More: "You're making Vladimir Putin proud. State run Media," political commentator Brian Krassenstein wrote.

"Why would I let your state media track my data?" another user asked. A third wrote: "I'd rather launch my phone into the sun than install a government propaganda app."

Other critics responded with memes, including one showing Trump's face superimposed on that of a North Korean state television broadcaster.

More: All politics are identity politics. Republicans have long mocked this notion, treating the very concept of "identity politics" as a left-wing fixation. In reality, the GOP's success is entirely due to the cheapest form of identity politics: For decades, but especially now, they have worked to distract voters from the party's ruinous policies with appeals to their identity as white, provincial and, most importantly, Christian. This campaign has been enormously successful. White evangelicals have been the backbone of the GOP for decades not because they love tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation, but because they have been told, repeatedly, that Democrats are demonic and there is no such thing as a liberal Christian.

This is why there's a growing panic in the Republican ranks over the campaign of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and it's not just fear that he could beat Ken Paxton, the state's Republican attorney general. Win or lose, Talarico " a seminary student-turned-politician " embodies an existential threat to the right's long-standing myth that to be Christian must necessarily mean voting Republican.

"As a young evangelical we were taught repeatedly and clearly: It is not possible to be a Christian and a Democrat," Brad Onishi, a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley and co-host of the "Straight White American Jesus" podcast, told me. "But candidates like Talarico are changing that. His theological acumen and keen ability to use the language of the New Testament to disarm bad-faith religious attacks is showing a new way forward."

Right before I got out of the USMC they were transitioning from shined all leather combat boots, which weren't the best but were tried and true, to synthetic material boots that looked like they'd fall apart after about a week in the field. Glad I didn't have to make that switch.

Will the tourists climbing to the top for the viewing deck he was hyping up just a few days ago be kept away from the snipers or will it be a free for all up there? Will there be guided tours of the ammo dump?

Let's hope the next president turns it into a park. It'd be way more useful that way.

One woman is 0.000014084507042253522% of the population of Massachusetts. A rounding error. Meaningless in any argument.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an excellent author. I loved his Mars Trilogy. New York 2140 was a good read as well. Red Moon I think is a glimpse into our near future, fighting with China over space in general but access to the moon in particular.

Guess I need to read this one too.

I agree with 70. Really though if you're drawing social security you shouldn't be in office.

More: In what would be a seismic shift, the Trump administration is quietly moving to strip a core protection of the Endangered Species Act, according to an internal memo obtained by The New York Times.

Under a new interpretation of the law's language outlined in the memo, the accidental killing or injury of an animal would no longer be considered illegal; only actions specifically intending to target an animal would.

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.

ACAB

The vote is unfortunately meaningless if DOJ won't pursue the charges, and there is no way this DOJ will do that.

More: The House is going home again"this time to avoid a vote on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's impeachment.

House GOP leadership announced Wednesday morning that they will end their current slate of votes early and head home until the midterms, a nearly two-month break.

"Members are further advised that upon completion of today's legislative business, votes are no longer expected in the House tomorrow, September 17th," a message from the office of House Majority Whip Tom Emmer read. "The last votes for the week are expected at approximately 4:45 p.m. this afternoon. This is a change from the previously announced schedule."

The House will now move up votes on cutting Environmental Protection Agency regulations to Wednesday.

People actually fall for this BS?

More: The remarks, made during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, stood at odds with earlier comments indicating that he did not intend to send federal agents to polling places around the country. However, when Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, pressed the issue, Mr. Patel seemed to reverse course.

"I thought you weren't going to be sending people to the polls," Mr. Welch said.

"When did you hear that? Just another lie," Mr. Patel declared, raising his voice.

Mr. Welch revisited the issue. "So you are sending F.B.I. agents to the polls?"

"We have election crisis coordinators manned at all 56 field offices," Mr. Patel replied, appearing to refer to what are known as election crime coordinators. "Election integrity is of paramount importance. This F.B.I. will not shy away from that effort."

Under the law, armed federal officers or military personnel are barred from being deployed "at any place where a general or special election is held." The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a letter to a Democratic senator last month that there were "no plans" for the armed forces to deploy troops to polling stations for the midterm elections.

Guess they got what they voted for.

"Broken hearts and dirty windows make life difficult to see." - John Prine.

More: Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

Kremlev's previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin's circle financially supporting the president's son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin's government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president's first term.

In the days leading up to Trump Jr.'s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.

It's not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.'s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million.

America's ship of state has never been controlled by pirates like the Trump family before.

Sure seems like something HIPPA should prohibit.

More: The 80-year-old president issued dark warnings at this week's GOP midterm convention about the nation's future if Republicans lost the November elections, and he even asked his followers to pledge to cheat if necessary or risk hellfire, and politics and history professor Alan Elrod published a column for Liberal Currents offered a disturbing theory about his plans.

"Trump's speech came off more like a sermon from Jonestown, and observers noticed," Elrod wrote. "My own overriding thought was: 'This speech was like some sort of performance art piece of a live entombing of a mad king and his most loyal followers.'"

--

"My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li has an elegantly simple theory for why Trump has become even more obsessed with legacy and with slapping his name on buildings and projects than he already was over his lifelong career as a shameless self-promoter: fear of death," Elrod wrote.

"As she put it: 'My current theory of Donald Trump is that he is utterly gripped by the terror of death, and is desperately attempting to leave some mark on the world that history cannot erase " this is the point of the wars, the annexation threats, the D.C. vandalism. I think right now he is genuinely fixated on adding new American territory as the brass ring, the thing they'll never be able to take away from his memory.'"

Elrod found himself inclined to agree as he watched the president's rambling, self-aggrandizing speech.

"It's a macabre but convincing psychological assessment," he wrote. "Rather than making America great again, Trump is inflicting grievous harm on it with tariffs, now upgraded to import bans against select Canadian goods; an illegal war; and a total ransacking of our public and private sectors for the enrichment of his courtiers and his family. And he is going to bury us all with him in a tomb of his own design " a ballroom."

Is now a good time to bring up Trump's Saudi nuclear deal?

More: Cooke, who has criticized the president on multiple previous occasions, first noted the "obvious moral problem that the money in question does not belong to those to whom Trump is promising it."

It is also a "reckless, shapeless, irritable spasm, divorced from the nature and purpose of our government and from the Constitution that created it," he said.

The idea is "deeply irresponsible," he added, because of the additional federal debt it would heap on the U.S.

And politically, argued Cooke, it would essentially confirm "for all time that the second Trump administration has been a failure" because he had to resort to what's been dubbed by critics as bribery of voters.

More: "The cost of diesel gets into just about everything," KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk said in a recent interview.

"From running a farm ... [to the] cost of food, but also everything across the economy that's shipped," she said. When diesel prices rise, everything "gets that extra fee tacked onto it."

Swonk predicted that the high cost of diesel will be an "inflationary problem" for months to come.

Since late July, diesel prices have been rising higher and faster overall than the cost of regular unleaded gas.

That's because key refineries that produce it have been knocked offline or destroyed, both in Eastern Europe " where the Ukraine-Russia war still rages " and in the Middle East.

#5,

You sure he didn't rename it "America?" That would explain a lot.