Sam Smith - The DC History
Center and Humanities DC have entered into an agreement to merge and become a
new organization. This may seem like insignificant news to many but for my wife
and I it’s quite startling because my wife Kathy ran the history center and I
helped to start the DC Humanities Council. As the two groups put it, “Together,
we are creating a unified nonprofit dedicated to preserving the District's
history, celebrating its culture, funding the humanities, and helping
Washingtonians better understand our city and one another.”
August 18, 2026
Bringing history and humanities together
Abortions
Prime Chronicle - Massachusetts erased its 24-week abortion limit and handed late-pregnancy decisions to a doctor’s professional judgment, igniting a national fight over how far the state should go. The governor’s office says the change ensures timely care for serious pregnancy complications. Opponents argue the law permits abortion until birth and say it endangers women’s safety. State data show very late abortions are rare, but the details behind cases are limited.
Federal judge supports FBI's planned move
Alternet
- A federal judge dealt a crushing blow to Donald Trump on Monday,
permanently blocking his administration's "unlawful" attempt to
hijack over $1 billion and cancel the FBI’s planned move to Maryland.
The ruling is a major victory for
Maryland and Prince George’s County officials. They fought the administration’s
July 2025 plot to scrap a decade-old plan to build a massive new FBI
headquarters in Greenbelt, Maryland. Trump had instead tried to squeeze the law
enforcement agency into a smaller footprint at the Ronald Reagan Building in
downtown D.C.
In a scathing opinion, the
federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s relocation plan and
blocked the FBI from redirecting the half-billion dollars in funds. The judge
ruled that Trump did not have the authority to unilaterally alter the plan, stating
he legally needed congressional approval to shift the money away.
"Maryland and Prince
George’s County committed more than a decade of work to earn the FBI
headquarters and pledged hundreds of millions of dollars," Maryland
Attorney General Anthony Brown said in a statement celebrating the decision.
"By blocking the Trump Administration’s unlawful attempt to move the FBI
to the Reagan Building and divert the funds Congress set aside for this
project, the Court has cleared the path back to Greenbelt."
Debate over the aging J. Edgar Hoover Building has continued
since 2011. The Greenbelt site was selected because it met strict Senate
requirements, including proximity to a Metro station.
ABC files suit against Federal Communications Commission
Axios
- ABC on Tuesday filed a lawsuit
against the Federal Communications Commission, arguing the agency has violated
its First Amendment rights by retaliating against the broadcaster for its
editorial decisions… It's a major escalation of ABC's fight with the FCC, which
it argues is motivated by broader efforts to silence a free and independent
press.
The lawsuit, filed with the U.S.
District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that in ordering an
accelerated review of ABC's local station broadcast licenses, the
administration "has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single
reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts."
It points to statements made by
FCC chairman Brendan Carr that suggest the administration has not been shy
about openly coercing ABC into changing its programming.
It cites an incident last month
in which Carr said ABC's decision not to broadcast the president's Oval Office
address was likely to be raised during its early review of ABC's broadcast
licenses.
The network is seeking an
injunction, asking the court for a temporary restraining order to stop the FCC
from moving forward with its early license-renewal proceedings.
Trump regime altering or killing significant data
The
Guardian - A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct
records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against
children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality
monitors from US embassies around the world.
These are among the hundreds of
federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as
part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do
not align with the administration’s priorities.
Over the past year and a half, at
least 28 federal datasets have been deleted and another 338 data collections
have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from
dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that
formed last year to monitor changes to government data.
“We’re at a very vulnerable point
as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden
administration and a co-founder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where
we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that
will save lives and benefit American communities.”
The tracker includes detailed
information about deleted or altered datasets from more than 60 federal
agencies that span the environment, labor, law enforcement and other topics.
But datasets on health appear to be the most affected by the Trump administration’s
crackdown, comprising about 40% of the total number of terminated or altered
data collections tracked by dataindex.us.
Trump and North Korea
MS
Now - With no intelligence, data or proof provided to back up his
assertion, Trump appears to be blindly trusting that North Korea’s murderous,
prison-state regime has turned a page toward global peace. With that choice,
Trump is unilaterally rejecting American intelligence threat assessments,
military preparedness and history. He’s also getting nothing in return for it….
Indeed, this isn’t the first time. Trump is resurfacing an old issue and gambit from his first term. The president has long wanted South Korea and other allies to pay a greater share for their defense, including the military exercises required to ensure it. In 2018, after meeting Kim, Trump surprised the Pentagon by halting regular military exercises with South Korea. After much global criticism and criticism inside and out of the Pentagon, the exercises resumed, but they were scaled back.
At best, Trump is playing with fire. At worst, he is
willfully endangering American lives, interests and influence for the chance at
saving money, based on nothing but a gut feeling.
August 17, 2026
Recovering real values - from those we learned on TV
I look forward to early afternoon
because I feel like I’m retrieving my real life. Yet I am also aware that this
shift is shared with millions of other Americans and hardly ranks as a solution
since tomorrow morning I will be back in hell.
Scholars and journalists are
rightfully confronting the collapse of an America now defined in no small part
by the rich and powerful. The fact that there is another more decent and useful
place gets little attention.
Yet I find myself regularly
involved with decent people, kind groups, and warming spirits. And increasingly
my mind is suggesting that the real conflict is between a good America and a
destructive one. Both involve us.
As I ponder the hidden conflict
that defines us these days, I have come to credit television with deserving
much the blame. Although TV has done
some positive things, like introducing white America to blacks, it has also taken time away from neighbors, communities,
groups and other forces that create positive change.
I go back far enough to have
experienced movements and coalitions of real people helping other real people
even if we were quite different. For
example this white guy worked with black activists in the 1960s and I was a
seventh day agnostic who joined with ministers who had common goals. You don’t
have such experiences just watching a screen in your bedroom.
Donald Trump is a creation of television politics and a clear example
of the dangers involved. We need to go back to seeing, talking and thinking
about life from a community rather than a televised creation. On average, we
are still far better than Donald Trump. We need to win back our real America and
define ourselves and our goals by our community, good groups, religion, local
politics and anything else more valuable
than what we we just saw on Channel 8.
Weather
Bloomberg - At least six people died in Indiana after severe storms and floods inundated the Midwestern state, prompting Trump to approve a federal emergency aid request. In Hawaii, one person was killed as Lala battered the islands with heavy rain. The storm weakened from a hurricane yesterday but is still expected to bring more rain to the Big Island and windward Maui.
Severe storms and flooding across Indiana Saturday have caused at least
seven deaths as of this writing. President Donald Trump issued an emergency
declaration to provide resources and aid relief.
1440 - Portions of southeast Indiana are
underwater due to the White River rising to record-breaking levels (see drone footage of flooding). The river crested at nearly 25
feet Saturday, surpassing the previous record set in 1913 by over a foot.
Rainfall exceeding 11 inches drenched parts of Indiana east of Indianapolis
over two days last week, sending water rushing into the White River and its
tributaries. About 300,000 people across the state experienced power outages.
Warnings remain in effect, but floodwaters are expected to recede in some
areas.
Separately, a tropical storm that
began as Hurricane Lala brought strong winds and rain to multiple Hawaiian islands
Saturday. Roughly 70% of the Big Island lost electricity, and at least one
person died in a storm-related car accident.
Supreme Court rejects Trump's E Jean Carroll case again
New
Republic - President Trump’s
last desperate attempt to avoid paying E. Jean Carroll has just been shut down
by the Supreme Court. Trump sought to
overturn a 2023 jury verdict awarding $5 million to Carroll for defamation and
alleged sexual abuse. The Supreme Court rejected an earlier appeal from Trump
in June, and Trump wanted them to take the rare step of rehearing the case,
which the court unceremoniously denied Monday.
Meanwhile....
NPR - Italian police said
on Friday that they had recovered paintings stolen from a museum in March. The
next day, thieves in Sicily managed to nab four more masterpieces.
Republican finances
The
Hartmann Report - There’s a reason everything is getting so expensive
and inflation seems intractable, and it goes way beyond just Trump’s stupid
war-of-choice in Iran. It explains why the morbidly rich keep getting richer
while the rest of America struggles, and why people are paying absurd interest
rates on everything from credit cards to home mortgages to car loans, and it
all rolls back to a wild conspiracy Republicans hatched in the late 1970s and
Reagan put into place in 1981.
It starts with — thanks to three
mind-bogglingly corrupt and illegitimate Republican presidents (Reagan, W.
Bush, and Trump) — our national debt rolling past $40 trillion in the next few
days, probably before Labor Day. That’s more than our entire nation’s total
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the sum of all goods and services produced in
the last year, which came in just a whisker over $32 trillion.
And we’re paying over a trillion
dollars a year on that debt that was intentionally run up by those 3 Republican
presidents and their buddies in Congress, which is a large part of why we’re
the only developed country in the world where families can go bankrupt because
somebody got sick and kids graduate from college with debt that will take them
decades (if ever) to pay off.
As if to shove it in our faces,
last week Trump proposed a new cut in the capital gains tax that is pretty much
exclusively paid by rich people … To add insult to injury he just raised taxes
on working class people’s wages by an average of $900 this year via the GOP’s
Big Beautiful Bill that passed without a single Democratic vote.
Todd Blanche
The
Guardian - US attorney general
Todd Blanche on Sunday declined to assure that the federal justice department
he helms would always act independently of the White House and Donald Trump. “No, I’m not going to pledge that,” he said
when asked about the topic by NBC’s Meet the Press host, Kristen Welker. “And
no attorney general should ever pledge that.”
Harry Truman on socialism
Via Colin Fraser
“Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
Polls
Time - Socialism has
a +40 net favorability among Democrats, compared
to –60 among Republicans, according to a new survey. The split is sharp: 58% of
Democrats view socialism positively, while 18% view it negatively, while 74% of
Republicans view the ideology negatively, with only 14% viewing it positively.
Trump's communist pal
Alternet - Although U.S. President Donald Trump is
attacking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other Democrats as
"communists" (which they aren't—Mamdani identifies as a
"democratic socialist"), he often speaks fondly of an actual
communist: North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Trump is now cutting back on
military drills with South Korea while citing his "very good
relationship" with Jong Un, and in the process, he is generating a great
deal of discussion — some of it quite negative.
On MS NOW, conservative host Joe Scarborough lambasted Trump for his "love letters" to Jong Un — who the former GOP congressman described as the "worst, most repressive tyrant on the face of the earth." Foreign policy expert Richard Haass, on MS NOW, pointed to the South Korea exercises as a troubling example of why many U.S. allies feel like they "can no longer trust the United States."
Chuck Schumer faces opposition
The
Hill - Questions are growing
about Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) future as an increasing number of
Democratic candidates say they will not support his bid for another
term as Senate Democratic leader. Progressive critics of the
Democratic establishment are calling for a leadership shake-up in Washington as
their candidates win Senate Democratic primaries in Illinois, Maine, Michigan
and Minnesota.
These candidates have the backing
of progressive Democratic senators in Schumer’s caucus. They say the party has
become too aligned with corporate interests and is not fighting hard enough to
increase taxes on the wealthy and expand the social safety net.
Progressive candidates Abdul
El-Sayed in Michigan, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota and Troy Jackson in Maine,
who are all running as Democratic Senate nominees, say they will not vote for
Schumer as leader.
Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana
Stratton, who won the Democratic primary to succeed retiring Democratic Whip
Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), said in March she won’t vote for Schumer to serve another
term because “voters all across the state of Illinois” are “fed up with what’s
happening in Washington.”
Even so, Senate Democratic
insiders say Schumer, who is 75, is likely to remain as Democratic leader.
Schumer is hailed by these voices as a tireless worker and prodigious
fundraiser for his party and colleagues.
August 16, 2026
Meanwhile. . .
Manhattan
median rent set a record $5,295 in June 2026, up 8% in a year.
The
Hill - President Trump issued fresh criticism on Friday evening toward
the nonprofit organization suing his administration over the White
House ballroom project, accusing the National Trust for Historic Preservation
of revealing “Top Military Secrets” in their lawsuit
More than 170,000 Canadians want US Ambassador gone
Independent - More than 170,000 Canadians have signed a petition demanding the removal of U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, after months of boycotting American goods and canceling trips in response to escalating trade disputes and talk of annexing the country.
Submitted on July 21 by a Calgary
resident, the parliamentary petition urges the Canadian government to declare
Hoekstra persona non grata under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
It also calls for a parliamentary committee to investigate “U.S. diplomatic
interference in Canadian domestic affairs.”
Under Canadian parliamentary
rules, online petitions require only 500 validated signatures to earn a formal
presentation on the floor of the House of Commons.
….The petition follows a decline
in relations between the two countries. A Pew survey released in June indicated
that 35 percent of Canadians viewed the United States as a reliable partner,
down from 82 percent in 2022. Canadian leisure travel to the U.S. has dropped
by more than a quarter over the last year, while Canadian consumers have
increasingly turned away from American products.
Donald Trump
Newsweek
- President Donald Trump is
asking Americans to accept paying higher gas prices as a patriotic trade-off as
the country continues its war against Iran, even as a majority of U.S. adults
want the conflict to end—and think the nation should have not gotten into it in
the first place, according to polling. National gas prices in the U.S. have
shot up since the start of the war, as disruptions in production and supply due
to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz have caused oil prices to
skyrocket.
Public radio listening is growing
Insider
Radio - Public radio listening is showing signs of a meaningful
rebound, with new analysis from the Radio Research Consortium finding the
noncommercial radio audience has grown during the past two years — and the
gains cannot simply be chalked up to Nielsen’s measurement changes. Looking across five major noncommercial
formats — news/talk, contemporary Christian, classical, AAA (adult alternative)
and jazz — RRC says combined cume across PPM and continuous diary measurement
markets is 9.6% higher than it was two years ago at the end of Q1.
Artificial intelligence hits literature
Christian
Science Monitor - This summer,
the literary agencies Europa Content and Hodgman Literary shook the publishing
world when they withdrew from sale a manuscript for the highly anticipated
crime novel “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body.” The book, written by Nigerian author
Jerry Falade, had already generated plenty of online buzz. It had secured
multimillion-dollar deals from major publishers in both the United States and
the United Kingdom and was slated to be released in 2028.
It was also, the literary
agencies said, unclear whether the book had been written by Mr. Falade or by an
artificial intelligence chatbot.
The controversy is at once new
and familiar, reflecting both the dramatic changes that the proliferation of AI
has wrought on book publishing and echoing other skirmishes this year in which
authors have been accused of using AI. This past spring, Hachette Book Group, a
leading American publisher, canceled the publication of “Shy Girl,” an eagerly
awaited horror novel by Mia Ballard, after rumors that Ms. Ballard had written
the book using AI overtook the internet.
Naval families hit back at Trump and Hegseth
The Guardian - Naval families with loved ones deployed for
months on US warships amid the Iran war have reacted with fury to Donald Trump
and the defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s dismissal of their concerns about the
extreme pressures and dire conditions they are enduring.
The Guardian has talked to three
naval families who have been following the physical and mental stresses bearing
down on their relatives with mounting alarm. The families, with loved ones on
board the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Tripoli, all spoke anonymously for fear
of retribution against their active duty relatives.
They spoke of insufficient
nourishment that has led to close relatives losing 20-30lbs in weight since
they were sent to the Middle East five months ago, leaving one sailor
“emaciated”, according to his mother. They spoke also of low-quality drinking
water and scarce mental health counseling and support despite the intense
burden of being at sea for months on end without making land. More
Russia
Washington Post - Ever since he launched the all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has been claiming that his “special military operation,” as the Kremlin propaganda euphemistically calls it, enjoys overwhelming support among Russian citizens — going as far as to say that “the entire nation” is united behind his war.
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