No column today, as I am enjoying the holiday by doing a whole lot of nothing.

Have a happy Labor Day, everyone!

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Just before the 20th anniversary of the impact of Hurricane Katrina, a group of current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency employees have signed an extraordinary letter warning America that we could be headed for a similar disaster. Not the hurricane itself, but the man-made disaster which followed, as George W. Bush's FEMA proved to be completely incompetent at disaster recovery in a big way. They even called their letter the "Katrina Declaration," to amplify their warning.

By week's end, all the people who publicly signed the letter were put on administrative leave. Most of the signatories did so anonymously, for precisely this reason -- they fully expected retaliation for blowing the whistle in public.

With Katrina, there was the lame excuse of: "Well, nobody could have seen this coming" to explain Bush and FEMA's inadequacies. This time around, there will be no such excuse. The Katrina Declaration lays out in great detail how the agency is being gutted of very experienced people and is being run by people with no experience in disaster relief at all. Elon Musk's chainsaw ripped away thousands of FEMA employees, and Kristi Noem has instituted policies which introduce massive delays in getting help to people who need it in a timely manner -- for no reason other than politics.

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Two weeks later, nothing has changed. This shouldn't come as too big a surprise to anyone, really. Donald Trump uses the phrase "in two weeks' time" in exactly the same way that Little Orphan Annie sings about "tomorrow" -- because it never comes. It's perpetually out there in the future, just out of reach.

So let's review. Tomorrow, two full weeks will have gone by since the summit between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Last night, Russia launched yet another massive attack which targeted civilians in Ukraine. Here's how the New York Times reported on it:

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The Democratic Party has been worried (with good reason) about their chances in the midterm congressional elections and beyond. Their brand has suffered, and voters aren't exactly flocking to their banner. But there are signs of life here and there, and a big one just happened in Iowa. Yesterday, a Democrat won a special election to the state senate, which will deny the Republicans a two-thirds supermajority in the chamber.

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Donald Trump thinks he has a plan. First, get rid of enough members of the Federal Reserve Board and replace them with his own minions, and then they'll do his bidding and drastically lower interest rates. Once he's appointed a majority of them, they'll do precisely what he wants without question. In the meantime, his appointee to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be firing high-level bean-counters and replacing them with apparatchiks, so that they can then make the official inflation number anything Trump wants it to be. This way, even if real inflation goes through the roof (as a result of lowering interest rates too fast), nobody will know about it because inflation will "officially" be at some ridiculously-unbelievable low figure. The economy "booms" (as measured by Trump's numbers), interest rates go down, and everyone's happy!

The one big problem with all of this is that average people still will notice high inflation, even if the official numbers never actually show it (for political reasons). The B.L.S. will be ridiculed, and independent (non-governmental) measures of inflation will become a lot more trusted. And America will become a lot less trusted by the rest of the world. Political influence on central-bank economic policy and fudging economic metrics will cause confidence in the American economy to fall (perhaps drastically).

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Current and former employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency just sounded the alarm over their agency's ability to continue their mission. In an extraordinary letter they warn of another impending disaster on the scale of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In fact, the title of their open letter is: "Katrina Declaration And Petition To Congress." In it, they warn that another man-made disaster on the same scale could easily happen soon, as a direct result of the changes the administration of Donald Trump has been making to their agency.

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After Donald Trump held two back-to-back summits, in an effort to get a quick ceasefire and peace agreement in Ukraine, not much of anything has actually changed. Unless you count the rest of the world either laughing at America's president or gingerly trying to not bruise his all-too-fragile ego. Both of those things have increased, sadly.

The whole kid-gloves treatment of Donald Trump, in an effort not to provoke a toddler-level tantrum, is just downright pathetic. What other U.S. leader has ever needed coddling and effusive false praise in order to even have a conversation with other world leaders? What other president would force a foreign leader to admire his collection of campaign hats, for that matter? Trump's narcissism knows no bounds, though.

Here is how people are talking about this sad situation:

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Donald Trump has ushered in a period of political shamelessness. Things that politicians used to do very quietly or in secret are now done right out in the open. There is no longer any pretense about such moves, the politicians now brag about what they're doing. This is evident in too many ways to even list, but the most prominent example right now is the mid-decade redistricting battles being waged in the states. Led by Texas and California, this could soon spread to other states as well, as Republicans jockey to avoid losing control of the House of Representatives next year and Democrats move to counterbalance these efforts.

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The prospects of a ceasefire happening soon in Ukraine were always pretty slim. Now they seem to be receding into oblivion. Without some strong and decisive action by Donald Trump, the situation in Ukraine does not look likely to change in any meaningful way any time soon. The war will continue, people will keep dying, and Vladimir Putin will feel no compunction to bring an end to any of it. That seems to be the emerging reality.

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After two big meetings between Donald Trump and the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and various Europeans, it's hard to figure exactly where things stand. Was anything accomplished at all? If so, what?

While Trump has been cheerfully optimistic in his statements, the Europeans seem a lot more cautious and guarded in their outlook. Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, though, don't exactly seem filled with any of this happy spirit. In fact, Russia keeps contradicting what Trump and the rest of them are claiming has been accomplished.

The most telling of the cheerful optimism that Trump displays is his apparent belief that he and Putin are great buddies, and that Putin really desires an end to this war. Neither of these things seem likely to be true, or at least certainly not to the degree that Trump believes. This was best evidenced by something an open microphone caught Trump saying to the president of France: "I think [Vladimir Putin] wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds." To Trump, Putin wants to be Trump's buddy so badly he'll make a peace deal just to please Trump. And yes, knowing Putin, that does sound pretty crazy.

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