Tim Miller shares highlights from his MS NOW appearance with John Heilemann and Jessica Taylor—Trump's political struggles, a scorching anti-war ad targeting Mike Rogers, Bill Cassidy's confirmation vote, and a state-by-state look at the Senate map, from Georgia to Texas to Kansas.
Cornell University has clarified that its dorm kitchens are for cooking food — not butchering bears.
The upstate New York university has now banned students from processing wild animals in shared residential kitchens after two students brought a legally hunted black bear into a dorm last fall and skinned it in a communal cooking space.
The incident occurred in September 2025, when students living in Ganędagǫ Hall reported seeing two classmates processing a black bear in the residence hall’s communal kitchen. Photos circulated among students and eventually reached Cornell University Police.
The students at the Ivy league university had legally hunted the bear off campus and brought it back to the dorm to process the meat, according to the Cornell Daily Sun. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation investigated but determined that no hunting laws had been violated, and no charges were filed.
The legality of the hunt, however, wasn’t the only issue.
Cornell temporarily closed the kitchen following the incident and had the space professionally cleaned before allowing students to use it again. Handling wild game can pose food-safety risks: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that raw or undercooked wild game, including bear meat, can carry trichinella parasites, which cause trichinellosis.
Nearly a year later, Cornell has made its position considerably clearer.
Under updated housing rules, students are prohibited from “skinning, butchering, or otherwise processing wild game animals” inside residential buildings. However, the policy still allows students to store and cook legally obtained game meat.
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The bear incident became something of campus legend in the months afterward. The Cornell Daily Sun even published a satirical guide in April titled “How To Skin a Bear in Your Dorm’s Kitchen” and an sardonic commentary how people have “spotted the ghost of a bear” haunting campus.
There is one final bit of irony: Cornell’s longtime unofficial mascot is Touchdown the Big Red Bear, a tradition dating to 1915, when the football team once adopted a live black bear. Its current incarnation is a student in a big red bear costume performing at sporting games.
More than a century later, Cornell apparently still has bears turning up on campus — though university officials would now prefer students not butcher them in the dorm kitchen.
Cornell’s new dorm policy means students hoping to recreate the episode will now have to take their bear elsewhere. For everyone else sharing the kitchen, that’s probably one less thing to worry about when making dinner.
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement says all of its field officers will soon wear body cameras, but a policy governing the devices gives the agency broad discretion over whether the public gets to see what they record.
ICE plans to equip officers nationwide with body-worn cameras by the end of September, following mounting scrutiny over fatal encounters involving federal immigration officers. But footage from shootings or incidents resulting in death or serious injury will be released promptly only when ICE determines doing so is in the agency’s “best interests,” according to the policy.
After a serious incident, a committee composed of senior ICE officials and attorneys will review the footage and recommend whether it should be released. Video could be made public within 72 hours, but the ICE director can delay or block its release if there are “specific and compelling circumstances.” The policy does not define what those circumstances are.
The rollout follows several fatal encounters involving immigration officers, including the deaths of two men shot by ICE agents in Texas and Maine last month. Neither shooting was captured on an officer’s body camera. Civilian video has also played a significant role in challenging official accounts of other controversial immigration enforcement encounters.
Experts say ICE’s control over which recordings become public could undermine the accountability the cameras are intended to provide.
“In some ways, ICE is saying the quiet part out loud,” Christopher Schneider, a sociology professor who studies police body cameras, told The Associated Press, describing selective release policies as a way for law enforcement agencies to shape their public image.
The Brennan Center for Justice has similarly warned that the effectiveness of body cameras depends heavily on the policies governing their use, including when cameras must be activated, whether footage is publicly accessible and what happens when officers fail to follow the rules. Research into body cameras has produced mixed results on whether they reduce use of force, though some studies have found reductions in complaints against officers.
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ICE spent $30.9 million on body-camera equipment in July, according to federal records cited by AP. Congress had previously allocated another $20 million for the cameras.
Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s border czar, has defended the expansion, saying body cameras frequently exonerate law enforcement officers and would allow Americans to “see what the officers saw.”
Whether Americans will actually get to see that footage, however, may ultimately remain ICE’s decision.
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A metal that has never been recorded before turned up in a grain of sand from Hiroshima Bay. Writing in Science Advances, Luca Bindi, Hans-Rudolf Wenk, Mario Wannier, and Teresa Salvatici report the discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast, sealed inside a glassy bead that formed during the airburst of 6 August 1945. — Read the rest
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A medevac flight that should have taken half an hour ended on the side of a mountain in New Mexico, killing all four aboard. Jeff Wise reports for Wired that a military GPS jamming exercise 100 miles away is part of the reason. — Read the rest
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The surface of the Sun has been photographed in more detail than ever before, and it turns out to be covered in whirlpools. Victoria Gill reports for BBC News on the most detailed images of the Sun yet, taken by the Inouye Solar Telescope on a high peak in Hawaii and published in the journal Nature. — Read the rest
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NASA created a Martian Dust Limit Working Group this year to figure out how much Mars dust a person can safely breathe, and Leonard David reports for Space.com on the dust hazard and how future astronauts might deal with it. — Read the rest
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Now you can immerse yourself completely in the uncanny valley by watching Fairgound, a new 24/7 AI slop channel available on Roku. It offers "series, films, and shorts from the world's best AI storytellers" across a variety of genres. [via Cord Cutters]
Fairground AI stands out as a pioneering offering dedicated entirely to AI-generated content.
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TL;DR: Headway Premium now includes a growing selection of fiction summaries alongside its huge nonfiction library. Get lifetime access for $69.99 (reg. $299.95).
Big news for anyone who loves books but never seems to finish them: Headway now includes fiction summaries alongside its popular nonfiction library. — Read the rest
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ACTING SECRETARY OF THE NAVY HUNG CAO traveled to San Diego to meet with families of sailors who are part of the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group. On Thursday night, he walked into a room filled with people who were angry, exhausted, frightened, and looking for answers about when their loved ones were coming home.
I know something about walking into that room.
In April 2004, the 1st Armored Division was preparing to return to Germany after a year in Iraq. Families had been counting the days; ribbons and ‘Welcome Home’ banners decorated our bases in Europe. The lucky soldiers who would be the first to leave were packing their gear and helicopters were receiving shrink-wrap. Then, by the time some of our troops had already been home a few days, came word that we would be extended in Iraq for an indeterminate number of months to counter the uprising of Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia. His group’s uprising was spreading across Baghdad and central Iraq, the security we had fought for over the last year was rapidly deteriorating, and the Pentagon believed we should stay to provide additional combat power.
Our twelve-month deployment would become fifteen months. Worse, because some units had already begun returning home, we had to recall back to Iraq roughly a third of our 20,000-person force that had already been reunited with their families in Germany.
In announcing the extension to our team, our division commander, Maj. Gen. Marty Dempsey, gathered his commanders. He told us something I have never forgotten. We could be disappointed, he said. We could even be angry. But we were leaders, and we had been given a new mission by the secretary of defense. Our responsibility was to explain that mission to our soldiers, prepare them for it, and lead them through it.
Then Marty gave me another mission that night: “We need to send a senior leader back to Germany to talk to the families. I want you to do it.” He kidded that it would likely be tougher than combat. To a degree, he was right.
Over three days, I traveled to the seven communities where our soldiers and families lived. At every stop, I walked into an auditorium filled with spouses and children who had expected their soldiers to be home within days or weeks. Instead, they had just been told that husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers would remain in combat for another few months.
When I arrived at the Ramstein airport, my wife was there to meet me. We hadn’t seen each other since the deployment began. After a hug, she gave me the best advice I ever received when talking to families.
Don’t tell them the mission demands their soldiers stay. They already know their soldiers have a mission.
Don’t tell them to be strong. They’ve already been strong for a year.
Don’t brief them on what the division is doing. They really don’t care about that.
Instead, listen to them and answer their questions until they don’t have any more questions to ask, and answer them honestly with what you know and don’t know.
So that’s what I did in all seven of those meetings. And the statements and questions began to flow.
One mother told me that she and her children had filled a jar with M&Ms—one for every day remaining in the deployment. Each night, the children removed one. The jar was almost empty. Now, she asked, what was she supposed to tell them? What was she supposed to do?
A young teenage girl told me she had been waiting for her father to come home because she wanted him to take her to the father-daughter dance at her high school. He wasn’t going to make it, so who would take her?
A 19-year-old Army wife stood up and, with a mixture of anger and confusion, simply said she had married her soldier right before they came to Germany, and he left for Iraq right after they arrived. She’d been making her way so far with the help of the other wives, but now she didn’t understand what was happening. She wasn’t interested in hearing about operational requirements in Baghdad or the strategic implications of the Sadr uprising. She wanted someone to explain why the Army had changed the bargain she thought it had made with her family, and she wanted her new husband home.
There were dozens of questions like those. Some were angry. Some were heartbreaking. A few couldn’t really be answered.
But something happened in those auditoriums. The anger didn’t disappear—nor should it have. Instead, it gradually changed into understanding and, finally, a reluctant acceptance of what their soldiers had been asked to do, and in turn what they had been asked to do. Not because I gave them a brilliant briefing. I didn’t. It happened because someone had come to listen to them, stood in front of them, and treated their fears as legitimate.
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I THOUGHT ABOUT THOSE FAMILIES when I heard about the acting secretary of the Navy visiting the families of the Abraham Lincoln.
Their situation is, in many ways, much tougher than what faced us. The Lincoln left San Diego late last year for what was expected to be a normal deployment and was subsequently diverted to the Middle East and combat operations against Iran. Its crew eventually endured 208 consecutive days at sea without a port visit—a modern carrier record—and families now describe sailors dealing with broken toilets and laundry facilities, moldy showers, food shortages, limited supplies, and the grinding physical and psychological effects of months aboard a warship conducting never-ending combat operations.
An aircraft carrier may be one of the most impressive machines ever built, but it is still operated by human beings. Flight decks are extraordinarily dangerous workplaces even under normal conditions. Sailors work long shifts around jet engines, fuel, weapons, heavy machinery, electrical systems, nuclear propulsion, and aircraft launching and recovering day and night. Fatigue accumulates. Attention wanders. Judgment deteriorates. Small mistakes in that environment can become catastrophic ones. This is the human side of war.
That is what some Lincoln families now fear. They aren’t merely complaining that their sailors are tired. They are worried that prolonged stress, exhaustion, and enemy activity could eventually get their loved ones killed.
Cao, himself a retired Navy captain and combat veteran, deserves credit for going to face those families. But showing up is only the first requirement of leadership. The more important requirement is understanding what those families need when you get there.
They don’t need to be told their sailors are heroes. They already know that. They don’t need to be told the mission is important. They understand that better than most Americans. And they certainly don’t need to be told to be strong.
They need leaders to listen. They need honest answers about what the deployment is all about, why the deployment continues, what is being done to reduce the strain on the crew, and—if no one can tell them when their sailors are coming home—an honest explanation of why no one can tell them. Military families accept extraordinary burdens. But accepting those burdens doesn’t mean surrendering the right to ask hard questions of the people who impose them.
Twenty-two years ago, I learned that lesson in seven auditoriums across Germany. Sometimes the most important thing a senior military leader can do isn’t explain the mission. It’s stand in front of the people paying the price for it—and listen.
The Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general early Saturday morning, narrowly elevating President Donald Trump‘s former personal lawyer to lead the Justice Department after Republicans rushed his nomination through before leaving Washington for their August recess.
Blanche was confirmed 50-49 during an overnight Senate session that stretched into the predawn hours Saturday. Every Democrat opposed the nomination, joined by Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has been absent from the Senate while dealing with health issues, was the only senator who did not vote.
The razor-thin margin capped a confirmation process that remained uncertain until its final hours.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., announced Friday that he would support Blanche, effectively giving Republicans the final vote they needed. Cassidy had previously raised concerns about Blanche’s leadership at the Justice Department, including his involvement in a controversial $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” compensation fund and an agreement providing broad protections from IRS audits for Trump and members of his family.
Cassidy ultimately argued that the choice was between Blanche and whoever Trump might install as acting attorney general if Blanche failed.
Collins and Murkowski went the other direction. Both had supported Blanche when the Senate confirmed him as deputy attorney general in March 2025, but broke with their party this time amid concerns about the politicization of the Justice Department and Blanche’s conduct while serving as acting attorney general.
Two other Republicans who had threatened Blanche’s nomination, Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, ultimately voted to confirm him after extracting concessions. Blanche terminated the anti-weaponization fund and narrowed the scope of the tax agreement before his nomination advanced from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Senate approved Blanche as lawmakers raced through a roughly 20-hour session before departing Washington for their summer recess.
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Blanche, who defended Trump in his New York criminal trial and federal criminal cases before joining the administration, has served as acting attorney general since Trump fired Pam Bondi in April.
He now takes the job permanently — with essentially no margin to spare.
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YOU MIGHT THINK DEMOCRATS would be up in arms over the violence perpetrated by the Trump administration and its agencies in implementing its deportation agenda.
And on its official social media channels, the Democratic party has issued powerful statements, as well as posts highlighting the last words of those killed by state violence.
But a closer look reveals that that social media energy has not translated into actual midterm messaging.
On July 26, less than two weeks after Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s death in Maine, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries unveiled the party’s “Fighting for an Affordable America” agenda in Pennsylvania alongside Gov. Josh Shapiro. The program made clear how the Democrats are framing the run-in to the midterms, with a focus on pocketbook issues such as (in the AP’s summary) “restoring healthcare cuts, bringing the cost of living down and ending the war in Iran to beat Republicans and hold President Donald Trump accountable.”
Glaringly absent from the Democratic priorities: reining in ICE abuses.
Again, it’s not that Democrats aren’t aware of the case for urgent action on Trump’s deportation regime. Privately, immigration advocacy groups have been pushing for them to speak out. Just four days before Jeffries’s agenda unveiling and before the August recess, a hundred Democratic members of Congress were briefed on the stakes of—and the electoral opportunity in—facing Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant program head-on.
During a weekly meeting convened by Rep. Katherine Clark, the House Democratic whip, Todd Schulte and Maria Praeli of the immigration-advocacy group FWD.us encouraged House Dems to meet the moment by “confronting anti-immigrant actions and violence.” Their PowerPoint presentation, obtained by The Bulwark, contends that the country has undergone a transformation on immigration in the last year, making immigration a viable, even critical, electoral issue that Democrats must seize upon heading into this fall’s midterms.
Schulte and Praeli told the Democratic lawmakers that forcing a government shutdown fight over Department of Homeland Security funding after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis—and linking immigration enforcement overreach and waste with affordability in general—was a political success, reinforcing voters’ growing belief that Trump’s priorities are warped.
They also highlighted that ICE’s exorbitant funding extends well past Trump’s term into 2029. And not only that—with the money that Congress has appropriated for it, the agency could actually continue to run at fiscal year 2025 levels well past the end of the decade, with enough cash to keep going “without [receiving] another dime until 2033.” Schulte and Praeli emphasized that ICE is toxic among voters: Citing data from the progressive polling firm Navigator showing ICE at its lowest net approval rating this spring, even before its recent Houston and Maine killings, which they linked to the $270 billion it received in federal funding.
The pair recommended a range of action items for Democrats to profitably focus attention on immigration, including advising them to:
mention specific stories of individuals who have been here for decades and are caught in the Trump administration dragnet,
continue to tie immigration overreach and corruption to affordability concerns,
hold more detention center visits,
conduct field hearings, and
participate in national days of action for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Guerrero.
The advice for Democrats to go on the strategic offensive on immigration was offered in part to further shake the party out of its post–2024 election paralysis. Back then, Democrats felt that they had completely missed where Americans were on questions of border security and immigration. That uncertainty led to awkward strategic silences and a lack of coherent strategy in response to the early ramp-up of Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
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During those bleak months, Democrats regularly assured me that Trump would go too far and a messaging opening would appear, but until that happened, they and their colleagues were frozen.
Trump did go too far, and some of the administration’s most egregious actions chipped away at voter trust in the president and his party on immigration. The presentation reminded lawmakers of the litany of DHS scandals and outrages over the last year and a half, including the time Kilmar Ábrego Garcia was mistakenly sent to a torture prison in El Salvador, and the multiple invasions of American cities, which started with federal agents descending on Los Angeles last summer and eventually resulted in shocking deaths in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
The proof is in the polling. A Fox News survey from mid-July shows voters now trust Democrats on immigration more than they do Republicans, eating into a previously winning issue for the GOP.
The party’s left flank long ago began to heed the call to push back against Trump more assertively on immigration, but their more moderate colleagues have often seemed more hesitant. Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and an attorney for Ábrego García, published an opinion article this week titled “Trump’s Immigration Policies Have Been Rejected; Why Won’t Dems Act Like It?”
Newman argued that Trump was always going to fail on immigration, and Democrats, too cowed to speak up in March 2025, now have an opportunity to do so with voter winds in their sails.
“Democratic elites should join the grassroots in fighting the real adversary—the brutal, violent, white-nationalist deportation campaign now tearing this country apart. They should get out of their conference rooms and Zoom calls and hit the streets with us,” he wrote.
Newman praised Democrats like Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) who went to El Salvador to meet with Ábrego García, as well as Reps. Joaquin Castro, who fought for the release of children and families from the detention center in Dilley, Texas, and Sylvia Garcia (D-Tex.), who stood with Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s family after his killing in Houston. There were others, too, like Sen. Andy Kim and Reps. LaMonica McIver and Rob Menendez, who fought against the abuses of Delaney Hall, a detention center in their state of New Jersey.
“Every Democrat should do the same,” Newman wrote. “Not as a photo op, but because it’s right. And because in every election to come, Democrats will be judged not by their campaign promises, but by what they did in the years Trump was in office.”
Still, a good chunk of the Democratic party seems to remain in that state of paralysis. In reporting this story, I heard over and over from Democrats involved in tight races that while immigration is a top-polling issue across the country, campaigns weren’t willing to risk advertising on it, especially now that we’re just three months out from November’s general election. Putting campaign dollars into anti-ICE messaging is still considered too much of a gamble.
“It was everywhere in the primary. When it was Dem-on-Dem, every Democrat was using immigration and ICE as a cudgel,” one strategist involved in more than fifteen Democratic races across the country told me. “Now in the general, pollsters do a poll and immigration shows up as a top-three issue, but Democrats are scared to talk about it because they think it’s going to turn off Trump voters, and they’re wrong.”
The pattern often becomes visible in local races, where money is tight, and campaign teams prefer to spend it on safe and reliable messaging on economic issues and Trump’s corruption rather than gambling it by crafting anti-ICE ads or making immigration policy pronouncements. That dynamic has been reinforced by outside PACs and groups, who can’t coordinate with the campaigns directly on messaging, and so need to take their cues from what the campaign prioritizes publicly. That coordination-by-another-name works easiest when the campaign’s messaging is most familiar to everyone involved.
Not all Democrats are locked into the old patterns. Manny Rutinel, a 31-year-old Colorado state House member running for Congress in the hypercompetitive 8th district, which the Cook Political Report rates a tossup, has put immigration at the center of his campaign. During the primary, he picked it up and used it to hammer his opponent Shannon Bird over an ICE-in-sensitive-locations bill; he clobbered her by 28 points. Rutinel is still talking immigration, now in the context of the general election, which he hopes to win to represent the most Hispanic congressional district in Colorado. Rutinel makes his priorities clear on the front page of his website: An inscription there reads, “I’m running to represent Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, and I’m fighting to lower costs, stop ICE from terrorizing our communities, and stand up to Trump’s attacks on our rights.”
“There was a bill where we came together to be able to stop ICE from going into schools and hospitals,” Rutinel told me, recounting his work in the state legislature:
It was a clear demonstration that Donald Trump isn’t interested in safety. What he’s doing here is targeting women and children, and terrifying our communities. . . . I highlighted that bill because there was a contrast there. It’s personal for me as a son of an immigrant in a district that is 40 percent Latino.
While few districts nationwide have such high Latino populations, Rutinel’s approach could still be adapted to campaigns in other parts of the country. He told me the people of his district feel betrayed by Trump for failing to follow through on his promise to go after violent criminals and instead tearing families apart.
“Folks are feeling the whole thing is being mismanaged. The focus is not on things they want the Trump administration to focus on. Folks across this district can’t afford rent,” he added, before lumping Trump and his opponent Gabe Evans together: “If they spent as much time thinking about lowering costs as they do about tormenting immigrants, things would be less expensive.”
Colin Rogero, a Democratic admaker who worked on two immigration-related ads hitting Bird for Somos PAC, a Latino voter-engagement group that backed Rutinel, told me Democrats can’t allow Republicans to define the playing field on immigration.
“It moves us enough to the right that it has voters asking what the difference is between us and Republicans when we’re taking money from the same people,” he said. “They shouldn’t just be killing and jailing people indiscriminately, but who is saying we have to stand up and fight that? It has to be us as a party.”
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
President Trump is facing low approval ratings, a weakening economy, and a prolonged conflict in Iran, but he seems focused on the Reflecting Pool and renovating the White House. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss how this may impact the GOP in the midterms, and more.
Of all the challenges and setbacks for the president to address, he seems particularly focused on the U.S. courts that are “coming out against the ballroom construction,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times, said last night. “We’re talking about a break between the voters that Republicans are looking to build support with and the president and his attention and his priorities.”
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Carl Hulse, the chief Washington correspondent at The New York Times; Kanno-Youngs; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; Missy Ryan, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Watch the full episode here.
© Courtesy of Washington Week With The Atlantic
Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s ruling Tisza party said on Saturday that it had nominated former Supreme Court President András Baka to become the country’s next president.
Baka, who worked as a judge on the European Court of Human Rights before being elected to head the Supreme Court, was removed from his post by the Fidesz government in 2011 — a move the ECHR ruled was unlawful.
“Throughout his career, Dr. András Baka has considered the principle of the separation of powers to be of paramount importance and has consistently stood up for the rule of law and judicial independence,” Tisza said in a Facebook post.
He is “the strongest guarantee that the office of President of the Republic will regain its true dignity and its ability to unite the nation and serve as a counterbalance to the ruling majority,” it added.
Parliament is set to vote on his candidacy next Tuesday. Tisza, which won a general election in the spring, enjoys a two-thirds majority in the chamber, making Baka’s election to the largely representative post a formality.
The nomination comes after former President Tamás Sulyok signed a constitutional amendment that removed him from office last month, bowing to months of public pressure from Magyar. The new prime minister had called for Sulyok’s resignation following Tisza’s landslide election victory that ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule.
Magyar’s first choice for president, chess grandmaster Judit Polgár, declined the nomination, saying the job would be too stressful.
Tourists traveling between Spain and Italy are caught in the middle of an escalating ideological feud over European border security involving Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
Madrid on Saturday restored border controls on ships and flights arriving in Spain from Italian ports and airports, suspending passport-free travel between the two countries. Spain said the move was necessary to protect its citizens from “the persistent irregular migration pressure suffered by the transalpine country.”
The move was an unmistakable retaliation for the checks that Italy has imposed on travelers arriving from Spain since Aug. 1. Rome enacted those measures in response to the mass arrival of people in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, citing fears that the unauthorized migrants could cross the Strait of Gibraltar and take advantage of the passport-free Schengen area to travel onward to Italy and elsewhere in the EU.
Madrid has pushed back forcefully against that narrative, and noted that the migrants could not leave the North African territory because they lack valid IDs required to travel on ferries to mainland Europe.
Spanish authorities and the European Commission this week confirmed that none of the 72,000 people who surged into Ceuta have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. During a meeting of EU interior ministers on Tuesday, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi publicly praised Spain for its handling of the situation and expressed Rome’s “sincere solidarity” with Madrid.
Yet despite requests from Madrid, the Italian government has declined to end border checks even after it became clear that there was no risk of the Ceuta crisis spilling into the rest of Europe. Rome’s inaction prompted Spain to issue a statement on Friday threatening to adopt “proportional measures” if Rome did not change course by Aug. 9.
After Meloni’s office responded by declaring “Italy does not accept ultimatums or demands from abroad regarding national security and border control,” Madrid moved to reintroduce its own controls.
Magnus Brunner, the European commissioner for internal affairs and migration, sought to mediate in the dispute.
“I was in contact with both the Spanish and Italian Interior Ministers today. Both confirmed that the internal border controls are temporary,” Brunner said in a post on X. “I stressed the progress we’ve made on tackling illegal migration and that trust between Member States is our most valuable currency.”
“Spanish authorities assured us the events in Ceuta will have no lasting effect on the Schengen area. That is why there are signals from Italy that controls could be lifted soon,” the Austrian commissioner added.
The tit-for-tat measures are emblematic of Meloni and Sánchez’s broader feud over migration policies.
Italy’s right-wing premier built her political brand as an opponent of migration and has led a charge to get the EU to adopt tougher border controls. Her Socialist counterpart in Madrid has, meanwhile, taken a diametrically opposed approach, arguing that the bloc needs to take in more foreign workers to remain economically competitive and stave off a demographic collapse.
Meloni slammed Madrid after it rolled out a scheme to grant legal status to more than 1 million unauthorized migrants earlier this year, and called for a debate on the consequences of the measure during a meeting of European leaders last month.
As the Ceuta crisis unfolded, the Italian premier spearheaded the drafting of a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa in which 22 EU leaders argued Madrid’s migration policies had undermined the security of the bloc’s external borders.
“We have a duty to effectively deter and relentlessly combat illegal migration, by coordinating our action, strengthening our external borders and addressing all policies that can serve as pull factors, such as the regularization of [a] very large number of irregular migrants,” the leaders wrote.
Madrid has forcefully rejected Italy’s accusations and pointed out that none of the migrants who entered Ceuta could have benefited from the legal status scheme, which is subject to specific qualifying conditions. Moreover, Spanish officials have bristled at Rome’s suggestion that they are mismanaging the bloc’s external borders, pointing to data showing Italy is doing a far worse job of handling unauthorized migrants.
“Italy is the EU member state that has recorded the highest number of irregular crossings in recent years, with figures that have at times been twice those of Spain,” a Spanish government spokesperson said on Friday.
By reintroducing border controls, Italy and Spain have underscored the fragility of the Schengen area, which has existed since 1995 and now extends to 29 European countries.
Under the current rules, any member country is allowed to reintroduce checks for an initial period of up to six months to address security threats. The measures can be renewed for six-month periods for up to two years, and, in exceptional circumstances, up to three years.
Few expect the spat between Rome and Madrid to endure for that long, but in the meantime those traveling between the two countries will have to endure the resulting inconvenience.
Throughout the week, passengers on flights departing from Spanish airports have complained about the scrutiny they have faced upon arrival in Italy, with travelers reporting significant delays as Italian carabinieri checked their IDs. On Saturday, passengers on Italian flights arriving in Spain were subjected to similar controls, with National Police holding travelers who could not provide official identification.
Some 3.2 million Spaniards traveled to Italy in 2024, and 5.4 million Italians visited Spain. The renewed controls could push travelers to reconsider trips between the two countries — and make other European destinations the inadvertent beneficiaries of an ideological battle playing out in passport queues.
This article has been updated with additional reporting by Gabriel Gavin.
Thing that I am now invested in: this woman has spent 30 weeks secretly training to beat her brother (a former competitive player) at Dance Dance Revolution. The showdown is today…
Osaka ranked seventh and Tokyo tenth in the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2026 Global Liveability Index. Japan was the only Asian country with two cities in the top 10. BBC Travel asked residents and planners why, and their answers came down to four rules. — Read the rest
The post Why Osaka and Tokyo keep landing in the world's top 10 cities appeared first on Boing Boing.
For many years now, former Trump adviser and longtime election conspiracy theorist Cleta Mitchell has managed to make herself relevant in the MAGA universe despite never officially joining the administration.
Mitchell’s election denial claim to fame came about most prominently in the aftermath of the 2020 contest.
She was at the forefront of President Trump’s effort to overturn 2020 election results in Georgia, and was even a participant in Trump’s now infamous January 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger from January 2021, in which Trump urged him to “find” enough votes to overturn President Biden’s victory in Georgia.
And more recently, Mitchell has been behind efforts to perpetuate fears about the non-existent threat of noncitizen voting, as well as efforts to push through the SAVE America Act, a restrictive election bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. She also runs the Election Integrity Network, an election denial group that pushes election conspiracy theories, including myths about noncitizen voting and the safety and maintenance of state voting rolls.
And unfortunately, Mitchell is still hard at work coming up with ways to interfere in our elections. This time it’s through financial ties to the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Heather Honey.
According to a report from Democracy Docket, Mitchell granted Honey more than $72,000 last fiscal year. And in 2025, Mitchell reportedly granted Honey’s consulting firm, Verity Vote LLC, $121,284 for consulting services.
For some important context, Honey misrepresented 2020 election data by falsely claiming that Pennsylvania had more votes than the registered voters. These faulty findings were later cited by Trump during his Jan. 6, 2021 speech at the Ellipse.
This isn’t the first time Honey and Mitchell have worked together, though. Honey is the founder of the Pennsylvania Fair Elections group, which is part of Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network.
By Khaya Himmelman
It’s time we get rid of MBAs. I’m not saying we take people who have MBAs and deport them, although….maybe. No, what I’m saying is we should abolish the Master’s in Business Administration. It’s a monstrous, grotesque relic of a bygone age that we never needed in the first place. It is a symbol of the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous style of capitalism that reigns supreme in the United States, dictating that the point of a firm is not to provide a good or a service to a customer, but to make as much money as legally possible.
As many or maybe even all of us sit around and ask questions like, “Why does it seem like everything is getting worse? How are some people making more money than God when others can’t afford to feed their families despite working two or three jobs?” We can look to this cohort of “leaders” and identify at least a portion of the problem. They are a group of people who are trained to extract wealth and give it to the wealthy.
When I was getting started in the news business, digital news was emerging and newspapers were dying. This was the big thing. Could print survive? It was existential but less comprehensive than the question we ask today: can the news survive? It seemed to me at the time that one of the problems in journalism was that when I scanned the landscape, most media organizations had a CEO who was not a former journalist or newspaper worker. This struck me as pretty insane. A newspaper is a unique kind of thing and the news is a unique kind of business. Ultimately, when I decided to come work at TPM, the fact it was run by Josh Marshall who was himself a journalist was a huge factor.
I was concerned with the world of journalism because I wanted to be a journalist. I understood the news. My reasoning was that journalism is kind of like a trade. Managing a newspaper is kind of like a trade. You need specific skills and knowledge to do it well. So when you bring in “business people” who run the companies to maximize profits, of course the product and service will suffer. But my scope was far too narrow. I think this applies to just about all industries. That’s why we should abolish the MBA.
In 1908, Harvard Business School launched the world’s first MBA program. The curriculum was based on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theories on scientific management. So-called “Taylorism” was a rigorous approach to management that aimed to maximize efficiency by creating a system of clearly defined rules and processes for workers to follow. These rules and processes were arrived at via rigorous testing, analysis and measurement. Taylor thought this sort of thing could be applied to everything in life.
One of the ironies of Taylorism is the gap between what Taylor seems to have intended if taken at face value and how his theories played out in practice. Here’s the first sentence of his book, “The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee.” Compare that to this line from a 2017 Guardian column: “Taylorism became synonymous with the evils of extracting maximum value from workers while treating them as programmable cogs in machines.”
Taylor didn’t subscribe to what we’d today call a “Shareholder Theory of Value.” In 1970, Milton Friedman wrote a New York Times essay titled The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits in which he argued that the executive of a given company is acting as an agent for the investors, and therefore the ultimate responsibility is to increase returns for said investors: “That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.” Friedman goes on to say that, of course, not all owners are the same. Someone might start a school or a hospital and in that case, the rendering of the service will be most important, not profit. It seems even Friedman couldn’t anticipate the private equity take over of hospitals.
If we take a version of Taylorism and give it Friedman’s ethics you begin to see the situation we’re in now: a bunch of highly-trained managers who go all-out to maximize profits at all costs for their investors. Obviously, the prosperity of the employee, which was important to Taylor, is gone. Prosperity for the employee is only good if it somehow benefits the investors. Also gone: making sure the product or service itself is good. As long as you are maximizing profits for the investors, that is good, and that doesn’t require a good product or service, necessarily. You can lobby for a monopoly or lay some people off. The airlines keep making money. When was the last time you thought an airline improved?
Both Taylor and Friedman are contemptuous of other human beings and that prevents them from seeing their own errors. Taylor was operating under the assumption people were lazy. Friedman assumes they are selfish. Neither is true, and when neither is true, you don’t need a class of oversseers to make sure the plebs get their work done.
So why abolish the MBA? We need to begin to shift society away from being organized according to profit. This won’t happen overnight and it might not happen ever. But it’s an objective we need to establish. We should get rid of the pathway to a life dictated by profit and wealth extraction, which is what an MBA is. Yes, we need people who understand bookkeeping and accounting and the basics of business. But we don’t need technocrats who reduce everything to financial data.
Abolishing the MBA is not a vanity project or an exercise in some kind of jealous retribution. It’s not good for society to have “leaders” who see their life’s work as enriching investors. A well-organized society wouldn’t even have this option on the table. Especially at a time when we face a worker shortage.
“We have pumped so many young people into business and finance,” Robert Hetrick, an economist at labor market data company Lightcast recently told The Hechinger Report, despite the acute demand for graduates in other fields. “It’s like a factory producing these workers like widgets, even though society is saying, ‘We really don’t need them.’ And the factory just keeps pumping them out.”
As a thought experiment, think of starting a society from scratch. You are going to need a lot of things. You’re never going to need anyone with an MBA because they are a kind of societal distortion. The true purpose of a firm is not to enrich its owners, it’s to provide a good or service to society. This isn’t some novel or insane idea only advocated by leftists. Management theorist Peter Drucker wrote that the concept of the profit motive is dangerous. Drucker wrote that both private and public organizations are parts of society that “do not exist for their own sake, but to fulfill a specific social purpose and to satisfy a specific need of a society, community, or individuals.”
The MBA is a failed idea. It may have had lofty ambitions to create great managers who manage great companies to make society better. But that’s no longer the case, and it’s not certain it ever was.
By Joe Ragazzo
“It’s not a big deal right now. The moon has clearly seen better days,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on rockets crashing into the moon.
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Republicans just can’t quit 2020. Floundering for a coherent midterms message amid rising inflation and a president who is more interested in treating D.C. like his personal SimCity than addressing affordability, the GOP keeps returning to the conspiracy well of 2020. Mike Rothschild’s latest Rough Edges column examines how Republicans are “repackaging and reus[ing] the conspiracy theories that got us here,” from the “genetically engineered” COVID pandemic to the Big Lie that Trump actually crushed it in that year’s presidential race.
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There’s run-of-the-mill scummy congressman behavior, and then there’s allegations of pouring boiling water on your then-spouse and fracturing your toddler’s collar bone. Republican Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) is accused of the latter. And yes, the former senior Trump adviser still thinks he’d be a great candidate for reelection, actually.
Miller has resisted pressure from his party to drop his reelection bid, instead going on a spree of ill-considered press appearances that make him sound every bit the creep he is alleged to be. He told CNN that it’s been “several years” since he last used illegal drugs, that he’s taking testosterone, and that the allegations against him — if true — would be “incredibly troubling.” On Newsmax, he blamed his ex, Emily Moreno (daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno [R-OH]), for “projection” and made detailed claims about her alleged mental health history.
The House Ethics Committee is investigating the abuse allegations against Miller, and the likes of House Majority Leader Mike Johnson (R-LA) are playing the Let’s Let Things Play Out card. But the GOP only has until Monday to replace Miller on the November ballot if he withdraws. Miller, for his part, insists he’s not going anywhere, telling Newsmax, “There’s no chance that I’m removing myself from this race,” even if Trump himself asks him to do so.
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Last weekend, Trump claimed to have won the senior (and super senior) club championship at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey. With an alleged score of two under par 70 on a course that has hosted multiple professional events, Trump bettered his age by 10 strokes and beat the next closest golfer by seven shots (imagine the golf world thinking it was a big deal when Jack Nicklaus shot a 71 to beat his age by a mere six strokes). This is apparently the 43rd club championship Trump has claimed, a feat sportswriter Rick Reilly has deemed without parallel. Taken together, Trump’s alleged results would seem to rank among the all-time accomplishments in amateur sport — not bad for an 80 year old guy who has only played golf 125 times since being back in office.
Naysayers will of course cry foul. They’ll mention how caddies at Winged Foot Golf Club nicknamed Trump Pelé because of how often he kicked his ball out of the rough. They’ll wonder why he has never won a club championship at a course he doesn’t own. They’ll suggest that his alleged practice of being the first to play a course when it opens and then immediately declaring himself champion isn’t “legit.” They might even take issue with the time he allegedly didn’t even play the tournament but still ordered that the champion’s name hanging on the wall be replaced with his own when he recognized it as someone he thought he could beat. In other words, they will quibble.
Trump, for his part, demonstrated his legitimacy by posting a video of “the winning shot” accompanied by trash talk insulting the talentless losers at his own club. To ask why that shot — an approach from roughly 40 yards that lands about 5 feet from the hole — was the winning shot and not the putt — especially when the margin of victory was seven — would just be more quibbling. It was obviously a gimme.
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Trivia answers: 1) For making romantic advances on two of his female staffers, buying them lavish gifts (like pink and blue handguns and a designer purse). 2) Evidence showing that damage to the Reflecting Pool was the result of contractor errors rather than deliberate vandalism 3) 1%, or roughly 15,000 votes 4) Head Start
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In the music video for Ariana Grande’s latest single, “Petal” — the title track off her eighth album, released last week — viewer discretion is advised. A parental advisory opens the clip, warning of the video’s explicit content and depictions of graphic violence, which culminate in Grande taking a chainsaw to the heads of four cigar-smoking, whiskey-chugging record execs. Earlier in the video, Grande’s character, Pepper, receives their written notes, including one that pointedly contains the critique, “Boring on the eyes, a little homely, couldn’t hurt to lose a few pounds.” The power tool to their throats is supposed to be a moment of personal and artistic triumph, echoed by the raucous cheers from the other women waiting to audition outside the blood-splattered boardroom.
But when Grande emerges from the audition, fake blood glistening from the visible curvature of her sternum beneath her skin, the jubilant, almost extreme response from the rest of the women feels as insidious as the criticisms from the men. They’re blindly screaming their heads off, bolstered by the person who stopped molding herself in someone else’s image, who refused to cater to how the world or the industry thought she should appear. Grande’s defiant self-control over her image is something for them to celebrate, even worship. Her restraint is the commendable trait on which the women hang their devotion. As the chorus of “Petal” puts it, “It’s such a f*cked situation.”
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Shortly after the video was released, the internet exploded with concern about Grande’s noticeably svelte appearance, and the scenes in the clip that seemed intended to exploit it. Grande’s stanbase quickly retaliated, saying that those commenting on her weight were bringing back body-shaming and tabloid-era hypercriticism. Detractors responded in turn, worrying that Grande’s ardent fans were enabling the singer’s unhealthy behavior and speculated eating disorder. The worry over Grande’s visible emaciation rendered the video itself moot. Whatever the message was — a self-aware nod to Grande’s own struggles, a defensive reply to those saying she’s too thin, a criticism of blind idol worship — it was quickly lost. A couple of days later, Grande’s team announced that she’d be taking a break from “public-facing work” following the conclusion of her Eternal Sunshine Tour in September. And while Grande later insisted the break was pre-planned and not “reactive or impulsive,” there’s no doubt the announcement was timed to dull the cacophony of both the jeers and cheers.
(Magnolia Pictures) John Early in “Maddie’s Secret”
In a moment when no one can quite agree on how to properly address what’s so clearly happening before our eyes with Grande, a film like “Maddie’s Secret” opens a dialogue. It’s not pretty or easy. But then again, movies tend to make the most sense out of the aspects of life that are neither pretty nor easy.
Watching the veneer slip from Grande’s grasp during a pivotal moment in her life is eerily reminiscent of the events in John Early’s wonderful film “Maddie’s Secret,” which coincidentally had its digital release the same day “Petal” hit shelves. In the film, Early plays Maddie Ralph, an aspiring test-kitchen chef at a hip food publication. With a major career milestone within her reach and increased appearances in front of the camera, the sudden pressures on Maddie trigger long-hidden patterns of disordered eating: bingeing and purging, secrets and lies.
And though Early’s film is a melodramatic comedy, it gets patently serious when it comes to the grim realities of eating disorders, taking an unrestrained and, at times, uncomfortable look at the harm enabling can do, and the tragedies it can engender. In a moment when no one can quite agree on how to properly address what’s so clearly happening before our eyes with Grande, a film like “Maddie’s Secret” opens a dialogue. It’s not pretty or easy. But then again, movies tend to make the most sense out of the aspects of life that are neither pretty nor easy.
It helps that Early’s vision of our media-steeped contemporary lives sees through the shiny, digital facade. The company Maddie works for, GourMaybe, functions somewhat like the pre-cancellation “Bon Appétit” test kitchen. It’s so intentionally inclusive and ambitious that it turns right back around to feel limiting, pigeonholing Maddie into a place where she feels in constant competition with her colleagues and herself. While waiting for two of her coworkers to leave a bathroom so she can purge, Maddie hears them discussing an app where you “input all your trauma and it links you up with a therapist, all over FaceTime.” The dance class Maddie attends with her best friend, Deena (Kate Berlant), is “radically inclusive, none of that toxic gym bro stuff.” All of the regimens surrounding Maddie and her illness are purportedly designed to be easily accessible for healthy, honest living. But they’re the same old systems in different clothes. And when Maddie’s disorder tells her she needs to stay in control, she contorts all of this trendy pastel-colored, serif-typefaced wellness to her favor, using it to fuel her harmful compulsions.
Grande moves in a similar space, but without the satire to easily delineate the difference between healthy and unhealthy behaviors. Like Maddie, she can easily cloak compulsions under the blanket of modern body positivity. When her noticeably smaller appearance began to concern people in 2023, Grande took to TikTok, urging the public to be “gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies . . . [even if you] think it’s good or well-intentioned.” She continued to say this would “keep each other safer” and that “you never know what someone is going through.” Fans have reiterated this messaging as her already thin frame became measurably smaller in the years since. But to turn the other cheek at this point, or even to chalk these changes up to healthful new habits, would be to ignore the obvious. Grande’s music would go on to parrot her sentiments, building a fan-fortified transparent wall between herself and the public — a barrier that would allow us to watch her grow thinner, while blocking every genuine concern.
(Magnolia Pictures) Kate Berlant and John Early in “Maddie’s Secret”
“Maddie’s Secret” does an impressive job of highlighting the dangers of this kind of enabling. Deena has an almost stan-like preoccupation with Maddie. Her relationship frequently crosses boundaries, but Maddie permits it because the attention makes her feel good and motivates her disorder. When Deena finds Maddie hunched over the toilet one evening, vomit strewn across her lips, Maddie swears that she’s taking steps to get it under control, and Deena assures Maddie that her secret is safe without providing her friend with the necessary action to actually help her. Deena wants to watch Maddie soar, to see her climb the echelons into food media superstardom.
Like Grande to her adoring fans, Maddie is Deena’s idol, and Deena measures Maddie’s success by her work benchmarks and public visibility. If, God forbid, Maddie should disappear — if Grande departed public life, as she’s now planning on — there would be a hole in Deena’s life. She would have to admit that she’s being wickedly selfish. So instead, Deena keeps an eye out in bathrooms and at dumpsters while Maddie purges. She shrugs off Maddie getting faint at dance class because she threw up her lunch. And then, Maddie collapses.
The health of millions of people doesn’t fall entirely on Grande’s shoulders. There are plenty of other ways that our culture has disguised unhealthy behaviors, as “Maddie’s Secret” so cunningly stresses. But Grande does perpetuate a silence, complacency, and enabling by painting genuine concern as gossipy chatter.
This is where the film becomes its most prickly. Early is interested in the sickly vanity of eating disorders and conceptual femininity, and he explores the danger of these illnesses through a lens that is both uneasy and unique to his film. The stakes are higher and more honest here than in most of the TV movies that “Maddie’s Secret” draws from. Maddie winds up in the hospital after cardiac arrest, a condition she’s far too young for. Her gums are bleeding, her jaw is swollen and there are teeth marks on her knuckles. A hospital psychiatrist, Dr. Kronenfield (Chris Bauer), tells Maddie that she’s at immediate risk of rupturing her stomach or esophagus and dying. “I’ll get it under control,” she tells him. “I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.” It’s the same language Maddie sold to Deena, but a view Dr. Kronenfield won’t buy. “You relapsed before, and you’ll relapse again,” he replies, urging Maddie into inpatient treatment.
Here, “Maddie’s Secret” fully diverges from its semi-parodic path, following Maddie to treatment, which, like many people who end up in mandatory care facilities, she doesn’t take seriously, believing she knows her body best. Her flippancy is only exacerbated by Deena, who fakes a bulimic health scare to join treatment and jailbreak Maddie so she can prepare for a major interview that will dictate her future at GourMaybe. But as Dr. Kronenfield warned, impulsion begets compulsion, and the decision causes Maddie’s horrific relapse and leaves Maddie’s rehab roommate (Vanessa Bayer) alone and vulnerable to her own illness.
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(Anna Webber/Getty Images for Cold Stone Creamery & Wetzel's Pretzels) Ariana Grande and Taylen Biggs
That’s the kind of ripple effect that such wanton enabling can have, even if it’s not intentional. Perpetuating these kinds of gravely serious illnesses extends the sickness past the confines of our own bodies, and into the world around us. For someone like Ariana Grande, who has millions of eyes on her at all times, the potential for harm is astronomically magnified. Surely she understands that. But when a fair portion of those millions are telling her that she looks perfect and encouraging her to keep going, keep performing, keep working, all for their entertainment, of course it becomes harder to see that the only thing they really want is for her to keep running herself ragged.
The health of millions of people doesn’t fall entirely on Grande’s shoulders. There are plenty of other ways that our culture has disguised unhealthy behaviors, as “Maddie’s Secret” so cunningly stresses. But Grande does perpetuate a silence, complacency, and enabling by painting genuine concern as gossipy chatter.
Pro-anorexia and pro-ED content has exploded over the last decade. What was once tucked into corners of the internet is now visible just beneath the sheen of any social media algorithm. A film like “Maddie’s Secret” accurately portrays idolization and enabling with as much horror as it should. Early plays Maddie’s lowest moments with raw sincerity and expressions of utter helplessness — visible cries for help, acted out with total concern and love for the feminine. In its own special way, the film provides an accessible entry point to discussing these matters, one that crashes through the transparent walls Grande, her fans, and the well-intentioned body positivity movement have built around her. If talking about a woman’s body is so radioactive that we can’t even begin to address the issue, leave it to Early — a man channelling his love for headstrong women who get so swept up in the world’s expectations that they risk losing it all — to speak out of turn.
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insights into Ariana Grande’s last few years
The post Ariana Grande fans need to see “Maddie’s Secret” appeared first on Salon.com.
Happy Saturday! Overtime is for everyone. If you’re a Bulwark+ member: thank you. If you’re not, there’s no better time to subscribe to Bulwark+ than today. If you like today’s issue, you can share this newsletter with someone you think would value it.
This week, I wrote two items on our gubernatorial race. When I got my start in politics (checks calendar) 27 years ago, I was an active participant in campaigns. Now, I observe them and write about them. It’s been an interesting trip down memory lane for me, but more on that in a bit. I hope you enjoy the Buckeye coverage and will join me in the comments for some #OhioTalk.
ICYMI: Here are links to each newsletter section so you can quickly get back to that edition you may have missed this week.
Morning Shots - Triad - Huddled Masses - Press Pass - Bulwark Goes to Hollywood - The Opposition - False Flag - The Breakdown - Receipts
Join Mona Charen and Bill Kristol for the next edition of The Bulwark Book Club LIVE at 1:30 p.m. EDT. This month’s pick is Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. Read it this weekend–it’s a quick read–then drop your questions, comments, thoughts on it for Bill and Mona through the comments of this post. We are excited for an afternoon of book talk and community with you.
Much like any job… Being a former political operative is not unlike working at McDonald’s. Once you’ve operated the fryer or manned a drive-thru window, you’ll never look at ordering fast food the same way.
For me, since politics is everywhere, being back in Ohio, where I grew up and worked in politics since I could drive, there’s a lot more I can’t unsee. Parades, county fairs, festivals. You watch the present-day practitioners and inevitably think back to your own glory days, perhaps even glamorizing the good old days a little. (The merch these days is way better.)
As I was waiting for Vivek Ramaswamy in Clermont County, I scanned the audience like I was doing advance work, making note of the potential disruptors. Not because I was worried about a heckler, but because I was curious about their perspective. And in Cincinnati, as I waited for Amy Acton to arrive at the local union hall, I kept thinking about a police union hall I was in 20 years ago, wondering if it had the same architect.
Suffice to say, if you read my two pieces, only one candidate, Amy Acton, has nostalgia on offer, the Ohio of yesterday. Vivek Ramaswamy seems to be “conservativemaxxing” hoping that decades of Republican rule will pay off for him. But it’s hard to be the candidate of change when your party has run the joint for decades.
As we saw in Missouri this week, voters rejected a ballot initiative to phase out the income tax. In Ohio, too, as I watched voters ask Vivek questions about his multitude of plans to make you pay less (or zero) for things that make the state and local governments run, I had a shred of hope.
Nobody loves paying income taxes or property taxes. But even people who have a sort of ironic disconnect who will laugh off extreme rhetoric as part of the game realize that at the end of the day, we have to pay for things. (Vivek had not yet announced his “free electricity in exchange for data centers” plan.)
In these 88 days until election day, I look forward to reporting more from the trail here in the Buckeye state on these campaigns, as well as from Springfield. It’s been so nice to hear from longtime members in my inbox and in the comments about their Ohio memories. And I’ve even met some readers who used to live in my Cincinnati neighborhood.
So this week’s comment prompt is: What do you miss about the politics of yesteryear? How much of that can we bring back, and how do you convince people to #Believe?1
Was this a job interview? A retiree won an auction to call an inning of Philadelphia Phillies baseball and… he belongs in a booth somewhere.
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Can you tell I’ve started the latest season of Ted Lasso?
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