Summertime and the readin' is easy! Good articles by Cole Bennett, Paul Wells, Ryan Broderick, Garrett Graff, Tom Scocca, and Paul Krugman, plus funny posts and TrumpWatch

Before doom befalls us on August 19, I wanted to recommend some interesting articles and comments - they aren't exactly a beach novel, but good reads all the same.

First, the more I read journalist Cole Bennett, the better I like his stuff -- his columns are both interesting and useful. His newsletters cover a range of daily news stories and I recently decided to subscribe to this substack because its a daily summary I can't find anywhere else. 

Here are a couple of examples:
Cole Bennett / Cole.notcole

Tuesday Night
MILITIAS TAKEN DOWN, AMAZON UNDER INVESTIGATION, CANADIAN BOOZE TAKEOVER, GAZA CAMPS, MORE TARIFFS......
Domestic Terror Plot Foiled in Quebec...
Trump’s 50% Copper Tariff Could Backfire...
Amazon’s “Fair Pricing” Policy Under Investigation...
Alcohol Sales Deal Reached “Mostly”...
Israel Planning Internment-Style Camps in Gaza...

And his commentaries focus on larger issues:

How the Left in Canada Can Stay United—And Actually Win
...The left fractures over strategy, party loyalty, and personality politics. The Green Party calls the Liberals sellouts. The NDP calls the Liberals fake progressives. Liberals roll their eyes at both. And while we argue over who’s more left, the right is laser-focused on winning.
But here’s the bottom line:
If the left actually wants to help people, it has to win.
...We’ve got to stop treating political parties like sports teams. If you support:
-Public healthcare
-Climate action
-Reconciliation
-Disability justice
-Affordable housing
-Protecting 2SLGBTQ+ rights
…then you’re on the same side. The fight isn’t between the Liberals, NDP, and Greens. It’s against the Conservative Party, and figures like Pierre Poilievre, Danielle Smith, and Doug Ford, who are actively trying to dismantle progress....

In other news, some American politicians are fed up with Canadian wildfire smoke so they making An Official Complaint To The Management:

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Cry me a river, fellas...(actually, that might help)

Next, Paul Wells gives us a fascinating analysis of a recent New York Times interview with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who seems to be a Trump fan now. 

Paul Wells

Daddy's club
To NATO's top civilian, the alliance makes no sense without Trump. Plus: a letter from the new Clerk (not to me)
....I can already imagine the comment-board rationalizations about how I am being a Gloomy Gus, and there is no contradiction at all between the new era of Canadian independence and the new era of paying a skull-numbing alliance tab, and how we need to get closer to NATO to get further from Trump, it’s like, you know, whaddya call it, a slingshot effect, blah blah blah. In fact I can make myself believe a lot of that too. NATO has been wargaming Russian invasion scenarios on the ground across the Baltics continuously since 2017, and all of that makes more sense with American soldiers on the ground than without them. Flattering Daddy would, in theory, be a small price to pay for holding that line.
But it’s not entirely emotionally satisfying, is it. I heard from progressive friends who were great admirers of Carney right up until they heard the numbers out of the Hague NATO summit, and started to realize how many billions there are between here and 5%. Canadian foreign-policy politics is rarely salient in our broader politics, but when it is, it’s largely in the service of telling ourselves some kind of story of standing up to Uncle Sam. Chrétien kept us out of Iraq. Pierre Trudeau smirked at Nixon and Reagan. Paul Martin stayed out of missile defence. And on and on.
Every one of those stories was more complex than it’s remembered. Pierre Trudeau let Reagan test cruise missiles over the prairies, for instance. But all the political potency is on the side of those who can cast Canada’s foreign policy as a means of keeping the Americans at bay. Just ask Lloyd Axworthy, whom I include here not as some sort of comic figure, but as a representative of a nationalist and progressive sentiment that Liberals, of all people, ignore at their peril.
What’s to be done about all this? I don’t have a lot of certainty. You make the decisions you need to make, ideally with an eye to something more serious than branding. But it’s at least worth acknowledging that the massively higher price tag Carney has accepted for the next decade of his defence and foreign policy only buys Canada a ticket to bigger dilemmas with higher stakes....

Wells also prints without commentary the email that Michael Sabia, the new Clerk of the Privy Council sent on Monday to Canada's civil servants - I think its interesting particularly because today Carney said he intended to make significant cuts to the civil service to pay for the new budget initiatives.

Next, Ryan Broderick has a great summary of how the Texas flooding tragedy happened and the nutty conspiracy theories that are trying to blame the deaths on anyone except the people actually responsible - Republican leaders in Texas:
Ryan Broderick / Garbage Day

Thoughts and prayers, etc.
...Conservatives spent the weekend trying to create a narrative for the floods that, you know, excused them of any fault. Which was difficult, seeing as how even X’s anti-woke AI bot Grok said it was Republican funding cuts that led to this weekend’s flooding deaths. It literally told users, “facts over feelings.” Ouch. But that’s ok. When reality doesn’t fit your ideology, it’s time to change reality.
...the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in just 45 minutes,” former Fox News producer Kylie Jane Kremer posted on X over the weekend. “That doesn’t even seem natural,” alluding to a common climate change explanation among America’s most unhinged, that, actually, there is some kind of nefarious group manipulating the weather to target conservatives....

And the conspiracies get even nuttier as the scale of the tragedy increases. 

I watched this press conference today and it was awful to see how they were bobbing and weaving around questions about why people weren't warned in time:

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Next, another chilling piece from Garrett Graff about what I now call the ICE Gestapo:
Garrett Graff / Doomsday Scenario

Four Fears about ICE, Trump's New Masked Monster
We're about to pour $200 billion into immigration enforcement—but understanding specifically why this is a bad idea is important.
...we’re turbo-charging an increasingly lawless regime of immigration enforcement and adding superpowers to America’s newly masked secret police....It’s easy intellectually to realize that pouring $200 billion dollars into immigration deportation and expulsion efforts is a bad idea, but I haven’t seen a lot of reporting and analysis that breaks down the why. So I wanted to write today about why specifically we should fear this increase in ICE funding ...we should be deeply fearful about what pouring $200 billion of combustible rocket fuel on our immigration enforcement will do to our country.

And Graff goes on to detail what is going to go badly wrong in America now. Grim stuff! 

Here's a similar sentiment, more succinctly stated:

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Next, Tom Scocca focuses on Trump's incredible immature pettiness -- remember Sharpie-gate? Well, its even worse now. I think that as Trump becomes less capable of any big thoughts, he takes refuge in small victories against minor enemies.
Tom Scocca / Defector

Totally Petty
...One side of Trump's presidency is his taste for grand tyranny, for wielding the vast powers of the United States in the most lawless and ugly ways he can. Congress and the Supreme Court have given up their own prerogatives to him, granting the White House illegal but effective license to dictate how the country spends its money, what its trade agreements are, who can work in the civil service and under what conditions, which niceties of the Bill of Rights his law-enforcement agents may choose to ignore.
The other side of Trump's rule, though, is his equally relentless insistence on meddling in things that are none of the president's business at all. Why should the president be in charge of collegiate swimming records? Formally, there was a chain of argument under it all about federal funding for higher education, the duty of institutions that receive such funding to ensure nondiscrimination, the contention that women assigned female at birth were being discriminated against by competing with and against a trans woman—but that was put together to justify what Trump wanted to do anyway. The federal government has enough obligations and enough opportunities to interfere that Trump can almost always find some lever to pull. ...

Next, Paul Krugman gives us an update on the Trump tariff shenanigans with sending silly letters around the world that make impossible and incoherent demands:
Paul Krugman

The Tariff Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
News flash: Trump is still Trump
...Many investors seem to have deluded themselves into believing that Trump was done disrupting world trade, and some economists, myself included, were hoping that we wouldn’t keep having to write about stupid, feckless trade policy. But here we go again.
...The point is that Trump doesn’t feel bound by trade deals America has made in the past. Why should anyone expect him to honor any new deals he makes, or claims to make, now?
Obviously this behavior isn’t unique to tariffs. Many domestic institutions, from law firms to universities, have discovered that attempting to appease Trump buys you at best a few weeks’ respite before he comes back for more.
It’s possible that the governments receiving Trump’s tariff letters haven’t figured that out yet. But they will. And my bet is that the TACO people — Trump always chickens out — are wrong in this case. I’ll be happy to be proved wrong, but right now it looks as if deeply destructive tariffs are really coming.

Rachel Vindman captures how bizarre this all is:

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Finally, TrumpWatch - my irregular feature of posts about Trump's passing:

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