Saturday Report 7/18/26 — Trump’s DHS threatens to jail election officials, Fox pretends the speech never happened, and Texas asks eighth graders to consider whether the Holocaust was God’s fault...

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— The Trump administration has now openly threatened to imprison American election officials who won’t let it “help” run this fall’s elections. Thursday night Trump went on prime time to inform the nation that our elections have been rigged for years and the evidence was hidden from us, a 26-minute performance that news organizations from PBS to the New York Times shredded in real time. Friday morning his Homeland Security Secretary, former plumber Markwayne Mullin, took a friendly question from a Daily Caller reporter and ran with it: states that decline to hand their voter rolls over to his SAVE program will find their election officials held accountable “by fines, by penalties, and even ... prison time.” He asserted his agency had found 250,000 noncitizens on the rolls in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada, though as election experts told The Guardian, he declined to share anything so inconvenient as a methodology. Non-citizens on the rolls aren’t generally an issue (and usually the result of errors processing driver’s licenses with “sign me up” checkboxes) because those people who aren’t citizens don’t want to risk five years in jail just to vote. As Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state noted, noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare in his state. Gavin Newsom’s entire response was two words: “Try us.” He’d already called Trump’s speech the “ramblings of a mad king,” adding that the only missing prop was a tin foil hat. Understand what’s happening: they’re laying the predicate now, in July, for contesting or seizing an election in November that they can see they’re going to lose. This is how they do things in Putin’s Russia, but no American administration has ever done this. Not one...

— Turns out that when you spend 45 years transferring the nation’s wealth to the top, the people at the bottom eventually notice. The new CNBC All-America Economic Survey finds Americans as gloomy about the economy as they’ve been since the pandemic years, with Trump’s approval down to 40% and just a quarter of the country optimistic about the future, with all this despite a booming stock market, (which explains who that market is booming for). Today 60% of Americans earning under $30,000 are cutting back on essentials, versus 35% of those making six figures or more. Over on CNN, chief data analyst Harry Enten went to the videotape and came back visibly rattled: among households under $50,000 — the very voters Trump won by a historic margin in 2024 — a mere 16% think groceries are affordable, and his 16-point advantage over Kamala Harris on the economy has become a 39-point deficit. That’s a 55-point swing. “The working class have turned against Donald Trump,” Enten said. Of course they have. This is the party that broke the unions, froze the minimum wage into a fossil, and has installed a union-busting lawyer atop the Labor Department in every Republican administration since Reagan. These are not Eisenhower’s Republicans, and they never intended to be. As Warren Buffett told Ben Stein back in 2006, “It’s my class, the rich class, that’s making [class] war, and we’re winning.” The only question left is whether the GOP can run the old play one more time — point at a migrant caravan, a Willie Horton, a trans teenager, anything shiny — and get voters to forget that 10 of the last 11 recessions started on a Republican president’s watch.

— And here’s the punchline the consultant class is going to spend all weekend trying not to say out loud: “democratic socialist” now polls better than “MAGA.” The same CNBC All-America poll that found the country miserable about the economy also asked what labels move votes. A candidate calling herself a democratic socialist makes 32% of registered voters more likely to support her. A Trump endorsement: 29%. A MAGA identifier: 27%, with 57% saying it’s disqualifying. So after eighteen months of Republicans screaming “communist” at every Democrat who can fog a mirror, the slur is testing better than the brand doing the smearing. The reason isn’t complicated, though you’d never learn it from the billionaire-funded media and think tanks: since Mamdani won New York, the candidates wearing that label have talked about rent, groceries, wages, and medical bills more or less nonstop — while everyone else talks about Venezuela and burn bags. It’s the economy, stupid. That was on Clinton’s own war-room wall, and it never stopped being true; it just got inconvenient once Clinton and Obama made their peace with neoliberalism and decided the donor class was a coalition partner rather than the problem. Capitalism still outpolls socialism in America, as CNBC notes. It’s just doing so by a shrinking margin, and 45 years of Reaganomics is the reason why. The billionaires spent two generations proving Keynes’ point better than Keynes ever did...

— Fox “News” covered Trump’s election-fraud address the way a cat covers what’s in the litter box. For three straight hours Friday morning, Fox & Friends did not mention it once — not a syllable — while every other network in America was taking the president’s claims apart line by line. Instead Kilmeade, Earhardt, and Lawrence Jones gave their viewers the Iran airstrikes, the air quality crisis, the Texas floods, the World Cup, and a lovingly extended appreciation of a Marco Rubio speech about “left wing violence.” Then they handed off to Dana Perino, who also didn’t mention it. The network carried the speech live, mind you; as it ended, Bret Baier told the audience Fox “is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statements.” Translation: we know exactly what that was, and our lawyers are in the room. Because Fox has been here before: in 2023 it wrote Dominion Voting Systems a check for $787.5 million rather than let a jury hear what its own hosts said in private about the last round of stolen-election fantasies. So the Australian billionaire Murdochs are impaled on the horns of a dilemma entirely of their own manufacture: tell the truth and lose the audience they spent thirty years training, or tell the lie again and lose another three-quarters of a billion dollars. Their solution, apparently, is to pretend the President of the United States didn’t speak. Somewhere in the Fox legal department, a partner is billing $1,400 an hour to explain the concept of “silence” very slowly...

— Texas has decided that five million public school children will study the Bible whether their families are Christian or not, and Jewish leaders are pointing out — politely, which is more than the state deserves — that this always ends badly. The Republican-controlled State Board of Education voted 9-5 to impose a mandatory reading list larded with scripture on every K-12 English classroom in the state, effective 2030. Board member Brandon Hall, a Republican and a youth pastor, explained the theory at a press conference: “Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state.” That will be news to the Baptists who fled Virginia’s established church, to Jefferson, and to the Senate that ratified Washington’s and Adams’ Treaty of Tripoli. The Telegraph reports that the curriculum’s Lamentations unit invites eighth graders to weigh “whether the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the sins of the Jews” — an actual lesson plan, in an actual American public school, in the year of our Lord 2026. A Texas rabbi, testifying as both a clergyman and the father of Jewish kids, begged the board to keep the line between teaching about religion and simply teaching religion, a line, he warned, this list forces teachers to cross. The board declined. Trump, naturally, is delighted, announcing that religion is back, bigger and stronger than ever. The Supreme Court settled this in 1963 in Abington v. Schempp, but of course that was a different Court, back when we had one with a shred of integrity still intact. Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple; Texas Republicans are marching the temple into the schoolhouse and billing the taxpayers...

— Senate Republicans just voted to let an AI algorithm with a financial stake in saying “no” decide whether your mother gets her knee fixed. On Thursday, a Democratic resolution to kill the Trump administration’s WISeR program went down 46-50, every no vote a Republican. WISeR — “Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction” — a name a Bond villain would reject as too on-the-nose — went live January 1st and imports the single most hated feature of the Medicare “Advantage” scam, prior authorization, into traditional Medicare, with AI making the call on things like knee arthroscopy and nerve stimulator implants. As the Medicare Rights Center notes, the private contractors running the algorithm share in the savings generated by the care they deny. They get paid to say no. Sen. Cantwell’s office found Washington seniors waiting two to four times longer for doctor-ordered care since the program started there, from about two weeks to as long as eight. The GAO ruled the whole thing should have come to Congress first; the administration shrugged. Rep. Suzan DelBene, who’s been chasing this thing for a year, called it what it is: “a back door to privatizing Medicare.” Republicans have loathed Medicare since LBJ signed it in 1965, when Reagan himself cut a record warning it would end American freedom. They can’t repeal it — the voters would burn Washington down — so they’re doing it the modern way: outsource the killing to a machine, take a cut of every denial, and call it efficiency. One campaigner summed the Republican Party up as “a group of millionaires working for billionaires who will rip healthcare away.” Sixty years of trying, and they finally found a hit man who doesn’t leave fingerprints...

— Congress is about to make you permanently jet-lagged, and the science says don’t. The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act 308-171 on Tuesday, locking the whole country into daylight saving time forever, with Trump cheering it on and demanding Congress “push hard for more daylight at the end of the day.” One problem: pretty much every sleep scientist in America thinks this is backwards. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s position, as lead author Dr. Muhammad Rishi explained to Scientific American, is that “permanent standard time is the best option from a human biology standpoint.” Your body clock is set by morning light, not evening light; take away the morning sun and you get worse sleep, worse metabolic health, worse mood, and more heart attacks, as the Washington Post laid out this week. We’ve run this experiment before, in 1974, and Congress repealed it within a year once parents saw their kids waiting for the bus in pitch darkness. So why are we doing it again? Follow the money: the lobbying muscles behind year-round DST are the golf industry, retail, tourism, and the convenience stores, all of whom would like one more hour of afternoon daylight in which to sell you something. Reps. Mary Gay Scanlon and Pat Harrigan have a bipartisan alternative that does it right, and Scanlon’s argument to her colleagues was almost quaint: “we should follow the science and prioritize Americans’ health.” Bless her heart. In this GOP-run Congress, the sun rises when the CEOs say it rises...

— Geeky Science Alert! The stick shift is dying, and it’s taking something with it that we’re going to miss more than we know. The Washington Post reports that the manual transmission is finally circling the drain, and the numbers are brutal: manuals were 35% of new American cars in 1980 and are under 2% now, and even in Europe they’ve collapsed from 91% of registrations in 2001 to 29% in 2024. That brief 2023 uptick that had enthusiasts comparing sticks to vinyl records turned out to be a dead-cat bounce; J.D. Power’s Tyson Jominy now says that promise was false, the march to the dustbin of history has resumed, and Americans — measured strictly by what they buy to drive — have simply gotten less fun. EVs don’t need gears or transmissions and self-driving cars don’t need you, so the clutch pedal is a dead end. But Edmunds’ Ivan Drury put his finger on the real story: “The more the car becomes your couch,” the less you want to shift it yourself. That’s it exactly. A stick shift demands that you pay attention: that you listen to the engine, feel the road, and participate in the machine instead of being carried by it. We are being gently, profitably relieved of the requirement to pay attention to anything, and we’re paying a premium for the privilege. Rest in peace, third gear. You made us better drivers, and maybe better citizens, but progress marches on...

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:

Now We Know the Road to Emergency Rule

There will be blood.

As your “founding father,” Thomas Jefferson so eloquently stated: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
~ Rohn Kenyatta

I hate to say I told you so, but many months ago I could see all of this coming and kept asking why people were betting that the Midterms would save us all. He will do anything to win. He will kill lots of people to make sure they win. They have been practicing with ICE for a long time. ICE was never about immigration, it was training for the midterms.
~ Peter Van Kampen

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