Wait - what ?

Infrared picture of movie theater customers, New York City, 1943 :: Photographer: Weegee

* * * * "People’re a nestful of needs. Dull needs, sharp needs, bottomless-pit needs, flash-in-the-pan needs, needs for things you can’t hold, needs for things you can. Adverts know this. Shops know this. Specially in arcades, shops’re deafening. I’ve got what you want! I’ve got what you want! I’ve got what you want! But walking down Regents Arcade this afternoon, I noticed a new need that’s normally so close-up you never know it’s there. You and your mum need to like each other. Not love, but like."

* * * * * “He saw the lightning in the east and longed for the east, but if it had flashed in the west he would have longed for the west. My desire is for the lightning and its gleam, not for the places and the earth.”

— Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi from Poem 14 of the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq (“The Interpreter of Yearnings”), translated by R.A. Nicholson

Steve Brodner ·

Glee Violette

OMG - Today is August 5th, 2026. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, "There Will Come Soft Rains." Written in 1950, the year after I was born. I read the story when I was in 10th grade, and it gave me the chills. I never forgot it. I had spent my school years having regular drills where we dove under our desks with our hands clasped over our heads, to protect us from a nuclear bomb. As if. The year I read it was 1963. The day President Kennedy was assassinated, school was dismissed early, and I walked home with a boy who lived nearby. Besides being devastated, we were both worried that Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the USSR, Russia, would take advantage of this moment of confusion to nuke America. To kill US. I had just read the Martian Chronicles only a few days or weeks before. The short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," is about a smart home of the future, where everything works automatically according to schedule, to give the family a stress free comfortable home life. The lights go on and off, the sprinklers water the lawn, the house is vacuumed. Gee. all the stuff we have now. Just as Bradbury predicted. But nuclear war has come, and only one wall of that one home remains, surrounded by the burning rubble of the neighborhood, and as the sun rises, the alarm clock feature cheerfully announces to the ashes of the family, "Good morning! It is August 5th, 2026..." [....] The title is from a poem by Sara Teasdale:

(1884-1933)

Moira Risen photography

* * * * *

The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.

—Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Polls in the Michigan Senate race between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens were wrong by 10 to 15 points. Not all of them, and not during the entire race. But in the final weeks leading up to the August 4 primary, they were off by 10% or more on average. They showed Abdul El-Sayed winning by a substantial margin. Late polling suggested a rout in favor of El-Sayed—a prediction that might have affected turnout. The prediction markets (Polymarket and Kalshi) gave El-Sayed a 98% chance of winning. But instead of the predicted route, El-Sayed won by 14,893 votes in a race with 1.53 million votes cast by Democrats, an outcome that the press has dubbed as a “nail-biter.” See details of the final polling in Newsweek, Abdul El-Sayed Chances Against Haley Stevens: Final Michigan Senate Primary Polls.

The chart below presents polling data from the Newsweek article linked above. (Note: I used Claude AI to prepare this chart from the Newsweek data.) The polling “miss” is in the far-right column.

The why of the polling miss is less important than the fact that it happened. It’s a reminder that polls are not elections; they are imperfect attempts to measure voter sentiment at a point in time. Polls do not determine outcomes; voters do. Or rather, voters who show up to vote determine outcomes.

Today, I have heard three commentators in the progressive media say, “There is no path to victory in the Senate for Democrats if they do not win Michigan.” That is an unmitigated, unadulterated, steaming-hot pile of nonsense. (And you know what I mean.) Six months ago, those same commentators were saying, “There is no path to victory in the Senate for Democrats. Period. Full stop.”

As a regular public service announcement, I remind readers that the length of time between now and the 2026 midterms, measured in Trump years, is equal to infinity.

Making predictions based on prior elections is hazardous where the relevant comparisons do not include a president who (1) started an enormously unpopular war eight months before midterms, a war that jacked up gas prices (2) imposed tariffs on consumer goods while cutting subsidies for Medicare prescription drugs, (3) demolished one-third of the White House for a gigantic ballroom no one wanted, and (4) reported billions in crypto revenue during his first year in office, largely from the sale of his self-branded cryptocurrency that made him rich at the expense of nearly every investor except his close golfing buddies. Modeling that scenario is rough!

The point is not to beat up pollsters; they do a fine job of that themselves. The point is to say that we should neither over-rely nor under-rely on polls. They are tools for professionals to use in guiding campaign strategy, not for calibrating our level of effort or expectations. We are in the fight of our lives, and polls can mislead us by providing a false sense of security or predicting disaster before it happens.

What should shake our confidence in polls is that there were obvious signs that the number, nature, and quality of the polls may have been overstating El-Sayed’s support. Poll aggregators presumably know how to correct for the influence of poorly designed or poorly executed polls. In the Michigan Senate race, those adjustments were not made, for reasons that are not clear.

In defense of pollsters, they do not “predict” outcomes, and their results are often mischaracterized as single-point results. That’s not the case. Polls have a margin of error, which describes the range of likely outcomes at a specific confidence level (95%). But polls have “tails” that extend beyond the margin of error, and those tails admit the possibility that highly unlikely outcomes might occur. Although such outliers are rare, they are inherent in the statistical models that underlie opinion polls. Pollsters therefore design their polls to minimize the likelihood of outliers.

Which brings us back to Michigan. The pollsters “missed” something in their models that is roiling the electorate. I don’t know what caused the “miss,” but Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo discuss the polling miss in more detail. But (as usual), it is Josh Marshall who hits the nail on the head:

It’s a good reminder that whether you’re a volunteer, a voter, an activist, or a campaign worker, you play these things out till the very end.

Coda: While many readers reacted positively to yesterday’s newsletter rebutting the notion that “Democrats are in disarray,” I did receive some sharp criticism from readers who said I glossed over the issue of Israel and Gaza, which played an important role in motivating some voters to vote for either Abdul El-Sayed or Haley Stevens.

Jennifer Rubin addressed the issue directly in her Contrarian column on Wednesday, Michigan Nail-Biter. I quote three paragraphs below, but I recommend her entire column to your attention. It is an insightful, measured analysis. She writes, in part:

Though legacy media and the MAGA-friendly punditocracy will insist the outcome of the race is evidence of — you guessed it! — “Democrats in disarray,” this is how primaries work. They test the relative strengths of candidates in a tough battle and begin the process of forging consensus for the general election. The only issue for Democrats now is to hold the seat. [¶] While pundits and partisan axe-grinders told us for weeks the race turned on an ideological schism in the party, ordinary voters, even in primaries that attract the most partisan segment of the electorate, choose between real candidates, not partisan manifestos. And what motivates them is not necessarily where they precisely stand on the left-to-right spectrum. Savvy political analyst Karen Finney observed: "National coverage of Michigan has turned this primary into a proxy war over Israel and Gaza while voters are drowning in medical debt, premiums, and everyday costs. Ignoring the full dynamics erases the stakes for voters and obscures what people across MI & the country are saying about their anger over costs and daily struggle."

While we must await the post-election analysis to determine which issues were responsible for Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory and Haley Stevens strong showing, both candidates urged party unity in their statements after the election was called in favor of El-Sayed. That is the first step in the process of creating unity in defeating Trump’s hand-picked candidate, GOP Rep. Mike Rogers

Update on Todd Blanche’s nomination as Attorney General.

As I noted yesterday, given Susan Collins’s statement that she will vote against confirmation of Todd Blanche, he can afford to lose only one more Republican vote in the Senate and still be confirmed. If two more Republican Senators join Collins in voting against him (for a total of 3 Republian “no” votes), he will not be confirmed.

On Wednesday, Blanche met with the two most likely no-vote candidates: Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA). Trump opposed Murkowski’s 2022 Senate re-election bid and supported Bill Cassidy’s GOP primary opponent, who is now the GOP nominee to take Cassidy’s seat in November. The meeting between Blanche, Murkowski, and Cassidy was fittingly held in “a basement hideaway room” in the Capitol. See NBC News, Sens. Murkowski and Cassidy meet with Blanche as attorney general vote remains uncertain

We should never count on Republicans to do the right thing, but each has strong reasons to vote against Blanche. Senator Cassidy, a physician, has been highly critical of Robert Kennedy’s conduct after Cassidy put him over the top. Lisa Murkowski opposes Trump’s policies on a number of issues, including women’s reproductive rights. Blanche was quoted yesterday as promising Christian groups that he would endeavor to ensure the “Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state.”

And, in case you are wondering, Senator Fetterman will oppose Blanche’s confirmation. See The Hill, John Fetterman will vote against Todd Blanche for Attorney General

GOP representative drops out of reelection bid after censure by House.

Rep. Chuck Edwards says he will end his reelection bid after censure recommendation by the House Ethics Committee. The censure recommendation comes after the committee found that Edwards engaged in “inappropriate conduct” with two female staffers. See Politico, Chuck Edwards says he will end reelection bid after censure recommendation.

Republicans in North Carolina have until Monday to replace Edwards on the ballot for the November election. The Democratic candidate is Jamie Ager, a fifth-generation North Carolinian farmer. Check out Jamie’s video message here: Jamie Ager for US Congress.

Iran and Oman are close to a deal to divide control of the Strait of Hormuz.

It is exceedingly odd that the conclusion of the US war against Iran is being hammered out between Iran and Oman. Those countries are close to an agreement to divide control of the Strait of Hormuz between them, something that would have been unthinkable before Trump started his ill-conceived war against Iran. See NYTimes, Iran Says It Is Nearing Final Agreement With Oman on Strait of Hormuz. (Gift link.)

Trump has moved on from the war and has begun the “who do I blame for my failure” after-action review. See WaPo, Trump, Hegseth clashed at Camp David over Iran missile depletion concerns. (Gift link.)

Per WaPo,

President Donald Trump’s frustration over the Iran war boiled over at Camp David last week, where he demanded answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on why he had apparently been misled on extreme munitions shortages that now threaten to limit military options with Iran, two people familiar with the exchange told The Washington Post.

Per the Post, Hegseth blamed Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg for the shortages and for failing to inform the president about the diminished stockpiles. Hegseth’s deflection of the blame is pathetic. It was Hegseth who urged Trump to initiate the attacks that depleted the stockpiles. As for informing Trump, the rapid depletion has been front page news for six months.

In a suprising reversal, FDA approves an mRNA flu vaccine

It is part of Robert Kennedy’s conspiracy theories about Covid that mRNA vaccines were ineffective and /or dangerous. Unsprisingly, the FDA initially balked when Moderna sought approval for an mRNA flu vaccine. But the public backlash against the FDA’s initial stance was so strong that the agency reversed itself and approved the vaccine. See NYTimes, F.D.A. Approves Moderna’s mRNA Flu Vaccine. (Gift link.)

Per the Times,

Initially the F.D.A. had refused to even review Moderna’s application for approval earlier this year, but quickly reversed course after a public outcry. The flu kills more than 300,000 people worldwide each year and was particularly harsh in the 2024-25 season, with an estimated 45,000 deaths in the United States . . . .

Let’s hear it for “public backlash.'“ Your voice matters!

Concluding Thoughts

The Michigan race for the U.S. Senate is dominating political news on Wednesday, so I will take the opportunity to give all of us a break from the firehose of commentary. A few other stories are worth noting, but they can keep for another day.

There are many ways to interpret the spate of incumbent House Democrats losing to more liberal primary challengers. From where I stand, it appears that the Democratic electorate wants representatives who will be more aggressive in taking on Trump on everything—the economy, the war, ICE, corruption and self-dealing, the climate crisis, and protection of individual rights against government overreach.

Oh, and there is a definite sense that the old guard in the Democratic Party should focus on elevating the next generation of leaders—instead of hanging on to power by their fingernails.

Look at this political cartoon by Bill Mauldin. (He’s the guy that did the WW2 “Willie & Joe” cartoons.) Trump is doing exactly this.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 5, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 06, 2026

On August 5, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a new tax to help fund the United States government during the Civil War. Far more than writing a traditional revenue act to address the catastrophic war that had demonstrated its horrors just two weeks earlier at the Battle of Bull Run, Congress deliberately constructed the law to shift ownership of the American government away from the bankers who had previously provided Treasury funds, to the American people.

Over the next four years, the Republican Congress would put taxes on virtually every product in the country and then, to guarantee that “the burdens will be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them,” as Senate Finance Committee chair William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) put it, they invented the nation’s first income tax.

In 1861, Congress levied a 3% tax on income over $800; in 1862, concerned that the level of taxation necessary to pay for the war would be too much for most Americans to bear, Congress placed a general tax at 3% and created a progressive income tax. It taxed income over $600 at 3% and income over $10,000 at 5%.

“The weight must be distributed equally,” Representative Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT) said, “not upon each man an equal amount, but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay.” In 1864, Congress revised those numbers upward. They put general taxes at 5% and raised the income tax brackets to 5% for income from $600 to $5,000 and 7.5% for income from $5,000 to $10,000.

Morrill thought it was important for the federal government to collect the tax directly to illustrate that people were supporting the United States of America, not individual states, as they might think if states collected the taxes. The federal government had a right to “demand” 99% of a man’s property for an urgent necessity, he said. When the nation required it, “the property of the people…belongs to the Government.”

Indeed, the new taxes did cement loyalty to the United States. With their money behind the war effort, Americans became more and more committed to their cause. As the war costs mounted, far from objecting to taxes, Americans asked their congressmen to raise them out of concern about the growing national debt. In 1864, Senator John P. Hale (R-NH) said: “The condition of the country is singular…I venture to say it is an anomaly in the history of the world. What do the people of the United States ask of this Congress? To take off taxes? No, sir, they ask you to put them on. The universal cry of this people is to be taxed.”

Enlisting more than 2 million soldiers and sailors into the war effort, moving them, equipping them, and arming them eventually cost the United States more than $5 billion. Taxes paid for about 21% of that cost.

Although Republicans invented the American income tax, party leaders in the modern era have turned against it.

In 1980, Republican president Ronald Reagan won the White House by promising that tax cuts would create such dramatic economic growth that Americans would be able to continue to fund popular programs despite those cuts. During the presidential campaign, Reagan’s rival for the Republican nomination, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency George H.W. Bush, called this promise “voodoo economics,” and he was right: the promise that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would pay for themselves never materialized. Instead, the national debt rose dramatically.

But the idea that tax cuts were a reliable solution to slow economic growth became Republican dogma.

Rejecting the principles Republicans laid down in the 1860s, Republican leaders ever since have taken the position that taxes do not build the country, but destroy it. Despite the rising national debt, that ideology continued into the modern era. In 2017 the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which lowered income tax rates across the board and offered most tax relief to the wealthy and corporations, became President Donald J. Trump’s signature law.

Those tax cuts eroded the revenue base of the U.S. government, sending the debt soaring. Nonetheless, in July 2025, Republicans passed Trump’s signature economic measure for his second term—the law they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—making permanent the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations they passed in Trump’s first term. They offset some of the costs of that measure with dramatic cuts to programs that help the American people, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Even with those offsets, economists estimate that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add more than $4 trillion to the national debt in the next ten years. And now, Trump’s war on Iran is adding yet more strain to the national budget. But, rather than restoring the tax base Republicans have cut away—or even passing a wartime tax—the Trump administration maintains that cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” will solve the problem of the growing debt.

Election results from yesterday suggest that the era of tax cuts as a solution to economic concerns may be coming to an end.

Voters in Missouri resoundingly rejected a Republican proposal to eliminate the state income tax and to replace missing revenue with a higher sales tax. The vote was not close: 83.3% of voters opposed the measure while only 16.7% were in favor, despite the fact that groups in favor of eliminating the tax—many of which kept their donors secret—outspent those in favor of keeping it by a margin of more than two to one.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

At 5:08 this evening, with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” blaring through the speakers at Red Rock Casino Resort and Spa in Las Vegas, Nevada, the President of the United States emerged from behind the bright blue curtains with a noticeably fuller head of hair, freshly dyed the familiar shade of orange he was known for in the past. As Donald Trump made his way to the podium, he stopped several times to catch his breath through pursed lips, staring off into the crowd that had gathered to hear him speak about “Working Families Tax Cuts.”

He spoke for an hour and sixteen minutes, but very little of that time was spent on working families or tax cuts. Instead, he delivered a speech that marks an all-time low for any American president in our nation’s history. He bounced from one outlandish claim to the next, attacking Democrats by saying their cities are “filthy dirty all the time. The cities stink, they smell.” He claimed that people who drive electric cars are “diseased.” And once again, he turned his attention to one of our closest allies and neighbors, calling Canada and the Canadian people “nasty.” That was just the beginning of a speech that disgraced the office of the presidency.

[...]

And then he started down the most dangerous part of his entire speech. Donald Trump called Democrats “communists” more than a dozen times. He said, “Communism is the greatest threat to our country in its history, including even World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, 9/11. I think it’s the greatest threat.” He said, “I could be the greatest communist in history,” then explained what communism (Democrats in power) would mean for our country: “At the end of the year, you’ll have nothing but death, squalor, poverty. You’ll have a life of hell.” He declared, “Together, we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America once and for all.” He kept going from there with his made-up scare tactics about the “communist platform.” He said of Democrats/Communists, “They have officially endorsed defunding the police, defunding the United States military, abolishing and giving up prisons, they do not want prisons. Because nobody deserves to be in prison, even a person that’s killed 10 people.” He claimed “the Communist platform also calls for legalizing heroin and fentanyl,” and then, he trailed on about fentanyl coming in by sea is down 97%. He even called the remaining 3% of drug runners “the bravest human beings on earth,” prompting someone in the crowd to shout “You’re braver” at the President of the United States, who smiled at the “compliment”.

What we saw in this speech was the president imploding from within. He knows his approval ratings are close to the lowest at any point across both of his terms. He knows the economy is destroying American lives, and that he is running out of scapegoats to blame for his own incompetence. He has already gone after immigrants, transgender people, the press, courts, democrats, and the “deep state.” And none of it has helped with his popularity or the Republicans’ odds of keeping control of Congress. So now he is desperately grasping for anything that might help. Including calling half the country communist.

Communism is not just a word. It carries the weight of an estimated 100 million deaths in the 20th century under brutal regimes in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere. For anyone who grew up during the Cold War, communism was a very real threat. It was the great enemy of many of our childhoods. Like so many others, I remember watching the Berlin Wall fall on television and seeing the relief in the faces of adults who believed a dangerous chapter of history was finally coming to an end. On a trip to Germany just before the world shut down in 2020, I took my family to trace the history of that era. We visited Checkpoint Charlie and stood beside the remnants of the Berlin Wall. We saw the architecture that kept the people of East Berlin from even seeing the other side, and we heard stories of families separated for decades. Vietnam is still a living wound for our parents’ generation, with many who never fully recovered from what they experienced and witnessed. The word triggers something deep and visceral, and Trump knows it. That is why it has become such a central part of his strategy to divide us and create a fear that only he can claim to save us from.

But what he is calling communism has no resemblance to what any elected Democrat in the United States has ever proposed. The furthest-left organization with any meaningful presence in American politics, the Democratic Socialists of America, advocates for universal healthcare, a higher minimum wage, stronger labor unions, and a regulated market economy with a strong social safety net. This is what exists in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Canada, Germany, and Australia. These are capitalist countries with private property, free elections, free press, and individual rights. They also have universal healthcare. Democratic socialism is not Marxism. It is not Leninism, Stalinism, or Maoism. It does not call for the abolition of private property, one-party rule, or the elimination of markets.

Trump does not care about any of these distinctions because he knows his most diehard followers will just take him at his word. The Washington Post reported that the communist messaging push is coordinated across Trump, Vice President Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and RNC Chairman Joe Gruters. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News, “This is not your granddaddy’s Democrat Party. These are communists.” Johnson said on Fox News, “It’s communism, socialism, those are deviations of Marxism. This is communism, and it has led to the murder of innocent people, tens of millions of them in the 20th century alone.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio called progressive movements “an encroaching darkness” and “the enemies of civilization.” Stephen Miller said, “The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred.”

What we can call this moment is McCarthyism. It is the same tactic Senator Joseph McCarthy used in the 1950s when he destroyed careers, ruined lives, and created a climate of fear where simply being accused of communist sympathies was enough to lose everything. McCarthy did not need to prove anyone was actually a communist to destroy them. The accusation was enough.

This is the tradition that Trump is drawing from when he stands at a podium and calls more than half the country communists. The irony of this moment is that the party that resembles communism the most is the Trump-led Republican Party. Because Trump’s own administration has demanded and been given U.S. equity stakes in private corporations.

He ended the speech by once again awkwardly dancing to YMCA and making kissing faces into the crowd as the song played. It was, in its own way, the perfect closing to Donald Trump’s state of mind. He attempted to portray enormous strength while underneath the act everything is falling apart.

We are watching Donald Trump implode. Every new target and lie to create fear is evidence of it. And in some sad and twisted way, that should give us hope. Not the kind of hope that means everything is fine, because it is absolutely not fine. But the desperation he is showing is real. He knows that when Democrats take back Congress in November, his unchecked power ends. He knows that there will be hearings, oversight, and a constitutional path to his removal through impeachment. That is what he is most afraid of, and it is why he is willing to say anything just to keep his base angry enough to show up in November. But what he forgets is that we are seeing all of this too, and more people are sick of the lies and the chaos, and they too will be showing up in November. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,