We’re Not Voting for Karl Marx, We’re Voting for a Damn Raise

     From left foreground, Michigan state Rep. Donavan McKinney, D-Detroit, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate primary candidate Abdul El-Sayed. (photo: Jose Juarez/AP)

Americans aren't embracing socialism—they're rejecting 45 years of Reaganomics, billionaire rule, and an economy rigged against the middle class… 

 

Thom Hartmann / The Hartmann Report

 07 August 26

  

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan seems to have broken the brains of Republicans and the chattering class.

Donald Trump’s pathetic bleats notwithstanding, people voting for progressive Democrats and “democratic socialists” aren’t voting for communism or even socialism; they’re trying to get America to the same sort of economy and form of government that works for everybody — a system somewhat like the one a majority of us had before Reaganism —that most other developed countries enjoy right now. That includes:

— A healthcare system that covers every American as a right of citizenship, where injury or illness won’t break a family. A half-million of our families lost everything to bankruptcy last year just because somebody got sick; that literally does not happen in any other developed country on Earth, just America. And wanting to free us all of that fear isn’t “communism.”

— An education system that really works for young people, instead of barely maintaining 70-year-old schoolhouses and slapping the Ten Commandments on the wall as if “Thou shalt have no other gods before me … for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” is going to incentivize students (it won’t).

— A college system like in every other developed democracy in the world where everybody, if they’re capable of handling the work, can get an education and graduate into the working world without debt. And an end to the existing ~$2 trillion in student debt, a crime visited on the generations coming up today by a handful of rich bankers and their Republican buddies.

— A political system where a foreign government, massive corporation, or a greedy billionaire can’t simply buy elections, legislators, and judges. Where citizens can easily vote without having to jump through a million hoops designed to drive down the participation of low-income people and women. Where people can trust that the government and its spokespeople are telling the truth under all circumstances.

— An environment where we can breathe the air and drink the water, the food is safe, and our collective actions have reduced the methane and CO2 that are driving climate change.

— An immigration system that reflects America’s embrace of diversity as “the great melting pot,” a phrase that was popular in the mid-20th century and is now derisively called “DEI.” No more masked secret police, no more concentration camps that lock up children and brutalize people who’ve never committed a crime (immigration violations are civil, not criminal). No more violations of the 4th and 5th Amendments, no more killing Americans for protesting, and no more arrests based on the color of a person’s skin.

— A tax system where the morbidly rich pay their fair share, instead of throwing that burden on working class people and the upper middle class — who often are now seeing their combined federal, state, and local tax rates run over 50% — while billionaires pay a fraction of 4% and absolutely nothing on literally trillions in unrealized wealth gains.

— Respect for international law, particularly the laws against violently attacking countries like Iran, Venezuela, or individuals in boats in the Caribbean who haven’t attacked us first. Defense of those countries who are under attack by Trump’s owner, Vladimir Putin, and his buddy President Xi. And respect for the human rights of Palestinians and acknowledgement of the criminal, genocidal slaughter they’ve faced under international war criminal Netanyahu.

— An economy where at least two-thirds of all American families can have what they had in 1981: the ability to buy a home, a car, take an annual vacation, put their kids through school, and have enough for a comfortable retirement. Instead, as Robert Reich points out:

“Household electricity costs are up 18%, ground beef prices are up 22%, gas prices are up 40%, ACA out-of-pocket premiums are up 58%, [and] inflation is at a three-year high.”

Americans aren’t really asking for that much: Canada has it all. England has it all. France has it all. Germany has it all. Spain has it all. As do dozens of other countries, all the way down to little Costa Rica.

This isn’t rocket science. People simply want a government that will help them and their children achieve their highest potential, an economy that’s not rigged by and for the morbidly rich, and a job that pays enough to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

The problem we face today is that a large cohort of our billionaire and CEO class are suffering from the mental illness commonly known as hoarding syndrome, a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder. There’s never enough for them, no matter how much they have, so they don’t care how many people must die or live in poverty for them to maintain their (tax-deductible) islands, palaces, bunkers, yachts, and private jets.

It’s like that popular meme you find these days all over the Internet:

“If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.”

Those billionaires and CEOs, following the 1971 advice of notorious tobacco lawyer and sociopath Lewis Powell, built out a massive think tank and media infrastructure to transform America from a middle-class nation into a full-blown oligarchy, where every decision made by the Supreme Court, Congress, and most state legislatures would take care of their wants and desires before those of anybody else.

Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court in 1972 and in 1978 he authored the Bellotti decision, saying that corporations are “persons” and money is the “free speech.” That let Reagan float into the presidency two years later on a tsunami of oil industry money (along with the treasonous deal he cut with Iran’s Mullah’s to hold the American hostages until after the election), remove Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House, and kill his plans for solarizing America.

Billionaires began immediately spiffing and sucking up to the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, who returned the favor in 2010 by doubling down on Bellotti with Citizens United. Now fortunes are spent on every election cycle, including tens of millions from groups representing the interests of foreign countries.

A few hundred billionaire families, representing considerably less than one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the American population, supplied roughly one-sixth of all the money spent on the 2024 federal elections and, in the presidential race, put down 44.5% of all the money spent by outside groups, virtually all of it for fellow billionaire Trump.

As Jimmy Carter told me almost a decade ago, America is no longer a democracy:

“Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery...”

This is what Americans are voting against this year in massive numbers, and no amount of name-calling and red-scare tactics by on-the-take Republicans and corporate Democrats, or hand-wringing by TV pundits and podcasters, is going to stop it.

Voters want fighters, and El-Sayed is a fighter. As are so many others in the Progressive Caucus and among the Zoomers, Millennials, and Gen X’ers now coming up into politics.

Americans know they’ve been screwed over the past 45 years since the GOP’s Reagan Revolution stopped seriously taxing the morbidly rich, killed off our unions, and sent our jobs overseas. And they’re rapidly waking up to exactly who it is who screwed them.

As my dear old friend Dick Gregory told me one brutally hot afternoon in Kampala as the two of us were touring Africa together in 1981 and discussing progressive change and US foreign policy:

“When you’ve got something really good, you don’t have to have to force it on people. They will steal it!”

American voters are in the process of stealing back their democracy and their middle class. Call it what you want, but it won’t be stopped.

Pass it along.

"For the people..."

Trump’s America Losing Billions Thanks to Canadians’ Boycott

 

Trump spewing money that Canadians used to spend in the U.S.
 

Your idiot prez has levied massive tariffs on Canadian goods, threatened Canadian sovereignty, and repeatedly insulted the Canadian people.  

 

Sophie Jager / The New Republic

5 Aug 26

President Donald Trump has made a habit of insulting our northern neighbors, and it’s coming back to bite him.

Canadians are boycotting travel to the United States in record numbers, costing the U.S. economy upward of $3.3 billion, the Canadian government reports. Tourism is at an all-time low this July, dropping more than 30 percent in year-over-year declines for the first time since 9/11.

“Following the change in the U.S. administration in early 2025 and the implementation of America First policies, Canadian travel sentiment shifted abruptly,” the report states.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the number of Canadians willing to describe the U.S. as a “reliable partner” has dropped from 83 percent in 2022 to only 35 percent today.

No mystery here: Since the start of Trump’s second term, he has levied massive tariffs on Canadian goods, threatened Canadian sovereignty, and repeatedly insulted the Canadian people. 

Just last week, Canada rescinded its invitations to U.S. officials for the grand opening of the Michigan–Ontario Gordie Howe Bridge, days after Trump imposed new 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian goods and blamed the country for wildfire smoke drifting across America’s northern border. Trump’s threats to turn Canada into the “51st state” and references to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as a “governor” only add insult to injury.

But actions have consequences. As Canadians sour on the prospect of visiting the U.S., the American people are losing tourist dollars to the tune of $3.3 billion.

“In response to these measures and threats to Canadian sovereignty, provinces, territories, and Canadians from coast to coast to coast have stood together, taking the necessary actions to support our economy and defend our workers, farmers, businesses, and families,” Prime Minister Carney wrote in a statement following the latest round of tariffs. “In all circumstances, Canada will work relentlessly and take any measures necessary to build our strength at home and to support Canadian workers, farmers, businesses, and families.”

If only President Trump could say the same.

The president sleeps while American burns (and Canada pulls out).

Trump loves making blue states suffer

 

Trump loves making blue states suffer

  

 "Cross me, will you?  To hell with you and to hell with your disasters. 

"It’s kind of our whole deal" as a democracy that all states be treated fairly and equally

 

by Lisa Needham

Daily Kos Staff 

Staff

Wednesday, Aug 2, 2026 at 1:00 PM MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Perhaps it’s best that the quiet part is pretty much being screamed now, and it’s all just out in the open that President Donald Trump is using the federal government to punish blue states without even the fig leaf of pretending it is about fraud or immigration or whatever.

Politico recently obtained emails showing that Trump personally overruled Federal Emergency Management Agency officials to deny disaster aid to New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York.

It’s pretty bleak to realize that these disaster aid requests were so airtight and valid that even the lackeys Trump has running FEMA thought they should be granted, but to no avail. 

Yes, the president has the sole authority to grant or deny disaster aid—which, come to think of it, seems to be kind of a big problem with the law here—but a former FEMA official told Politico that “I can’t think of a time a declaration was denied” after FEMA had verified the damages were enough to require disaster aid.

So this means denying aid to Rhode Island for the February 2026 blizzard that dumped 37.9 inches on the state in 24 hours and caused $19 million in damage, while approving $846 million in disaster relief for nine Republican-leaning states the same day. Trump also denied disaster aid to New York for the same blizzard.

While blue states are getting battered by the ravages of natural disasters and having to go it alone, Trump has approved nearly 90% of requests for aid from states governed by Republicans.

Of course, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson was duly trotted out to insist that “there is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief” and that Trump handles disaster requests “with great care.”

Ah, yes, like the “great care” with which Trump arbitrarily cancels grants for states that voted for Harris. Turns out that the administration is indeed openly politicizing how it doles out federal money, and apparently isn’t afraid to say it. 

Federal officials admitted in a court filing earlier this month that they totally lied when they said that the cancellation of over $7.5 billion in grants for clean energy projects in blue states was because the projects “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”

Whoopsie. Turns out they actually canceled the grants “based solely” on political criteria. “With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

Well, that’s not subtle, is it.

It isn’t clear why the administration decided to come clean on this, but there is one bleak theory, which is that the Department of Justice is admitting this in court to tee up an argument that it is perfectly fine and good and within the president’s authority to cancel any federal funding to any state that didn’t vote for him.

---

Related |Trump lackeys cry fraud to strip $10B from blue states

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Because that’s certainly Trump’s stance, from inventing fraud allegations to terminate billions in vital Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Child Care Development Fund aid in five blue states to pressuring blue states to join in his murderous deportation spree or lose completely unrelated federal funding. Or the creation of an anti-fraud “task force” that seems designed to overlook red state fraud and invent fraud in blue states in order to justify withholding federal money. Or killing the funding for the Hudson River tunnel project that affects New Jersey and New York and taunting Sen. Chuck Schumer about doing so. 

This isn’t how the United States works. States aren’t obliged to vote for the president to get money from the federal government. It’s kind of our whole deal. But this is the world we live in now, and until Congress or the Supreme Court tells Trump to knock it off, we’re stuck. 

"That'll teach you Antifas to cross the Donald.  May you wallow in your own disaster."

Yes, Trump Will Attempt a Coup

     People vote during primary elections at the Brooklyn Museum in New York on June 23, 2026.(photo: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

If we are vigilant, he won’t pull it off.  

 

Robert Kuttner / The American Prospect

30 July 26

Free and fair elections this November should produce a Democratic wave, mass repudiation of Trump, and the possibility of a new impeachment. 

With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that Trump has only one strategy for averting that fate: stealing the 2026 midterm election. He can’t seem to deliver a speech without returning to his obsession that he actually won the 2020 election, most recently in a prime-time address filled with false evidence of supposed foreign interference.

On January 6, 2021, Trump attempted to stage a coup and he will surely try again. Last time, only the integrity of a handful of Republican officials spared the Republic that fate. Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, rebuffed Trump’s demand to find exactly 11,780 votes, and Vice President Mike Pence refused to go along with Trump’s scheme, laid out in detail by John Eastman, to refuse to certify the results.

This time, Trump is relying on four possible strategies to steal the election. The survival of our democracy depends on whether each of them can be foiled, and how.

The first is to use executive orders and directives to gain control of voter rolls, which will then be purged using commercial databases that are rife with errors. These demands were spelled out in detail in Trump’s executive order of March 31. The order also required the U.S. Postal Service to deny mail balloting to states that did not comply with Trump directives.

This ploy has been complemented by threats from other Trump officials. Earlier this month, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials with prison time if they did not comply with Trump demands. But as I wrote in this piece, so far the courts have consistently blocked every single Trump effort to take over elections. Just last Saturday, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit blocked the Trump administration’s effort to move forward with mail-in voting restrictions in 23 states that sued ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Trump’s second strategy is to somehow get Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which could require proof of citizenship and photo ID for people to register and vote, and otherwise turn control of elections over to the federal executive. Trump has been willing to hold hostage one important legislative objective after another to try to compel Congress to pass this legislation. He has tied its passage to the renewal of a foreign surveillance law that expired last month, and refused to sign a bipartisan housing policy bill. The housing measure went into law without his signature.

The SAVE America Act has passed the House but is dead in the Senate. As Senate Majority Leader John Thune keeps telling Trump, the votes are simply not there. The House stuck a mini-SAVE in a budget bill that can be passed without Democratic votes, but Senate rules may disqualify it and Thune doesn’t want to pass that bill at all, because it would force his vulnerable members to take a series of unpopular votes, as my colleague David Dayen explained.

In the run-up to the November elections, the focus will shift to strategy number three: voter suppression, intimidation, and election disruption, both before and on Election Day. Democratic state attorneys general have been having regular “tabletop” exercises to anticipate Trump tactics and counter them.

What if the FBI showed up to a polling place, demanding election materials or equipment? Suppose federal troops or ICE agents were deployed to intimidate voters or disrupt the election? What if Trump declared a national emergency? Attorneys general have been working with secretaries of state to anticipate and block these and other tactics.

One valuable memo has just been circulated by Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the Minnesota ecumenical progressive group ISAIAH, and one of the most savvy on-the-ground organizers in the progressive movement. Her memo, titled “Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework,” summarizes all the possible Trump tactics, and strategies for anticipating and countering them.

She calls for “mapping the actual machinery of election administration,” finding the vulnerabilities, and “deploying organized people into the specific vulnerable spaces (county board meetings, legislative hearings, certification processes) well before November. The job is to pre-position the case against their power grab by naming their strategy in public, making it transparent, and going on offense.” The rapid response mechanisms, Schrantz writes, need to be political, legal, media, operational, and above all, organized, with massive grassroots deployment of large numbers of well-prepared citizens. The entire memo is worth a careful reading.

The most alarming Trump tactic would be an echo of January 6, 2021: an effort to stage a coup by overturning the results. The Constitution provides in Article I, Section 5 that each house of Congress is the sole judge of its membership. But actual election results are certified by the states. Courts have repeatedly held that such certification is mandatory.

The process and legal requirements are explained in this guide published by four legal defense-of-democracy groups, led by the Brennan Center. If a cabal of Republican secretaries of state or governors tried to stall or overturn actual results, the courts would quickly intervene. Only in the cases of extremely close elections, within a state’s legitimate rules for a recount, could certification be legitimately delayed.

Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Brennan Center, told me, “Across all states, certifying election results is a mandatory duty. If an official improperly delays or refuses to sign off on the results, state officials and courts can step in to compel certification. Every attempt to refuse certification since the modern election denier movement began has been unsuccessful.”

But a more sinister scenario was posed in a widely circulated article last week by New York Times columnist David French, an anti-Trump conservative who is also a lawyer. French points out that the process for contesting an election to the House is governed by the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969. Under that act, a losing candidate has 30 days after certification by a state to challenge the certification, and the challenge is ultimately decided by a simple majority vote of the respective chamber.

French poses a coup scenario, in which “even if Democrats win a House majority after all the votes are counted this fall, one or more defeated Republican candidates could try to persuade the lame-duck Republican majority not to permit their Democratic opponents to take office while the challenge is pending.” The incoming House would subsequently be flipped from majority Democratic to majority Republican. Because the Constitution is clear that each house is the sole judge of its membership, the courts could not intervene.

I’ve written about this risk, and something about French’s column struck me as off. I double checked, and confirmed that it is the new incoming Congress, not the lame-duck Congress (which expires on January 3) that certifies the new membership. I triple checked with Brennan’s Wendy Weiser, and she confirmed my finding.

When I emailed French, he also confirmed my reading of the law, but said that he was posing this scenario because the challenge process begins in the old Congress and that Republicans might try to act under “bad-faith readings of the law.”

But if dozens of losing Republican candidates, in a coordinated effort, claimed that they had really won, the usual judicial deference to the political process might well not apply. Courts would likely step in to uphold state certifications, and the duly elected new Congress would be seated.

If this Republic survives, it will take a combination of citizen mobilization and vigilant courts that have increasingly lost patience with Trump’s efforts to govern as a dictator.

DOJ Spent $1 Million on Banners of Trump’s Face

 

A banner of President Donald Trump on the exterior of the Robert F Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C. T (photo: Getty)

 

Depts. of Agriculture, Labor, and Interior also using your tax dollars on Trump banners  

 

Graig Graziosi / Indenpedent

29 July 26

Depts. of Agriculture, Labor, and Interior also spending your tax dollars on Trump banners on their headquarters

The Department of Justice has reportedly spent nearly a million dollars hanging giant banners featuring President Donald Trump’s face on its headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The DOJ is based out of the Robert F Kennedy Department of Justice Building.

The department reportedly signed a contract for the banners in January for an "RFK Beautification Project" that included cleaning the building's exterior walls, upgrading its exterior lighting, and hanging the Trump-visaged "Celebratory Banners," according to records obtained by Politico.

The DOJ spent a total of $892,192.07 on the project, according to the documents. An additional $54,768 was spent on the project under a "supplemental agreement" this week, the records show.

The line items showing exactly how much money the department spent on the Trump banners were redacted, according to Politico. The DOJ cited the protection of "trade secrets" to justify the redaction.

“The banners were part of a broader beautification project for the historic RFK building, executed under an existing DOJ construction contract,” a DOJ spokesperson told the outlet. “We are proud at this Department of Justice to celebrate 250 years of our great country, and our historic work to make America safe again at President Trump’s direction.”

The DOJ's headquarters isn't the only building in the nation's capital that's sported Trump's face on its exterior. The first of the banners — which has since been removed — was hung at the Department of Agriculture earlier this year. That banner hung near another one depicting Abraham Lincoln and cost the agency $16,400.

The president has also been trying to add his name to various Washington, D.C. sites. He added — and was then forced to remove — his name to the Kennedy Center, and slapped his moniker on the outside of the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Trump's banners were produced by Llorente Enterprises, based in nearby Alexandria, Virginia. In addition to his face, the banners outside the DOJ include the phrase "MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN."

Senator Adam Schiff, who is critical of the president and the banners, has been investigating agencies using the images.

He said in a statement last week that he found a $39,000 contract for the Department of the Interior's banners that feature Trump alongside George Washington.

The senator said the banners were a waste of public tax dollars.

“Not only is this a terrible waste of Americans’ hard-earned money, it is clearly against the law,” he said. “Congress has long outlawed spending tax dollars on propaganda and self-aggrandizement and an eight-story-high Donald Trump head certainly qualifies as propaganda.”

Hegseth flames out in effort to defend Iran war

 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on July 21. AP

 

 Trump admin's complete failure to defeat Iran, reopen Strait of Hormuz 

by Emily Singer

Daily Kos Staff 

July 25, 2026 at 9:00 AM MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to ask Congress for another $67 billion for President Donald Trump’s war in Iran. And to say it went poorly for Hegseth would be an understatement.

The unqualified former Fox News host, who never should have been confirmed to his job in the first place, angrily sneered and had toddler-like tantrums as Democrats asked him questions he struggled to answer. 

The war has obviously been a disaster, leading at least 18 American troops to be killed and at least 427 other service members to be injured. The Trump administration has inflicted economic pain and hardship on Americans for a conflict that has so far cost the nation at least $37.5 billion.

During the hearing, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia embarrassed Hegseth by using the defense secretary’s own comments to show that the war has been a failure.

Ossoff repeated Hegseth’s assertions in April on in the war that Iran’s military had been taken out, that the war was a “historic and overwhelming victory” for the United States, and that the “every single objective” had been “achieved.” Yet, over three months later, the war is ongoing, with Iran launching deadly attacks against American troops and holding the global economy hostage with its blockade of the Hormuz Strait.

“You will not answer whether your statement made on the 14th day of the war that Iran’s military was ‘destroyed and made combat ineffective’ was a truthful statement to the American people as you sit here and ask for tens of billions more for the conflict,” Ossoff said.

Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan continued Ossoff’s line of questioning, showing how Iran still has missile capability and is killing American troops.

You’re asking the American people for a blank check, because once again, the Trump administration’s efforts have been an utter and complete failure to win this war to this point,” Peters said.

Clearly rattled by Democrats’ questioning, Hegseth crashed out, yelling at Peters, “You have Trump derangement syndrome!” and blaming Peters for the death of troops for not giving Hegseth another $67 billion in taxpayer dollars to continue this boondoggle of a war.

“It’s not a question of money; it’s a question of leadership and understanding what it takes to actually win,” Peters said, after calling Hegseth a “failure.”

People stand on a bridge destroyed after a strike in Hormozgan province, southern Iran, on July 18. AP

Ultimately, Hegseth’s request for more money to continue Trump’s disastrous war is a political headache for Republicans, who are in the position of having to either deny Trump more funds or anger Americans who broadly oppose the war.

Gas prices are once again surging after hostilities between the U.S. and Iran resumed. As of Wednesday, the average price per gallon in the United States stands at $4.06, according to AAA. That’s a 17-cent increase in a week. 

The war is now unpopular even with Trump’s MAGA base, only around a third of whom think fighting has been worth the economic cost, according to a poll Politico released Tuesday.

Republicans are admitting that the war is likely to cost them mightily in the November midterms.

“We’re preparing for the bottom to fall out,” an unnamed “GOP operative working on midterm races” told Politico.

In fact, the war is so bad that even the Trump sycophants at Fox News are begging him to get it under control. 

“The clock is ticking for President Trump to get out of this war before voters head to the polls,” said Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “It’s making a lot of Republicans nervous—it’s already, as we know, unpopular.”

Showing some awareness of this quagmire of his own making, Trump on Wednesday once again threatened to commit war crimes in order to scare Iran into surrender, saying that the U.S. will destroy a bridge or a power plant in the country every time Iran attacks a ship in the Hormuz Strait.

It’s a strategy Trump had early on in the war, and he is reverting to it as he flails. 

The situation is so bad that Republicans are now warning that this might be another forever war like the ones former President George W. Bush started in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“They don’t have a plan here,” an unnamed “person close to the White House” told Politico. “This is a classic escalation trap.”

Would you trust these two clowns if you had a son or daughter in the military?  Would you trust them to wage war even if you didn't?

Global Warming Unmakes Winter in the U.S. West

 People fish along the Deer Creek Reservoir near Heber City, Utah, on Feb. 7, as the state experiences about one-third of its normal early-February snowpack. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty)

 

Worst snow drought on record foreshadows imperiled water supply in Western U.S.

Bob Berwyn / Inside Climate News 

22 July 26

For millions of people across the American West who rely on water from winter storms to sustain farms, towns and industries, last winter became an agonizing vigil for snow that seldom came.

What little snow did fall melted much too quickly, leading to the worst snow drought on record for nearly the entire mountain backbone of the region, from northern Montana to the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades, through Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado and Utah, and into New Mexico and Arizona. 

It disrupted daily life and caused economic hardships, dried up streams, left reservoirs depleted and primed forests and grasslands to burn in wildfires.

And if the planet continues warming at the current pace, a snow drought as severe and widespread as last winter’s could occur every third year by 2050, and nine out of 10 years by the end of the century, said a team of researchers from Montana, Wyoming and Colorado who analyzed how human-caused warming of the climate system influenced the drought.

Their extreme event attribution study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that global warming has already made such a drought about four times more likely today than in a climate without industrial fossil fuel emissions.

As dry and especially warm conditions persisted for months, uneasiness spread through mountain ski towns and ranching communities. Fearing the summer—and years—ahead, “scientists, the recreation industry, and the press asked whether the low snow anomaly was attributable to climate change,” the authors wrote in the paper.

It became apparent that the 2025-2026 snow drought would make a compelling case study for extreme-event attribution research, said lead author Adrienne Marshall, an assistant professor and hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines.

The findings have serious implications for state and federal agencies managing water and other natural resources. The study found that global warming made such an extreme snow drought about 14 times more likely in the Upper Colorado River Basin, where accumulated snow usually melts slowly into the summer, providing water to river ecosystems, orchards and power plants thousands of miles away in the deserts of the Southwest.

Marshall said it was a ”gut punch” when the study showed how much more frequent extreme snow droughts will likely be if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t reduced. It really hit home, she added, when she went on a spring snowpack survey to several high-altitude measuring sites at Hidden Valley and Trail Ridge Road in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park.

“There was just so much bare ground where there should have been snow,” she said. “It was really striking, and it brought home what we were seeing in the analysis.”

Recent progress in climate modeling bolstered their confidence in the results, she said.

In particular, co-author Stefan Rahimi, an assistant professor of computing and atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming, used a new generation of high-resolution Earth system models that simulate the atmosphere and mountains at a resolution fine enough to capture rugged terrain where snowfall and the accumulation of frozen precipitation can vary dramatically over short distances.

At the heart of the effort was a high-resolution physics-based snow data set for the Western U.S., which took him four years to compile, even with some time on the University of Wyoming-based Derecho supercomputer, a flagship system for climate modeling and a partnership between the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Science Foundation.

Simply running climate models at higher resolution without improving how well they represent the underlying physics is a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle with more pieces, but many of them are blank or blurry. For an attribution study on a snow drought, those pieces have to be filled with detailed information on how mountains shape storms, how snow collects and how it melts. Without that, finer-scale simulations are a “fool’s errand,” he said.

Co-author Marianne Cowherd, a climate and Earth scientist and assistant professor at Montana State University, said she used to mainly think of snow as a transportation headache, and a source for school snow days, having grown up in Michigan. When she moved to California, she came to see mountain snow as stored water, a shift in perspective that made snow a compelling way to study climate change.

The snow drought started unfolding even as the winter seemed about normal at first, she said, with only slightly below average precipitation in the Northern Rockies. The problem was persistent warmth. Every major river basin in the West experienced either its warmest or second-warmest winter on record, according to federal agencies. 

Often, rain fell instead of snow even at elevations higher than 8,000 feet above sea level, where winter rain is historically rare. It evaporated into the warm air, slowly at first, and then all at once when the region was blistered by a March heatwave that left some snow-measuring sites snow-free in early April, when the snow should be at its deepest.

Around Bozeman, people were shocked by early ski area closures and started worrying much sooner than usual about dry forest fuels and the wildfire danger. What struck Cowherd the most was when “people around town started thinking farther ahead than they normally would, and connecting poor snowpack with fire, water and the rest of the climate system,” she said.

One of Cowherd’s contributions to the research was developing ways to define and categorize snow droughts in measurable terms, for example by the total water content stored in the regional snowpack in spring, when supplies for the summer season are assessed.

If extreme snow droughts happen frequently by the end of the century, she added, “We may need to reexamine how we’re defining drought, and even what we intuitively mean by a drought. Is it about an expectation? Is it about supply?”

Among people who spend a lot of time thinking about climate change and studying climate models, “there’s this sense that you just know that certain trends that you see must be driven by climate change,” she said. But a statistical evaluation, considering whether climate change is a factor, or whether an event would have happened without warming, “is a much more rigorous type of question,” she said.

“I think the most surprising thing was just how much the Upper Colorado stood out as being just quite scary,” she said. As the study began, she focused on how unusual it was that so many places were experiencing snow shortages simultaneously. “And then this project really showed me how much worse it was in the Upper Colorado than in any other part of the West.”

Besides depleting water supplies, droughts greatly increase the occurrence of massive forest fires.