Saturday Report 8/15/26 — Trump Shocks 5,000 Sailors With Remark About Their Nine-Month Deployment…

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— Trump stuns 5,000 exhausted Sailors: nine months at sea isn’t “nearly long enough.” Roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines have been stuck aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln for over 250 days leading some to suicide attempts, but Trump says they haven’t suffered nearly long enough. When reporters asked him about the deployment that’s making headlines in the wake of reports of moldy showers, broken toilets, weeks without laundry, and one dinner that amounted to two tortillas and a half-cup of rice, Trump’s response was blunt: “No, no, no. [They’ve been there] Not nearly long enough.” Senator Richard Blumenthal says being without a port call in over 200 days is “a modern record” for the Navy, and families say shipboard doctors have warned that the crew is “coming apart.” Whiskey Pete tells Newsmax that it’s all lies, “completely misrepresented,” but nobody ever really took him seriously; the guy’s a completely unqualified C-list Fox weekend host with a short stint in the National Guard who destroyed two small vets organizations he tried to run. Remember all those years that Republicans kept reciting “thank you for your service” every time a member of our armed forces showed up? It was all performance art. These guys don’t give any more of a damn about our troops or our military than Trump did when his daddy paid a corrupt podiatrist for a phony X-ray showing somebody else’s bone spurs that got this pathetic coward out of Vietnam.

— Trump‘S DOJ is building a shield against Democratic investigations before the midterms. Blanche and Trump are getting ready for Democratic investigations if the GOP loses control of either the House or the Senate this fall. Step one was to extend Trump’s executive privilege beyond the traditional and legal government-employed advisors to anybody he chooses, including friends, donors, business contacts, and even people who have never held a federal job or taken an oath. Blanche’s DOJ memo essentially says that shielding a buddy billionaire from having to testify to Congress is a public service to all of us. No questions asking how much money they gave Trump personally in exchange for pardons, tariff exceptions, or other goodies; no questions about contracts his sons have managed to get from the Pentagon; no questions about his billion dollar crypto scams or, frankly, anything else. Under this new memo, Trump can basically say that any of his buddies or partners in crime who could testify against him are now “advisors” and immune from having to spill the beans. Even Richard Nixon is rolling over in his grave at this level of corruption, lawlessness, and unaccountability.

— AI crosses a terrifying line, and researchers are debating hitting the brakes. OpenAI stopped internal work on their new Astra model after discovering it was capable of attacking hardened computer systems all on its own, without anybody telling it how to do it. Anthropic documented three cases of Claude invading the live systems of three actual external organizations when it was supposed to be confined to its own sandbox. Meta’s model launched an actual attack on a third party, and one of the new OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face. Days earlier, the UK’s AI Security Institute nailed Anthropic’s Mythos model, turned loose in a test environment, for researching an open-source project’s human maintainers, fabricating multiple online identities, and useing them to con a real human being into signing off on its code. When the Mythos model was challenged publicly, it went back and edited its own trail to look innocent. And this is just what they’ve told us about; there’s no regulation of this industry, at least here in the US (the EU is getting closer), for devices that have been compared to nuclear weapons in terms of their potential to create widespread destruction of infrastructure and systems. Congress is starting to wake up, but the industry has pulled together a multi-hundred-million-dollar war chest to buy legislation and pay off legislators, a practice that was legalized in 2010 by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court. So much for Reagan’s repeated assertion that industry self-regulation is the highest form of governance…

— Trump’s team targets nursing home voters with chilling new election rules. As he privatizes Medicare and threatens big cuts to Social Security, Trump is trying to make sure people in nursing homes can’t easily vote. Dr. Oz’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services just published new guidelines for America’s long-term care facilities that deleted — entirely — their previous instructions that nursing homes should have a plan to make sure residents can vote. Instead, they pushed out dire warnings to nursing home staffers about how long they could end up in prison if they help somebody vote in the wrong way. Thirteen Senate Democrats, led by Alex Padilla and Elizabeth Warren, wrote to Oz pointing out that the memo is apparently designed to intimidate staff out of helping the country’s 1.2 million nursing home residents cast a ballot. Given how many immigrants work in nursing homes, this will hit hard. Republicans in Texas have already test-run this, which is probably where Oz got the idea: Texas social worker Kelly Brunner made clerical errors registering disabled residents in 2020, although no improper vote was ever cast, and Texas Attorney General (and now Senate candidate) Ken Paxton charged her with 134 felonies anyway. She spent $50,000 on lawyers and lost her teaching license. Republicans are getting desperate: first it was Black voters they were purging and gerrymandering into irrelevance, then Hispanics they’re terrorizing and threatening to bring ICE to the polls, then shutting down voting operations in college towns, and now it’s the elderly as they’re working to destroy Social Security and Medicare. These people are sick.

— Big Pharma hits jackpot as record 59% of Americans struggle to afford prescriptions. A record 59 percent of Americans say they can’t afford their prescriptions while ten massive drug companies pulled in $298 billion in just the first six months of this year. Comparing the first six months of this year to last year, Protect Our Care’s latest Greed Watch report found that the top ten drugmakers raked in $24 billion more this year than in the first half of 2025. That let them give their shareholders $63 billion in buybacks and dividends. And thanks to the tax provisions Republicans stuffed into the first Trump tax cut bill, J&J, AbbVie, Pfizer, Amgen, and Merck have paid nothing in federal income tax since 2018. Zero. Not reduced — zero. And all of this while the White House Council of Economic Advisers falsely insists Trump’s “most favored nation” unenforceable and largely PR-only “handshake deals” will save Americans $529 billion. When Senator Ron Wyden tried to check their claimed numbers, nobody in the administration would give him any information whatsoever. This is what forty-five years of Reaganomics has given us: record corporate profits, zero corporate taxes collected, and a third of Americans forced to cut their pills in half.

— Putin tests NATO again, as Trump burns through America’s weapons. For the second time in ten weeks, NATO has had to scramble fighters to deal with Russian incursions into their territory. This time it was Lithuania’s turn, as NATO confirmed Italian and Turkish F-16s based out of Estonia responded, neutralizing the Russian drone over an unpopulated area. The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania don’t have any of their own fighter jets, so the Italians and the Turks had to step in. Last month it was a Russian missile landing in Poland, and to the south, Moldova recalled its ambassador from Moscow after a drone exploded near the village of Crocmaz on August 9. Moldova has had 1,500 Russian troops squatting in their Transnistria region for three decades, as they try to fend off a Kremlin operation that, per newly surfaced files, recruited 150,000 Moldovans and spent $20 million to subvert its elections. As Trump burns through American munitions and JD Vance brags that stopping US weapons from going to Ukraine was one of the “proudest moments” of his vice-presidency, Russia appears to be testing NATO defenses in preparation for an actual assault. If that were to happen, do you really believe that Trump would order US NATO forces to intervene? I’m not holding my breath; this is a very, very dangerous sign for world peace.

— Geeky Science Alert! Scientists make a stunning discovery about how birth order may affect your health. Where are you in your family’s birth order? It may make a big difference. A new study published in Nature Health looking at insurance claims of 10,270,012 children from 5.1 million two-child families, spanning 2003 to 2024, found some surprising results having to do with birth order. Of 418 diseases with enough cases to test properly, 150 of them showed “statistically significant birth-order associations” with 79 connecting conditions to first-borns, and 71 toward second-borns. Firstborns had higher odds of autism, ADHD, Tourette’s, OCD, food allergy, and hay fever; second-borns were more likely to be afflicted by shingles, substance use disorder, gastritis, and/or migraines. Now, if we could just make sure that everybody — regardless of their position in the family’s birth order — could have inexpensive healthcare, maybe we could use this data to start some programs that anticipate these trends in a preventative way.

— Trump guts America’s firefighting capabilities as historic heat and hurricane threats explode. As Hawaii is bracing for the first hurricane ever to make landfall on the Big Island and the strongest heat dome on the planet is squatting over the American South, Trump is firing the people who fight fires. After all, climate change is a hoax, right? Hawaii Governor Josh Green declared a statewide emergency Thursday as Tropical Storm Lala churned over unusually warm water toward the Big Island, which would make it the first hurricane landfall there since records began in 1900 and only the state’s second ever. Forecasters are warning of at least 8 to 12 inches of rain with isolated totals hitting a life-threatening 25 inches. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports the planet’s strongest heat dome will hit the continental United States this weekend, mostly in the South, with anticipated temperature records being broke in nineteen states. And out West, more than 12 million acres have already burned in 2026 — more than all of 2024 — while the Forest Service has shed roughly 5,900 people, absorbed a $438 million budget cut, and shut down 55 of its 77 research stations. Given this assault against our forest service and firefighting capabilities, three of four federal wildland firefighters are reportedly thinking about quitting. The oil companies knew this would happen way back in the 1970s and spent the next half-century telling us lies, paying off corrupt scientists, and buying the loyalty of corrupt Republicans who’re now dismantling the fire crews as they insist the climate change is a hoax. Somewhere in hell, Ronald Reagan is giving Trump a big thumbs-up.

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:

Trump Is Making Money Laundering Great Again

Didn’t Trump accused Hillary of using bleach in order to delete her “treasonous” emails?

There isn’t enough bleach, a big enough shredder or room at the bottom of the Potomac for get rid of the evidence of this “hugely biggest corruption since the beginning of corruption”.
~ J. Newman

The rebuilding that will be required is going to cost a lot of blood, sweat, and tears and will take a decade or more. Where is today’s FDR?
~ Larry Bushard

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