August 28, 2026

BUREAUCRATS FIND LOOPHOLE IN TRUMP’S DEI BAN: They always do. This one concerns the federal workers’ Thrift Savings Plan, part of their retirement benefit program.

Posted at 9:00 am by Mark Tapscott

HISTORY:

Posted at 8:49 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE NEW SPACE RACE: The world’s busiest spaceport is about to get a lot quieter, at least for now.

A Falcon 9 launch early Tuesday was the last planned Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral until SpaceX begins flying Starship missions from Florida, according to Kiko Dontchev, the company’s vice president of launch. For at least the rest of the year, and maybe longer, this means the launch rate at the Florida spaceport will drop from eight or nine per month to perhaps two per month.

It wasn’t long ago when two launches per month was the norm, an indication of just how quickly SpaceX’s launch cadence has grown. Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center sit on adjoining property and share the same range on Florida’s east coast, so it is worth considering them a single spaceport. The last time the Florida spaceport did not lead the world in space launches was in 2015.

“From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on Starship,” Dontchev wrote on X. “The West Coast team will continue regularly launching Starlink from Vandenberg.”

Yep, that’ll be louder — but everybody knows the real action will be in Louisiana, starting in 2029 or so.

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green

IT’S A GOOD START, BUT THERE’S A LONG WAY TO GO:

And on the flip side:

Last month, Christopher Caldwell painted Trump as something like Blofeld leading an army of SPECTRE operatives in a Free Press article titled: Inside Donald Trump’s Ruthless Return.

Nuance has lately been in short supply. The president has suffered a humiliating defeat in a Middle Eastern war he launched against the wiser counsel of most of his advisers. The middle class is discontented, and the clamor for economic redistribution is louder than it has been since the 1930s. Many of Trump’s detractors claim to have told us so. Elect a barbarian and you’ll get a barbarian. Simple as that. W

But this is wrong. The more closely one observed Trump’s first term, the more surprised one would have been by his second. Trump Phase I was a joke. The 2020 press conference that his team called at “the Four Seasons” in Philadelphia—thinking they were booking a five-star hotel and winding up instead at a landscaping company next to a pornography emporium—is the perfect symbol of it. Trump was incurious. He knew as little about the workings of Washington on the day he left office as he did on the day he arrived. No one around him ever figured out how to recruit even a handful of people who could master the basics of the executive branch. A lot of what he did worked—there was bold diplomacy in the Middle East, an outstanding economy for lower earners until Covid came, and thereafter an impressive emergency program to develop a vaccine. But even the triumphs were shambolic. In the end Trump, like Gatsby and Père Goriot, left town abandoned by everyone. As Haberman and Swan point out, “no elected Republican of any stature” was present at Joint Base Andrews to see him off.

If Trump I was an error, Trump II is a terror. The hapless, almost slapstick first Trump administration, more embarrassing than threatening, was replaced after the four-year Biden interregnum by the most skilled and ruthless team of political operatives since the first term of Franklin Roosevelt.

To be fair, both Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Donald J. Trump assure me that FDR was one of the “Great” Presidents (if not the “Greatest”):

 

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

TAKING IT ALL DOESN’T WORK: New analysis from Cato Institute shows taking every penny made above $1 million is way short of covering even one year of the federal budget deficit. So much for “taxing the Rich.”

Posted at 8:00 am by Mark Tapscott

GOODER AND HARDER, LA: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass orders cops to stop cracking down on illegal street vendors.

Under fire Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is ordering local police to stop giving criminal citations to controversial street vendors who don’t follow city rules.

Bass is facing a tough reelection campaign after fending off a challenge from Spencer Pratt in a jungle primary, now going head-to-head with leftist Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Her administration is asking the LAPD to dismiss any past criminal citations that were incorrectly given and to no longer issue the citations in the future.

As of 2024, there are over 50,000 vendors across the city and only 687 with active vending permits.

Bass told the California Post that she ‘stands firmly with street vendors’ and wants to protect them from Donald Trump’s illegal migrant purges.

‘Street vending is a quintessential part of LA’s world-class food scene and a livelihood for thousands of hardworking Angelenos. Supporting LA’s street vendors is more important than ever given ongoing attacks by ICE,’ Bass said in a statement.

Criticism came from brick and mortar business who believe the illegal vendors cut into their bottom line, especially around big events like the World Cup or the coming 2028 Olympics.

Adam Carolla, call your office: “Once cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles do this—once you essentially look the other way for the homeless, junkies, illegal immigrants, criminals, or whoever it is, while shining a spotlight on taxpayers with over-regulation, over-permitting, and trying to manage every grain of their lives, versus saying to illegal immigrants, ‘Go do whatever you want,’ or to the homeless, ‘Go shoot up wherever you want or sleep wherever you want’—then you’ve lost it. L.A.’s there. San Francisco’s there.”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

CYBERSECURITY: ‘We have a limited window’: 116 companies, entities sign on to major AI cyber defense push.

Sophisticated AI models, capable of orchestrating agentic attacks in minutes, have upended the cyber industry in recent months, cementing the need for better security tools to combat mounting AI threats.

Open-source AI platform Hugging Face, which signed the letter, was recently at the center of a breach orchestrated by rogue OpenAI agents. The hack rattled the cyber and tech sector, raising questions over accelerating AI development.

Amid this backdrop, cybersecurity companies have skyrocketed in value as businesses recognize the security need and have managed to brush off earlier disruption concerns that rattled the broader software sector this year.

And sometimes they escape and attack without prompting.

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green

A REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN AD IN THE MAKING:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

SHIP OF FOOLS:

Classical reference in headline:

But, to tell the truth, I’d never met any Old Leftists. I expected them to be admirable and nasty, like Lillian Hellman, or brilliant, mysterious, denying everything, like Alger Hiss, or —best of all—hard-bitten and cynical but still willing to battle oppression, like Rick in Casablanca. I did not expect them to be the pack of thirty fussing geriatrics I met at Kennedy Airport, misplacing their hand luggage, losing their way to the ladies’ room, barking at the airline personnel, and asking two hundred times which gate we’d have to be at in three and a half hours.

They were leftists all right. In between palsies of fretting, they’d tell you how wonderful the Soviet Union was: pensions were huge, housing was cheap, and they practically paid you to get medical care. Believe me, you haven’t been bored until you’ve been buttonholed by a seventy-year-old woman who holds forth all afternoon on the perfidies of American foreign policy and shows you pictures of her grandchildren. These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.

“Progressivism” — where time stands still.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll