Two important local elections produced great news for the Democratic Party.
In Iowa, a special election was held for a state Senate seat in a solidly Republican district that Trump won by 11.5 points in 2024. Democrat Caitlin Drey won, overturning a Republican supermajority in the state senate. Drey won by more than 10%. There was a 20-point swing to the Democrats.
In a ruby red district in Georgia, seven candidates vied for a state Senate seat. Democrat Debra Shirley came in first with 39% of the vote. There will be a runoff on September 23 and she will oppose the top-scoring Republican, who won 17% of the vote.
Trump with his new Attorney General and two other associates. (Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In what experts are calling one of the most remarkable comebacks for a convicted sex offender in recent memory, on Friday Donald J. Trump announced that he was replacing Attorney General Pam Bondi with Ghislaine Maxwell.
Explaining his decision, Trump said, “Pam said there’s a client list, and Ghislaine said there isn’t. So I have decided Ghislaine would be better at this job than Pam.”
In another stunning reversal of fortune, Trump announced that Bondi would be taking Maxwell’s place in prison, adding, “I wish her well.”
He said he was confident that Maxwell would receive speedy confirmation by Senate Republicans, noting, “If they confirmed Hegseth they’ll confirm anyone.”
But he fired the scientist studying environmental causes of autism and dismantled her program.
He won’t rest until he can find a scientist who agrees with him. That’s not how science works. It’s based on experimental evidence, not ideology.
ProPublica wrote:
Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.
Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.
McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.
As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.
For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms.
He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest.
In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.”
Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.”
As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism…
The article goes on to describe the important research conducted by McCanlies and her colleagues at NIOSH into the relationship between exposure to certain toxins and autism.
Secretary Kennedy was obviously ignorant of the work these scientists had been doing for years on causes of autism.
The researchers were pleased to know that the toxins they had identified as related to autism were banned by the Environmental Protection Agency. But then came the shocking news that EPA leader Lee Zeldin was removing restrictions on some of the worst chemicals.
Meanwhile, Kennedy seems determined to establish a causal link between vaccines and autism. This theory has been thoroughly debunked by scientists.
Trump announced that he was “firing” Lisa Cook, a distinguished economist, as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board. Paul Krugman wrote a new analysis overnight.
He posted:
Yesterday Donald Trump said that he had fired Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. My wording is advisable: He “said” that he had fired her. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems clear that he does not have the right to summarily fire Fed officials, certainly on tissue-thin allegations of mortgage fraud before she even went to the Fed.
Cook has said that she will not resign. So at this point the immediate onus is on Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman. He has the right — I would say the obligation — to say, “Show me the legal basis for this action.” If Trump’s officials can’t provide that basis, he should declare that as far as he is concerned, Cook is still a Fed governor.
If Powell caves, or the Supreme Court acts supine again and validates Trump’s illegal declaration, the implications will be profound and disastrous. The United States will be well on its way to becoming Turkey, where an authoritarian ruler imposed his crackpot economics on the central bank, sending inflation soaring to 80 percent:
And the damage will be felt far beyond the Fed. This will mark the destruction of professionalism and independent thinking throughout the federal government.
So, about the legal authority. The Supreme Court, shamefully, has said that Trump has the authority to fire officials at will throughout the federal government, effectively eviscerating the principle of a professional civil service. But even the Court specifically carved out protections for Fed governors, saying that they can only be removed “for cause.”
Normally “for cause” means neglect of one’s job or malfeasance on the job. Yet even Trump’s people have made no claims that Lisa Cook has failed to fulfil her duties at the Fed or done anything wrong in her role as governor.
So what is the complaint about Cook? Trump says that she committed mortgage fraud by taking out two mortgages, claiming both properties as her primary residence, back when she was a professor at Michigan State, before joining the Fed.
Even if true, this accusation wouldn’t meet the standard for immediate dismissal from the Fed.
Furthermore, there’s no reason to believe Trump’s assertions that she committed fraud. So far, the Justice Department hasn’t even made any formal charges, let alone won a conviction. And we have no clear evidence of wrongdoing. As far as I can tell, the only evidence seen by outsiders shows that she took out mortgages on two properties, and the security instruments associated with these mortgages say that both properties are “principal residences.”
But as Adam Levitin at Credit Slips, says, “principal” isn’t the same as “primary”: someone who has a home in the city and a second place in the country might well consider both “principal” residences. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Cook even knew what the security instruments said — she may have done nothing more than promise to make her mortgage payments.
And a claim of mortgage fraud requires both that the borrower make a deliberate misrepresentation — as opposed to making a mistake on a complicated process — and that this misrepresentation caused financial harm to the lender. We’ve seen no evidence at all for either proposition.
This is not a case a nonpolitical Justice Department would even consider bringing to trial, or have much hope of winning. And again, it has no relevance at all to Cook’s work at the Fed, providing zero justification for dismissal “for cause.”
But of course Trump’s attempt to fire Cook has nothing to do with allegations of fraud. Her real crime, in his mind, is that she isn’t an obedient minion (oh, and that she’s a black woman.) The goal of his attempt to fire her is to replace independent Fed officials with lackeys who will take Trump’s orders — not just by getting rid of Cook but by intimidating everyone else.
As I wrote yesterday, the real message here is “If you get in our way we will ruin your life.”
The immediate test here is how the Fed itself responds. Cook is doing the right thing by refusing to resign. Jerome Powell now faces a moment of truth: Will he back her up, until or unless Trump demonstrates that he has the legal authority to fire her?
What if Trump uses some kind of force — deployment of U.S. Marshals? — to block Cook from continuing to work? Good. That will demonstrate to everyone the grotesqueness of this power grab.
And one way or another, this will end up in the courts, where we will find out whether our judicial system has any integrity left.
What will all of this mean for financial markets? The markets keep shrugging off the Trump administration’s lawlessness, and maybe they’ll do it again. But really, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t, ultimately, about monetary policy. It’s about whether we are still a nation of laws.
Yesterday, Trump took the unusual step of firing Lisa Cook, a governor of the Federal Reserve Board appointed by President Biden. As of now, it’s not clear that he has the authority to fire her. She might go to court to get injunctive relief. She said that Trump had no authority to fire her, and she will not resign. She is represented by high-profile lawyer Abbe Lowell.
A MAGA partisan claimed that she had committed mortgage fraud, but there have been no hearings, no independent review, no evidence. Just charges made on Twitter.
No President has ever removed a member of the Federal Reserve Board. Ever.
Paul Krugman is a Nobel-Prize winning economist who wrote a regular column for The New York Times for many years. He retired and started his own blog on Substack.
Yesterday morning, before Trump fired Cook, Krugman posted this column about Trump’s demand that Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook resign, after being accused of mortgage fraud. Trump’s staff has also accused two other enemies of Trump of mortgage fraud: New York Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff of California.
Trump wants to gain control of the Federal Reserve Board, which is supposed to be independent and nonpartisan, because it sets interest rates. He wants lower rates to boost the economy. He has bullied the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, to resign, although Trump appointed him in his first term.
Be sure to watch the two-minute video at the end.
Krugman writes:
Donald Trump is threatening to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, over allegations that she made false claims on mortgage applications before she went to the Fed.
I am not going to lead with a discussion of what Cook may or may not have done. That would be playing Trump’s game. Clearly, he’s just looking for a pretext to fire someone who isn’t a loyalist — and who happens, surprise, to be a black woman. If you write about politics and imagine that Trump cares about mortgage fraud — or for that matter believe anything Trump officials say about the affair without independent confirmation — you should find a different profession. Maybe you should go into agricultural field work, to help offset the labor shortages created by Trump’s deportations.
The real story here isn’t about Cook, or mortgages. It’s about the way the Trump administration is weaponizing government against political opponents, critics, or anyone it finds inconvenient.
You should think about the attack on Cook in the same context as mortgage fraud accusations made against California Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Or you should look at the attacks on Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, over the cost of renovations at the Fed’s headquarters. Or the still mysterious raid on the house of John Bolton, who at one time was Trump’s national security adviser.
The message here clearly isn’t “Don’t commit fraud,” which would be laughable coming from Donald Trump, of all people. Nor, despite what some commentators have said, is it all about revenge — although Trump is, indeed, a remarkably vindictive person. But mainly it’s about intimidation: “If you get in our way we will ruin your life.”
As with individuals, so with institutions. Universities are being threatened with loss of research grants unless they take orders from the White House. Law firms are being threatened with loss of access unless they do pro-bono work on behalf of the administration. Corporations are being threatened with punitive tariffs unless they support administration policies — and, in the case of Intel, hand over part ownership of the company.
This newsletter usually focuses on economics, and I could go on at length about the ways rule by intimidation will hurt the economy. There’s a whole economics literature devoted to the costs when an economy is dominated by “rent-seeking” — when business success depends on political connections rather than producing things people want. I’ve been writing a series of primers on stagflation. One of the way things could go very badly wrong would be politicization of the Federal Reserve, with monetary policy dictated by Trump’s whims, and it would be even worse if Fed policy is driven by officials’ fear of what will happen if they don’t follow Trump’s orders.
It’s also important to realize that the Fed does more than set interest rates. It’s also an important regulator of the financial system, a job that will be deeply compromised if Fed governors can be bullied by personal threats.
But there’s much more at stake here than the economy. What we’re witnessing is the authoritarian playbook in action. Tyrannies don’t always get their way by establishing a secret police force that arrests people at will — although we’re getting that too. Much of their power comes not from overt violence but from their ability to threaten people’s careers and livelihoods, up to and including trumped-up accusations of criminal behavior.
Which brings me, finally, to the accusations against Lisa Cook. According to Bill Pulte, the ultra-MAGA director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Cook applied for mortgages on two properties, claiming both as her primary residence. This isn’t allowed, because banks offer more favorable mortgage terms on your primary residence than on investment properties.
Borrowers sometimes do sometimes commit deliberate fraud, claiming multiple properties as their primary residence when they always intended to rent them out. For example, Ken Paxton, Texas’s Attorney General, claimed three houses as his primary residence, renting out two of them, and has also rented out at least two properties that he listed as vacation homes. Somehow, however, Pulte hasn’t highlighted his case, let alone threatened him with a 30-year prison sentence.
The truth is that even when clear mortgage fraud has taken place, it almost always leads to an out-of-court settlement, with fees paid to the lender, rather than a criminal case. In 2024, only 38 people in America were sentenced for mortgage fraud. No, I’m not missing some zeroes.
So did Cook say something false on her mortgage applications? Pulte says so, but I’d wait for verification. Also, false statements on mortgage applications are only a crime if they’re made knowingly, which is a high bar. And nothing at all about this story is relevant to Cook’s role at the Federal Reserve. If the administration thinks it has enough evidence to bring charges, it should bring charges, not demand that she quit her job.
The important thing to understand is that we are all Lisa Cook. You may imagine that your legal and financial history is so blameless that there’s no way MAGA can come after you. If you believe that, you’re living in a fantasy world. Criticize them or get in their way, and you will become a target.
When Trump sent the military and ICE and the local police to control the streets of D.C., his close aide Stephen Miller scoffed at protests. He said the protestors were “elderly white hippies.” An anonymous artist posted this drawing on BlueSky:
Forget the economy. Forget inflation. Forget the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. What really animates the sick and sorry Trump administration is medical care for transgender youth. Now, there is an issue that involves the peace and prosperity of the nation–NOT!
My view: it’s none of my business. Issues like abortion and trans rights should be decided among patients, families, and doctors. Not by politicians. Not by me.
The Justice Department is harassing providers of care for young people who are transgender and demanding their personal data.
The Justice Department is demanding that hospitals turn over a wide range of sensitive information related to medical care for young transgender patients, including billing documents, communication with drug manufacturers and data such as patient dates of birth, Social Security numbers and addresses, according to a copy of a subpoena made public in a court filing this week.
The June subpoena to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia requests emails, Zoom recordings, “every writing or record of whatever type” doctors have made, voicemails and text messages on encrypted platforms dating to January 2020 — before hormone therapy, puberty blockers and gender transition surgery had been banned anywhere in the United States.
About half of states have since passed laws prohibiting all or most gender treatment of minors. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a Tennessee ban did not violate the Constitution.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said last month that the Justice Department had issued more than 20 subpoenas seeking to hold “medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology” accountable. It is highly unusual for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to announce such legal activity. Bondi did not identify who received the subpoenas, what information the government sought or what potential law violations it is investigating.
According to seven people familiar with the subpoenas, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution, the subpoenas targeted care for patients younger than 19 and went to providers in states that still allow gender care for minors, as well as states where it has been banned. The subpoena, as well as public statements by Bondi’s chief of staff, indicate the federal government is attempting to build cases against medical providers that allege they may have violated civil and criminal statutes while providing care that was legal in their states.
Jacob T. Elberg, a former federal prosecutor specializing in health care fraud, said Bondi’s statement suggests the government “is using its investigative powers to target medical providers based on a disagreement about medical treatment rather than violations of the law.”
Elberg, now a law professor at the Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law at Seton Hall University, said that the subpoena itself is not wildly broad for a health-care-fraud case. But he noted that under a federal privacy law, the Justice Department must show that any information it demands on patient identities is relevant to a legitimate law enforcement probe.
This article was written by William Burns, who retired after serving as CIA Director. It was addressed to other career officers who were abruptly fired by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The article is titled: “A Letter to America’s Discarded Public Servants: You all deserved better.”
Burns likened the mass dismissals to the McCarthy era when China experts were falsely accused of being Communists and ousted, leaving the U.S. without their years of knowledge and experience. He warned of the dangers of suppressing dissent.
For three and a half decades as a career diplomat, I walked across the lobby of the State Department countless times—inspired by the Stars and Stripes and humbled by the names of patriots etched into our memorial wall. It was heartbreaking to see so many of you crossing that same lobby in tears following the reduction in force in July, carrying cardboard boxes with family photos and the everyday remains of proud careers in public service. After years of hard jobs in hard places—defusing crises, tending alliances, opening markets, and helping Americans in distress—you deserved better.
The same is true for so many other public servants who have been fired or pushed out in recent months: the remarkable intelligence officers I was proud to lead as CIA director, the senior military officers I worked with every day, the development specialists I served alongside overseas, and too many others with whom we’ve served at home and abroad.
The work you all did was unknown to many Americans, rarely well understood or well appreciated. And under the guise of reform, you all got caught in the crossfire of a retribution campaign—of a war on public service and expertise.
Those of us who have served in public institutions understand that serious reforms are overdue. Of course we should remove bureaucratic hurdles that prevent agencies like the State Department from operating efficiently. But there is a smart way and a dumb way to tackle reform, a humane way and an intentionally traumatizing way.
If today’s process were truly about sensible reform, career officers—who typically rotate roles every few years—wouldn’t have been fired simply because their positions have fallen out of political favor…
And if this process were truly about sensible reform, you and your families wouldn’t have been treated with gleeful indignity. One of your colleagues, a career diplomat, was given just six hours to clear out his office. “When I was expelled from Russia,” he said, “at least Putin gave me six days to leave.”
No, this is not about reform. It is about retribution. It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government. It is about paralyzing public servants—making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power.
Gary Rubenstein is a blogger, a high school math teacher, and a relentless detective of inflated claims of “success” by schools that game the system.
In this post, he once again exposes a trick that KIPP in New York City pulled to get its high school onto the U.S. News list of the state’s “best high schools.” The list is weighted in favor of high schools where significant numbers of students get at least a 3 on AP exams.
Strangely, a different New York City KIPP High School is ranked 682nd.
How can there be such a discrepancy between the two KIPPs? How can one of their schools be so good while the other is so bad? It’s simple. I know because this is a scam that they have been pulling off and on for the past 8 years. And in 2017 they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for this meddling blogger. In 2023 they did get away with it despite this meddling blogger. Whether they get away with it this year, only time will tell.
Here’s the way it works: There is only one KIPP high school in New York City and it is called KIPP NYC College Prep. So what are these two schools, KIPP Academy and KIPP Infinity? Those are two middle schools. The main statistic US News uses to rank high schools is the percent of students at that school who passed at least one AP test with a 3. So what KIPP does is it takes all the students from KIPP College Prep who pass an AP test and say they are enrolled in the middle school called KIPP Academy. Then they take the majority of their students who don’t pass an AP test and say they are enrolled in KIPP Infinity. This way KIPP Academy middle school becomes a high school with 100% of their 50 students passing an AP while KIPP Infinity middle school becomes a high school where 0% of their 216 students passed an AP.
It’s actually pretty ingenious. As I mentioned, they got caught in 2017 and got disqualified that year. I haven’t checked every year but I also checked in 2023 and they were not disqualified that year. You can check out the links to those previous posts if you want more details.
Now I don’t know if KIPP is using this fraudulent data to get people to donate to them. I also don’t know if their teachers are even aware of this. But if anyone who works for KIPP NYC College Prep is aware of this (maybe by reading this right now) and you don’t speak up about this, you are teaching your students that it is OK to cheat and to lie, so try to think about that as you teach each day.
And if anyone knows of any way to report this fraud to US News & World Report, feel free to do so.
I am reposting this news because the earlier version did not have a link. I added additional information about the decision and the Judge.
This decision blocks all efforts to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the state of Mississippi. If ever there was a state that needs DEI to heal from the burden of a racist history, it’s Mississippi.
Mississippi’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools remains blocked after a federal judge granted the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction in an Aug. 18 decision.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi also denied the defendants’ requests to dismiss the case, calling the defendants’ points “moot.”
“This Court generally agrees with Plaintiffs’ view of the challenged portions of (House Bill 1193).
It is unconstitutionally vague, fails to treat speech in a viewpoint-neutral manner, and carries with it serious risks of terrible consequences with respect to the chilling of expression and academic freedom,” U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate wrote in the Court’s decision.
The law, which the Mississippi Legislature approved and Gov. Tate Reeves signed in April, prohibits Mississippi public schools and institutions of higher learning from teaching, creating or promoting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The Republican-backed law also bans schools from requiring diversity statements or training during hiring, admission and employment processes in educational institutions.
Public institutions are also not allowed to teach or “endorse divisive concepts or concepts promoting transgender ideology, gender-neutral pronouns, deconstruction of heteronormativity, gender theory (or) sexual privilege,” the law says.
H.B. 1193 would prohibit public schools from requiring diversity statements or training in hiring, admission and employment processes at educational institutions.
Preliminary injunctions are dependent upon four qualities: “a substantial likelihood of success on the merits; the irreparable injury to the movants if the injunction is denied; whether the threatened injury outweighs any damage that the injunction might cause the defendant; and the public interest.”
Wingate Highlights Threat to Academic Freedom
Judge Wingate also granted the plaintiffs’ request to add class action claims to the lawsuit, meaning the injunction will apply to teachers, professors and students across the state. The plaintiffs’ lawyers sought the addition after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June limited the ability of federal judges to grant sweeping injunctions.
Judge Wingate was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa and received his law degree from Yale Law School. He was appointed as a federal district judge by President Ronald Reagan.
Diane Ravitch's blog 