He was especially horrified because he hates dogs

Suck it up

Trump’s 50% Tariffs Take Hold After US-Canada Trade Talks Collapse

We’re back to war with Canada, our oldest and closest ally, jacking up tariff taxes on US consumers

Jon Queally for Common Dreams

While courting North Korea and Russia, Trump
destroys ties with our historic allies and
says this make US stronger and safer.

“It’s war.”

That’s how one Canadian journalist described developments between the governments of the US and Canada after trade talks between the two were suspended on Friday night without a deal in place to avoid the imposition of 50% tariffs threatened by Donald Trump on a wide swath of Canadian goods.

Both nations accused the other of scuttling the deal, with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney citing “last-minute changes” by the Trump administration and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer pointing to “new demands and walk backs” by the Canadians.

Asked earlier on Friday if a deal was within reach, Trump responded, “I think so, yeah, we’ll see.” But by late Friday night, it was clear the talks had collapsed entirely as Carney summoned Canada’s representatives back to Ottawa.

In his statement on Friday night, Carney said, “We have recognized from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market.”

Here are Trump's demands on Canada: 

"French language rules in Quebec?" WTF!

Unexpected findings add new insight on cannabis and heart health

Might have some heart benefits

By University of California, San Francisco

Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan

Habitual cannabis users experienced about 9% fewer premature heartbeats on days they inhaled cannabis compared with days they abstained, a counterintuitive finding that adds to the complex and evolving understanding of how cannabis affects the heart, according to new UC San Francisco-led research.

The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, is among the first to examine the acute cardiovascular effects of inhaled cannabis in people living their normal daily lives. While the findings challenge assumptions drawn largely from observational studies, the researchers caution that they should not influence medical or behavioral decisions around cannabis use.

With millions of Americans using cannabis, studies like this are increasingly important for understanding its health effects, the researchers said.

"We were surprised by the results because they contradicted our original hypothesis," said Gregory Marcus, MD, MAS, an endowed professor of atrial fibrillation research in the UCSF Division of Cardiology. "That's why randomized trials are so important. When the data challenge our expectations, our job as scientists is to understand them, not ignore them."

The trial enrolled 108 adults who regularly smoked or vaped cannabis but had no history of clinically diagnosed cardiac arrhythmias. Over 14 days, participants were randomly assigned each day to either inhale cannabis or abstain while wearing a continuously recording electrocardiographic monitor, activity tracker, sleep monitor and continuous glucose monitor.

Participants served as their own controls, allowing investigators to compare physiological changes during cannabis use and abstinence days.

What To Do with Us Boomers?

Why We're a Problem

Robert Reich

I keep hearing that we Boomers are to blame for just about everything wrong with America — unaffordable housing (because we bought up most of the housing stock and now refuse to leave), the depletion of Social Security (because we’re collecting it now), the national debt (because so much of it is being spent on Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits for us), inequality (because apparently we have so much money), climate change (because we’ve been polluting longer than anyone else alive), and even Trump (because he’s one of us).

I don’t have standing to contest these claims because, well, I’ve also made them. They’re a theme of my latest book, Coming Up Short (out in paperback in a few weeks).

All of this seemed confirmed by a recent headline in The Economist: WHY PEOPLE OVER THE AGE OF 55 ARE THE NEW PROBLEM GENERATION.

But not for the reasons I supposed. According to The Economist, the real problem with us Boomers is we’re partying too hard. We were too wild, crazy, and irresponsible back in the day, and we’re still too wild, crazy, and irresponsible.

The Economist opines that compared to younger generations, we’re drinking more and using drugs more, and we’re going to wild retirement-community parties where sometimes we’re even — oh my goodness! — having sex.

Who are the winners in this culture war?

The defense of transgender student rights shifts, once again, to the Westerly School Committee

Steve Ahlquist

Dozens of people attended the August 19 meeting of the Westerly School Committee to advocate against agenda item 12d, “Request of Counsel to seek written opinion from Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office regarding SCOTUS Decision as to transgender athletes.” The decision is West Virginia v. B.P.J., in which the United States Supreme Court upheld state laws, such as West Virginia’s “Save Women’s Sports Act,” that banned or restricted transgender women athletes from participating in women’s school sports teams on a 6-3 vote.

You can watch the relevant parts of the School Committee meeting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltJLTv1o0g8

“You folks who came to the mic tonight wondering who put this item on the agenda,” said Westerly School Committee member Peter Nero. “It was me. The reason I put it on the agenda is that I want final clarity on where Rhode Island law stands, and I want the Attorney General to put that in writing, because I don’t want to have any more of these long nights… Bottom line: I wanted clarity on this so we don’t have more meetings like this, and we put an end to this now. That’s why it’s on the agenda.”

The long nights Committee member Nero is referring to are likely the meetings where the school committee takes up potential changes to their Transgender, Gender Nonconforming & Transitioning Students Protocol and a large number of people fill the room to advocate for transgender student rights.

Committee member Timothy Killam seemed exasperated. He wanted to talk about what he considered the positive things happening in Westerly, like the opening of a new school in a couple of weeks. “Why are we going around in circles about this instead of talking about some forward progress? In my opinion, we have a protocol in place. We don’t have a problem right now. Why are we taking the time about this?”

Committee member Killam sought to assure the people in the room that they had misunderstood the agenda and that nothing would be decided during the meeting. “I want you all to understand: if you read the agenda, we’re not voting on anything today,” said Committee member Killam. “That was never on the agenda. And if you interpreted it that way, you are incorrect. No vote is being taken tonight. Period. There is not. It was simply a statement to ask for something in writing.”

Seventeen minutes later, the School Committee voted 4 to 3 against seeking an opinion from the Attorney General. Later in the meeting, Committee member Angela Goethels apologized for her yes vote, saying that upon further reflection she was against it.

Ahead of the vote, when asked about seeking a written opinion from the R.I. Attorney General’s Office about the status of the State Law regarding transgender students, Attorney William Nardone said, “I’m not sure what you want me to ask the Attorney General. If you want me to ask him for ‘his opinion on a decision,’ frankly, I would be embarrassed to send that letter to the Attorney General…”

The “clarity” desired by Committee member Nero doesn’t exist, opined Attorney Jennifer Wood, who has decades of legal expertise in the education space.

“I wasn’t going to comment tonight because I saw that you didn’t have an agenda item that you were voting on this evening - although it ended up being voted on - and I didn’t want to attenuate further what has been a painful and difficult conversation for your committee over several evenings,” said Attorney Wood. “And I definitely never wanted to discourage anyone from seeking an opinion from the Attorney General. I would never be so arrogant as to suggest that that should not be done.

“I appreciate the desire for clarity and finality on this issue that this committee and that a lot of others in the community are yearning for. I am here to share the bad news that it is not yet available. [In the] West Virginia v. BPJ case, the Supreme Court ruled narrowly on one aspect of the issue that relates to transgender athletes’ participation in sports. But on page three of the decision, in footnote number one, it’s quite straightforward: Brett Kavanaugh, writing the majority opinion says, [paraphrasing] ‘We’re not deciding most of this issue in this decision. All we’re saying is that the 27 states who have state law that permits the exclusion of transgender women in women’s sports, they can do that. And the 23 states that do not have state law, and among them, Rhode Island, states that permit the participation of students in sports teams that are aligned to their gender identity can also do that. We’re not opining on that today. We weren’t asked to; it’s not in the case, and we’re not doing that.’ Then they, in the footnote, the court further excludes: We’re not talking about trans men participating in men’s sports.

“So the clarity and finality that I think everyone wants isn’t there.”

Public Testimony

Public testimony lasted over an hour. Every person who spoke was there in defense of transgender students. Here are some excerpts, edited for clarity:

NOT A JOKE: Trump threatens US bond market with military intervention

Trump actually said this yesterday...

Trump congratulates himself

Plus he CHEATS

The EPA’s data on cancer risk from air pollution has gone dark

Ending your right to know

Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Reporter

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

Darya Minovi was mapping pollution from medical sterilization plants across the country when many of the communities she was speaking to began asking the same question. The facilities emit ethylene oxide, a potent carcinogen, and those who lived nearby wanted to know how much the emissions were increasing their cancer risk. She turned to data compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency to find out.

The resulting maps, published in 2023 by the Union of Concerned Scientists (SEE SCREENSHOT BELOW), a nonprofit where Minovi is a researcher, revealed that more than 14 million people lived in a 5-mile radius of ethylene oxide-emitting facilities. Crucially, the map highlighted 23 sterilization facilities that the EPA had found emit ethylene oxide at levels that definitively contribute to elevated cancer risk. The project helped raise awareness and was used to push the government to tighten limits on ethylene oxide emissions.

But now, the cancer risk data that made Minovi’s analysis possible has quietly gone offline. After more than two decades of sharing this information with the public, the Environmental Protection Agency has omitted cancer risk estimates from its latest update to national air pollution data. The agency is continuing to release raw pollution figures, but it is no longer providing information on the additional cancer risk that the emissions cause. It has also not updated its searchable U.S. map of cancer risk from air pollution with the most recent data.

The risk assessments are routinely used by communities to understand the effects of the pollution in their neighborhoods, as well as by journalists and nonprofits to inform the public and hold polluters accountable. Withholding this information would shift the burden of interpreting pollution data — a technically demanding task requiring specialized experience and an understanding of EPA protocols — onto the public, Minovi said, making it harder for communities to access this vital public health information. 

This Flesh-Eating Fly Is Back in the U.S.

Scientists Are Tracking Where It Could Strike Next

By Mika Ono, University of California - San Diego

Meet our little friend. New World screwworm larva close up, and the mouth hooks they use to eat living flesh. Credit: USDA

A wound no bigger than a tick bite can be enough for New World screwworm to take hold.

A female New World screwworm fly can deposit hundreds of eggs at a time in an animal’s or person’s wound. When those eggs hatch, the larvae do something most maggots do not: they burrow into healthy flesh and begin feeding. A single female may lay as many as 3,000 eggs during her lifetime.

For decades, the United States had largely escaped that threat. An ambitious eradication campaign eliminated New World screwworm from the country and eventually forced the parasite south to Panama. But after spreading north through Central America and Mexico, the fly has returned.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed the first animal case of the current U.S. outbreak on June 3, 2026. Since then, detections have been reported in Texas and New Mexico. Across Central America and Mexico, the wider outbreak has already produced more than 209,400 reported animal cases and 2,440 human cases. No locally acquired human infestations have been reported in the United States, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the current risk to the U.S. public remains very low.

Scientists Race to Predict Screwworm’s Next Move

The return is reviving memories of a pest that once inflicted enormous losses on American agriculture. In the 1950s, New World screwworm cost U.S. livestock producers tens of millions of dollars annually, with losses reaching an estimated $50 million to $100 million a year in the hardest-hit areas of the Southwest.

Now, researchers and public health officials are trying to answer an urgent question before the fly spreads farther: Where is it most likely to appear next?

The threat of more, expanded measles outbreaks looms with start of school

With measles on the rise, school gets riskier

Sarah Boden

Map showing where the most measles cases have been reported in the United States in 2026. 
 Credit: CDC

School starts soon in north-central Colorado and pediatrician Shen Nagel, MD, is bracing for the possibility of a measles outbreak. 

In some ways this is par for the course. After major holidays and summer breaks, kids bring viruses back to their classrooms, and Nagel sees spikes of flu, respiratory syncytial virus and other respiratory illnesses, among his patients at Pediatrics West, a practice in suburban Denver.

Measles might soon be added to that list, though it wasn't a disease that pediatricians worried about much when Nagel started practicing 25 years ago. But post-COVID-19, dropping vaccination rates and conflicting federal messaging have created an opening for measles, widely considered the most contagious infectious disease known to humans. 

The good news is that most parents do get their kids the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which is 97% effective after two doses. Experts who spoke to CIDRAP News for this story say that if a fully vaccinated child has a normal immune system, parents shouldn't worry about their child catching measles at school—especially if that school has a relatively high vaccination rate. Outbreaks are extremely unlikely in communities where overall MMR coverage is 95%.

“Travel with Natalie”

How three words from Jon Ossoff prompted an epic MAGA crash-out.

Tom Schaller

Donald Trump is easily triggered. That’s hardly news.

He’s temperamental and emotional in a way that supposedly disqualifies women from serving in powerful political or corporate roles. He lashes out at critics, opponents, the media, even his own staff. 

Were it not so frightening, it would be Veep-level hysterical that the man atop the world’s most powerful government and military lacks the impulse control of a high schooler.

But the questions now swirling around Trump’s personal assistant Natalie Harp — and especially the way Sen. Jon Ossoff unleashed a media firestorm this week by invoking her name — offer a long overdue lesson for Democrats on how to successfully bait Trump and his MAGA cohorts for maximum effect.

Harp strikes a chord

Let’s start by unpacking what Ossoff actually said last Sunday, which was not nearly as salacious as the ensuing MAGA meltdown would have you believe.

“While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks,” said Ossoff, of Trump. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

In just four sentences, Ossoff’s carefully crafted language shattered Trump’s curated image as a tough, tireless, troop-loving, America First warrior. The Georgia senator indicted Trump’s military misadventures and octogenarian stamina. He highlighted Trump’s sloth and greed. Ossoff depicted Trump as a detached, spoiled, soft, and vainglorious brat who could make Charli XCX blush.

But the kicker was these three words: “travel with Natalie.”

Ossoff’s statement would have delivered the same critique of Trump as an entitled, lazy lout had he omitted any mention of Harp. But he dropped her name — and only her first name, plus the first-person plural “their” for emphasis — to pair them and suggest a degree of interpersonal intimacy.

Ossoff’s gambit worked perfectly. Americans immediately wanted to learn who Natalie Harp is. 

Answer: a “platinum blonde geyser of positivity, there to buck him up when the going gets rough,” as the New York Times described the young aide who serves as Trump’s personal, 24/7 “security blanket.”

Media journalist Brian Stelter reported that searches for “who is Natalie Harp?” surged an astounding 5,000 percent, and Fox News’ Jesse Watters had to admit on air that his program had not mentioned Ossoff in six years but now his network was talking about the young senator nonstop.

The White House and conservative pundits lost their marbles, crying foul about attacks on the young staffer and veiled implications of her and Trump having an affair.

More amusing and hypocritical is how conservative apologists rushed to Harp’s defense, depicting her as a child immune to attention or attacks, and the victim of sexist “dehumanization.” (In fact, Harp is 35 — an adult more than twice the age of the Central Park 5 Black youths when Trump called for their execution before they were even tried for a crime that, it turned out, they never committed.)

There’s more: Harp is apparently so obsessed with Trump she’s happy to serve as his emotional support companion.

In 2023, Harp twice dodged presidential security protocols and wary Trump staffers to get close to Trump — once, by securing a maid’s room at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey golf club, and then by sneaking into an SUV trunk in Trump’s motorcade. She behaves like a rock band groupie, not a presidential adviser.

Harp has also skirted security clearance checks, a fact that suggests Trump is willing to sacrifice national security to maintain his emotional “security blanket.” That’s the term Ossoff used to describe Harp when, instead of apologizing or backtracking as weak-willed Democrats often do when facing backlash, he doubled down on his Trump attack during a Monday television interview with MS NOW’s Jen Psaki.

Ossoff shows the way

But enough about poor Natalie — back to Ossoff.

The senator and his speechwriters clearly understand that powerful words do more than assert or indict: They create imagery.

Ossoff painted a picture of Trump flying in comfortable, Middle Eastern-supplied luxury, oblivious to the problems around him, his every need and indulgence fulfilled like some oleaginous sultan. That image contrasts sharply with his MAGA cult supporters’ rally flags depicting Trump as a bandana-wearing Rambo delivering rough justice.

Depicting Trump as Ossoff skillfully did generated paroxysms from Republican politicians and conservative talking heads.

The right-wing media narrative is lousy with depictions of liberals and Democrats living better than — and therefore condescending to — their lessors: those humble, hardworking, heartland Americans. Ossoff delivered this same appraisal of Trump in fewer words than a median-length William Faulkner sentence. The senator’s quip was a Thomas Nast cartoon sketched with four sentences.

And therein lies the key lesson of this episode: Trump can be weakened by policy attacks, especially on the economy and his foolhardy war with Iran. But politicians in the new media age who want to gain traction — no less run for the White House — need to talk less in stentorian policy tones, like a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, and more like Jimmy Kimmel or Chelsea Handler.

The Georgia senator whom many believe to be a frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination understands that Democrats need more than “affordability” policy messages to win in 2026 and beyond. They need to depict Trump as feeble, selfish, and tone-deaf.

By inserting Harp into the national political discourse, Ossoff inverted the national narrative about which side is politically soft and entitled. The 2028 presidential election is more than two years away, but this week Ossoff put his party and the punditry on notice that he will be a skilled and formidable contender.

A flustered Trump dismissed Ossoff as “Pee Wee Herman.” Weak tea.

Trump’s snide derogatories have lost their oomph. More to the point, like all bullies his feckless response proves he can throw a punch but can’t take one.

And the senator’s invocation of “Natalie” — leaving out her last name to imply some special intimacy between Harp and Trump — was the shiny frame that drew millions of eyes to the Trumpian imagery Ossoff so deftly painted.

Troll bridge to 2028

Conservative media routinely dismiss Trump’s opponents by attaching the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” label to those who dare to criticize their MAGA champion. But nobody is more troll-able and deranged than the thin-skinned, fragile male egoist who currently occupies the Oval Office.

Narcissists like Donald Trump cannot abide criticism, and no critique is more effective with insecure narcissists than mockery. Making fun of Trump as a lazy, unpatriotic, and ineffective president cuts to his bone. Trump commits ample policy and political errors without provocation, but he is far more prone to blunder when under attack and on the defensive. And so are his allies.

Trump’s supporters warn that if Democrats recapture the House this fall, they will immediately impeach Trump for a third time. His self-dealing corruption, which makes Watergate look like a parking ticket, alone warrants his removal. But to paraphrase a time-worn maxim, if you try to kill a wannabe king you better succeed. Even if Democrats flip the Senate, they will not have enough Republican support to convict Trump on any House impeachment article.

The better way to impeach Trump is to rattle his confidence and destroy his heavily-curated image as a tough and competent patriot. This week, Jon Ossoff separated himself from the pack by providing liberals and Democrats a perfect formula for how to do so.

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Sunday Women's Equality Day event in Westerly