Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News was supposed to have a showing of his drawings in Buffalo. But it was canceled due to threats from MAGA people who don’t like his artwork or his politics.
This cartoon, in particular, was denounced by rightwing media, who agreed it was “vile.”
William J. Broad, science writer for The New York Times, reports on the Trump administration’s draconian cuts to scientific research. As the U.S. cuts back on investments in basic research, China is increasing its spending.
I invite anyone who reads this to try to explain why this administration is reducing spending on scientific research.
Broad writes:
President Trump’s budget plan guts federal science funding for the next fiscal year, according to an overview published by an external group. Particularly at risk is the category of basic research — the blue-sky variety meant to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and sow practical spinoffs and breakthroughs in such everyday fields as health care and artificial intelligence.
The group says it would fall by more than one-third.
The new analysis, made public Wednesday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a general scientific society based in Washington, D.C., added up cuts to the budgets of hundreds of federal agencies and programs that do scientific research or provide grants to universities and research bodies. It then compared the funding appropriated for the current fiscal year with the administration’s proposals for fiscal year 2026.
For basic science research, the association reported that the overall budget would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent. For science funding overall — which includes money for basic, applied and developmental work, as well as for facilities for research and development — the analysis found that the federal budget would fall to $154 billion from $198 billion, a drop of 22 percent.
The new analysis shows that the Trump administration’s budget plan, if adopted, “would essentially end America’s longstanding role as the world leader in science and innovation,” said Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.
His group, Mr. Smith added, is working with Congress to develop “a funding plan for strategic investment that would help to sustain continued American scientific leadership rather than destroying it.”
Mary Woolley, president of Research America, a nonprofit group that promotes science, said the new analysis showed that the budget plan “is threatening not only science but the American public. If approved by Congress, it will make the public less safe, poorer and sicker.”
Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, did not reply to a request for comment on the new analysis.
In early May, the White House unveiled a budget blueprint that listed proposed cuts to a handful of science agencies. For instance, it sought a reduction in the budget of the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much basic research, to $3.9 billion from $8.8 billion, a drop of 55.8 percent.
Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the science association, said in an interview that the comprehensive analysis drew on several hundred proposed budgets from federal science agencies and programs, as well as figures supplied by the White House Office of Management and Budget. In May, the budget office made public the rough sketch of the administration’s overall proposal for next year but included only a small number of science agencies and figures.
Ms. Zimmermann added that the association’s new compilations would be updated as new budget data from federal agencies and programs became available. However, she said, the group’s estimates of cuts to federal basic research are “not going to be undone by a minor number change.”
The science group has long recorded the ups and downs of the federal government’s annual spending on science. Taking inflation into account, Ms. Zimmermann said the administration’s proposed cut of $44 billion would, if approved, make the $154 billion figure the smallest amount that the federal government has spent on science in this century…
In May, science appeared to be high on the list for significant funding cuts, while large increases were proposed for the Pentagon and Homeland Security. Until the science association updated its reports on the proposed presidential budget for fiscal year 2026, however, the public had no clear indication of the overall size of the federal cuts.
The proposed drop in federal funding for science research, if approved by Congress, could let China match or take the lead in global science investments, Ms. Zimmermann said.
In April, the science group published figuresshowing that China had greatly increased support for its scientific enterprise in the past two decades. As of 2023 — the most recent year available for comparisons — China’s investment was close to equaling that of the United States.
Experts say it could take years of data gathering to know if China is pulling into the lead.
Since the disaster in Texas, where more than 100 lives were lost to a flash flood in the middle of the night, Senator Ted Cruz has been readily available to comment for every television camera.
He has warned Democrats and Republicans alike not to politicize the tragic events (forgetting that Republicans pounced on the Los Angeles fires to blame Democrats and DEI as the 98-mile-an-hour winds were still spreading disaster. They blamed Mayor Karen Bass [who is female and Black], they blamed the female leaders of the LA Fire Department, they blamed Governor Gavin Newsom for refusing to turn on an imaginary faucet in Northern California).
What Cruz has not mentioned is that he inserted a cut into Trump’s Big Ugly Bill that slashed $150 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget for forecasting the weather.
The Guardian reported:
“There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say, ‘OK what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”
The National Weather Service has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and about $20bn in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials.
But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (Noaa) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis.
Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, before its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150m fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting.
Cruz was vacationing in Greece with his family when the flood occurred. A few years ago, when the power grid in Texas collapsed during a bitter cold spell, Cruz and family were on their way to Cancun. Maybe he should put out public alerts about his vacations so we can all be prepared for disasters.
Politifact debunked the claim that Trump totally defunded NOAA and the National Weather Service, it acknowledged that cuts were made (at the insistence of DOGE).
“While the administration has not defunded the NWS or NOAA, it is proposing in 2026 to cut significant research arms of the agency, including the Office of Atmospheric Research, a major hot bed of research,” Matt Lanza, Houston-based meteorologist and editor of The Eyewall, a hurricane and extreme weather website, told PolitiFact. “Multiple labs that produce forecasting tools and research used to improve forecasting would also be impacted. The reorganization that’s proposed would decimate NOAA’s research capability.”
The New York Times published a long article about the rise and power of Stephen Miller. Miller is one of Trump’s closest aides. His title is Deputy Chief of Staff but he seems to be in charge of immigration policy and many more areas. His goal is to deport every immigrant out of the U.S.
This is a gift article, so you should be able to open it and read it.
Here are a few choice selections.
About the turmoil in Los Angeles, where Trump nationalized the state Guard and sent in hundreds of Marines, which generated protests:
The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.
There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy….
Mr. Miller is more obdurate when it comes to domestic policy, particularly immigration. For Mr. Trump’s second term, he has led the president to stake out a series of maximalist positions, from the ICE raids to the use of the Alien Enemies Act to raising the possibility of suspending habeas corpus for people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. Mr. Trump seems to enjoy having Mr. Miller play the heavy on immigration. During his first term, he jokingly told people who urged him to take more moderate stances on immigration that Mr. Miller would never go for them. Last year, he reportedly quipped during a campaign meeting that if it was up to Mr. Miller, the population of the United States would be only 100 million people and they’d all resemble Mr. Miller. The humor, however, underscores something serious: On immigration, Millerism is a more consistent ideology than Trumpism.
While Mr. Miller is an ardent restrictionist, seeking to reduce all immigration to the United States, Mr. Trump has at times backed H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers; created a wait-list for a proposed special visa, called a Trump Gold Card, that wealthy immigrants could buy for $5 million apiece; and expressed regret about the impact ICE raids were having on the agriculture and hospitality industries. Indeed, the backlash to the ICE raids was so great that in early June, Mr. Trump reversed himself and declared the agriculture and hospitality sectors off-limits to that sort of strict immigration enforcement — before, after intense lobbying from Mr. Miller, he reversed himself again. Still, the hiccup was enough to hint at a broader potential rupture, especially if Mr. Miller’s immigration policies continue to prove unpopular. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration, once his greatest political strength.
Dan Rather and his team at Steady writes fearlessly about the dangers posed by Trump and his unqualified Cabinet.
In this post, he discusses the scandal of appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has no medical or scientific qualifications. He is a lawyer whose head is filled with conspiracy theories. Worse, he has used his position to cancel major scientific studies and fire scientists.
Rather writes:
The last person this country needed to address the many public health issues we face was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man Donald Trump chose to helm the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy is an alarmist, a conspiracy theorist, and a disinformation disseminator who is putting American lives at risk. His convenient amnesia and lack of a medical or science background — he is a lawyer by training — has led to confusion, fear, and poorer health outcomes. He has been HHS secretary for only five months.
And this guy’s HHS leads a country that now has the lowest life expectancy and the highest maternal and infant mortality rates among Western countries while offering absurd options to help us. It’s about to get worse.
The budget reconciliation bill that Donald Trump gleefully signed into law on July 4 will drastically and dramatically impact Americans’ health. An estimated 17 million will lose health insurance. Millions more will see their premiums balloon. Hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes will close. The legislation will cause the largest reduction in food assistance ever, disproportionately impacting children. This will result in an estimated 51,000 preventable deaths a year.
Look no further than Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda as one of the main causes of the hard-right shift. MAHA has emphasized real health issues facing Americans, such as chronic disease, obesity, and poor nutrition, but has offered wrong-headed solutions.
Rather than looking for common sense or legislative options, Kennedy has weaponized his fear-based wellness campaign, preying on people’s rightful concerns about their health. He blames corruption in the food industry and gets people to focus on things like removing food dye or the “dangers” of canola oil (it’s safe), rather than address the real culprits: income inequality, lack of access to health care, environmental pollutants, and now the “big, ugly bill” and its anti-health agenda.
Beyond the bill, there are pressing public health crises affecting Americans. The surging measles outbreak that started in Texas could and should have been contained back in January. Yesterday, the CDC confirmed 1,277 cases in 38 states, a 33-year high. Many believe those numbers are low because of underreporting. Remember that in 2000, the World Health Organization declared measles eradicated in the U.S. Now our country is on track to lose that status.
Kennedy initially downplayed the outbreak, saying, “We have measles outbreaks every year.” The U.S. does have measles cases every year, usually fewer than 200, and they are typically attributed to unvaccinated people contracting the disease abroad.
The best defense against this highly contagious and preventable disease is vaccination, according to the American Medical Association (AMA). The MMR vaccine is one of the safest and most beneficial on the market. It is 97% effective and usually lasts a lifetime. Prior to 1963, when the measles vaccine was introduced, the U.S. saw 3 to 4 million cases a year.
Kennedy, a vocal vaccine skeptic, has been lukewarm at best at encouraging people to vaccinate against measles.
At a congressional hearing in May, Kennedy was asked if he would vaccinate his own children against measles. He replied “probably.” Then added, “My opinions about vaccines are irrelevant. I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.” We agree.
His skepticism about vaccines in general, and the MMR vaccine specifically, has led to a drop in immunizations and a prolonging of the current outbreak.
But it’s much more than measles. Last month, in an unprecedented move, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the nonpartisan Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Formed in 1987, the committee is made up of doctors and public health professionals who help the CDC determine best practices for vaccine usage.
Kennedy quickly replaced eight of the members with unvetted candidates. Several are avowed anti-vaccine advocates. One new member has been on the committee before. During his first tenure, he made 12 conflict-of-interest disclosures, which is curious since Kennedy said he fired the original members because they were “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest.” A review of the committee’s disclosures found few conflicts, and all were communicated.
Kennedy’s distrust of vaccines has international implications. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) is recognized as one of the most successful public-private health alliances ever. GAVI was founded in 2000 by the United States, Great Britain, and the Gates Foundation with the goal of increasing vaccine access around the world. It has been credited with significantly reducing infant and child mortality globally. GAVI delivered 2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses.
Kennedy has halted America’s financial contribution to GAVI, which accounts for 12% of its funding, because of (his) concerns about vaccine safety and what he calls a “disregard for scientific evidence.” That is rich coming from a non-scientist who disregards anything that does not align with his narrow and unfounded beliefs.
Though a Democrat for most of his life, Kennedy has fully embraced the MAGA strategy of lying with impunity. The list of his lies is long. Here are some highlights:
While the reckless whims of Donald Trump represent a clear and present danger to every American’s mental health, the dangerous actions of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. risk their physical health. It is a sad day when the person in charge of this nation’s health could also be described as a public menace.
From Day 1 of the Trump administration, the strategy of the Trumpers was to “flood the zone.” That is, to roll out so many new policies that the public could not keep track, and the media couldn’t deal with them all. Trump’s staff had the blueprint in Project 2025, and they were prepared with dozens of executive orders. That, plus the depredations of Elon Musk’s DOGE kids made it seem as if we had suddenly been swarmed by an invasion from outer space of aliens intent on destroying our government.
Now that Congress has passed Trump’s One Big Ugly Bill, we are in the same situation. The near 1000-page bill has so many policy reversals that no one knows all of its contents. The goal seems to be to wipe out anything that Biden or Obama accomplished.
Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, insists that we pay attention to the dramatic increase in funding for ICE. Will we have labor camps spread across the country where detainees can be hired out to farmers to perform the labor they used to be paid for?
Tomasky writes:
One aspect of the Republicans’ big, ugly bill that didn’t get enough attention until Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elevated it over the last few days is the massive amounts of money it directs to the apprehension and detention of immigrants. On Thursday, right after the bill passed the House, AOC posted on Bluesky:
I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion – making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social)July 3, 2025 at 2:58 PM
The next day—the Fourth of July, as fate would have it, when President Trump signed the bill into law—historian Timothy Snyder posted a columnon Substack under the blunt headline “Concentration Camp Labor.” If AOC’s post and Snyder’s headline sound hyperbolic to you, consider what’s actually in this new law.
It includes $170 billion for immigration enforcement: about $50 billion to build a wall on the Southern border; $30 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); and $45 billion for detention camps.
A little perspective: ICE’s existing annual budget has been around $8 billion, so $30 billion is nearly quadruple. As AOC noted, it will make ICE into a huge police force that will indeed be larger than the FBI ($11.3 billion), the Bureau of Prisons ($9 billion), and the Drug Enforcement Administration ($3.3 billion) combined.
What is ICE going to do with all that money? One thing, obviously, is that it will try to hire enough people to hit MAGA apparatchik Stephen Miller’s target of rounding up 3,000 people a day. That’s a target it apparently still hasn’t even hit. On June 5, NBC News reported that ICE hit a then-record of 2,200 detentions that day. That included hundreds of people who showed up at regional ICE offices to check in as required by the release program they were enrolled in—a program under which these people were deemed not to be threats to public safety and whose movements were already monitored by ankle bracelets or geo-locator apps.
In other words, ICE has already been detaining thousands of people who, yes, entered the United States illegally, but ever since just lived, worked, and even paid taxes. Some may have gotten into some trouble with the law, but they’re wearing monitors and showing up for their appointments. Others have had no scrapes with the law at all. And now ICE is going to have the resources to detain thousands more such people.
And no—the American public emphatically does not support this. A late June Quinnipiac poll found that 64 percent of respondents said undocumented people should be given a path to citizenship, and only 31 percent said they should be deported. And that 64 percent is up from 55 percent last December, meaning that people have watched six months of Trump’s immigration policies in action and turned even more strongly against deporting everyone.
So that’s what ICE is going to do with its $30 billion. Now think about $45 billion for detention camps. Alligator Alcatraz is expected to cost $450 million a year. Right now, a reported 5,000 detainees are being held there. The Trump administration says the new $45 billion will pay for 100,000 beds. So that’s 20 more Alligator Alcatrazes out around the country. But it’s probably even going to be worse than that, because the state of Florida, not the federal government, is footing the bill for that center. If the Trump administration can convince other states to do the same, or pay part of the freight, we’re looking at essentially a string of concentration camps across the United States. Besides, there’s something odd about that $450 million a year price tag. (Here’s an interesting Daily Kos community post asking some good questions about that astronomical cost. The math doesn’t add up.)
Forty-five billion will build a lot of stuff. As a point of comparison: In 2023, the United States budgeted $12.8 billion to build new affordable housing. We’re about to spend nearly four times on detention centers what we spend on housing.
Open the link to finish reading.
Is the climate changing? Most scientists who study the environment believe that it is. They agree that human-caused pollution degrades the climate and that the health of the planet requires less reliance on fossil fuels. The Biden Administration passed landmark legislation to encourage the transition from oil and gas to electricity. Trump has rolled back whatever he could of Biden’s contribution to green energy. No more tax credits for electric vehicles or solar panels. Every program that promotes green energy has been dismantled.
The New York Times reported that the Department of Energy has added three scientists to its roster who are known for their criticism of mainstream climate science. The Secretary of Energy is Chris Wright, an entrepreneur who was CEO of Liberty Energy.
The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.
The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show. They are Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.
Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.
In addition, Trump officials have been recruiting scientists to help them repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, and which now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly…
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed alarm that the Energy Department had hired the three scientists.
“What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil-fuel burning, the consequences of which we’ve seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S.,” Dr. Mann wrote in an email.
Dr. Mann added that the Trump administration appeared to have fired hundreds of “actual government science experts” and replaced them with “a small number of reliable foot soldiers.”
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said it would be troubling if these three scientists were involved in repealing the 2009 endangerment finding, which cleared the way for the government to regulate the planet-warming gases emitted by cars, power plants and other industrial sources.
It is sickening to realize that the US, our beloved country, is now aligned with Russia and Putin. It is sickening to realize that when the UN took a vote to condemn Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. voted “no,” allied with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. It is sickening to realize that the U.S. is now in cahoots with the enemies of freedom and democracy.
It is sickening to see the Justice Department turned into a weapon for Trump’s personal revenge. It is sickening to see Trump’s vicious assault on higher education and academic freedom. It is sickening to watch the arrest and detention of immigrants by masked men without ID without a semblance of due process. It is sickening to see the massacre of civilians in Gaza. It is sickening to see the Trump family scoop up billlions in real estate deals, crytocurrency and other ventures. It is sickening to see the Republican Party pass a budget that cancels the health insurance of millions of low-income Americans to pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans.
One man is responsible: Trump. He worries about Putin’s feelings, not about Russian bombs hitting Ukrainian schools, playgrounds, hospitals, homes, and its energy supply. He plays with tariffs as a way to humiliate other countries, carelessly wiping out the life savings of people who trusted him. Was it by accident that he excluded Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and Cuba from his tariff threats? Trump jokes about turning Gaza into a luxury resort instead of demanding an end to the war. The cruel budget that takes from the poor and gives to the rich was his budget. It is his massive ego that has turned the Department of Justice into his personal revenge and retribution machine.
I wish he could watch Charlie Chaplin in this speech from his film The Great Dictator. It is only three minutes. Please watch. These thoughts are needed today more than at any time since 1945.
The editorial board of the Sun-Sentinel in Florida expressed shock and disgust at the creation of the detention camp for immigrants now called Alligator Alley. The existence of this hell-hole offended their sense of decency but they were offended even more by the casual glee that Trump, DeSantis, Noem and others expressed about the inhumanity of the detention center. Inmates will die of the scorching heat and humidity. That’s predictable. And these swells in their air-conditioned offices will laugh.
Unable to resist the political clickbait, President Donald Trump muscled Gov. Ron DeSantis and
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier out of the limelight Tuesday, to celebrate the opening
of a Florida first.
It is an armed camp where thousands of immigrants targeted as undesirables will be confined, possibly without hearings, under the brutal conditions of a swamp in the Everglades in a place most Floridians have never heard of, called Ochopee.
It wasn’t the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz” that brought the president to the camp.
It’s not Florida’s fast-tracking of construction that’s entrancing right-wing media, breathing new life into DeSantis’s national political dreams, and boosting Uthmeier’s reelection profile.
It is the savagery.
The headline-grabbing power of “Alligator Alcatraz” lies entirely in the imagery of brown people getting out of line and being ripped bloody by alligators or suffocated by snakes.
Strip out the celebration of suffering and grotesque inhumanity and it’s just a row of tents in the middle of nowhere.
No respect for the land
This is one more scar on land environmentalists are waging a decades-long battle to save.
It’s just one more insult to the Miccosukee Tribe, which called it home long before Uthmeier embraced it as a stepping-stone to his election campaign.The imagined torment of immigrants at this camp is not a glitch. It’s the main selling point.
This distinguishes it from World War II’s horrific internment of families and orphans of Japanese descent in tar-paper shacks, because they were of the wrong ethnicity at the wrong time. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt called them concentration camps.
But FDR didn’t hawk T-shirts emblazoned with images suggesting gruesome deaths or show AI-generated images of alligators in ICE hats. The Republican Party of Florida did. So did the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The World War II White House did not mark the opening of an internment camp by breathlessly reporting a ravenous cannibal detainee said to be eating himself while in federal custody on a deportation flight. DHS did.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and internment cheerleaders want you to believe that comparisons to other inhumane camps is hysterical hyperbole, as if the cynical marketing of Alligator Alcatraz is not.
The heat and humidity
In a particularly vivid example of his trademark cluelessness, DeSantis rebuffed criticism of inhumane conditions by pointing out the new camp’s showers.
Of course it is inhumane. Of course Trump, DeSantis, Noem and Uthmeier will deny bathing in the specter of savagery, even as Trump’s GOP raised money off it, while sidestepping their role in likely deaths that will have much less soundbite potential.
As Floridians know so well, heat is among the deadliest of weather events. High humidity prevents the body from cooling. Combined, the two are lethal.
The detention camp will place thousands of immigrants in wire cages in a humidity-intense swamp that is all but inaccessible to hospital ambulances, and where the summertime heat index can soar above 100 degrees.
Evacuating in advance of severe storms presents its own dangers, especially as it does not take a hurricane to flood a swamp or the two-lane road running next to it.
On Tuesday, when a typical summer shower dumped less than two inches of rain during the opening tour, water seeped through the edges of buildings, walls shook and water spread across electrical cables, Spectrum News video showed.
On Wednesday, forecasters upped the odds of a major windstorm moving across Florida.
Trump has bigger plans
Environmentalists are suing to stop construction, but Trump has even bigger plans for detention.
It’s wishful thinking to believe South Florida’s immigrant communities within driving distance of Alligator Alcatraz will be exempted, regardless of citizenship status.Trump made clear during Tuesday’s tour that naturalized U.S. citizens — who live in virtually every community in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties — may be next to face detention and deportation.
“I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told reporters. “So maybe that will be the next job.”
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
The disastrous floods that swept through Hill Country and caused the deaths of 80 or more people were made worse by human error.
The New York Times found that the local branches of the National Weather Service were short on staff; critical positions were empty. The computer specialists who worked for Elon Musk in an operation called DOGE decided that too many people worked for the National Weather Service. Some meteorologists took buyouts, others resigned.
Furthermore the affected area did not have an early warning ststem. Local taxpayers didn’t want to pay for it.
The quasi-libertarian belief that we don’t need government services and we shouldn’t pay for them took a toll on innocent people.
The combination of Musk’s ruthless cost-cutting and local hostility to taxes set the stage for a disastrous tragedy.
The Times reported:
Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.
Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation.
The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.
The shortages are among the factors likely to be scrutinized as the death toll climbs from the floods. Separate questions have emerged about the preparedness of local communities, including Kerr County’s apparent lack of a local flood warning system. The county, roughly 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, is where many of the deaths occurred.
In an interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending.
“Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Mr. Kelly said. Asked if people might reconsider in light of the catastrophe, he said, “I don’t know.”
The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.
The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.
That office’s warning coordination meteorologist left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure.
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Some of the openings may predate the current Trump administration. But at both offices, the vacancy rate is roughly double what it was when Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January, according to Mr. Fahy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 