Donald Trump is driving the American economy straight into a ditch. That's a pretty simple concept, and it's (just barely) short enough to fit on a bumpersticker. Which makes it a dandy political slogan for Democrats to start hammering out relentlessly.

Doing so is pretty easy, since you can connect all sorts of dots to it: A soft jobs market. Inflation rising. Hamburger prices up. Electricity prices way up. Trump's tariff war, which has created a "Trump tax" on a whole bunch of products. Trump took hold of an economy that had achieved a "soft landing," and now he's driving us all right into a ditch. Everything he does seems to make things worse. See how easy that is to do?

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Will Democrats ever pull back from examining the individual political trees and grasp the nature of the whole forest before them? I wonder this because I see time after time the Democratic Party being shown exactly how they can win elections -- and then time after time they just flat-out ignore it. Or downplay it. Or attempt to come up with a solution that doesn't address the core problem but instead merely tinkers around the edges of it. Or bury it in wonk-speak. I have to admit, it is frustrating to watch.

The answer to Democratic woes is pretty obvious. If they would only fully embrace economic populism, they could revitalize the party, entice disaffected voters back, and not only fight back against Donald Trump and Trumpism, but also strongly stand for a solution (instead of just repeating the refrain of: "Trump is bad.... mmm'kay?").

The general public has one overriding concern that they see politicians in both parties refusing to solve in any meaningful way. It can be simply stated: everything costs too damn much. The economy is rigged so that the billionaires and the giant corporations always get richer, while the rest of us pay higher and higher prices for just about everything. This is the overriding concern of the vast majority of the American public, in fact, and outpaces just about every other political issue there is, including immigration, crime, foreign policy, and all the culture war bugaboos. Because everything costing too damn much hits everybody, all the time.

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Congress is back in town, and so is the pressure to release the Epstein files. Immediately after the House of Representatives convened, Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna filed their discharge petition, which could soon force the speaker to hold a floor vote on their measure to force the Justice Department to release all its files on Jeffery Epstein.

A discharge petition is a way for a majority of the House to force a vote on a measure over the objections of its speaker, which means in practical terms it must get 218 signatures (a majority of 435) from House members within a week of being filed. All Democrats are expected to sign the petition, and so far Massie has three other Republicans on board as well (Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Nancy Mace). Massie needs two more Republicans to get across that 218 threshold. He is trying to encourage his fellow party members to join him, but the White House is reportedly pushing back on any who have indicated any interest in doing so. From a press conference today, Massie lamented: "The message is that there's 200 Republicans who could do something to protect, to get justice for the victims and survivors, and I only need two of 200, and none of them are stepping up to the plate." There were a few other GOP House members in the audience at this press conference, but none of them would publicly commit to supporting the discharge petition -- at least not yet. At least two gave rather non-committal answers when asked by reporters what they were going to do, though.

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I'm not sure whether that title is the most apt, or if "Conventional Thinking" might have been better. Because it seems that both major American political parties are considering holding national conventions next year before the midterm elections. Which is indeed unconventional -- even thinking about midterm conventions. Semantic games aside, though, I do find myself wondering if it would be a good idea or not.

The idea was first proposed by the Democrats, who are considering holding a convention to showcase their up-and-coming prospective candidates and to whip up their base in an effort to motivate them to turn out to vote. I was actually surprised to read (in Axios, who got the scoop on this story) that it wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened. As they report:

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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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