Disease Resurgence

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Maggie Astor and Dani Blum at NYT:

Doctors around the country say they are seeing more cases of serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses that vaccines have long kept at bay, including whooping cough and bacterial infections that can cause pneumonia or meningitis.

The concern among doctors comes on the heels of a resurgence of measles nationwide, fueled by distrust in vaccines that grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump have amplified. Public health experts have long seen measles as a harbinger: Because it is so exceptionally contagious, it can be the first disease to spike as vaccination rates broadly decline, and a sign of more to come.

For some of these diseases, national data show clear and substantial increases in recent years; for others, the increases are small, or there are anecdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm.

...

The onslaught of preventable illness and other health risks can feel overwhelming, doctors said. So can navigating the medical misinformation some patients recite.

“It just feels like you’re a tiny little boat with a giant tidal wave coming at you,” said Dr. Erin Charles, a regional pediatric hospitalist at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “And you might convince one family here and there.”

Many parents continue to refuse vaccines even after their child has been hospitalized with a vaccine-preventable illness, doctors said. Dr. Kirk said she had never had a parent in that situation tell her they had changed their mind and would have their child vaccinated on the standard schedule. Dr. Hofto said she could sometimes persuade families, but often not.

An episode of The Pitt takes on the antivax loonies.

AI Is Fallible -- Very Fallible

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

It is better than a couple of years ago -- but still very fallible.

Chris Cillizza:

What do people use A.I. for when it comes to the news?

To check facts, according to new polling from Katie Harbath.

And A.I. is (still) not good at doing that.

“I would not use it as a fact-checking mechanism,” Harbath, a former GOP operative and longtime Facebook executive who now writes Anchor Change with Katie Harbath, told me in a Substack Live on Wednesday.

Writing on that topics, Harbath noted:

Ask one of the leading AI chatbots a question about the upcoming midterm elections, and there is a 90% chance the response will be flawed in some material way: a factual error, a clear partisan lean, a citation to a foreign state-controlled outlet, or some combination of all three.

In our conversation on Wednesday, Harbath added:

I am always double-checking what numbers [the AI is] pulling in…I do not just blindly trust. We’ve seen so many examples of that — like there was a story recently about a book where the AI generated a bunch of fake quotes that the person put in.

(Sidebar: Katie is referring to “The Future of Truth” by Steven Rosenbaum — a book about truth in A.I. that, wait for it, had fake quotes in it that A.I. had made up.)

So….not great!

Katie and I had an in-depth conversation about both how the average voter uses A.I. as well as how campaign pros are using artificial intelligence to do their jobs.

This is the first in a series of conversations Katie and I are going to have about the transformative power of A.I. — and how it is playing out in the realm of campaign politics.

Presidential Power, June 2026

 Article II

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. ...

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States...


He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

... 

[He] shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

Use of Force

Plenty of precedent: CRS counts 469 foreign interventions between 1798 and 2022.

Dueling Lincoln Quotations

"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, is to and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose– and you allow him to make war at pleasure ...This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us." -- letter to William Herndon, February 15, 1848

"Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation." --letter to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864

Since January 20, 2025: Iran, Venezuela,counterterrorism Strikes in Iraq, Nigeria, and Somalia.

Executive Orders

Executive Clemency

Investigation and Prosecution

• James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell
• John Bolton:  pleading to one count of mishandling classified information.
• Universities and funding
• Law firms representing Trump adversaries: contracts
• Media companies and FCC license threats

Soft Power:  "Power to Persuade"

Overall approval

Constraints on Presidential War Power

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military.

Matt Glassman:

My view, as discussed last week, is that presidential warmaking is an almost wholly political issue, rather than a legal one. No court is going to stop a war.

That said, I think may people hear "wholly political" and just assume that the president has a free hand to do whatever he/she wants. I completely disagree. In fact, presidents are incredibly constrained by politics when it comes to war.

Take Trump and Iran. What are some of the major political constraints:

1. Military capacity
2. Cooperation of allies
3. Reaction of foreign adversaries
4. Reaction of markets
5. Congressional opinion
6. American public opinion
7. Partisan/base opinion

The first two---military capacity and ally cooperation---are straightforward; they are essentially supply-side constraints. Presidents can only go to war with the military Congress provides. Ditto with allies; absent the ability to use airspace and foreign bases, some operations become impossible. And it's always better to have a coalition of nations fighting the war than going it alone.

The third and fourth items on the list---foreign and market reactions---are constraints because they create immediate negative feedback, political and economic. Trump can't just nuke Tehran because that could easily trigger an escalation to global war, and WW3 with China is a bad outcome. Similarly, now that Iran has closed the strait and oil prices are spiking, the economic costs of the war may soon exceed the benefits, encouraging the president to seek a diplomatic off-ramp.

The final three items---opinions in Congress, the public, and the president's party---are the most purely political. These matter because the president has goals other than the objectives of the war, and negative opinions about the war will inevitably spill over to future political goals, whether they are policy, electoral, or egoist.

Gutting the Diplomatlic Corps

Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

Abigail Williams at NBC

The State Department declined to provide exact numbers. According to the American Foreign Service Association, around 2,000 U.S. diplomats have left the Foreign Service over the last year, either through layoffs or forced retirements, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, experience in crisis response and highly specialized language skills paid for by the U.S. government.

Their departure from a workforce that was estimated to be more than 13,000 in 2024 leaves the U.S. at a critical disadvantage, current and former State Department officials say, at a time when the nation is facing an escalating number of foreign policy crises.

...

The leadership vacuum is large. The ambassadorship in Moldova is still vacant, along with more than half of ambassadorships around the globe, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where a worsening Ebola outbreak began. There is no ambassador to Ukraine, and seasoned diplomat Julie Davis, who has been leading the embassy in Kyiv while simultaneously serving as ambassador to Cyprus, is stepping down next month to join others in retirement.

...

In the Middle East, where the U.S. continues to navigate a war with Iran and the fallout with regional allies, half of the U.S. missions, including four Persian Gulf countries, are without formal U.S. ambassadors. Pakistan and Qatar, where officials have taken on critical mediating roles in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, are without ambassadors.

The absences contributed to the frantic effort to evacuate thousands of Americans who became stranded, and withdraw personnel when Iran began retaliating across the region in March, current and former diplomats say.

Not good pic.twitter.com/yvodGttLpV

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) June 4, 2026

250

Many posts have discussed patriotism.

 Josephine Walker at Axios:

Dueling events for America's 250th birthday are creating confusion as celebrations ramp up across the U.S.

Why it matters: The disconnect made headlines last week when a group of performers withdrew from on the National Mall, prompting President Trump to step in.

Those concerts were organized by Freedom 250, a White House-established initiative. America 250, a separate, Congress-approved missive, has planned events nationwide in the run-up to Independence Day.

The intrigue: Several of the performers who canceled cited being misled about the event.Country singer Martina McBride said on Instagram that she "was assured this was a nonpartisan event that was meant to celebrate ALL 50 states. ...Yesterday things started changing and what we were told is, in fact, not what is happening."

...

Freedom 250 is planning events that reflect Trump's flair for spectacle.

That includes a UFC fight on the White House South Lawn, an IndyCar race through downtown Washington, D.C., a FIFA World Cup fan zone and the Great American State Fair — both to be held on the National Mall.

Jemar Tisby at The Bulwark:

The issue is not hosting a sporting event, it’s the one they chose and what it says.

If the White House wanted to host a sporting event commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary, they could have chosen “America’s Pastime”—baseball.

And they could have held it at a stadium dedicated to the purpose, not spent tens of millions constructing a temporary arena that may leave scars on the landscape for a long time to come.

Instead they chose cage fighting, the most visceral expression of violence for sport.

What does it mean to normalize blood sport at that address?

Whatever your personal opinion of MMA as a sport, this is a deliberate choice about what power looks like, what celebration looks like, and what America is supposed to mean.

Yet it’s not a departure from this regime’s ethos; it’s right in line with their performance of masculinity.

The Streets of Los Angeles

Many posts have discussed failures of governance in California.

Constance Sommer at LA Reported:

Following this winter’s heavy rains, L.A. motorists reported 6,700 potholes in January, a 49% jump from the previous month. In the past, L.A.’s Bureau of Street Services, also known as StreetsLA, used to try to “repair every pothole within the next business day,” according to a former version of the bureau’s “How Do We Fix Potholes?” page. The current page doesn’t mention repair times at all.

L.A.’s streets are falling apart. At public hearings city workers complain that they can barely keep up with even the most basic street services. Hundreds of street staff were laid off last year. Trucks remain parked at city lots because there aren’t enough people to use them to perform major repairs. Since last July, the city has made do with stopgap measures like plugging potholes and laying down rectangular asphalt patches that stop short of a full resurfacing of the road.

According to the city’s own measurements, 60% of its streets were in good condition a year ago. Now it’s 53%.