—SOMETIMES YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP
…Hey, how was your week? Mine was, um, up and down.
…I was a Poli Sci major and have always loved politics, national or international, and I’ve never wanted this to become a political blog (it won’t be), but these last two weeks have been fraught with situations that are hard to ignore, and even more difficult to believe, so, fair warning, the bulk of this is going to contain real life headlines from the last two weeks showing how we have the most corrupt “person” ever (including his family) governing in our nation's most important role.
Should you choose to skip those sections (and I understand if you do), I have a couple of nice stories at the end of this post. I promise we will return to our regular scheduled programing next Friday.
Pinkie swear.
… The U.N. backed a map that shows Africa true-to-size. The U.S. was sole objector.
The U.S. was the only country to vote against the U.N. resolution, which encourages the use of an “Equal Earth” map. The U.S. described it as a “radical ideological project.”
The U.N. General Assembly voted 164 votes to 1.
… Trump threatens to cancel Kennedy Center renovation if his name isn’t added
… Trump attacks the three Supreme Court justices he appointed
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The Trump administration on Monday gutted regulations that limited planet-warming emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants. |
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…Trump Has Untethered Himself From Reality
(NYT, 915/26)
Trump’s top six lies about 9/11
(The Guardian, 9/6/26)
1. Claiming the attacks made his building the tallest in downtown New York
2. Twenty-five years ago on Sept. 11, whatever else he was doing later, Trump was four miles away at Trump Tower, where he called into WWOR-TV to say that he could see out one window to the World Trade Center. He also took the time, on a day when nearly 3,000 people died, to mention that a building of his, 40 Wall Street, “was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest,” as my news-side colleague Katie Rogers noted last Tuesday. “And then,” Trump continued, “when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”
3. As Rogers pointed out, “It wasn’t.”
2. Claiming he helped clean up
“Everyone helped clear the rubble, and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit. We had hundreds of people there.”
In 2019, PolitiFact interviewed a New York City fire department battalion chief who did not recall Trump sending any workers to the site.
3. Lying about Muslims
When he first campaigned for the presidency in 2016, Trump repeated a story that “thousands and thousands” of Muslim Americans “were cheering” in Jersey City, New Jersey, on the day of the attacks in 2001.
Despite many fact checks, no evidence has been discovered to back up this claim.
4. Lying about Ilhan Omar
In September 2019, Trump retweeted a video that purported to show the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Muslim and the first Somali American to serve in the US Congress, dancing on the anniversary of the attacks, calling her: “The new face of the Democrat Party!”
CBS News reported that Omar had been dancing at an event organized by the congressional Black caucus, which was not held on September 11.
5. Claiming to have predicted the attacks
In his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump mentioned the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden as among “a bewildering series of smaller crises” faced by the US.
At the time, Bin Laden was known to Americans because al-Qaida had in 1998 orchestrated the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
That didn’t stop Trump from in 2018 writing on X that the US “should have captured Osama Bin Laden long before we did”, adding: “I pointed him out in my book just BEFORE the attack on the World Trade Center.”
6. Lying about firefighters
During a ceremony at the White House ellipse on Tuesday to honor emergency workers who responded to the attacks, Trump said that when he and a group of workers went to visit lower Manhattan shortly after the attacks, he was carried out by firefighters worried that the lower Manhattan skyscraper One Liberty Plaza – formerly known as the US Steel Building – would collapse.
“Two firemen, big strong guys – and I’m not the smallest guy in the world – they grabbed me under the arm, said: ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up,” the president claimed. “This is not easy to do – I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said: ‘Fellas, I can run myself,’ but they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.”
PolitiFact notes that Trump has told a version of this story before, including in an interview with Fox News that aired earlier this week. It appears to be a stretch.
While concerns about One Liberty Plaza’s stability did prompt the evacuation of at least one nearby building the day after the attack, there’s no evidence Trump was present, while his claim of bringing workers to the site is unsupported.
… After 'Lake America,' Trump suggests a new name for the state of New Mexico (WP, 9/7/26)
The White House on Sunday amplified President Donald Trump's call to rebrand New Mexico as "New America," reposting an image from the president's Truth Social account showing the state's name crossed out and replaced with "America."
…Russian Businessman Paid for Donald Trump Jr.’s Lavish Wedding After-Party (WP 9/05/26)
The payments, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, represented an extraordinary flouting of ethical norms for an American president’s family member.
… Jared Kushner’s Dollar Diplomacy
(The New Yorker, 9/03/26)
“Kushner is plagued with conflicts of interest,” Virginia Canter, a former White House counsel, said. “He is supposed to be working for the American people, but in fact he has tremendous financial incentives to further the interests of his investors.”
…Trump Administration Moves to Gut a Core Endangered Species Protection
(NYT 9/16/26)
An internal memo reinterprets the law so that only the intentional killing of animals, not collateral harm, is illegal.
The change would be transformative because, in the United States, the killing of endangered animals almost always happens incidentally, in the course of economic activity. Until now, industries and individuals could be held accountable for those foreseeable deaths and, as a result, they have been incentivized to avoid them
…Trump Approves $2.8 Billion Arms Sale to Israel, Including 40,000 One-Ton Bombs
(NYT 9/15/26)
The package would be among the largest deliveries of U.S. munitions to Israel.
Human rights groups and some foreign governments have condemned Israel for dropping the giant munitions in densely populated areas, sometimes killing dozens of civilians in strikes targeting just one individual. (At least 74,000 people have been killed in the Gaza strip and 147,000 wounded.)
…But finally, there’s good news tonight!
Do You Remember?
--Melissa Kirsch, The Good List
Monday night is the 21st night of September, the date immortalized in Earth, Wind and Fire’s 1978 dance-floor mainstay “September.” In one of the most delightful NPR stories ever aired, Allee Willis, who co-wrote the song, talked about creating what was “obviously the happiest sounding song in the world.” I listen to the NPR segment every year, laughing each time when Willis describes how she pleaded with the band’s lead singer, Maurice White, to change out his placeholder lyric in the chorus — “ba-dee-ya” — for real words:
Finally, when it was so obvious he was not going to do it, I just said, what the [bleep] does ba-dee-ya mean? And he essentially said, who the [bleep] cares? … I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting from him, which is never let the lyric get in the way of the groove.
I love this. How do we let the lyric get in the way of the groove in our own lives? How do we let an insistence on being sensible get in the way of the dancing?
Willis, who died in 2019 at 72, never let the lyric get in the way of the groove. Her songwriting hits include the “Friends” theme and “Neutron Dance” by the Pointer Sisters, plus she co-wrote the music and lyrics to the musical “The Color Purple.” “I hear melodies constantly,” she told The Times in 2018. “I always say, ‘If you were to drop dead, I could write to the clunk of the body.’”
If you spend the 21st night of September dancing, then you can spend the 22nd night of September celebrating the autumnal equinox. It begins at 8:05 p.m. Eastern, when the sun crosses the celestial equator, moving from the northern half of the sky to the southern. I plan to follow the example of the Swedish musician Lykke Li who told The Times, “Fall is a time to decide a little bit who you want to be.” Perhaps we should all decide a little bit on Tuesday.
Migratory Restlessness
We’re at peak migration now in North America. About 8.5 million birds were in flight over New York at 11 p.m. on Sunday, according to Cornell Lab’s Migration Dashboard, a very nifty site that shows the patterns, speeds and altitudes of birds migrating in your area. The Scarlet Tanager is making its way toward South America; the Prairie Warbler is heading for the Caribbean.
The seasonal restlessness that birds experience is called Zugunruhe (“migration anxiety” in German). They flap and flutter, hop and pace: let’s get this show on the road, let’s get out of here already. Who hasn’t known such restlessness, that urge to move, to make a change?
When birds feel Zugunruhe, they take off. For humans, it’s often more complicated. “When the sun turns traitor-cold and all the trees are shivering in a naked row, I get the urge for going but I never seem to go,” Joni Mitchell sang. Of course, there are the human snowbirds who head south for the winter, but the rest of us sit with a version of Zugunruhe, interrogating it, trying to find an outlet for it.
One way to calm the commotion: peruse “The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time,” according to the U.S. Bird History Substack. It’s not a thousand-mile night journey to sandy shores, but you’ll find good company in species like the Inaccessible Island Rail, a fellow nontraveler that lives in the south Atlantic and, weighing just under two ounces, is the smallest flightless bird in the world.
