Category: Uncategorized

Trump’s big beautiful bill is unlikely to raise the opposition that Democrats hope it will. The tax cuts will go into effect immediately, but the Medicaid cuts will not go into effect until after the midterm elections.  The tax cuts will not be very apparent because they just extend the…

From the Financial Times: The writer is exec­ut­ive dir­ector of the Non- pro­lif­er­a­tion Policy Edu­ca­tion Cen­ter and was the Pentagon’s deputy for non­pro­lif­er­a­tion from 1989-93 Henry Sokol­ski Of all the ques­tions Amer­ica’s bomb­ing of Iran has gen­er­ated, the one that’s received the least atten­tion is how we got here. The…

The Financial Times’ Martin Wolf has written an excellent column on the international and domestic dangers unleashed by Donald Trump’s administration. He says: Let us start with the domestic front. We are watch­ing an assault on the rule of law. Abbe Low­ell, erstwhile defender of Jared Kush­ner and Hunter Biden, warns that…

American President Trump and Brazilian President Lula have been arguing at long distance since Lula hosted the BRICs meeting in Brazil.  According to Bloomberg, Lula told Trump to mind his own business after Trump defended former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro from criminal prosecution in Brazil for attempting a coup.  “This…

The Washington Post reports on concerns about layoffs at the State Department: The Trump administration’s plan for mass layoffs at the State Department has left much of the workforce exasperated and embittered, tanking morale as extra demands were made to assist U.S. citizens seeking to flee the Middle East amid…

When I arrived in Rome, my predecessor had been gone for some time.  His assistant, who would be my assistant, had been handling the science job until my arrival.  I had not had Italian language training, and the main issue for the office was fisheries, which was handled by the…

The Washington Post reports that as part of its attack on European countries for their democratic institutions, the State Department is revising its human rights reports to be more critical of leftist views. I think I wrote the first human rights report on Brazil while I was working on the…

As I was finishing my tour as the deputy director of the State Department’s “green” environmental office – responsible for living things like forests, animals, and humans – the office across the hall that was responsible for supporting foreign service science officers in the field asked if I would accept…

In the New York Review of Books, Christopher Brown writes about what a “Manchurian Candidate” would do if elected, and it turns out to almlst exactly what Donald Trump has been doing. He says: Imagine that the president of the United States was a “Manchurian candidate,” an embedded foreign agent…

I am disappointed in Bill Maher’s readout of his dinner with President Trump. Maher found Trump charming and gracious, with no name calling or epithets. My theory is that Trump could do this because he won, and Maher lost.  Unspoken but underlying the conversation was Trump’s view that I kicked…