalation without congressional consent, then the constitutional system has lost one of its most important safeguards.

This is why the current confrontation should not be reduced to a partisan dispute between Democrats and Republicans. The real issue is whether the United States still believes that war is a national decision rather than a presidential prerogative. Congress must therefore make a choice that transcends Trump himself: party loyalty or constitutional patriotism.

Republican lawmakers who defend Trump’s authority today should consider what they are actually defending. They are not merely protecting the foreign policy of one president. They are helping define the permissible scope of presidential power for decades to come. Once extraordinary powers become precedent, they rarely remain confined to the circumstances in which they were created.

The United States has survived presidents with radically different visions of executive authority. What allows the constitutional system to survive them is the willingness of institutions to impose limits on presidential power. If lawmakers fail to reassert their authority, Trump’s most consequential legacy may be the normalization of a presidency capable of committing the United States to war without meaningful congressional authorization and leaving later administrations to deal with the consequences. Trump will eventually leave the White House. The precedent he creates may not.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims Iran tried to kill one of his sons, but gave no details about ​when the alleged plot took place, which son was targeted or how ‌close it came to being carried out. Netanyahu’s oldest son, Yair, lives in Miami.

• The Supreme Court cleared a roadblock for Trump’s push to restrict mail-in ballots via the U.S. Postal Service, but a separate nationwide injunction keeps the rule blocked for now. The administration’s proposed rule for mail-in ballots could scramble the 2026 midterms by forcing local and state officials to adopt an untested federal system on short notice and potentially undermine confidence in U.S. elections.

• British Prime Minister Andy Burnham says the U.K. will help Ukraine make its own long-range missiles by sharing classified technical information for British components. Burnham, who was in Kyiv for Ukraine’s Independence Day, said defense firm MBDA will release details on U.K.-made parts for the SCALP missile to Ukraine to help the country assemble the weapons.

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The post Netanyahu: “Iran Tried to Kill My Son” | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

We are breaking past heat records, but they will not stand for long. Summer heat now arrives earlier, lasts longer, spikes higher, and lands in places that never planned for it.

For the tens of millions of Americans who work outdoors, and the millions more in warehouses, kitchens, and factories without air conditioning, there is still no federal standard requiring an employer to give a worker water, shade, rest, or training on a day when the heat can kill.

Between 1992 and 2019, more than 900 workers died from heat on the job, and every year tens of thousands more are sickened or injured—farmworkers collapsing in fields, roofers baking on exposed surfaces, laundry and dollar store workers laboring in buildings that trap heat like ovens. Those official numbers are undercounts, because heat deaths are chronically underreported.

Heat illness is not a scientific mystery. Heat stroke can kill in minutes, but staying safe is mostly about staying cool, hydrated, and getting help fast when confusion or dizziness sets in.

No one should be sent into a hotter, more volatile climate with nothing but the occasional popsicle and luck.

We protect workers from ladder falls, electric shocks, even excessive noise, with clear and enforceable rules. Yet there is still no federal standard requiring employers to provide the basics on dangerously hot days.

We came close. In 2024, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed the first-ever national heat safety standard. In 2025, the agency heard weeks of testimony from workers, doctors, unions, and employers. Then the progress on a strong rule stalled.

Now, some in Congress want to bury it for good. The House Education and the Workforce Committee recently voted to advance the Heat Workforce Standards Act, which would bar the Labor Department from finalizing or enforcing the heat rule.

This isn't a pause. It's a lock on the door, designed to stop not just this administration but any future one from protecting workers from heat. The bill's sponsor called workplace heat a problem that doesn't need solving. Easy to say when you spend every day in air conditioning. Impossible to accept when your loved one doesn't come home.

The industry groups behind the bill insist protections cost too much, the argument once made against seatbelts, hard hats, and fire exits. The numbers say otherwise. OSHA estimates a single average case of heat exhaustion costs more than $79,000 in medical bills, lost time, and lost productivity. Water and rest breaks are cheap. Hospitalizations and funerals are not.

So if Washington won't act, who will?

Investors can. Companies that get ahead of this aren't only doing right by their workers; they're managing a financial risk that shows up in turnover, litigation, and lost output. The Natural Resources Defense Council and Trillium's new guide for investors gives shareholders the questions to ask in the boardroom, and boards tend to listen when the people who own the company start asking them.

States can, and are. Seven now have heat standards, and lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Virginia are working to join them. Every state that acts protects its own workers now and builds the case that no one's safety should depend on their zip code.

The people facing this risk grow our food, build our homes, deliver our packages, and cook our meals. Many of them will not ask for water or a break today—afraid of retaliation, afraid of losing a shift, afraid of losing a paycheck they cannot afford to lose. No one should have to weigh a livelihood against a life. And no one should be sent into a hotter, more volatile climate with nothing but the occasional popsicle and luck.

Employers who resist these rules imagine that breaks cost them too much. They have it backward. Heat is already hurting both workers' health and their bottom line. Protections like water and rest don't subtract from a workday, they only help workers do their job.

The toll from this summer is still being counted. Every party to this—Congress, employers, investors, states—can still decide how high it goes.