Salem Political Snark

Trump's war against science, including climate change, will be disastrous

Those of us opposed to Trump have lots of choices when it comes to his most dangerous actions.

Mass deportations of law-abiding undocumented migrants. Tax breaks for the wealthy paid for by huge cuts to Medicaid. Slow-walking support for Ukraine. Mass firings of career federal employees. To name but a few.

But in the long run, I suspect that historians of the future will look back and judge that Trump's most disastrous action in his second term was to engage in a war against science, notably including the science of climate change.

The world has already surpassed the 1.5 C increase in temperature that was considered an important goal to preserve the habitability of our planet for us humans. More efforts are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not less.

Yet Trump and his Republican cronies have been dismantling Biden's climate initiatives both by executive orders and legislative action. More burning of coal and oil is exactly what isn't needed now, but Trump is working to cripple our nation's renewable energy industry, the wave of the future, and support the fossil fuel industry, the stagnant pool of the past.

Mentions of climate change have been deleted from federal agency web sites, an absurd head-in-the-sand approach akin to a young child putting a blanket over their head and crying, "Now I'm invisible!" Today the Washington Post had a story about how a tool to help communities prepare for future flooding exacerbated by climate change has been eliminated by the Trump administration. 

The Commerce Department has indefinitely suspended work on a tool to help communities predict how rising global temperatures will alter the frequency of extreme rainfall, according to three current and former federal officials familiar with the decision, a move that experts said will make the country more vulnerable to storms supercharged by climate change.

All this is part of a broader war Trump is waging against science. In the June 14, 2025 issue of New Scientist, Chandra Prescod-Weinstein, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, has a column called The Big Picture: The universe is still there to be understood, despite brutal new cuts to US science budgets. But the damage to future research will be huge.

Here's a PDF file of her column, along with an excerpt.
Download Trump's cuts to NASA and the National Science Foundation will have huge consequences | New Scientist

Our current political moment instead feels like realising that we had been living with a false sense of security – that US science and government support for it would be there tomorrow – but without a cool new reality on the other side. Instead, the US government is dispensing with publicly funded culture, throwing it into a black hole. I don’t make that metaphor lightly; I think it’s important. When an object crosses a black hole’s event horizon, it is the point of no return. The object can’t go back.

We are in the same situation. While the universe will still be there to be understood, the damage to our capacity for research will be long lasting and the alteration to our trajectory permanent. Already, a generation of master’s and PhD students has had the number of available slots reduced. Aspiring professors aren’t being trained in the same numbers; this affects not just future scientists but science communicators, too.

A whole future is being disposed of. And while Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to NASA’s astrophysics budget and the National Science Foundation’s physics, mathematics and astronomy budgets won’t keep the rest of the world from doing science, there will be far-reaching consequences. This is due to the US’s role as a global investor in particle physics, cosmology and research into fundamental reality.

It's even worse than this, of course. Trump is also slashing the budget for the National Institutes of Health, a move decried by an article in the JAMA Health Forum, "Cutting the NIH -- the $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe." Excerpts:

Scientists researching new cancer cures are neither culture warriors nor campus protesters. But so far, the biggest financial blows against academia have been borne by biomedical research. The Trump administration has selectively canceled grants, fired intramural researchers, and plans to cut billions that are paid by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for indirect costs.

The administration has proposed to Congress a 43% cut to next year’s NIH budget, equivalent to $20 billion per year. The government has threatened to stop funding virtually all biomedical research if certain universities do not accept demands for changes in curriculum, admissions, hiring, and other policies—none of which are related to lifesaving science. As a result, hiring freezes are common at medical centers, and clinical trials are or might be put on hold.

...New therapies lengthen lives. Buxbaum et al estimate that new medical therapies generated 48% of the 3.3-year increase in life expectancy in the US between 1990 and 2015. If biomedical research remains as important in the future as in the past, a 15.3% reduction in new therapies would lead to a reduction in life expectancy of 0.24 years per person over the next 25 years. In a population of more than 340 million, this reflects 82 million fewer years of life.

Economists use various methods to estimate the value of life and typically find that years of life are valued at roughly between $100 000 and $200 000 per year. Even using the lower value in calculations, the lost health from the NIH cuts translates into more than $8.2 trillion ($100 000 × 82 million years).

These losses would be weighed against the gains that emerge from reduced public spending. Over 25 years, the proposed annual savings of $20 billion amounts to $500 billion in budgetary reductions. This pales in comparison to the $8.2 trillion in lost health, which is 16 times greater than the proposed cost savings. Put another way, punishing campuses by cutting health research funding would destroy the equivalent of one-quarter of annual gross domestic product in the US.

Avelo Airlines leaving Salem in August. My reaction: "I told you so"

To nobody's surprise except the City Council, Chamber of Commerce, and Travel Salem -- who assured citizens in 2023 that this time, really, you can count on it, an airline offering commercial service will remain at the Salem airport -- Avelo Airlines has announced that as of August 10 it will no longer have flights to and from our once-again airline'less city.

Here's an excerpt from today's Salem Reporter story by Rachel Alexander and Mirandah Davis-Powell, "Avelo pulls out of Salem."

Avelo Airlines is ending flights out of Salem in August, leaving the community again without a commercial operator after a years-long effort to return service.

The announcement Monday morning caught city officials and business leaders by surprise. Avelo officials said the flight cancellations as of Aug. 10 followed a company decision to close a hub in Burbank and end all West Coast service later this year. 

The move did not reflect on Salem specifically, company officials said. 

Activists nonetheless claimed credit for the shutdown, which followed sustained protests in Salem and other cities about the airline’s service in other states to federal immigration agencies.

Avelo’s base in the Los Angeles area has two aircraft that fly to Salem and other West Coast destinations, spokeswoman Courtney Goff said. The first airplane will stop flying Aug. 12, ending flights to some destinations, including Salem.

Avelo will stop flying the second aircraft and close the base effective Dec. 2. The company is offering refunds to all passengers for now-canceled flights.

Burbank was one of two destinations the budget airline flew from Salem, and the only one operating year-round.

Avelo will also end flights from Eugene in December.

Avelo spokeswoman Courtney Goff declined to say how full flights out of Salem were or how many passengers were affected by their reservations being canceled. 

I like the story's title, Avelo pulls out of Salem, because it nicely reflects the classic image of Charlie Brown and Lucy that I use to illustrate the unjustified optimism of those who keep plugging for commercial airline service at the Salem airport.

For those too young to know about Charlie Brown and Lucy, every fall Lucy promises that she'll put her finger on the ball so Charlie Brown can kick it, and every fall Lucy pulls the ball away just as Charlie Brown thinks this time she won't do it.

Back in January 2023 every member of the City Council voted to approve $2.4 million in precious general fund dollars to lure an airline to offer services in Salem. I presciently called my blog post about this decision, "City Council approves $2.4 million for airport in dumb move." 

The City Council action was opposed by a majority of people testifying at the meeting, including representatives of 350 Salem OR who decried adding to our city's greenhouse gas emissions when we have a marvelous airport in nearby Portland.

But in this town money talks, and business leaders talked the City Council into spending several million dollars on another quixotic attempt to bring commercial air service to Salem -- ignoring the fact that United Airlines pulled out in 1980, smaller airlines pulled out in 1993, Delta Connection flights began in 2007 and ended in 2008, and a commuter airline started and ended service within just three months in 2011.

Hopefully this latest failed attempt to bring commercial air service to Salem will be the final nail in the coffin of such efforts. City councilors need to think more independently and not be swayed by pie-in-the-sky sales jobs from airlines, the Chamber of Commerce, City of Salem staff, and Travel Salem that aren't backed by common sense.

At least I can hold my skeptical head high. It's a pleasure to share this passage from my January 2023 post where I called the $2.4 million general fund expenditure a dumb move. I predicted commercial air service would only last 1-2 years, which is what happened.

So the nine City Council members, most of whom are progressives who claim to want Salem to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions as called for by the Climate Action Plan they approved, just agreed to spend $2.4 million to bring large highly polluting commercial passenger planes to the airport.

Why? Because the Chamber of Commerce and Travel Salem want to make it easier for out-of-state people to visit nearby wineries, maybe spending time at a Salem hotel, but probably not -- since there are more attractive lodging options elsewhere in Northwest Oregon's wine country.

But, wow, we might get to be the West Coast hub for a budget airline that's probably destined to go out of business after sucking up the benefits of the $2.4 million the City Council has just bestowed on the unnamed airline.

Few people in Salem appear to want to subsidize another attempt at bringing commercial air service here. Yet City of Salem staff are for this; some in the business community are for this; so every member of the City Council dutifully went along with a project at odds with their own Climate Action Plan, and common sense, because whatever city staff and the Chamber wants, they usually get from the City Council.

When the unnamed airline ceases service in Salem after a year or two, I won't be shy in telling everyone who voted for this, "I told you so." Unfortunately, the homeless people who could have been helped mightily by the $2.4 million in general fund dollars won't be saying that to the City Council.

Because in this town those with the most money have the loudest voice. And that's who the City Council listens to most assiduously. 

Netanyahu has prolonged Gaza war to keep himself in power

I detest Israel in the same way that much of the world detests the United States. Not because I dislike the people of Israel. Not because I dislike the nation of Israel. Because Israel is being led by a despicable leader and a far-right government that is responsible for harming many innocent human beings.

By carrying out what comes close to being the genocide of Palestinians living in Gaza -- destroying their homes, indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, denial of humanitarian aid, mass killings of noncombatants -- Israel has squandered the goodwill that was directed at the country after Hamas attacked and killed 1,200 people in Israel. 

Prime Minister Netanyahu is Israel's Trump. Selfish. Egotistical. Habitual liar. The New York Times has confirmed what many have long suspected: that Netanyahu has prolonged the war against Hamas in order to remain in power. 

This is both totally believable and totally outrageous. Netanyahu would rather have many thousands of innocent Palestinians killed or injured, along with failing to negotiate the return of the remaining Israeli hostages, so he can keep on playing his authoritarian Prime Minister games. 

It's no wonder Trump and Netanyahu get along so well. They both care about themselves first, with the good of their nation coming in a distant second. 

Here's a gift link to the New York Times Magazine story, "How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power." It's quite long. But there's a much shorter version, "Takeaways from the Times Investigation Into Benjamin Netanyahu." I've copied it in below. 

When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, setting off the war in the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career seemed doomed. Nearly two years later, the war is still going, and Netanyahu has assumed a position of rare domestic strength.

Our six-month investigation, containing many details that have never been previously reported, tells the behind-the-scenes story of how Netanyahu survived and then prospered as the war dragged on. The article brings readers to Netanyahu’s hospital ward in July 2023, to his home in the minutes after the Oct. 7 attack began, to the Israeli military headquarters in the days that followed and inside several cease-fire negotiations and Israeli cabinet discussions throughout 2024 and 2025.

Through interviews with more than 110 officials in Israel, the United States and across the Arab world, as well as a review of dozens of government records and other documents, we reveal how Netanyahu’s actions first made Israel more vulnerable to the October disaster and then helped to prolong and expand the ensuing war. Unexpectedly, the war’s expansion allowed Israel to defeat Hezbollah and bruise Iran. But its extension in Gaza brought relentless misery for Palestinians, led to the deaths of Israeli hostages and allowed Netanyahu to defer a political reckoning.

Here are five takeaways from the investigation.

Before Oct. 7, Netanyahu ignored repeated warnings about a potential attack.

As Netanyahu convalesced in his pajamas in the hospital in July 2023, a senior general brought him a troubling intelligence assessment. The report warned that Israel’s enemies, including Hamas, had taken note of the country’s domestic turmoil, set off by Netanyahu’s divisive plan to weaken the judiciary, and were preparing an attack.

Netanyahu ignored this and other warnings, and his government went ahead with the overhaul, passing a law hours later that limited the judiciary’s power, setting off more unrest. Two days later, Hamas’s leaders once again noted the turmoil in Israel — and decided the time was right to proceed with a long-planned attack.

Netanyahu deflected responsibility and tried to blame defense officials.

Minutes after the attack began in October 2023, at the nadir of his political career, Netanyahu was already planting the seeds for his personal survival act. “I don’t see anything in the intelligence,” Netanyahu said in one of his first phone calls that day. It was his first deflection of blame and an early hint of how Netanyahu would try to prolong his political life by blaming the security and intelligence chiefs for failing to prevent the attack.

As fighting still flared in southern Israel, Netanyahu’s team then briefed sympathetic influencers, telling them that it was the generals who were at fault for Israel’s worst-ever defense failure. At the same time, they moved to prevent the leak of conversations that might prove problematic to Netanyahu, stopped the military from creating official recordings of their meetings with Netanyahu and arranged for the searching of generals — including Herzi Halevi, the army chief — for hidden microphones.

Later in the war, Netanyahu’s team ordered archivists to alter the official records of his earliest phone calls on Oct. 7. Then they leaked a sensitive document to a foreign newspaper — circumventing Israel’s military censorship system — in order to discredit Netanyahu’s critics, including distraught families of hostages still in Gaza.

To avoid alienating far-right allies, Netanyahu dragged out truce negotiations.

In the opening hours of the war, Netanyahu turned down an offer from Israel’s opposition leader to form a unity government, preferring to remain in a coalition with far-right extremists who were more likely to let him remain in power after the war. That decision made him beholden throughout the war to the far right’s demands — in particular on the question of whether and when to reach a truce with Hamas.

When momentum toward a cease-fire seemed to grow, Netanyahu ascribed sudden significance to military objectives that he previously seemed less interested in pursuing and that top military officials told him were not worth the cost, such as the capture of the southern city Rafah and later the occupation of the Gaza-Egypt border.

Saudi Arabia and the United States were willing to make a landmark Israeli-Saudi peace deal. Netanyahu demurred.

During intense talks with American counterparts in May 2024, the Saudi leadership took the risky step of signaling it was ready to form formal ties with Israel — as long as the Gaza war ended, the United States made concessions to Saudi Arabia and Israel began the process of recognizing Palestinian statehood. “Let’s finish this,” Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said in one late-night meeting about the U.S.-Saudi parts of the deal.

Netanyahu’s resistance to taking that path was among the many issues that strained U.S.-Israeli relations under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. As the death toll in Gaza rose in December 2023, Biden grew so frustrated during one call with Netanyahu that he abruptly ended the conversation. As cease-fire talks stalled months later, American officials cited polls showing that more than 50 percent of Israelis now supported a hostage deal rather than continued war.

“Not 50 percent of my voters,” Netanyahu replied.

Conflict in Lebanon, Syria and Iran helped restore Netanyahu’s lost prestige.

At the start of the war, Netanyahu avoided steps that might expand the conflict into an all-out war with Hezbollah and Iran, key allies of Hamas. He called off a major attack on Hezbollah in the war’s opening days and avoided uncontrollable escalations with Iran.

But nearly a year into the war, a sequence of unforeseen intelligence successes led Israel to kill several senior Hezbollah commanders. Now emboldened, Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Hezbollah’s leader and the invasion of its heartland in southern Lebanon, destroying much of its arsenal.

Then, Israel managed to wipe out much of the Iranian air-defense system — significantly undermining the Iranian threat. Now neither Iran nor Hezbollah could protect President Bashar al-Assad of Syria against a rebel advance, prompting the ouster of another longtime nemesis of Israel.

With Tehran unusually vulnerable, Netanyahu then proceeded with an attack on Iran that became the greatest episode of his political career. Celebrated in Israel as a victory, the military campaign left Netanyahu’s party in a stronger polling position than at any point since October 2023.

Trump's Agriculture Secretary expects Medicaid recipients to work in fields

It's always hard for me to figure out which of the many absurd pronouncements by Trump administration officials is most deserving of ridicule. This statement by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins came out on top today.

I'm not sure what the "34 million able-bodied on Medicaid" refers to. There are about 41 million adults on Medicaid, with a bit over 7 million aged 65 or older, so Rollins seems to be speaking about every adult on Medicaid aged 19 to 64 (41 million minus 7 million equals 34 million).

But only 8% of the 34 million, or about 3.3 million, reported that they are retired, unable to find work, or were not working for another reason. I guess these are the folks who the Agriculture Secretary thinks will be jumping at the chance to work in fields, often doing (literally) back-breaking labor.

As a pleasingly sarcastic MSNBC story about the Agriculture Secretary's remarks points out, Rollins seems to want the United States to act like communist Russia or China in forcing people to work on farms.

In other words, as the agriculture secretary sees it, there’s no need for concern about farmers losing out on immigrant labor because those workers can be replaced thanks to “automation” and Medicaid beneficiaries.

A lot of words come to mind when trying to describe such an approach, but for now, let’s go with “flawed.”

Right off the bat, let’s note the fact that most Americans on Medicaid already have jobs, so they won’t be available to pick crops and replace the victims of the White House’s mass deportation campaign.

What’s more, many Medicaid beneficiaries live in urban areas, which tend to be nowhere near farms, and I have a hunch the administration doesn’t intend to pay for an elaborate travel-reimbursement program to shuttle city residents to and from agricultural areas. (History offers some examples of regimes that forced urban residents to work on farms, but the Trump administration should probably try to avoid emulating Stalin’s five-year plan.)

Alas, there’s no reason to stop there. It’s also true, for example, that many Americans on Medicaid have physical disabilities and/or live in nursing homes, so asking them to work in fields to collect produce for consumers probably won’t go well.

But what I find myself stuck on is Rollins’ quote in the context of the Republicans’ domestic policy megabill. GOP policymakers approved sweeping and unprecedented cuts to Medicaid, arguing that Americans who lose coverage can simply get jobs that offer health insurance.

It’s against this backdrop that the secretary of agriculture suggested that Medicaid beneficiaries — whose coverage is at risk — can replace immigrants as farmworkers, brushing past the inconvenient fact that farmworkers tend not to get health care coverage.

All of which is to say, if the administration is counting on Americans on Medicaid replacing immigrants on farms, officials should probably start working on a Plan B.

I'm not feeling proud to be an American on this Fourth of July

I've never been a flag-waving sort of American. Yet I consider myself patriotic. I vote in every election. I'm active in my community. I want the United States to be an international leader, helping bring democracy and prosperity to other less fortunate countries. 

But on this Fourth of July, when we celebrate our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, I'm not feeling great about my country. I've got a lot of company from my fellow Democrats, only 36% of whom are extremely or very proud to be an American.

There's a simple reason. In 2015 80% of Democrats were extremely or very proud to be an American. This was at the tail end of Obama's presidency, when we had a decent human being in the White House who embodied core American values of compassion and caring.

After Trump became president in 2016, then was elected again in 2024, it became much more difficult for liberals like me to feel good about our country. And this wasn't because a Republican occupied the White House.

I'm old enough to have experienced quite a few Republican presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, H.W. Bush, W. Bush, and now Trump. Until Trump came along, I never was ashamed of my county under GOP leadership. I just disagreed with many of the policies embraced by Republican presidents.

Now, though, Trump is an embarrassment.

His character flaws are horrendous. Trump never exhibits genuine concern for anyone who doesn't subscribe to his childish MAGA'ism. He has no idea what truly makes America great: our diversity, equity, and inclusion, three words that Trump has ordered stricken from the federal government, along with a big chunk of private entities such as universities. 

We used to be a magnet for people around the world who wanted a better life for themselves and their children. Now this image reflects our international reputation.

Previous Republican presidents upheld the core of our American norms and values even as they tinkered around the edges of them to make this country more conservative. Those presidents didn't demonize anyone who disagreed with them, as Trump does. 

Trump has no interest in being a president for all Americans. I've never heard him reach out to Democrats, saying something like "Though we may disagree, we are united in wanting to make our country better." Trump is a narrow-minded autocrat who admires authoritarianism and detests democracy. 

In 1776 the United States said NO to being ruled by a king. In 2025, as the massive No Kings protests last month made clear, we're equally opposed to being ruled by King Trump. He's the first president to make a mockery of our democracy and, worse, be supported in this by almost all Republican politicians and a majority of the Supreme Court.

That leaves it up to the American people to keep alive the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, which says that it is the Right of the People to resist despots. In 1776 the tyranny was from an external king. In 2025 the tyrant is home grown and resides in the White House.

Trump's megabill is both unpopular and uninspired

Liberals like me hate what used to be called Trump's Big Beautiful Bill before Senate Democrats deleted that name for an excellent reason (it's big, and a bill, but isn't at all beautiful). Among other things it will:

-- kick many millions of Americans off of Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act 
-- make permanent tax breaks for corporations and wealthy people at the expense of poor people
-- cripple our country's renewable energy industries, leaving China to lead in this area
-- increase the national debt by $3-4 trillion
-- throw many billions of dollars into deporting hard-working undocumented migrants

Polls show that Americans dislike Trump's megabill by about 60-40. That's to be expected, given that the people the megabill benefits are many fewer than the people the megabill hurts.

But a Politico story discusses an issue that I hadn't thought of before -- how the megabill doesn't help Trump's Republican Party (there are no GOP policy positions aside from whatever Trump wants) form a long-term governing majority. 

Here's how "The Limits of Trump's Revolution Are Laid Bare by the Megabill" starts out.

In the service of pushing his tax-and-spending megabill over the finish line, Donald Trump has spent recent days cajoling, threatening and meeting with lawmakers. His message to them was simple.

“It’s a great bill,” the president explained at a Florida event Tuesday. “There is something for everyone.”

It’s an astonishing oversight. Over the past decade, Trump has unleashed the tectonic forces of political realignment. He has torn his party down to the studs and then remade it in his image. He has splintered the Obama coalition and accelerated a class-based political reordering that stands to upend nearly a century of convention. His most recent win was marked by a more racially and ethnically diverse voter coalition than in his two prior campaigns.

These are accomplishments most presidents have only dreamed of. Yet the centerpiece of Trump’s legislative agenda does almost nothing to harness any of it in the service of a permanent MAGA governing majority. He is spending every last cent of his political capital on a bill marked by its lack of ambition and vision.

It suggests real limits to the MAGA revolution, either because the coalition is inherently brittle or because of the stiff challenges Trump still faces in transforming the GOP, even as he utterly dominates it.

This was the moment to announce the arrival of what could be a multi-ethnic working-class coalition. The time to deal a crowning blow to a feckless opposition party that remains convinced the only thing holding it back is ineffective messaging. Instead, the White House produced a domestic policy bill that could have just as easily been produced by any generic Republican administration.

There’s no Nixon-goes-to-China policy surprise, no dramatic break from the familiar. Nothing bold to suggest the unique populist coalition he has assembled or to cement it in the decades ahead. Its signature idea, tax relief, is meaningful — and shouldn’t be minimized — but that’s always been a core GOP tenet. So has a generalized commitment to growth and prosperity. Spending on border security addresses a critical need, but isn’t inherently additive.

Much of the bill smacks of a reassertion of decades-old Republican policies and an embrace of party orthodoxy. It is easily caricatured as a giveaway to the wealthy that also slashes health care, a piñata for Democrats to bash and ride back to a House majority.

One astute conservative student of the realignment likened the legislation “to a death march through a series of choices that nobody really wanted to be making.”

“[It’s] not something that has an especially coherent logic to it or much prospect of actually accomplishing the things that I think people want,” Oren Cass, founder of the think tank American Compass and a leading advocate of conservative economic populism, told POLITICO Magazine recently.

The failure to imbue the legislation with more of a Trumpist ideological throughline may be due to a few factors; perhaps it’s Trump’s well-known aversion to wonky policy details, or the fact that most Republican lawmakers are still loyal to the Reaganite economic policy they came up with even as they now publicly bow to Trump.

But whether the sprawling bill is ultimately judged a policy success or failure, it lacks an original vision to hold together the constituencies Trump has improbably knitted together — tax relief, border spending, safety net cuts and Biden policy rollbacks aren’t a theory of the case. Sure, it has a few Trumpian frills that nod to the president’s populist campaign pledges, but they are largely small-bore and were scaled back by senators anyway. “No tax on tips” became a temporary tax deduction on tips, for instance. The brief musings about a tax hike on upper-income earners quickly were extinguished by opposition from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Decades from now, no one will point to this legislation as a key building block of a lasting Republican coalition. It’s more likely to be remembered for the estimated $3.3 trillion it is set to add to the national debt.

Chair of Salem Main Street Association says I'm not welcome in downtown anymore

At last Monday's City Council meeting, T.J. Sullivan, board chair for the Salem Main Street Association said in the public comment period, "There are a couple of people who are about the complaints who aren't welcome in downtown Salem anymore."

T.J. Sullivan

Sullivan was referring to the complaint against Mayor Julie Hoy that I filed with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission. (Another person filed a similar complaint.) That complaint was found to have merit after a preliminary review, and a full investigation of Hoy and city councilors will take place.

It appears that Sullivan has been watching too much Fox News lately, since he believes that as the chair of the Salem Main Street Association he has the authority to decide who gets to "migrate" to downtown. As far as I know, American citizens can't be banned from part of a city because they criticized a conservative mayor. But I haven't been keeping up on all of Trump's executive orders.

The good news, I guess, is that Sullivan didn't call for my deportation -- though maybe this blog post will  further incur the Wrath of T.J. and I'll be hit with an even more absurd insult. 

After someone pointed out to me what Sullivan said at the city council meeting, I replied that he must have been joking and needed to see the video. However, if his remark was supposed to be humorous, I have to admit that it didn't come off that way, especially since it followed a mention that members of the city council supposedly couldn't attend a Salem Main Street Association meeting because of the ethics complaint.

That's ridiculous. Oregon's public meeting law prohibits members of a body like a city council from conducting "serial communications" where deliberation of an issue takes place privately outside of the public eye. It doesn't prevent city councilors from attending meetings of the Salem Main Street Association.

Here's the video of the city council meeting. I've made it start just before Sullivan makes his public comment.

Trump's constant lying means he can't be believed about Iran's nuclear program

If there's one thing that can be said with certainty about Donald Trump, it's that he is a habitual shameless liar. This was annoying when he was a presidential candidate. As president, Trump's constant falsehoods are a clear and present danger to our national security.

All American presidents have shaded the truth to some extent. That comes with being a politician.

But in the past lying by the occupant of the White House about important issues was fairly rare. The most notable recent example was the George W. Bush administration lying about evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in an attempt to justify invading that country.

With Trump, the lies flow freely regarding matters great and small, important and unimportant. Devotees of the Cult of Trump aren't much bothered by this, because they checked their capacity for independent thinking at the Please Fool Me cloak room when Trump became a national political figure.

However, anyone who cares about the credibility of the United States, which is sinking like a stone as Trump's second term is proving to be even more of a lie-fest than his first term, has to be concerned, especially when it comes to national security issues.

After American warplanes attacked three of Iran's nuclear sites a few days ago, Trump went 0n national television to claim, without any evidence, that Iran's nuclear program had been completely obliterated. This was utterly unlike what any previous president would have said, since the proper response was to say that the attack was a success but it will take time to assess how much damage was caused to the sites.

Because Trump demands absolute loyalty from his acolytes, his complete obliteration claim couldn't be questioned by members of his cabinet -- even after a leaked preliminary report from a Defense Department intelligence agency said that it appeared Iran's nuclear program had only been set back by a few months.

So now the Trump administration is twisting itself into logical knots, trying not to contradict Trump's initial lie about Iran's nuclear program while not embracing the consequences that would follow if it were indeed true that the nuclear program had been obliterated. 

For example, if that were the case, then there would be no need to negotiate a treaty with Iran about not restarting enrichment of uranium or development of a nuclear weapon because there is no Iranian nuclear program that could be restarted. 

A Politico story, "The administration is struggling to back up Trump's bold claims on Iran strikes," says:

The Trump administration is running into a problem as it touts the U.S. strikes in Iran as an unqualified triumph: It hasn’t yet provided clear evidence to prove it.

The effort began after a preliminary classified U.S. intelligence assessment that leaked to the press appeared to undercut Trump’s assertions the strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.

In the last 36 hours, Trump and his aides have sparred with the news media, rushed out new statements from intelligence chiefs to counter the leaked report, and called a press conference to detail the many years of planning that went into the strike.

So far, officials have not been able to publicly provide convincing evidence that the entirety of Iran’s sprawling nuclear program was destroyed — a conclusion that would likely take spy agencies weeks if not months to establish. Assessments they have offered are light on details and flit between ambiguous language about whether Tehran’s nuclear program has been destroyed or just experienced a major setback — a lesser achievement.

Moreover, in working to debunk the leaked assessment saying Iran’s nuclear program may have only been set back months, Trump administration officials have stressed that it is too early to evaluate the strikes — though that’s precisely what they are trying to do.

...Trump has claimed any nuclear effort by Iran has been halted, saying, for example, in a social media post Thursday: “It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability.” He has also said that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back “basically decades.”

Speaking at the NATO summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Trump even said a nuclear deal with Iran was no longer necessary because Tehran has been cowed by the U.S. strikes. “They’ve had it,” he said at one point.

But there is some suspicion that Iran maintains other, secret nuclear sites the American airstrikes left untouched. And even though Israel has killed scores of Iran’s leading scientists and intelligence officials in the war, Iran likely retains enough scientific and technical talent to build a bomb if it wants.

There are many reasons to worry about Trump's incessant lying. To my mind, they point to the risk of having an American president who can't be believed. Our allies can't believe what he says. Our enemies can't believe what he says. This makes negotiating with the Trump administration extremely difficult, because any agreement can be undone when Trump changes his lying mind.

Which is often, because Trump doesn't embrace any strong  values. He's a flag that blows whichever way his ever-shifting mind blows in the direction of whatever is most advantageous for him at any given moment. 

This is why progressives like me look back with some fondness at presidents we used to heartily dislike: George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon. They were flawed, but in a traditionally conservative way. Meaning, their lies and mistakes were mostly in the service of a political philosophy, not their own personal self-interest. 

Trump is different. He only cares about himself, wrongly believing that what is good for King Trump is good for the nation. No, it isn't.

 

Democratic Socialist wins New York City's Democratic primary for Mayor. Wow!

Most of what I know about today's Democratic primary for the New York City mayor comes from posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, from people who follow NYC politics much more closely than I do from my perch some 3,000 miles away in Oregon.

I learned that Andrew Cuomo, the former Governor of New York, was trying to mount a comeback after he resigned following allegations of sexual abuse and mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. Cuomo has been leading in the polls over his chief primary rival, Zohran Mamdani. 

Zohran Mamdani

Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, was expected to lose to Cuomo, though NYC's ranked choice voting process would make the primary race interesting. Final results weren't expected until next week, as the number of candidates in the primary for mayor made it unlikely that anyone would get more than 50% of the vote and win outright.

Well, Mamdani surprised the pundits by coming out ahead of Cuomo, who has conceded to Mamdani. A Politico story talks about the implications of Mamdani's victory for the Democratic Party nationally.

If Mamdani’s lead holds, it would mark a humiliating defeat for Cuomo, a fixture in New York politics who tried to resurrect his career four years after resigning in disgrace, following sexual harassment and Covid mismanagement allegations.

A Mamdani victory would also be tantamount to a political earthquake that will reverberate across the country, as the Democratic Party — still reeling from its losses last year — tries to chart its path forward. His lead late Tuesday night portends what will likely be an historic triumph of the party’s left wing in the biggest city in the United States, for one of the highest-profile jobs in American politics.

The hard-fought local fight mirrors the national Democratic divide: A young, inexperienced socialist running on a hopeful message with the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez versus a 67-year-old, three-term former New York governor who worked in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet and got the ex-president’s endorsement in the race’s waning days.

It is also the most high-profile Democratic primary in the country since President Donald Trump won a second term seven months ago. Seen as a referendum on how Democrats should counter the White House, New Yorkers lined up in droves during nine days of early voting, many of them matching the profile of a prototypical Mamdani supporter: Young, white and in gentrifying areas of the city.

If the results Tuesday night hold, they will have chosen a new voice focused on affordability over a party elder who leaned into his prior experience fighting Trump and promised to restore order to Adams’ chaotic City Hall.

Buoyed by that relentless focus on affordability — Mamdani pledged to freeze the rent on more than a million regulated apartments and push for a tax increase on the rich to fund free buses and create city-owned grocery stores — the social media savvy state lawmaker earned a devoted following that included more than 50,000 volunteers. That workforce is unprecedented in a New York City race, according to Jerry Skurnik, a longtime political consultant.

Being a Democrat who desperately wants my party to make a strong showing in future elections, I find Mamdani's apparent victory to be really encouraging. Democrats have to break out of their stale identity politics where they attempt to craft election wins by targeting traditional Democratic voting blocs with traditional policy messages.

It's great that Mamdani is a young Muslim who takes bold stands that don't sound like they've been fashioned out of polling and focus groups. I don't know him at all well, but my impression is that he is able to speak authentically, from the heart, which is valued by voters these days over carefully tailored speeches.

Sure, Republicans will seize on his Democratic Socialist leaning, hoping to brand Democrats nationally with what they consider to be the socialist epithet. But I doubt this will work very well. After all, Trump is a convicted felon with lots of other personal negative baggage, and he's sitting in the White House.

I find it admirable that NYC voters chose Mamdani over Cuomo even though Cuomo hammered his opponent for criticizing Israel and promoting Palestinian rights. I agree with Mamdani's position on these issues, as do most Americans. 

It's absurd to equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. Plenty of Jews in both the United States and Israel find a lot not to like in how Israel has conducted its war against Hamas and treated Palestinians in the West Bank. 

M. Gessen wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times, "The Attacks on Zohran Mamdani Show That We Need a New Understanding of Antisemitism." Here's how it starts out:

Last Wednesday, the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani held a press conference in Harlem to announce that the civil rights activist Maya Wiley had endorsed him. As the event was wrapping up, the thing that always happens to Mamdani happened: Someone in the crowd wanted the candidate to prove that he was sufficiently opposed to antisemitism. “It pains me to be called an antisemite,” Mamdani said, and then, as he went on to describe what it’s been like, he choked up.

He has plenty of reasons to be upset. He has been subjected to a relentless barrage of anti-Muslim slurs and threats. Someone messaged, “The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.” He has had to hire security. Meanwhile, proposed mailers illustrated with photographs of Mamdani doctored to make his beard fuller, darker and longer have been circulating online.

An anti-Mamdani TV ad includes a montage of him wearing a kurta — a long shirt in a style often worn in South and Central Asia (though on the campaign trail Mamdani usually wears a jacket and slacks). Billionaires who support the candidacy of the former governor Andrew Cuomo bankrolled glossy fliers that warn that “Mamdani’s radical plans would make New York less safe.” The message: He is a Muslim fundamentalist who poses an existential threat to this city and its Jewish residents.

When I spoke to Mamdani on the phone a couple of days after that press conference, it became clear to me that there is another reason he chokes up: It’s hard to keep defending yourself against a false accusation. It’s logically impossible to prove an absence. And as anyone who has ever been falsely accused knows, it hurts.

The mayoral campaign isn’t the first time that Mamdani, who has spoken out in support of Palestinian rights, has faced accusations of antisemitism, but this time critics have focused on two events. In the June 4 Democratic debate, candidates were asked which foreign country they would visit first after becoming mayor. Cuomo named Israel. Mamdani said he would stay in the city and added, “As mayor, I will be standing up for Jewish New Yorkers and will be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs, whether it’s at their synagogues and temples or in their homes or at the subway platform.”

A moderator then insisted that Mamdani declare whether he believes in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He answered that he believes “that Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights.” Cuomo cut in to score a point: “He said he won’t visit Israel!”

If there is such a thing as correct answers in politics, Mamdani had them. It ought to be uncontroversial for a mayor to focus on his city and for a politician to assert the value of equal rights. But the exchange fueled accusations of antisemitism.

Last week, Mamdani was interviewed on “FYPod,” a podcast aimed at a young political audience. One of the hosts asked Mamdani to comment on the slogan “Globalize the intifada,” which, the host acknowledged, means different things to different people. “Antisemitism is a real issue in our city,” Mamdani responded. “It’s one that can be captured in statistics,” he continued. “It’s also one that you will feel in conversations you will have with Jewish New Yorkers across the city.”

He talked about a Jewish man who told him about being at services at his synagogue, hearing a door creak open behind him, and feeling terrified. Mamdani talked about a Jewish man in Williamsburg who had started locking a door he’d always kept open. Then Mamdani said he would fight antisemitism not by banning words but by increasing funding for anti-hate-crime programming by 800 percent.

His response showed deference to the American tradition of free speech, evidenced commitment to tackling the issue at hand and showcased his remarkable talent for articulating the feelings behind the politics. More accusations of antisemitism followed.

Trump's bombing of Iran likely will have unintended consequences

Currently President Trump and the rest of his administration's merry band of MAGA acolytes are puffing out their chests, all proud that seven B-2 bombers dropped 14 giant 30,000 pound "bunker buster" bombs on three underground nuclear sites in Iran.

But as I said in a post about the attacks on my Church of the Churchless blog yesterday, it's likely that things aren't going to go so smoothly from now on.

The best case scenario would be that the attacks were successful, Iran doesn't retaliate in a major way, Iran agrees to a peace deal with the United States and Israel that guarantees Iran won't reconstitute its nuclear program, and a pro-democracy movement takes hold in Iran that ends the fundamentalist Islam control of the country by a single person, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Unfortunately, it is very unlikely that the best case scenario will happen.

As the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Iran will respond in some fashion. Then Israel and the United States will respond to that response. And so it will go, actions spurring reactions in a series of events that are impossible to predict.

Obviously it would be dangerous for Israel and the world if Iran ever was able to build a nuclear bomb and develop the capability to deploy it via a missile or some other means. Problem is, the March 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community said that Iran isn't building a nuclear weapon and hasn't reauthorized a suspended nuclear weapons program.

We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so. In the past year, there has been an erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public that has emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision making apparatus. Khamenei remains the final decision maker over Iran’s nuclear program, to include any decision to develop nuclear weapons.

So there was no pressing need to bomb the underground nuclear sites. It appears that Trump gave the go-ahead to do this because Israel's prime minister, Netanyahu, goaded Trump into action after Israel attacked Iran with the weapons at its disposal and needed the United States military to bomb the underground sites -- since only a B-2 bomber can carry the bunker-buster bomb, both of which Israel lacks.

As I said in my previous blog post:

Iran has been denying that it seeks to build a nuclear bomb. But it's been enriching uranium to levels that are far beyond what's needed for civilian nuclear purposes, such as generating electricity. Israel is justifiably concerned that if Iran did get a nuclear bomb, it could be used to destroy much of their country.

Problem is, life is inherently unpredictable. Wars, even more so. At the moment there's no reliable evidence as to how much damage the B-2 bomber attacks caused to Iran's underground nuclear facilities.

There's a strong possibility that the lesson Iran is going to take from the attacks by the United States and Israel is that it needs to acquire nuclear weapons as soon as possible. For nobody messes with North Korea, a nuclear power, while Russia invaded Ukraine after that country gave up its nuclear weapon stockpile following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Iran could develop a nuclear weapon in secret, perhaps with the help of Russia and North Korea. Or those countries could give a nuclear weapon to Iran, though they might not be willing to risk the blowback if this was made public. Today Vice-President Vance said that the United States isn't at war with Iran, it is at war with Iran's nuclear program.

Fine. But if Iran's nuclear program goes underground, not physically but secretly, how is the United States going to stop what can't be detected?

There's no way we're going to invade Iran like we invaded Iraq. If Iran quietly develops a nuclear weapons program that up until now it has held off on, the first we might hear about it is when Iran announces that it is a nuclear power with multiple weapons and the capability to deliver them.

As a final observation, the screenshot below of a post on X shows that the only reason Iran currently possesses such a large stockpile of enriched uranium is because Trump withdrew from the JCPOA agreement negotiated between Iran, the United States, and several other nations during Obama's second term.

After Trump tore up the agreement following his 2016 presidential win, Iran steadily enriched uranium from a negligible level until it reached about the same level as before the JCPOA went into effect. 

This means that Trump is having to deal with the problem that he himself created, since the JCPOA was working fine to limit Iran's nuclear capability until Trump trashed that agreement.