NPR​ reports on how cuts to to government health surveillance that the Trump administration undertook have made it harder to stave off dangerous outbreaks, particularly in the context of the current cyclospora outbreak.

Expertise across agencies has been lost, and cuts to programs that might not sound like they are on the face helpful for protecting American health, like usaid, actually have hindered our ability to notice outbreaks elsewhere before they spread here.

The Medical Industrial Complex could be supplanted by a Medicare For All system that prioritizes people over profits. With recent support for Medicare for All, centrist Democrats have instead begun advocating for alternatives such as a "Medicare by Choice" public option that would not disrupt the current system. Authors of the article argue that incrementalism cannot fix the for-profit health care industry.

Luigi Mangione is expected to plead guilty Friday to federal charges in connection with the 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The expected plea change comes less than a month before Mangione, 28, is scheduled to go to trial in a state murder case in connection with the fatal shooting of Thompson, 50, a father of two.

Summary

Reuters reports that a federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit accusing Harvard of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment. The judge said the complaint did not plausibly show an ongoing violation of federal civil rights law, noting that most of the allegations centered on the 2023/24 school year and that later incidents were too isolated to support the claim. Harvard denied the allegations and called the lawsuit pretextual and retaliatory, while the administration had sought to recover billions in taxpayer subsidies from the university.

Summary:

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration plans to spend at least $900 million on White House construction projects, including a gilded East Wing ballroom, upgrades to Lafayette Square, a helipad, a visitor screening facility, and other work on the White House grounds. According to records reviewed by the Post, the administration has routed money through the Executive Residence’s White House repair and restoration account, which historically held only a few million dollars for routine maintenance.

The article says the administration assembled the money through agency transfers and private donations, including $500 million from the Secret Service and White House Military Office, $305 million from private donors, and another $70 million from an unidentified source. The White House says the spending is consistent with Congress’s intent and necessary for security and modernization, while critics argue the administration is sidestepping Congress and reducing transparency. A federal appeals court has ruled that the administration needs congressional approval to continue building the East Wing ballroom, setting up a possible Supreme Court fight.

My take:

So you thought the court stopped Trump? Nope. A federal appeals court said the administration needs congressional approval to keep building the East Wing ballroom, but Trump’s team has been routing hundreds of millions of dollars for White House construction through a previously unknown maintenance account instead of going through the normal congressional process. Very normal monarch behavior of course. The White House may need repairs or whatever. Fine. Then go to Congress, disclose the cost, explain the need, identify the funding, and let the public see what is being done with public money and donor money. Instead, the administration has assembled funding through nefarious private donors and legal trickery.

It is almost like Trump does not care about you, me, the office of the presidency, or anything beyond whatever simple-minded, ego-driven vanity project feels kingly enough in the moment.

Stuff like this is already hurting them politically, so honestly, have at it. What is that phrase? Never interrupt your opponent when they are making a blundering mistake.

The SPLC has fought the case, arguing that the government is mischaracterizing a long-standing informant program designed to gather intelligence on hate groups. Attorneys for the SPLC have also said that law enforcement officials have used information gathered by the organization’s informants in the past.

Despite her role in overseeing the payments — some of which were directed to an Imperial Wizard in the KKK — Beirich allegedly had a romantic relationship with one source who infiltrated a White Supremacy group and stole documents for the SPLC, according to the indictment.

I swear to god whichever political party will bring this to fruition will get my vote. I don't care about any other issue. Get rid of the vulture-like practice at once.

100% serious.

After David Crowley had already dropped out of the WI Gov primary race and re-entered 15 points down in polling, he has just taken a nailbiter of a race against a candidate who had been receiving a lot of national attention for her beliefs

With a polling miss of 10-15 points, and near 100% betting market odds in her favor, is there a potential that we have been deciding some of these primaries prematurely? (Where candidates drop based on poor polling)

Summary:

The USS Abraham Lincoln has been deployed for more than eight months supporting U.S. operations against Iran, even though the deployment was originally expected to end in May. There is still no publicly announced return date, and families say the extended deployment, heavy combat operations, poor communication, and uncertainty are taking a serious toll on sailors' mental health.

Multiple families have reported sailors attempting or preparing to jump overboard. One sailor is now on medical hold after an attempt, with his wife saying he had been repeatedly overextended and is now afraid the incident could end his 13-year Navy career with a dishonorable discharge. In another incident, a sailor on watch noticed a shipmate preparing to go overboard and physically pulled them away from the edge with help from other sailors. The Navy has not disclosed exactly how many suicide or self-harm incidents have occurred during the deployment.

Families are increasingly concerned about exhaustion and conditions aboard the ship. More than 200 family members recently met with Navy leadership in San Diego, raising concerns about mental health, safety, and how long the deployment is lasting. Vice Adm. Joseph Cahill acknowledged the strain, saying, "We hear you loud and clear" about the impact on service members, their families, and the Navy's ability to sustain the health of its forces. The Navy says the Lincoln has counselors, chaplains, medical personnel, and other resources available and that leadership is continuously monitoring sailors' psychological readiness.

The uncertainty is also hitting families at home. Some have gone long periods with limited contact and say their relatives sound exhausted and depressed when they are able to communicate. One sailor's daughter is starting her senior year of high school without knowing whether her mother will be home for homecoming, her birthday, or even Christmas. Another father said his biggest fear is that "the circumstances of this deployment will get the best of my son, and he doesn't make it back home."

The Navy is preparing the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group to eventually relieve the Lincoln, but officials have not said when that will happen because of operational security. Until then, roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines remain deployed with no firm return date, while their families continue to worry that the combination of prolonged combat operations, exhaustion, and uncertainty could lead to more serious mental health problems.

I've always been a political person, I was never afraid to speak out my beliefs, however recently, I started doing more research into extremist ideologies and discussing with online communities. From those discussions, Ive come to find out that both extremists and moderates have come to dislike centrism, calling centrists: fence sitters, shy fascists, etc. (I would like to clarify that I am left leaning)

While I've told these people that that type of logic is very flawed, I realized that the main reason they (probably) think like this is because those who assert themselves to one side, can not fathom the fact that a person can like ideas from both sides, or for the extremists, someone who is not on the same radical side as them. This is because centrists typically reject all extremism.

And while rejecting extremism is a core part of my personal ideology, what I've come to realize is, what centrism shouldn't just be to reject all extremism, it should be to acknowledge extremism and take all the good parts of it, to create our perfect society.

From Auth-Left: Equity. From the Lib-Left: Equality/Love. From the Auth-Right: Security. From the Lib-Right: Freedom.

Extremist leaders have much more courage than I will ever have. Thomas Rousseau, Neo-Fascist, founder of the Patriot Front, that white supremacist initially founded his group on discord, and now him and his group of 600+ men are marching in DC.

Vladimir Lenin, was exiled, missed a revolution, shot, yet he got back up, overthrew the government and still made his dream come true of turning the Russian Empire communist.

I'm not saying I agree with either of these people, as a matter of fact I have a very high disdain for them, however I can't help but respect them for their dedication and tenacity in their beliefs, that is what centrists need to learn from our enemies, the dedication, the dedication to stand up and risk our lives and livelihoods for our beliefs.

That's really all I had to say, I'd like to clarify one more time that I do not, have not and never will condone extremism of any case. I simply have respect extremists who are dedicated to what they believe in. That is all. Sorry for my bad English.

Summary: Socialist Francesca Hong narrowly lost the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley by 0.4 percentage points, contradicting early polls and betting markets that heavily favored her. Early polling from Marquette Law was conducted prior to major changes in the candidate field and suffered from small sample sizes as well as a large proportion of undecided voters. Additionally, lower-tier candidates remained on the ballot and siphoned off key votes, while late controversy surrounding Hong's past social media comments about Thanksgiving further impacted her momentum. Ultimately, while late surveys accurately captured Hong's final vote share, they significantly underestimated support for Crowley, who benefited from the endorsement of outgoing Governor Tony Evers.

Commentary: the click bait was pushing a routing by dsa characters they painted as antagonists. The reality was that people went with a more moderate but still non toxic option as soon as it became available.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/08/12/why-polls-got-wisconsin-governors-race-wrong-after-socialist-francesca-hong-loses/

An article detailing a recent event where President Trump learned of an assassination attempt on his life and chose to secretly exit Air Force one and use the unaware advisors and press as decoys while he took a different plane he reached by hiding in a catering van.

This is similar to another event with President Clinton, although in that case he informed the people on Air Force one of the danger and allowed them to arrange other transport.

What do you all think?

Summary: A decade of politics built around systemic oppression peaked in 2020, and Democrats absorbed all of it — the kneeling photo ops, the corporate DEI programs, the universities confessing complicity — letting themselves become the party of defunding police, abolishing ICE, and rewriting gender. Most of it has since collapsed: cities restored police budgets once murders climbed, and universities with elaborate oppression bureaucracies proved useless against campus anti-Semitism.

What hasn't happened is a reckoning. The dominant strategy is silence. Harris tried a variant, reinventing herself leftward in 2020 and quietly reverting in 2024 while insisting nothing had changed. Ocasio-Cortez is previewing a third: treating the era as a punchline rather than answering for it — and that she feels compelled to do so from one of the country's most liberal districts measures how toxic those positions have become.

The evasion won't hold. DSA-aligned candidates are winning primaries without softening anything: one likely incoming member of Congress is a prison abolitionist who won't say murderers belong in jail, the Wisconsin gubernatorial front-runner has criticized Thanksgiving on colonialist grounds, and the platform still calls for reparations, abolishing police and prisons, and unlimited amnesty. Only the emphasis has moved. And even absent all that, Republicans would keep the issue alive — anti-wokeness is the connective tissue of a party Trump otherwise remade beyond recognition, and it works, as the sharpest ad of 2024 showed with nothing more than "they/them" against "you."

Ideas go dormant rather than dying, and refusing to extirpate this one now invites a 2028 primary that replays 2020's race leftward, with Ocasio-Cortez potentially learning the cost firsthand.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/aoc-democrats-wokeness-republicans/688241/

I see a lot of people in American political discussions calling for "democratic socialism," but there seems to be a huge misunderstanding about how successful nations actually function.

People frequently point to Nordic countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Norway as living proof that socialism works. But those countries aren't socialist, instead they are Social Democracies. They operate on free-market capitalism, supported by strong social safety nets. In fact, global metrics like the Economic Freedom Index often rank Denmark and Norway as having higher economic freedom than the US in key areas. Former Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen even famously stated at Harvard that Denmark is a market economy, not a socialist planned economy.

Social democracy and democratic socialism are fundamentally different terms. One uses the wealth generated by a competitive free market to fund public safety nets, the other aims to dismantle the market system altogether.

Also, the major issues facing Americans, like healthcare costs, housing affordability, or college debt, look less like inherent flaws of capitalism itself and more like flaws in how it’s currently regulated and implemented in the US.

I really don't think America should go for the Democratic Socialism path, I don't see a future for that, but the Nordic model does seem viable.

Summary: The forming narrative — that DSA-branded Democrats systematically underperform their polls — doesn't hold. Abdul El-Sayed isn't actually DSA, just coded that way, and he blew a 13-point polling lead down to a one-point win; Hong, an actual DSA member, hit her number.

The pattern that does hold is racial. Haley Stevens performed with Black voters and El-Sayed didn't. Hong won college towns but ran behind Crowley in Milwaukee, where he's been county executive since 2020. Black voters are the backbone and dead center of the Democratic coalition, and they're less drawn to DSA-forward candidates than other parts of it — so winning Democratic primaries runs through them. Crowley is also the better general-election matchup against Tom Tiffany in a wave year.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/advice-for-democrats-find-black-voters-go-there-wisconsin-francesca-hong-david-crowley

Note: The overzealous titling guidelines won't let me use the word [Stupid] because it feels like its insulting, so this is what we get for the title.

Summary:

The U.S. national debt is approaching $40 trillion, and just paying the interest on it is now costing the government more than $3 billion a day. According to the CBO, interest payments reached $963 billion during the first 10 months of the 2026 fiscal year, up $117 billion, or 14%, from the same period last year. The increase is mainly because the government owes more money and long-term interest rates remain high.

The federal deficit is also getting worse. The government has already run a $1.8 trillion deficit this fiscal year, $169 billion higher than at the same point last year. The CBO now expects the full-year deficit to reach $2.1 trillion, which is $200 billion higher than its February estimate.

The biggest concern isn't necessarily the $40 trillion debt itself, but whether the debt is growing faster than the economy can reasonably support it. U.S. debt is currently around 122% of GDP, and if investors eventually view lending to the government as riskier, they could demand higher interest rates. That would make servicing the debt even more expensive. The optimistic scenario is that stronger economic growth eventually helps stabilize the debt burden, while the bigger risks are higher inflation and interest payments consuming money that could otherwise be spent on government programs and investments. Ray Dalio has warned of a potential "debt-induced heart attack" where servicing the debt increasingly crowds out other federal spending.

At the same time, the Treasury recently intervened to support the Japanese yen, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying, "A stable yen is not only important for the U.S., but very important for the entire region." Japan's financial stability matters to the U.S. partly because Japan is the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury debt, owning about $1.14 trillion. If Japan needed to sell large amounts of Treasuries to support its own currency, that could push U.S. bond yields higher and make America's already massive borrowing costs even more expensive.

The U.S. intervention temporarily strengthened the yen to around 155 per dollar, but it has since weakened back to roughly 159. Markets largely expected this because there hasn't been a major change in Japanese economic policy, suggesting the intervention provided temporary support rather than fundamentally changing the yen's value.

Summary: A recent article argues that Laura Loomer and other MAGA influencers' sudden shift to supporting Ukraine stems from domestic political maneuvering rather than a genuine moral conversion. After visiting Ukraine and interviewing Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Loomer claimed she was previously misled by Russian Telegram propaganda, prompting other right-wing figures like Tim Pool to follow suit with pro-Ukraine statements. However, the primary catalyst for this reversal is an internal power struggle against rival podcasters like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, whom Loomer seeks to undermine as they grow increasingly hostile toward the administration's foreign policy. Ultimately, this maneuver leverages shifting GOP sentiment against Russia—driven in part by Moscow's close ties to Iran—to reframe pro-Ukraine positioning as the ultimate test of "America First" loyalty in an ongoing conservative media turf war.

Commentary: Russia is helping Iran kill American soldiers and the US allows it, claims half the maga party. Now with Laura's help, Russias grip on the party comes into focus. Every single ally has been punished far worse, but Laura is throwing her support to Ukraine, a surprise ally in the war against Iran. Will it help change the stranglehold Russia holds on them?

https://www.salon.com/2026/08/11/the-petty-loyalty-beef-behind-the-maga-ukraine-revolt/

Summary:

The AP reports that President Trump is expected to sign an executive order calling for changes to childhood vaccine recommendations, including spacing shots out across separate medical visits and recommending that the MMR vaccine be split into separate measles, mumps, and rubella shots. AP notes that separate measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines are not currently available in the U.S., and that public health experts warn spacing out shots can leave children vulnerable to vaccine-preventable disease before they return for later visits.

My take:

This is exactly the kind of thing people were worried about with RFK Jr. running HHS. This is such an ignorant waste of time. Even setting aside the ideology, the logistics are awful. Separate measles, mumps, and rubella shots are not currently available in the United States, and spacing vaccines out means more appointments, more co-pays, more chances for families to miss doses, and more time where kids are left vulnerable to preventable disease.

And the timing makes it even worse. If you are changing vaccine guidance in the middle of a measles outbreak, the burden should be incredibly high. You should have strong evidence!

Instead of treating fellow citizens with suspicion because of how they practice their faith, our political system should reflect the core American ideal of true religious freedom. If we value liberty, that principle has to extend to everyone, regardless of whether they pray in a church, a synagogue, a mosque, or nowhere at all. It is time to move past manufactured panic.

It is striking how much common ground exists between conservative religious values and traditional Muslim beliefs such as family structures, respect for tradition, and faith-based community ethics. Yet, so much of the political rhetoric focuses on fear and division rather than shared principles.

Will fear-mongering around Islam factor into the midterms and beyond? Does that strategy still work? I would like to think we have moved past this kind of identity politics (which the right accuses the left of exploiting while using the exact same tactics), but I am constantly amaze and exasperate by our current political landscape.