Trump says “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker will be reported to FCC
The president of the United States threatened to sic the FCC on Meet the Press host Kristen Welker for, uh, reporting on the results of elections and pointing out that more and more of Trump’s endorsed candidates are losing. That’s it. Widely available information presented in a slightly critical way was enough to set off the world’s biggest baby, who raged-tweeted that “because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment,” and “how can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?” To that, we have to say “First Amendment, ever heard of it?” and “thank you for alerting us to the fact that you’re an even bigger loser than we previously thought you were!”

Take Action: Impeach RFK Jr. for unleashing epidemics of deadly disease with his insane policies!

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VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump pulls new scheme over his own convictions
Brian Tyler Cohen and legal expert Glenn Kirschner break down Trump’s desperate attempt to get his felony convictions erased.

Take Action: Restore the Voting Rights Act!

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Union ironworker takes on Big Lie-pushing MAGA radical in battle for critical House seat
Brian Poindexter for Congress: Brian Poindexter is a union worker and city councilman who has worked hard his entire life in machine shops, on construction sites, driving trucks, and serving his neighbors. He’s the perfect candidate to win over the working-class voters of Ohio’s 7th district, which is currently represented by a Republican who has spent his two terms in office towing the MAGA party line — and racking up a slew of nasty allegations, including domestic violence. Will you chip in to to help jump-start Brian’s campaign and help Democrats pick up this vital and winnable House seat?

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Gary, Indiana, is America’s latest climate victim
Sarah Lazare, The American Prospect: ” Ruben Chavez was in an elevator at his high-rise apartment in Gary, Indiana, on August 11, when severe storms knocked out the power. He got stuck between the fourth and fifth floors, and according to a staff member who helped retrieve him, workers at the building called 911, operated by Lake County, but nobody answered. So security and maintenance staff rescued Chavez themselves. ‘The security and maintenance guy came around and they brought me a ladder,’ he told me as he sat near the entrance to the Park Shore Commons, where the power was out for a total of 12 days. ‘I had to get on my belly and slide down. They guided my feet on the ladder.’

The building’s power was restored on August 22, but on August 26 when I visited, the complex reeked of rotten food, which had spoiled when refrigerators stopped working. World Central Kitchen, a humanitarian organization, was still stationed outside delivering food to the residents. The power is finally coming back on in Gary, though when I visited hundreds were still without. Stories are unearthing about the squalid—and sometimes dangerous—conditions that residents were forced to endure during outages that lasted up to two weeks. About 80 percent of Gary’s 69,000 residents are Black, and around a third live in poverty, the result of more than half a century of deindustrialization, disinvestment, racial segregation, and bank redlining.

The crisis, and the slow pace of power restoration, has shone a light on institutional neglect of this community, made worse by human-made climate change. Studies show that the tornadoes, thunderstorms, flooding, and heavy winds that tore through Northwest Indiana starting on August 11 will grow more frequent and severe as global temperatures warm.

Take Action: Tell the Forest Service: Don’t pave America’s roadless national forests!

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Centrist Dems are at war with their own voters on Israel
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin: “The ‘civil war’ currently playing out in the Democratic Party is usually thought of as a battle between socialists and progressives on the one hand, and centrists on the other. Which it is. But it’s also a battle between the Democratic establishment and its own voters. If you need proof, look at party leadership’s plans to install Jared Moskowitz and several other right-wing Democrats in influential foreign policy positions if the party retakes the House of Representatives. ‘I’ll be in a position to help steer US policy on Israel and the Middle East,’ said Moskowitz, who will become chair of the Middle East and North Africa subcommittee if the party wins big in November.

The views of the Democratic electorate on Israel are not ambiguous. A recent poll carried out by YouGov, for example, found that majorities of upward of 60 percent of Democratic voters across several key states overwhelmingly want their 2028 presidential candidate to cut off weapons for Israel and even sanction Israel over its illegal behavior. Moskowitz’s appointment is, to put it lightly, a slap in the face of this supermajority of his party’s own voters. Moskowitz is a darling of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for his implacable support for Israel’s genocide, opposing a ceasefire for months while Israeli forces carried out some of the worst killing and vehemently opposing any conditions whatsoever on US aid to Israel — even though, under US law, it’s already illegal to send aid to states violating human rights.

At one point, he was one of just sixteen Democrats to join the GOP in voting to reverse former President Joe Biden’s decision to stop sending Israel the largest, most indiscriminately destructive US bombs. At various points, he led a congressional effort to conceal the number of civilians Israel had killed, voted to defund the United Nations (UN) agency responsible for helping Palestinian refugees, and authored a bill to defund the UN if it expelled Israel, which he has introduced multiple times. Since then, he has lent his full support to Donald Trump’s free speech crackdown, supporting Trump’s attempt to deport a green card holder critical of Israel, writing a bill to punish Americans who boycott Israel, and pressuring Trump to retaliate against Colombia because of its president’s criticism of the country, which he did.

But beyond Israel and Palestine, House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’s decision to elevate Moskowitz also hands the party’s Middle East policy to a supporter of what has proven to be Trump’s most disastrous foreign policy decision, both on the politics and its actual outcomes for US interests: the Iran war. Moskowitz and the rest will play political cover for a leadership that remains out of step with, if not actively hostile to, the will of its own voters. It’s a strategy that will translate into more disastrous foreign policy choices that the rest of the country has to live with — but also only remains viable as long as Moskowitz and the others are able to keep winning their races.”

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The rebranding of “Lake America” is Trump’s desperate attempt to distract us
Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian: “Don’t mention the war! Or the economy, for that matter. Or the Epstein files. Or Natalie Harp. Or ‘affordability,’ which, as Donald Trump recently said at a rally, is a word that was ‘never used’ by the media before he took office. Best not to talk about anything that affects ordinary people or embarrasses the president, really. Instead, let’s all rejoice in Trump’s latest triumph: renaming Lake Ontario, which is shared by Canada and the US, as Lake America. On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to America-fy the lake’s name on US maps and documents, which is an excellent use of time and resources. I suppose we can at least be thankful that the president, who is trying to slap his own name on everything from airports to the Kennedy Center, didn’t decree that the body of water be called Lake Trump.

This is not an isolated embarrassment: the Lake Ontario name change follows the president’s rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America last year. ‘We have a gulf and we have a lake – now all we need is an ocean. Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific,’ Trump told reporters. Give it a few more months of the disastrous war in Iran and a bruised Trump may well make good on that threat: the man will do anything to distract from his failings. As well as being a distraction, this pathetic maneuver is supposed to be a middle finger to Canada. Trade negotiations between the US and Canada recently collapsed, with the Trump administration imposing a 50% tariff on some goods and the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, promising a ‘dollar for dollar’ response. One suspects that Trump thinks Lake Ontario is named after the Canadian province it borders. Ergo he reckons a unilateral name change is a good way of showing the US’s northern neighbour who is boss.

A US president ordering the name change of a Great Lake in order to antagonize one of its closest allies would have been headline news for weeks in a normal timeline. Now it’s just another Thursday. Still, this is more than a silly stunt that both Canada and the governor of New York have made clear they are going to ignore. It’s a glaring demonstration of just how desperate, isolated and out of ideas Trump is. Trump is weak and floundering: because he lacks the intellectual and diplomatic ability to reshape reality to his liking, he’s trying to rebrand it instead. But it doesn’t matter how many executive orders he signs; people will be calling Lake Ontario by its original name long after we can all stop calling Trump ‘president.’

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Food for thought

The Sunday roundup

Hope…

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