- The Trump administration denies climate change, in favor of big business;
- Trump is best on cashing in;
- Paul Krugman explains why deportation don’t create jobs and will lead to more deaths of native-born Americans;
- Brief items about conservatives and small government; the end of CBS News; theocracy; how women need to be imprisoned; and how evangelicals need to outbreed the left;
- An NFL writer finds San Francisco to be a delightful place; “they lied to you” about the city.
The big story, once again:
NY Times, 12 Feb 2026: Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change, subtitled “The Environmental Protection Agency rejected the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and well being. It means the agency can no longer regulate them.”
President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.
Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.
\
CNN, 12 Feb 2026: Trump delivers a deadly blow to EPA’s ability to regulate climate pollution
“We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding,” President Donald Trump said on Thursday, calling the policy “disastrous.”
Trump said repealing the regulations “has nothing to do with public health.”
“This was all a scam, a giant scam,” Trump said on Thursday. “This was a rip off of the country by Obama and Biden.”
Once again, Republicans/conservatives are disengaged from reality. They deny the science because its conclusions interfere with big business making lots of money. It’s as simple as that. Reality is biting them already, what with increasingly extreme weather — but they don’t “believe” that. They only “believe” what’s good for business, or supports conservative ideology.
But many people who are not such conservatives do understand the science, and the threats, and there will still be a market for energy-efficient cars and solar panels, for example, among many other products. Just because Trump removes some rules — which can be re-implemented in three years after he’s gone — doesn’t mean car makers will abandon that market.
\\\
On the same theme. We’ve established that they’re driven by racism, but they’re also about making money, and the expense of everything else, including the health and safety of future generations.
NY Times, opinion by Nicholas Kristof, 11 Feb 2026: What Trump Is the Best at, Hands Down
President Trump is unrivaled in American history in one respect: None of his predecessors ever cashed in on the presidency as he has.
The Teapot Dome scandal under Warren Harding? Richard Nixon’s slush funds during Watergate? Those seem like junior high school by comparison with the present culture of corruption.
The fire hose of disclosures has been overwhelming. A Times editorial estimated conservatively that the Trump family has made more than $1.4 billion in documented gains by exploiting the second term of his presidency. (Others offer higher figures.)
And all that pales beside the latest bombshell: a $500 million secret deal backed by a government leader in the United Arab Emirates, just four days before Trump was inaugurated for his second term.
He goes on to explain this latest scandal, just broken by the Wall Street Journal. I won’t bother with the details; one’s eyes glaze over. And these scandals are so frequent, they interfere with each other.
Kristof concludes:
During my career, I’ve seen mind-boggling corruption in many places. The former Indonesian first lady, Madame Tien, known as “Madame Tien Percent.” A Chinese friend, the son of a Politburo member, who told me that he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do no work for a company, so it could use his name to win land deals. I never expected to see anything like this in America — yet that is what happens under authoritarian leaders.
Let’s step back for a moment. When President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, his Justice Department investigated whether he could accept it. The Constitution and statute law ban any official from accepting a gift or emolument from any foreign state. The Justice Department cleared the Nobel Prize only because it was not granted by Norway itself but by a private Norwegian group — and the lawyers made clear that if the money came from the government, a president could not accept it.
If accepting a state-funded version of the Nobel Peace Prize would be unconstitutional, how can it be legal for this president to rake in vast amounts of cash in effect from a foreign leader? When will we rebel against this culture of corruption?
\\\
Wonkery from Paul Krugman.
Paul Krugman, 12 Feb 2026: Making America Stagnate Again, subtitled “Deportations don’t create jobs and will increase deaths of native-born Americans. Who knew?”
Yesterday’s employment report was widely expected to be weak. As it turned out, it was unexpectedly strong, with an estimated 130,000 jobs added. But monthly job numbers are extremely noisy. If you read the details of the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it actually said that its central estimate was 130,000 jobs, with the true number lying between 7,700 and 152,000 (the 90 percent confidence interval that accompanies all its estimates). And for technical reasons not worth going into here, the true range of uncertainty is even bigger. Basically BLS estimates the level of employment based on a sample subject to sampling error, which makes the estimated change over any given month extremely noisy.
A better indication of how the economy is doing is job gains over the past year, shown at the top of this post (dashed green line). This is a lot less noisy than the monthly number, and it also happens to cover the first year of Trump 47. Since January 2025 the economy is estimated to have added 359,000 jobs, down almost 900,000 from job growth the previous year. This indicates that the job market is very close to complete stagnation. Furthermore, the only sectors that saw large job growth were health care and social assistance (solid blue line). Employment elsewhere declined. Manufacturing employment, notably, fell. So Trump’s economy is not exactly delivering the “manly jobs” that he promised.
More charts, more analysis. With emphasis on health-care workers. Concluding:
This effect on the number of healthcare workers means, in turn, that increased immigration leads to lower senior mortality, and conversely that blocking immigration and deporting foreign-born workers will increase deaths among older Americans. A back of the envelope calculation using Grabowski et al’s numbers suggests that reducing the immigrant population by one million immigrants, which is what Stephen Miller wants to do every year, would lead to around 15,000 extra deaths per year among U.S. seniors.
Which brings me back to the stunning stagnation of job growth that has already taken place on Trump’s watch. Trump’s minions would have you believe that near-zero job growth is fine because immigration has plunged — even though they assured us that this wouldn’t happen. But the reality is that the war on immigrants, in addition to being a moral and civil liberties nightmare, will make native-born Americans poorer — and send thousands of us to an early grave.
\\\
Briefly noted.
- Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 12 Feb 2026: Trump doesn’t want to nationalize elections. He wants control, subtitled “Conservatives praise small government and states’ rights — until power is at stake”
- Conservatives believe in small government, until they don’t. Other examples include policies on abortion and the environment.
- Robert Reich, 12 Feb 2026: The tragic end of CBS News, subtitled “Another trusted source of information bites the dust under Trump”
- About the latest producer to resign from CBS News, one of whose new mottoes under Bari Weiss is “We love America.” (Meaning, she bows to Trump.)
- With a reminder of Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast on CBS in 1954.
- Friendly Atheist, 12 Feb 2026: GOP lawmaker asks God to cleanse government of non-believers at Christian Nationalist event, subtitled “At the “National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance,” Tennessee Congresswoman Diana Harshbarger called for a purge of non-believers from the government”
- Arrogance. This seems to be a particular trait of religion. She wants a theocracy, i.e. doesn’t believe in the Constitution.
- Media Matters, 11 Feb 2026: Nick Fuentes: “The number one political enemy in America is women. … They have to be imprisoned.”
- Subtitled: Fuentes: “So just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, communists, you know, all of his political rivals, we have to do the same thing with women. … So they go to the gulag first. They go to the breeding gulags.”
- Insane. Could this possibly be a parody? And he has MAGA fans!
- Joe.My.God (JMG), 12 Feb 2026: Evangelical: We Will “Outbreed The Left” Since They’ll “Vaccinate, Trans, & Abort Themselves Into Extinction”
- Almost as insane. Not only because people who do vaccinate don’t die as often as those who don’t. Can they not have noticed this? Reality again.
- Also, how did we get here, according to him? Where did this ‘left’ come from? The evangelicals have had thousands of years to dominate society. (I could answer, but I’ll let it sit there.)
\\\
One final significant piece. And once again, the conservative politicians are lying to you. They’re scaremongering.
SFGate, 12 Feb 2026: Prominent NFL writer says ‘they lied to you’ about San Francisco
In the wake of Super Bowl 60, the overriding narrative is clear: San Francisco scored. Hotels cashed in, downtown landmarks like the Ferry Building and Moscone Center saw huge crowds and, for locals who champion their city, the event poked major holes in the plot against San Francisco.
Over 70,000 people attended the game at Levi’s Stadium, but approximately 1.3 million passengers traveled into San Francisco International Airport. As these visitors returned home, they brought with them a clearer sense of what San Francisco is actually like — as opposed to a politically motivated narrative that has derided the city.
“I’m going to tell you: They lied to you about San Francisco,” longtime NFL writer Adam Rank said Tuesday during “The Jim Rome Show.” “They tried to take a run at Frisco, saying it was some terrible place and you needed to be scared. It really was nothing like that. It was a delightful city.”
