On August 3, NORAD scrambled fighter jets to intercept a civilian aircraft that entered a “Temporary Flight Restriction” zone in New Jersey. What was this very special, very sensitive zone? A golf club. Why was it so special and so sensitive? US president Donald Trump was enjoying a round of golf there.

The day before that, the US Army Corps of Engineers increased the outflow of Little Caesar Lake into Ohio’s Miami River at the request of the Secret Service. Why? Vice-president JD Vance went kayaking on the river and a higher water level was required “support safe navigation of US Secret Service personnel.”

Or maybe not. An anonymous source, The Guardian reports, says the real purpose was to create “ideal kayaking conditions” for the Very Special Important Politician.

At this point, I should mention that I’m only picking on Trump and Vance because they happen to be in office. This kind of thing is far from new … but it got old a long time ago.

In 1992, a woman I didn’t know then, but have now been married to for 25 years, was eating with friends at a hotel restaurant when the Secret Service barged in and demanded that everyone leave. Then-president George H.W. Bush was on his way to that hotel, and The Little People needed to get out of his way.

Over the 12 years I lived in St. Louis, I lost count of the times that air and ground traffic were disrupted for hours at a time because apparently it’s unthinkable for the hoi polloi  to use runways, roads or sidewalks during (or for hours before) a big-name politician wants to fly in on a special plane and proceed by motorcade (without regard to the publicly posted speed limits, of course) to wherever he or she happens to want to go.

America treats its politicians like the kid in that old Seinfeld episode, “The Bubble Boy” — isolated and coddled lest contact with regular human beings harm them.

The rest of us apparently exist only to provide these power-mongers with votes, and occasionally with audiences carefully curated for high levels of adoration and applause. Outside those contexts, we’re to be neither seen nor heard.

Okay, that’s not completely true. We also fork over $3 billion per year for the Secret Service, $800 million for the Capitol Police Department, and heaven only knows how much for military air cover, etc., to ensure that Very Special Important People never experience  discomfort  due to  unintentional contact with us mere mortals. They definitely want to hear from us, or at least our employers’ payroll departments.

To which I retort: MOOPS! (If you know, you know.)

Don’t fall for the fiction that these pampered pols “work for you.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On August 6 — unless he chickens out — US president Donald Trump will impose a 50% tariff on American buyers of Brazilian coffee.

Brazilian coffee isn’t the only coffee Americans  find themselves paying exorbitant taxes on. Vietnamese, Indonesian, Indian, Colombian, Nicaraguan, and European Union-produced coffee just got hit with tariffs (paid by American consumers) ranging from 18% to 32% as well.

Brazil, however, accounts for 45% of US coffee imports, and 99% of the coffee we drink is imported (outside of Hawaii, American soil/climate are apparently not very hospitable to coffee cultivation).

How much coffee comes to the US from Brazil? About eight million 60-kilogram (132 pound) bags per year. Americans drink 179 billion cups of coffee per year, 491 million cups per day.

That’s about to get a LOT more expensive, whether you go in for fru-fru bespoke beverages prepared by expert baristas at your favorite shop, or just fire up your drip, “k-cup,” or espresso machine at home.

“DON’T MESS WITH PEOPLE’S COFFEE” strikes me as one of the most basic rules implicit in the maintenance of civil society, but apparently Trump didn’t get the memo.

What’s his political and legal rationale for the huge tax increases on American coffee drinkers?

Politically, he’s announced himself annoyed at the Brazilian regime’s prosecution of its previous president for allegedly trying to put over a coup and remain in office despite being defeated in an election. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

Legally, he cites an imagined presidential power to impose new taxes any time he decides there’s an “emergency.” No such power is mentioned anywhere in the US Constitution — a document which, in fact, reserves the power to tax exclusively to Congress — but he doesn’t seem inclined toward self-doubt on the matter (or any other matter).

The negative effects on your wallet won’t remain limited to the tariff rate itself, either. There’s also the effect on global demand/supply, an effect that will likely linger long after the tariff is repealed.

The Chinese regime, Reuters reports, just licensed 183 Brazilian coffee companies to sell their wares in that very large market. American coffee drinkers’ loss is Chinese coffee drinkers’ gain. And absent a massive increase in supply, that likely sustained increase in demand  for Brazilian beans presages higher US prices even after Trump’s trade war insanity ends.

Wake up and smell the (expensive) coffee:

Tariffs are onerous taxes — on you.

They’re damaging economic sanctions — on you.

There’s nothing “America First” about them.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Six decades after Tom Lehrer adapted his songs on such then-current topics as the Second Vatican Council and the vice-presidency of Hubert Horatio Humphrey from NBC’s That Was the Week That Was into his final album That Was the Year That Was, it remains clear that his works will remain relevant weeks, and years, after his passing on July 26 at 97.

Even at 37, Lehrer agonized that “when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.” The more contemporary composer Gustav Mahler had been decomposing for 53 when his widow Alma was memorialized by Lehrer.  An ongoing outpouring of letters to the editor testifies to the outstanding memorableness of Lehrer’s musical output, such as Stephen DeBock’s in the August 1 Wall Street Journal recalling how his “devout Christian mother, upon hearing ‘The Vatican Rag,’ begged me to play it again and again as tears of laughter streamed down her cheeks” — while the popular music of today makes even such then-edgier albums sharing the mid-Sixties Billboard charts with Lehrer as Whipped Cream & Other Delights seem as reverential as Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.

Admittedly, as LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik noted on Lehrer’s 90th birthday, writing about “racial conflict, pollution, religious intolerance, nuclear brinkmanship” ensured engaging issues that “have never gone away.”  If anything, Lehrer underestimated the political rancor to come.  The current wave of anti-obscenity legislation won’t be opposed as openly by either what Lehrer called “the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue … as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression” or by those like himself for whom “dirty books are fun!”  He quipped of the era’s Cold War enemies that “Russia got the bomb, but that’s OK, ’cause the balance of power’s maintained that way” and “China got the bomb, but have no fears; they can’t wipe us out for at least five years.”

In the 2003 book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, Lehrer is quoted as a self-described “wishy-washy liberal” who sees little mettle in playing one of his most-requested ditties since “everyone is against pollution.”  Yet the ozone layer was saved from chlorofluorocarbon corrosion in large part via staunch conservative Margaret Thatcher — and thus, as Carl Sagan pointed out, the British leader’s “early studies in chemistry” — while the Ronald Reagan Lehrer jibed years before winning elections initiated nuclear arms reductions influenced by the dramatized telefilm The Day After.

Lehrer foresaw a future where competition between nations produced nuclear weaponry “transistorized at half the price.”  Further exponential dwindling of costs, mostly in areas distant enough from politics for real market competition, has produced a world closer to the surreal exaggerations of Gary Larson’s The Far Side, in which “the Hendersons have the bomb” on the lawn next door. Properly harnessed for social cooperation, free choices can join neighborhoods and nations in harmony, without the chorus being Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When We Go.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “This is Still Tom Lehrer’s Week That Was” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 4, 2025