Much, much credit is due for the incredibly philanthropic contribution to our planet’s future made by Patagonia’s Chouinard family.  Read about it in the NYT.  If only more wealthy individuals were so unselfish…

From the Steve Jobs Archive, a site set up by his friends and family, an email Steve sent to himself in 2010:

From the Washington Post, Drew Harwell reporting; “Truth Social faces financial peril as worry about Trump’s future grows“

Sad 😉

More good stuff from Matt Yglesias,  writing on the peculiar reluctance of law-and-order Republicans to support adequate funding of the IRS (defund the police? horrors!  defund the IRS? they vote yes!):

“…the government collecting the tax revenue it’s owed is unambiguously good, and the Republican Party’s opposition to it is telling and disturbing.

After all, they wrote a tax reform bill in 2017, and even though their bill cut taxes on net, it did raise a bunch of revenue (most famously from curbing the SALT deduction) to partially offset the cost of the tax cut. The GOP could have increased tax enforcement as another offset, and instead of letting Democrats spend the revenue, they could have used it to make the cuts in the Trump tax bill even bigger.

But they didn’t. Because separate from the party’s overall view on the desirable level of taxation, they’ve developed a peculiar soft spot for tax cheats.”

I agree. And I was the CIA Director https://t.co/LRAHDDyy4n

— Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) August 17, 2022

From Adam Schiff’s closing arguments at DJT’s impeachment trial:

“We must say enough — enough! He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again.

He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again.

Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in [this] very election? Can we be confident that Americans and not foreign powers will get to decide, and that the president will shun any further foreign interference in our Democratic affairs? The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can’t. You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it.

You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.

What are the odds if left in office that he will continue trying to cheat? I will tell you: 100 percent.

A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.”

He couldn’t have been more correct.

DJT just can’t help himself – he lies like he breathes.   From The NYT:

Former President Donald J. Trump claimed on Friday that before leaving office, he declassified all the documents the F.B.I. found in this week’s search of his Florida residence that agents described as classified in a list of what they seized — including several caches apparently marked as “top secret.”

“It was all declassified,” Mr. Trump asserted in a statement.

and:

Seeking to deflect attention from reports that the classified documents he had kept in his Florida home might have contained materials related to nuclear weapons, former President Donald J. Trump claimed on Friday that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had done the same thing.

“President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”

But the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, which preserves and maintains records after a president leaves office, confirmed on Friday afternoon that Mr. Obama had not kept his documents — classified and unclassified — as required under the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

Peter Wehner puts the problem of Congressional Republican self interest vs. that of the the common good very well in his NYT opinion piece What in the World Happened to Elise Stefanik?:

“Ms. Stefanik’s story is important in part because it mirrors that of so many other Republicans. They, like Ms. Stefanik, are opportunists, living completely in the moment, shifting their personas to advance their immediate political self-interests. A commitment to ethical conduct, a devotion to the common good and fidelity to truth appear to have no intrinsic worth to them. These qualities are mere instrumentalities, used when helpful but discarded when inconvenient.”

Remember the following when it comes time to vote.  Well summarized by Heather Cox Richardson in her July 23 Letters from an American:

“In the House, Republicans voted against federal protection of an individual’s right to choose whether to continue or end a pregnancy and to protect a health care provider’s ability to provide abortion services: 209 Republicans voted no; 2 didn’t vote. That’s 99% of House Republicans.

They voted against the right to use contraception: 195 out of 209 Republicans voted no; 2 didn’t vote. That’s 96% of House Republicans.

They voted against marriage equality: 157 out of 204 Republicans voted no; 7 didn’t vote. That’s 77% of House Republicans.

They voted against a bill guaranteeing a woman’s right to travel across state lines to obtain abortion services: 205 out of 208 Republicans voted no; 3 didn’t vote. That’s 97% of House Republicans.”

Jamelle Bouie writes in the NYT about the problems inherent in the current manifestation of the U.S. Senate.  It’s worth a read: Joe Manchin Is a Symptom, but It’s the Senate That’s Sick