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— The for-profit Medicare Advantage giants are doing exactly what for-profit companies do, and a million or so seniors are about to find out what “advantage” actually means. Republicans have hated government run programs like Social Security and Medicare — and consistently worked to gut or harm them — since their introduction in 1935 and 1965 respectively. This is why the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress pushed through the creation of the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003, which is neither Medicare nor an advantage. It’s simply a corporate alternative to real Medicare that actually costs us taxpayers more but generates hundreds of billions in profits every year for the companies that run it, who then share some of that profit with GOP (and some Democratic) politicians. And, because it’s all about making profits rather than delivering healthcare, while real Medicare will never require you to get pre-authorization before any sort of medical procedure, Advantage plans almost always do. That’s their profit: denying you care. But apparently that’s not enough for some of these behemoths; now they’re dumping customers who’ve gotten older and sicker and thus more expensive. Humana is shutting down plans covering roughly 600,000 members for 2027, its second year in a row of what it cheerfully calls “targeted plan exits,” while a Leerink analyst note reported by Axios says UnitedHealthcare appears to have dropped about 13 percent of its plans across 18 states. The “giveaways” they offer to get you to sign onto inferior insurance, like major dental benefits, free groceries, and over-the-counter drugs are being slashed, while copays when you visit an (expensive) specialist are exploding. Humana’s CFO told Wall Street the company will “recapture a significant portion of that volume,” corporate double-speak for “we’ll re-sell the same seniors a worse product.” Their goal, laid out during an earnings call with shareholders and executives, is a “sustainable” pre-tax profit margin. Not better care: better profit margins. When Bush pitched this “Advantage” scam as “choice” in 2003, apparently what he meant was the insurance company gets to “choose” whether or not to pay for your care. Every other industrialized nation in the world figured this out decades ago; we’re still letting Big Insurance’s shareholders decide how much they’re going to pay for your doctor or hospital visit.

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— Diesel hit a record $6.05 a gallon Friday, and Trump’s insane war with Iran is entirely responsible for it. According to AAA figures reported by NPR, the national average is up from $5.85 a week ago and $3.70 a year ago, a jump of more than 60 percent since Trump and Netanyahu started their war in late February. CNN notes diesel is on track for the biggest annual percentage increase ever recorded as a result of oil being back above $100 a barrel. Regular gas is at $4.29. And as NBC News points out, after six-plus months of insisting the war would be short, Trump’s now claiming that it’ll magically be fixed just after the election, so please vote for Republicans because this is just temporary. Nobody’s believing him. Diesel powers every truck, train, tractor, and container ship in America, so when it goes up, so does every item on every shelf in every store. This recent hike in fuel prices is only now starting to show up in our purchases; it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse. Welcome to Trump’s “golden age,” all because he thought he could be as slick as Reagan with Grenada, Bush with Iraq, and Bush with Afghanistan, getting himself a “little war” that would goose his popularity. Sadly, he’s not bright enough to do it right, and the drunk weekend TV commentator he put in charge of the Pentagon is even dumber. This is not going to end well.

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— Trump closed his midterm convention in Dallas by making the crowd raise their right hands and pledge they would cheat for him, then told them they’ll go to Hell if they don’t vote the way he wants. According to The Hill, the president had the arena repeat after him that they pledged “to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe,” and then delivered the theological part: “You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell.” Most shocking — and even more shocking that no Republican has publicly repudiated it or called for Trump to step down — was when Trump had his followers swear, as the Daily Beast reported, “I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do.” Registered to vote or not, he added. Donald Trump Jr., Speaker Mike Johnson, and RFK Jr. all took the pledge. Trump also unveiled a $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every adult citizen, payable only if Republicans keep both chambers, with no explanation of how he’s going to get Congress to appropriate the money. Remember those DOGE and Tariff Rebate Checks we all got? Yeah, me neither. When a party’s closing argument is “cheat or burn in Hell,” it’s telling the world that it can’t win an honest election.

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— A right-wing think tank has spent twenty years secretly building a database on thousands of Muslim Americans, and only admitted it when HuffPost started asking questions. This is astonishing and deserves a much larger treatment in our media. The Middle East Forum is a Netanyahu/Likud-aligned group whose “Israel Victory Project” wants America to help Israeli achieve “victory” over the Palestinians. Their files, according to investigative reporting from Huffington Post, contain more than 4 million data points on more than 5,500 Americans and 10,600 organizations, including names, social media accounts, tax information, and organizational ties. Sitting members of Congress Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and André Carson were targeted, along with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who isn’t Muslim, was filed under “Fellow Traveler,” a phrase that eerily echoes Joe McCarthy’s infamous and fundamentally anti-American playbook. Georgetown’s Mobashra Tazamal put it plainly, writing that “It’s a target list.” And once the reporters called, MEF’s response was to announce that “researchers” can now apply for access. Lists like this always start with an unpopular minority (for McCarthy it was gays and communists), but rarely end there. The organization’s founder, Daniel Pipes, recently bragged about the arrest by DHS last month of a Georgetown scholar who’d criticized Israel and they’d compiled a dossier on. This isn’t the sort of thing healthy democracies promote, although these guys are in tight with Trump and friends.

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— Trump got asked a simple question by a Black woman reporter on the tarmac in Dallas and responded by lunging and screaming at her. ABC’s Rachel Scott asked why, if his economic policies are working, Trump thinks he needs to pay people $5,000 to vote for his party. Trump claimed it was a “reward” for “surviving Biden” rather than a bribe, and when she tried to follow up by asking about the $2,000 Tariff Dividend and $5,000 DOGE dividend checks that never arrived, he leaned into her space, jabbed his finger at her face, and repeatedly screamed “Not you!” This is at least the third time this year he’s gone after Scott specifically, having previously called one of her questions “stupid” and referred to her as a “horror show.” This is how a democracy dies, one attack on the media at a time, all being cheered on by lickspittle elected Republicans and the billionaire-owned rightwing media that now dominates America.

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— An active-duty Navy sailor was trotted out on stage at the Republican convention as a prop, which is against Pentagon rules, and the Pentagon so far has nothing to say about it. CBS News reports that Petty Officer 2nd Class Wilbert Joseph Castañeda, who was freed last year from a Venezuelan prison in a prisoner swap, stood before Trump’s Trumpapalooza Dallas crowd holding a sign reading “351 days” as the announcer thanked President Trump for rescuing hostages “taken during the Biden administration.” This is against Pentagon policy and perhaps a violation of the law: Defense Department Directive 1344.10 says active-duty troops can attend partisan conventions but only as spectators, must be out of uniform, and cannot participate in a way that seems to endorse the politics. As former Army JAG officer Cody Harnish told CBS, “The moment he stepped on stage as part of the production, he stopped being a spectator.” Meanwhile, Air Force Major Jason Watson is facing court-martial under Defense Department Directive 1344.10 for criticizing Trump on the steps of the Capitol while being in uniform. And, most astonishingly hypocritical, the disgraced Marine Stuart Scheller, who pleaded guilty to that same violation for his viral anti-Biden videos shot while in uniform, now holds a senior personnel job in Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon. In other words, the rules are enforced on troops who criticize Trump and waived for those who suck up to him. That’s the exact opposite of “the rule of law” and an “apolitical military” that are supposed to have defined and defended America since 1789.

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— The people building artificial intelligence spent the week telling Congress it might kill everybody, so Mikey Johnson decided the House should leave town for six weeks and avoid the topic. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit Tuesday with a post that’s been viewed more than 150 million times saying the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The process called “alignment” is AI-industry speak for making sure that the goals and behaviors of an AI system are “aligned” with the needs of humanity (including our survival), but Anthropic’s lead alignment scientist, Evan Huginger, posted in response that he puts the odds of AI killing off all of humanity within the next decade at a shocking “>10 percent.” Trump says it’s not a big deal; beating China in the AI race is more important that the death of all humans. And Johnson refuses to respond to congressional concerns even though more than 20 members of Congress, including a handful of Republicans, have called for action, and a bipartisan bill for a human-controlled “kill switch” has already been introduced. The Republican position is apparently that anything a billionaire wants to build must be good for us, particularly as the AI industry becomes one of the largest funders of congressional campaigns. While the engineers themselves are screaming from inside the building, Republicans — who were also fine with their Medicaid cuts killing another 50,000 Americans a year — are standing around with their fingers in their ears.

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— Crazy Alert! Apparently Donald Trump isn’t the only one who can rename things. Weeks after Trump signed an executive order bizarrely christening Lake Ontario

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— Vladimir Putin has spent the past year turning “plausible deniability” into a full-time European hobby, and this week Germany finally pushed back sorta, kinda, maybe hard. It took an explosive-laden drone found near an Ukraine-bound cargo plane at Germany’s Leipzig airport to provoke Berlin to formally accuse Moscow of running “a well-established pattern” of hybrid warfare. They expelled the Russian ambassador, shut down the Russian consulate in the capital city of Bonn, and put in place new visa restrictions on Russian visitors. After CIA Director and Trump lickspittle John Ratcliff made a sorta-secret visit to Russia, Trump tried to reassure the world, saying that his master Putin “is not going to be attacking a NATO territory.” Except that they already have, repeatedly, and are continuing to. The New York Times worried out loud this week about “a fight that spirals out of control.” Trump consistently kisses Putin’s ass while JD Vance recently said one of the “proudest” moments of his time in office was cutting off defensive weapons to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia keeps probing the defenses of European countries with drones and missiles, particularly the Baltic states. This administration’s cowardice and craven whimpering in the face of Putin’s aggression, and the complicity of Republicans in Congress, could easily lead us to a larger war in Europe that, in turn, could trigger World War III. And if Trump refuses to go along with Article 5 of the NATO treaty, as he has suggested may happen, this could be exactly what Putin and Xi are aiming for.

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— Javier Milei has apparently decided that if you can’t win an economy, you can always win back a windswept archipelago full of penguins with 3,000 sheep-farmers. Great Britain has claimed and run the Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina, since 1833. But Milei is in big political trouble as his neoliberal reforms have gutted that nation’s middle class (just like neoliberal Reaganomics did to America’s) so — like Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, Bush Sr.’s invasion of Iraq, Bush Jr.’s invasion of Afghanistan, and now Trump’s attack on Iran — the Argentinian wannabe strongman has decided to whip up nationalist fervor over the islands to get voters’ minds off the economy. He’s apparently coordinating this with his “good friend” Trump, as our president recently said he’s “thinking of reviewing” America’s 70-year neutrality stance on the issue of the islands. When the actual Falklanders themselves held a referendum on which country should control them back in 2013, fully 99.8 percent of the voters wanted to stay with Britain. Downing Street, for its part, reaffirmed an “unshakeable“ commitment to the islands. Somewhere, Winston Churchill’s ghost is checking the tide tables while Abraham Lincoln’s is looking at the wreckage of the party he brought to power and sobbing…

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— ICE has found a new frontier for cruelty at California’s largest immigration lockup: outlawing the hug. The California City Detention Facility is a former prison in the Mojave Desert that CoreCivic has converted into a concentration camp for brown-skinned people. It was reportedly opened without the proper permits and has since been running as a black box free of federal inspections. And now they’re forbidding “inmates” — the vast majority of whom have not committed any crime whatsoever (being in the country without authorization is a civil, not criminal, offense) — from touching their own families. Instead of the meeting rooms common in prisons (there’s one in this facility, too, although it’s unused), the company is apparently going along with the Trump policy of maximum cruelty by keeping people behind thick glass walls so they can only communicate with family members, children, newborns, and loved ones via a phone that goes through the glass. In response, a grassroots campaign called Hugs Beyond Bars has spent months trying to shame ICE and CoreCivic into allowing contact visits, delivering a 1,100-signature petition to Senator Alex Padilla’s office after a San Francisco vigil for the (at least) 24 people who’ve died in ICE custody so far this year. This is the same facility where a federal judge had to issue a preliminary injunction to force ICE to provide blankets and medical care to the roughly 1,000 people caged there in the near-freezing desert nights. Nothing radicalizes people quite like watching your own government decide affection is a security risk…

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— Missouri’s Supreme Court just handed Trump’s national gerrymandering crusade its first real faceplant. That state’s highest court, in an unanimous ruling, blocked a Republican-drawn congressional map pushed through last September at Trump’s urging. It was specifically designed to dismantle Kansas City Democrat Emanuel Cleaver’s district, giving the GOP a seventh out of eight House seats from a state that’s only 49% registered Republicans. Rightwingers are freaking out: Attorney General Catherine Hanaway declared the ruling has thrust the state into a “constitutional crisis” and vowed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, while Trump himself took to his Nazi-infested social media site to call it a “Dark Day for ‘Justice.’” Democracy, deployed correctly, can still occasionally out-muscle a gerrymander, assuming the five black-robed on-the-take rightwingers in DC don’t decide otherwise in the next two months.

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— Speaking of senators who’ve forgotten what their job is, John Fetterman’s transformation from Bernie-backing mayor of Braddock to Fox News’ favorite Democrat cleared its final decency checkpoint this week. The Wall Street Journal broke a bombshell investigation yesterday, finding that Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman is behaving more like a Republican than a Democrat. He claimed his stomach was upset so he couldn’t meet with three paralyzed veterans who’d traveled from rural Pennsylvania, but then an hour later strolled into his office and did an upbeat hit with Fox “News” to support Netanyahu’s genocidal policies. When Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said they were eager to talk to him about Medicaid cuts, he reportedly texted back, “Well I’m not,” claiming the hospital just wanted “free trips to DC.” He blew off a busload of flood-zone constituents who spotted him in the hallway — he refused to even acknowledge them — while finding time that same week for a meeting with a pro-Netanyahu college basketball coach. When he was told that a police funeral for three slain officers could run three hours, he texted, “This may be a nonstarter.” He’s popped into 26 hearings just long enough to get marked “present” but didn’t speak a single word in 20 of them. And now conservative donor cash is rolling into his campaign coffers and he polls better with Pennsylvania Republicans than their actual Republican senator does. Pennsylvania Democrats are genuinely horrified but they — and the rest of us — are stuck with this badly damaged and sadly deranged man for at least another two years.

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— Trump has apparently spent so much time threatening to weaponize the Federal Reserve, sanction foreign assets, and personally inspect Fort Knox that America’s oldest allies have started quietly walking their gold out the door. As Hitler was moving across Europe, country after country shipped their gold reserves to the United States for safe-keeping. Now, they’ve concluded that Trump’s so deeply embedded up Putin’s backside and so irrational that they can’t trust us any longer, so they’re shipping it all back home. The Netherlands announced this week it’s moved roughly $12 billion in bullion — most of it previously parked in New York — over to London, while France already sold off $15 billion held in New York and replaced it with bars kept safely in Paris. Germany and Italy, the world’s second- and third-largest gold hoarders, are reportedly weighing whether to bring theirs home too. When the people who fled their assets out of Europe because they were worried about Hitler begin to do the same because of Trump, Americans should take serious note of what a dangerous sign of the times this is.

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— Elon Musk, a man who spent a quarter-billion dollars to buy the last election for Trump and got access to Americans’ private data with it (along with stopping dozens of investigations into him and his companies), is reportedly in a full panic over a documentary he can’t buy his way out of. Ashley St. Clair, one of the mothers of Musk’s 14 known children, says that Musk told her how the 2024 elections results would come out, but did so “hours” before the public knew thanks, he said, to a secretive satellite data program. Now, Musk is freaking out because director Alex Gibney’s film “Musk,” due out October 16, is said to expose the billionaire as among the most dangerous men on Earth, and reportedly digs into St. Clair’s claim. My old friend and colleague David Sirota summed up Musk’s meltdown succinctly: “The bully is mad.” Musk has already called the film a “hit piece” and Gibney a “douche,” which, from the man who bought a social media platform specifically so he could promote white supremacy and control his own narrative, tracks. Turns out there’s one thing money still can’t buy: an accountability journalist and documentary-maker who isn’t afraid of you.

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— Nineteen months into the term that was supposed to end inflation on day one, the bill has come due. The staff of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee added it all up this week: the average American household has, so far this year, paid more than an extra $3,800 for housing, groceries, and utilities because of Trump’s and the GOP’s insane policies and the cuts to healthcare in the so-called Big Beautiful Tax-Cut for Billionaires Bill. Electricity is up $113 just in the first six months of this year, and ACA insurance premiums increased more than fifty percent with deductibles going up another thousand dollars. Tariffs will, this year, add another $2,500 and that was before Trump threw the 50% tariff on Canadian goods. All to fund another round of tax cuts for billionaires and massive monopolistic corporations run by Trump’s billionaire cronies. Meanwhile, Trump and his corrupt crime family have grabbed something on the order of $6 billion (not including Jared’s billions) and he’s making millions almost every day trading in gas and oil as his on-again-off-again proclamations about Iran swing the market up and down. This is not just the most corrupt president (and family) in American history, it’s also the most destructive to the wealth and health of the average American. Reagan would be proud.

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— The United States Navy is now raiding its own payroll accounts to keep Trump’s war going. The Guardian did a deep dive into internal documents and interviews with officials, contractors, and analysts and discovered a Pentagon memo warning that the Navy could run short on it’s ability to make payroll because the accounts from which sailors are paid have been essentially robbed to cover the unanticipated costs of Trump’s and Netanyahu‘a insane war against Iran. They’ve deferred maintenance on shore facilities, munitions stockpiles are depleted, and, as retired naval officer Harlan Ullman put it, “The piggy bank is broken.” Whiskey Pete and Trump have used up our weapons, wrecked our ships and sailors’ morale, and burned through the money Congress had allocated for them. Pete has been begging Congress for emergency cash since July and, even though the House passed a $1.15 trillion defense bill and a separate $73 billion for the Iran operation, it’s entirely possible none of that money will be available because Congress never authorized the war in the first place, as the Constitution requires. Meanwhile, Trump is demanding $1.5 trillion for next year (the largest military budget since WWII even adjusted for inflation) and is now personally forcing the Navy’s shipbuilders to redo their new aircraft carriers to dump modern tech for launching jets and replace it with steam power from the 1940s because he thinks that’s prettier. It’s gonna delay ship building by years, much to the delight of Putin and Xi, which may be the point. Six months into this war, costing us at least a billion dollars a day (not to mention the damage to our reputation around the world) and there’s still nothing to show for it except higher prices at the pump and the grocery store.

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— Senator Ron Wyden wants a criminal investigation of Bob Kennedy. The Guardian and the AP used a FOIA lawsuit to pry loose letters showing that Kennedy’s 2019 trip to Samoa was, in fact, all about vaccines even though Kennedy told the Senate at his confirmation hearings it wasn’t. Following his visit, a measles outbreak killed 83 people in that country, most of them children under five, so Wyden is asking Republicans for a criminal referral to the Justice Department, saying, “There are consequences for lying to Congress.” American Oversight is calling for an investigation, and Hawaii Governor Josh Green, a physician who went to Samoa to help during the outbreak, wants Kennedy gone from his position. HHS called the whole thing “defamatory,” which is rich. After 2 people died from measles this week in Pennsylvania and there’s currently an 875-case outbreak in North Carolina alone, America is on the verge of losing the international “measles-free” status we achieved in 2000. The only problem Wyden and Markey face is that the DOJ is run by a Trump lickspittle who’s just as corrupt and willing to ignore the law (look at the Epstein files about Trump that they are still hiding as a prime example) as Trump himself. Accountability may have to wait another two years for the next administration to be sworn into office.

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— The “Godzilla” El Niño building in the Pacific right now is not a run of bad luck. University of Michigan researchers published an article in the journal Science this week reporting that fossil fuel-driven heating has been intensifying the warm phase of the El Niño that’s building in the Pacific and is fixing to hit us all in the next few months with dramatic consequences. Every single “severe” El Niño ever recorded has happened since the 1980s when, no coincidence, Reagan took Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House, killed off his Solar Bank program, and nuked the green subsidies Carter had started. Trump just did essentially the same to Biden’s green projects, paying billions to companies not to build wind farms off our coasts. Ocean surface temperatures are the hottest ever recorded and perhaps the hottest in over 100,000 years. Close to 50 million people will face famine before the end of the year because of this El Niño, according to the UN’s World Food Program, as monsoon rains will dry up across India and drought will hit Indonesia and Australia. India is already stockpiling grain in anticipation. The fossil fuel industry has spent billions lying to us and buying our politicians since the 1970s when they first truly realized what their product would do to the world. It’s way past time to hold them and their Republican toadies accountable.

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— Arizona’s attorney general has a blunt message for the United States Postal Service. Kris Mayes has joined up with 24 other Blue states to sue the USPS to block the rule they finalized last week putting themselves in between your state and your ballot at Trump’s request. Early voting starts in North Carolina in just a few weeks, with other states following on soon after. This all came out of a wildly unconstitutional executive order Trump signed to try to block voting by people he thinks are likely to go for Democrats. What’s particularly ironic about this particular lawsuit is that Arizona’s vote-by-mail system was designed, built, and put into place by Republicans decades ago when they ran that state and more than three-quarters of voters in that state use it every cycle (as does Trump himself, via Florida). This is what it looks like when our president takes vote-rigging advice from Putin because he’s desperate to avoid being investigated by people with the power of subpoena.

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— The National Park Service has spent over a year quietly detailing how to hand a slice of Yosemite National Park to a Republican-donating Nevada real estate firm. Kingsbarn Realty Capital owns 83 acres just outside the park’s boundary, about five miles from the fabled sequoias, and wants a chunk of land to build a road into that area. Previous administrations turned them down, but now people are smelling the possibility of a GOP-donating rat as Trump is trying to give them what they want. Congressman Jared Huffman said, “It kind of smells, you know,” adding that these places belong to future generations and shouldn’t be “sold off to Trump’s ultrawealthy friends to profit off of.”

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— Trump also wants to run roads through 45 million acres of untouched national forest to help out his logging, mining, and drilling donors. This would be the single largest rollback of protected public lands in the history of our country, opening the last large unfragmented stretches of national forest across 37 states and touching 70,000 miles of waterways. This week the Center for Biological Diversity published a paper titled Deadly Incursions finding that the blast radius for this would hit more than 400 threatened and endangered species and 7.5 million acres designated “critical habitat” along with 1,800 miles of protected rivers and streams. Grizzlies in the Rockies, salmon in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, Mexican spotted owls and Gila trout in the Southwest, Hellbenders in Appalachia, and rare butterflies more or less everywhere are all threatened. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — a morbidly rich Trump lickspittle who sold his company to Microsoft for more than a billion dollars but has no background whatsoever in forest management — has been bizarrely claiming that Richard Nixon’s Endangered Species Act was “weaponized” by previous administrations. The public comment window closes September 21.

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— Crazy Alert! Diesel hit $5.50 a gallon and billionaire-owned Fox “News” finally found sixty seconds for it. The week diesel broke through $5.50 a gallon nationally (August 19-26) Fox “News” found exactly one minute of airtime the entire seven days. Diesel moves pretty much everything we eat, wear, or buy and — combined with the fertilizer and oil shortage from Trump’s Iran war — is crushing farmers as well. During that one minute Fox spent on the topic they claimed that the price hike was because refineries had been closed “because of green goals,” a total crock. Media Matters, which tracks Fox, revealed this, as well as their claim that Fox spent a mere 15 minutes last month discussing the rising price of gas, and also blamed that on “green” policies. Somewhere in Iowa a farmer is watching Fox and has decided the reason his fuel bill doubled is Greta Thunberg…

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— Republicans created the morbidly rich and stuck America with the $40 trillion debt. For decades, I’ve been pointing out that in 1981 Ronald Reagan adopted a strategy proposed a few years earlier in the Wall Street Journal of spending like a drunken sailor when a Republican is in the White House to stimulate the economy and create the illusion of good times, while running up the national debt to astronomical levels, all so that they could scream about the national debt and demand cuts to social programs whenever a Democrat came into office. Republicans have been religiously following this ever since; the only Republican president to deviate from it was George HW Bush. The result, of course, is our $40 trillion national debt. With that $40 trillion, we could have had a national healthcare system and free college for all Americans, but instead we got Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, had a whole collection of bizarre billionaires. Finally, thankfully, both economists and Democrats have figured this out and are finally starting to speak out. It’s insane that the GOP has gotten away with this scam as long as they have…

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— Donald Trump claims we have a new category of crime: publishing numbers he doesn’t like. When the Center for American Progress ran the crime data for Washington DC after Trump threw thousands of National Guard troops onto the streets and found that they not only didn’t reduce crime but also burned through more that $1.7 billion in our tax dollars, Trump went nuts. His personal lawyer sent a 9-page letter to CAP demanding a retraction, an apology, and cash (of course), backed by the threat of a $5 billion defamation suit. Always classy, Trump’s lawyer closed the demand letter with the all-caps “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.” He also floated the possibility of going after CAP’s donors, the sort of Putin-esque or Stalin-esque action that FIRE’s Aaron Terry called (correctly) “wholly incompatible with a free society.” Meanwhile in Florida, Trump toady Joe diGenova has his DOJ investigators demanding to interview the FBI officials who executed the Mar-a-Lago search — which turned up more than 100 classified documents Trump had stolen and was criminally in possession of — in pursuit of the theory that thief Trump, rather than the US government, was the actual victim. Is this still America?

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— Trump’s inspectors general have found our government’s waste, fraud, and abuse: It’s them. You’ll recall that Trump fired over 20 Inspectors General across most all of the federal government’s major agencies, replacing these watchdogs with MAGA grifters and lapdogs. The IG for the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Cheryl Mason, demanded a private bathroom suite for her office, apparently because she didn’t want to rub elbows with the riff-raff. She claimed that Senate-confirmed appointees are legally entitled to a private bathroom, a law that literally doesn’t exist. There is a $5000 cap for renovations, which wouldn’t begin to touch the cost of what she did. She also commissioned a personal flag at more than a thousand dollars at the same time she was largely ignoring the “stop fraud and waste” job of an Inspector General while she slow-walked reports on electronic health records, and cut criticism of the VA’s physician shortages out of final drafts. Over at the Labor Department, losing Republican Congressman Anthony D’Esposito fired the staff overseeing corruption and now campaigns alongside Trump. At HUD the acting IG told his staff that instead of looking for waste, fraud, and abuse, they should instead become the Secretary’s “strong right arm.” Audits are, as a result of all this corruption, down 15% and investigative reports down by a quarter. As fired Interior IG Mark Greenblatt put it plainly: “You’ve co-opted the umpire and made them part of your team.” Veterans get the shortages, Mason gets her very own flag.

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— The Democratic establishment is now upset that they’ve spent a decade begging young people to run for office. Over on Fox “News” they’re loving James Carville, who’s now aligned himself with a “moderate” group that wants to hang onto control of the Democratic Party, as he blasted the DSA for borrowing the Party’s “godd’mn” name. This is part of a broader pattern among the neocons and neoliberals who’ve largely run and profited from the Party since Clinton flipped it in that direction in 1993, as documented by Fair Media Watch’s Raina Lipsitz. Young progressives are getting into races across the country, and the old Party “establishment” is recasting their participation as some sort of sinister infiltration. The problem Carville, Axelrod, et al are having is that a new Berkley Institute of Government Studies poll found that Democrats in California back candidates who call themselves progressive fully 60% of the time, and back those who call themselves “democratic socialists” 58% of the time. So-called “mainstream Democrats” are only supported 48% of the time by Democratic voters. And that’s among all ages; when you look at voters under 40 the gap is even wider. Meanwhile in the real world of actual Senate races, Roy Cooper is advertising that he opposed defunding the police, Iowa’s Josh Turek is running an ad boasting that he sided with Republicans more than 700 times, and Mary Peltola is promising Alaskan voters that she’ll take on Democrats too. A party this eager to apologize for existing may want to consider what it’s asking anyone to vote for.

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— Judge Emmet Sullivan, forty-one years on the federal bench, has run out of F’s to give about the Justice Department’s ongoing Epstein/Trump child rape coverup. Yesterday, Sullivan gave AG Todd Blanche until next Thursday to explain why his department keeps hiding a trove of foreign-language Epstein documents, along with FBI agents’ interview notes from women accusing Epstein and Trump of rape and sexual abuse. This is the same case — brought by Katie Phang — where the judge issued a preliminary injunction way back in June ordering the DOJ to remove redactions including email exchanges about a torture video and video interviews with a woman who accuses Trump of raping her when she was a minor. Sullivan noted that Blanche has basically admitted he’s covering up for Trump by breaking the law known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and at a hearing earlier this month one of his DOJ lawyers refused to commit to any timetable whatsoever for compliance. Sullivan is threatening these attorneys with contempt, but odds are they all figure Trump will pardon them and billionaires will hire them no matter what. The cover-up continues, as the billionaire-owned corporate press yawns…

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— Big corporate American employers are advertising jobs that don’t exist just to terrify their employees. It’s psychological warfare against workers, this scam run by major corporations where they spend a few pennies to post job opportunities similar to their own existing workers’ jobs not because they plan to hire people but to intimidate their existing employees into not asking for raises. The job platform Greenhouse found that 18 to 22% of its own postings were never filled by the companies posting them, an analysis of LinkedIn put the U.S. figure at 27.4%, and BLS data showed a shocking 2.2 million advertised openings in a single month that produced not even one single hire. When pressed, nearly one in three employers admitted that they posted roles with no intention of hiring anybody. Welcome to the end point of 45 years of Reaganomics where unions are struggling, workers are under psychological warfare attack, and the middle class continues to be converted into the working poor by the GOP and their corporate buddies.

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— Crazy Alert! Rosie O’Donnell closed out her week guest-hosting Kimmel with an extraordinary rendition of “Danny Boy.” Back from her new home of Ireland, where she’s lived since 5 days after Trump’s second inauguration, O’Donnell spent the week refusing to say Trump’s name, instead calling him “Mango Mussolini” and “President Oompa Loompa.” She dedicated her final number Thursday night to Trump with the classic Irish song Donny Boy as the screen behind her showed his polling graphs collapsing, the Reflecting Pool turning green, the ballroom, the Iran war, and measles. She wrapped it up with the chorus, “Come on, resign and make this country great again.” She also thanked Jimmy Kimmel for reminding everyone that free speech still exists here in America, a reminder of how FCC Chairman and Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr tried to take him down and is still harassing Disney/ABC. It was perfect!

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— Trump stuns 5,000 exhausted Sailors: nine months at sea isn’t “nearly long enough.” Roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines have been stuck aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln for over 250 days leading some to suicide attempts, but Trump says they haven’t suffered nearly long enough. When reporters asked him about the deployment that’s making headlines in the wake of reports of moldy showers, broken toilets, weeks without laundry, and one dinner that amounted to two tortillas and a half-cup of rice, Trump’s response was blunt: “No, no, no. [They’ve been there] Not nearly long enough.” Senator Richard Blumenthal says being without a port call in over 200 days is “a modern record” for the Navy, and families say shipboard doctors have warned that the crew is “coming apart.” Whiskey Pete tells Newsmax that it’s all lies, “completely misrepresented,” but nobody ever really took him seriously; the guy’s a completely unqualified C-list Fox weekend host with a short stint in the National Guard who destroyed two small vets organizations he tried to run. Remember all those years that Republicans kept reciting “thank you for your service” every time a member of our armed forces showed up? It was all performance art. These guys don’t give any more of a damn about our troops or our military than Trump did when his daddy paid a corrupt podiatrist for a phony X-ray showing somebody else’s bone spurs that got this pathetic coward out of Vietnam.

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— Trump‘S DOJ is building a shield against Democratic investigations before the midterms. Blanche and Trump are getting ready for Democratic investigations if the GOP loses control of either the House or the Senate this fall. Step one was to extend Trump’s executive privilege beyond the traditional and legal government-employed advisors to anybody he chooses, including friends, donors, business contacts, and even people who have never held a federal job or taken an oath. Blanche’s DOJ memo essentially says that shielding a buddy billionaire from having to testify to Congress is a public service to all of us. No questions asking how much money they gave Trump personally in exchange for pardons, tariff exceptions, or other goodies; no questions about contracts his sons have managed to get from the Pentagon; no questions about his billion dollar crypto scams or, frankly, anything else. Under this new memo, Trump can basically say that any of his buddies or partners in crime who could testify against him are now “advisors” and immune from having to spill the beans. Even Richard Nixon is rolling over in his grave at this level of corruption, lawlessness, and unaccountability.

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— AI crosses a terrifying line, and researchers are debating hitting the brakes. OpenAI stopped internal work on their new Astra model after discovering it was capable of attacking hardened computer systems all on its own, without anybody telling it how to do it. Anthropic documented three cases of Claude invading the live systems of three actual external organizations when it was supposed to be confined to its own sandbox. Meta’s model launched an actual attack on a third party, and one of the new OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face. Days earlier, the UK’s AI Security Institute nailed Anthropic’s Mythos model, turned loose in a test environment, for researching an open-source project’s human maintainers, fabricating multiple online identities, and useing them to con a real human being into signing off on its code. When the Mythos model was challenged publicly, it went back and edited its own trail to look innocent. And this is just what they’ve told us about; there’s no regulation of this industry, at least here in the US (the EU is getting closer), for devices that have been compared to nuclear weapons in terms of their potential to create widespread destruction of infrastructure and systems. Congress is starting to wake up, but the industry has pulled together a multi-hundred-million-dollar war chest to buy legislation and pay off legislators, a practice that was legalized in 2010 by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court. So much for Reagan’s repeated assertion that industry self-regulation is the highest form of governance…

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— Trump’s team targets nursing home voters with chilling new election rules. As he privatizes Medicare and threatens big cuts to Social Security, Trump is trying to make sure people in nursing homes can’t easily vote. Dr. Oz’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services just published new guidelines for America’s long-term care facilities that deleted — entirely — their previous instructions that nursing homes should have a plan to make sure residents can vote. Instead, they pushed out dire warnings to nursing home staffers about how long they could end up in prison if they help somebody vote in the wrong way. Thirteen Senate Democrats, led by Alex Padilla and Elizabeth Warren, wrote to Oz pointing out that the memo is apparently designed to intimidate staff out of helping the country’s 1.2 million nursing home residents cast a ballot. Given how many immigrants work in nursing homes, this will hit hard. Republicans in Texas have already test-run this, which is probably where Oz got the idea: Texas social worker Kelly Brunner made clerical errors registering disabled residents in 2020, although no improper vote was ever cast, and Texas Attorney General (and now Senate candidate) Ken Paxton charged her with 134 felonies anyway. She spent $50,000 on lawyers and lost her teaching license. Republicans are getting desperate: first it was Black voters they were purging and gerrymandering into irrelevance, then Hispanics they’re terrorizing and threatening to bring ICE to the polls, then shutting down voting operations in college towns, and now it’s the elderly as they’re working to destroy Social Security and Medicare. These people are sick.

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— Big Pharma hits jackpot as record 59% of Americans struggle to afford prescriptions. A record 59 percent of Americans say they can’t afford their prescriptions while ten massive drug companies pulled in $298 billion in just the first six months of this year. Comparing the first six months of this year to last year, Protect Our Care’s latest Greed Watch report found that the top ten drugmakers raked in $24 billion more this year than in the first half of 2025. That let them give their shareholders $63 billion in buybacks and dividends. And thanks to the tax provisions Republicans stuffed into the first Trump tax cut bill, J&J, AbbVie, Pfizer, Amgen, and Merck have paid nothing in federal income tax since 2018. Zero. Not reduced — zero. And all of this while the White House Council of Economic Advisers falsely insists Trump’s “most favored nation” unenforceable and largely PR-only “handshake deals” will save Americans $529 billion. When Senator Ron Wyden tried to check their claimed numbers, nobody in the administration would give him any information whatsoever. This is what forty-five years of Reaganomics has given us: record corporate profits, zero corporate taxes collected, and a third of Americans forced to cut their pills in half.

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— Putin tests NATO again, as Trump burns through America’s weapons. For the second time in ten weeks, NATO has had to scramble fighters to deal with Russian incursions into their territory. This time it was Lithuania’s turn, as NATO confirmed Italian and Turkish F-16s based out of Estonia responded, neutralizing the Russian drone over an unpopulated area. The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania don’t have any of their own fighter jets, so the Italians and the Turks had to step in. Last month it was a Russian missile landing in Poland, and to the south, Moldova recalled its ambassador from Moscow after a drone exploded near the village of Crocmaz on August 9. Moldova has had 1,500 Russian troops squatting in their Transnistria region for three decades, as they try to fend off a Kremlin operation that, per newly surfaced files, recruited 150,000 Moldovans and spent $20 million to subvert its elections. As Trump burns through American munitions and JD Vance brags that stopping US weapons from going to Ukraine was one of the “proudest moments” of his vice-presidency, Russia appears to be testing NATO defenses in preparation for an actual assault. If that were to happen, do you really believe that Trump would order US NATO forces to intervene? I’m not holding my breath; this is a very, very dangerous sign for world peace.

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— Geeky Science Alert! Scientists make a stunning discovery about how birth order may affect your health. Where are you in your family’s birth order? It may make a big difference. A new study published in Nature Health looking at insurance claims of 10,270,012 children from 5.1 million two-child families, spanning 2003 to 2024, found some surprising results having to do with birth order. Of 418 diseases with enough cases to test properly, 150 of them showed “statistically significant birth-order associations” with 79 connecting conditions to first-borns, and 71 toward second-borns. Firstborns had higher odds of autism, ADHD, Tourette’s, OCD, food allergy, and hay fever; second-borns were more likely to be afflicted by shingles, substance use disorder, gastritis, and/or migraines. Now, if we could just make sure that everybody — regardless of their position in the family’s birth order — could have inexpensive healthcare, maybe we could use this data to start some programs that anticipate these trends in a preventative way.

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— Trump guts America’s firefighting capabilities as historic heat and hurricane threats explode. As Hawaii is bracing for the first hurricane ever to make landfall on the Big Island and the strongest heat dome on the planet is squatting over the American South, Trump is firing the people who fight fires. After all, climate change is a hoax, right? Hawaii Governor Josh Green declared a statewide emergency Thursday as Tropical Storm Lala churned over unusually warm water toward the Big Island, which would make it the first hurricane landfall there since records began in 1900 and only the state’s second ever. Forecasters are warning of at least 8 to 12 inches of rain with isolated totals hitting a life-threatening 25 inches. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports the planet’s strongest heat dome will hit the continental United States this weekend, mostly in the South, with anticipated temperature records being broke in nineteen states. And out West, more than 12 million acres have already burned in 2026 — more than all of 2024 — while the Forest Service has shed roughly 5,900 people, absorbed a $438 million budget cut, and shut down 55 of its 77 research stations. Given this assault against our forest service and firefighting capabilities, three of four federal wildland firefighters are reportedly thinking about quitting. The oil companies knew this would happen way back in the 1970s and spent the next half-century telling us lies, paying off corrupt scientists, and buying the loyalty of corrupt Republicans who’re now dismantling the fire crews as they insist the climate change is a hoax. Somewhere in hell, Ronald Reagan is giving Trump a big thumbs-up.

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

— Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids. A Texas law firm with virtually no immigration experience, but multiple people close to Trump or accused of being open racists, just got a $150 million sole-source contract to replace the public defenders defending kids being held in Trump’s concentration camps for brown-skinned people. Meanwhile, ICE says that, sure, they’ll wear body cameras when they beat up and murder people, but they’ll only share those videos when they make them look good. Don’t expect to see any released that actually show criminal activity by armed, masked ICE thugs. Sounds over the top? Here’s their exact language: they’ll only release body camera footage when “it is in the best interests of the agency.” Trump has built his SA/SS force of violent, unaccountable modern-day Klan members to intimidate and even kill anybody who dares defy this regime, and it’s not about to start following the law or even behaving morally any time soon.

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— Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. Since he fired his statistics person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with a hand-picked toady, the numbers have been looking weird. For example, the regime reported 57,000 new jobs in May, then later quietly revised that down to 20,000 (although the headlines of 57,000 are still out there); they reported 129,000 new jobs for June, then quietly revised that down to 63,000 (ditto on the headlines). And this week we found that instead of the anticipated creation of 80,000 new jobs, the American economy actually lost 23,000 jobs last month (and expect that number to get worse when they “revise” it in 2 months). No matter how hard they try, they can’t keep Americans from noticing that housing, groceries, gas, transportation, drugs, medicine, and pretty much everything else are more expensive while billionaires and the Trump Crime Family get richer and Republicans continue to refuse to allow an increase in the minimum wage or the right to unionize. Eventually, reality catches up with politics, no matter how fast and furious Trump and his lickspittles try to keep us distracted or hating on each other, and hopefully it’s going to catch up in a big way this November.

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— Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, recently lied to his constituents that the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments President Obama designated were brought into being no public comment or input when, in fact, over 2.7 million people weighed in during the comment period. Another Big Lie is that we must let drilling companies exploit our public lands to become “energy independent,” a designation we reached during the Obama years. They’re also trying to tell us that the way to prevent forest fires isn’t to cut back on climate-change-causing CO2 from burning fossil fuels but, instead, to log those trees and leave behind nude wastelands (which actually catch on fire even more easily, because all the wood debris there is dead). Trump — who’s probably never walked through an old-growth forest in his life — tried pitching the lie that people can’t and don’t use our public lands for recreation like camping and fishing. And they try to tell us that we’re not subsidizing the oil and cattle industries with our public lands when in fact we’re handing them the equivalent of billions of dollars every year. Hopefully one of these days there’ll be a cost to these Republicans for the continuous streams of lies they keep pouring out on dozens of topics.

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— Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. Here’s how it works. Normally, when we release oil from the strategic reserve we sell it on the open market at market prices. That would mean that the oil Trump’s releasing would go for around $100 a barrel, paid by the oil companies. When the oil shortage is over, the government would go onto the public market and buy the oil back for, say, $50 a barrel and refill the reserve. It actually makes a profit for the government. But what Trump’s doing is “loaning” our oil to the oil companies at no charge. They then sell it for $100 barrel and when it’s time to “return” the oil to the reserve they’ll buy it on the market at $50 a barrel (or however low it goes when the crisis is over). The entire profit — quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars — instead of going to us taxpayers, goes to the oil companies who funded Trump’s campaign for president. Lever News has the entire sordid story broken down on their site in an article by Freddy Brewster.

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— America’s oligarchs and the Republican Party they own know how to hold onto potentially wayward members of Congress. People are scratching their heads in wonderment; after Trump trashed Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis to the point that all three are leaving Congress at the end of the year, all three ended up voting for Todd Blanche to continue the Epstein coverup and give Trump the $100 million the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade for his Chicago Trump Tower tax fraud. Why? former senators can be extraordinarily valuable to lobbying/government-relations firms because of their personal relationships with senators, senior staff, committee personnel, administration officials, donors and corporate leaders. Their intimate knowledge of how the Senate actually operates and the prestige/access associated with having been a senator are worth serious money: former senators often start at $5 million a year. But if their colleagues shun them because they’re afraid of retribution from Trump, that value vanishes. Do the math…

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— The solar industry claims a scalp. Two, it turns out, can play at this game: a new political action committee (Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC) formed and funded by solar industry executives ran ads against Tennessee’s toxic MAGA congressman Andy Ogles, and then beat him in the primary, replacing him with a Republican who’s favorable to solar power. Now that five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that our elections and politicians are for sale, the auctions have begun!

— Is Israel using rape, electric shocks, and beatings to discourage activists from bringing food and medicine to Gaza? It sure looks that way, according to The New York Times, reporting “numerous reports of physical abuse” as well as “deeply disturbing accounts of sexual humiliation and degrading treatment carried out by Israeli forces.” Israel’s openly racist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir even strutted around with the captives, making a degrading video that was so abusive and offensive that even US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a total suck-up to Benjamin Netanyahu, called Mr. Ben-Gvir’s actions “despicable,” adding that he had “betrayed the dignity of his nation.” It’s time to end American financial support of this rogue regime that’s giving antisemites more than enough raw material to use in their rants against Jews and thus putting people at risk worldwide.

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— Is that a squirrel on Trump’s head? The guy’s been totally bald on top for decades, as his daughter told us years ago, and his comb-over has been getting thinner and thinner. So apparently he’s taken to either hair extensions or a wig. The media is having a field day with it, with headlines like: Trump’s Suddenly Thick Hair Raises Eyebrows and Wild three days of ‘wig’ transformations. When I was a teenager working as a progressive rock DJ in Lansing, on a couple of occasions I DJ’d drag shows at a local gay bar. In the wig and makeup departments, Trump nearly beats some of the drag queens I knew…

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— Welcome to Trump’s latest billion-dollar scam, this time in the Middle East. Just like with his failed “Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU),” Trump, with lots of fanfare, is proclaiming that he’s achieved peace in the Middle East by brokering a deal between Hamas and Israel, with Hamas laying down their weapons and Israel withdrawing from Gaza. The only problem is that Hamas said they’d only disarm after Israel leaves Gaza first, and Israel is refusing to even comment on this deal that they apparently had nothing to do with writing. So, it’s really just fantasy fiction that Republicans think might help soften the blow at the gas pump and grocery store by telling us somehow that all the cost and deaths and depletion of our weapons stockpiles were done for a noble cause. This whole bizarre pitch came out of Trump’s Board of Peace, a make-believe United Nations that he “chairs for life” and stocked with Rubio, Kushner, Witkoff, Tony Blair, a private equity CEO, and assorted loyalists, including 28 countries that signed on with a payment to Trump’s new org of a billion dollars each and not a single board member from any of them. How do you spell G-R-I-F-T? We must elect people who treat diplomacy as real, meaningful work rather than just a photo op.

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— A third of Democrats now call themselves democratic socialists, according to a new CNN poll. There’s considerable confusion, particularly in our corporate media, about the difference between people who call themselves democratic socialist and the members and positions of the Democratic Socialists of America political party, which could take on Democrats in multiple states the way the Green Party has in the past and has a platform including many things no Democrat would support. What’s going on here is that America is in the midst of a populist moment (and has been since 2008) wherein voters will elect anybody who promises fundamental change to an economic and political system they know isn’t working for them. Forty-five years of Reaganomics have gutted the middle class and five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court changed the rules of politics to legalize bribery so the only entities getting what they want out of Congress any more are billionaires and giant corporations (and Israel). These should be the tea leaves that elected Dems and the DNC are reading, but so many are so wed to corporate or AIPAC money that it’s going to be a real struggle over the next few years to reinvent the Party in, basically, Bernie’s and AOC’s image. But that will happen, no matter how much the “problem solvers,” Clintonistas, and hustlers like Rahm Emmanuel and James Carville protest.

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— Trump wants his $100 million from the IRS and free grifting for his friends and family members for life and, by G-d, he’s going to get it. That’s the basic message coming out of the GOP right now, with Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee voting unanimously to remove a provision that would have stopped Trump’s IRS grift from must-pass budget legislation. Todd Blanche is refusing to put into writing his sworn statement to Congress that the so-called weaponization fund is dead and Trump won’t get the tax relief he’s seeking. Back in 2008, Trump claimed a deduction on his Chicago tower that he’d also claimed the previous year; this is generally called “tax fraud.” The IRS caught it and has been trying to collect the money ever since; with interest the bill is now over $100 million. With the document Blanche signed as a “settlement” with Trump, that tax bill goes away, as does every other tax liability — past, present, or future — for Donald, Melania, Uday and Qusay, Ivanka and Jared, all of their various children and other family members, and their partners in any companies they’ve started or run. They won’t even have to pay taxes at all, because the enforcement mechanism will have been neutered altogether. This is what’s holding up Trump’s nomination of Blanche to be permanent Attorney General, and word is leaking out that Cornyn and Tillis might be amenable to a deal where “only” Trump and his kids get this exception and the $1.7 billion “fund” goes away (Trump has since found other ways to pay off his supporters). As The Wall Street Journal reports, a senior White House advisor said bluntly: “The boss wants his money.” This is Putin-level corruption right in plain sight; it’s amazing there aren’t more protests and Democrats aren’t holding daily press conferences to proclaim their outrage.

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— Is Trump taking Iran’s side because Putin told him to? Or to prepare us for our losing this war to Iran by saying it’s not such a big deal? At a Camp David cabinet meeting with the 13 billionaires in his cabinet and others yesterday, Trump claimed that the hack that’s hit water systems in at least 7 states wasn’t done by the government of Iran but, instead, came about because the Democratic governor of Minnesota is “incompetent.” This is nothing new for Iran: In early-2013, an IRGC general publicly claimed Iran had the “fourth biggest cyber power among the world’s cyber armies.’” On August 15, 2012, they used that power first to disable the world’s wealthiest oil company, Saudi Aramco, irretrievably destroying 30,000 computers, leaving only an image of a burning American flag on every monitor’s screen. Then they went after a 245-foot-tall, 800-foot-long dam in Oregon, the Arthur R. Bowman Dam, which backs up the Crooked River. Had they opened its floodgates fast enough, it would have wiped out the downriver town of Pineville, killing thousands. Fortunately for Oregonians, they got the wrong dam; instead of the Oregon dam, they successfully infiltrated and took control of the Bowman Avenue Dam in New York State, which reroutes a relatively small stream. In an article about the attack, Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Yadron wrote, “America’s power grid, factories, pipelines, bridges and dams—all prime targets for digital armies—are sitting largely unprotected on the Internet.” It was just a fluke that they got the wrong dam. But now Trump is saying that Iran isn’t doing this sort of thing, and there’s got to be a reason for that lie.

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— “Elect a clown, expect a circus” alert! It shouldn’t surprise us that the white supremacists in the Trump administration wouldn’t know which countries are where on a map of Africa, but somebody could at least have run it past a person with Africa competence. The truly sad part is that the presentation was part of an effort to keep alive the only thing that George W. Bush ever did that was useful for anybody other than billionaires: the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR). Sad.

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— Trump is asking cops to help him continue grifting with crypto. The Trump regime is pushing law enforcement groups hard to support the GOP’s new Clarity Act, which would forbid others but explicitly allow Trump and his wife to keep issuing their $TRUMP and $MELANIA “collectible” digital coins, which have already helped make them billions of dollars. Moving to help Trump and his sons profit from the crypto scams they’re running, CNN reports: “At the Justice Department, Blanche shut down some cryptocurrency criminal investigations and disbanded a group of prosecutors and investigators who focused on cryptocurrency crimes as part of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.” They also note that: “Some law enforcement groups, including the National District Attorneys Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, have warned that the proposed law does not do enough to ensure transparency and accountability among crypto companies.” Now Trump wants legislative relief, and Republicans are inclined to give it to him but they’re hesitating at the moment because law enforcement groups are skeptical, and Trump himself is lobbying them. Keep an eye on this one.

— FCC Chief evokes howls of laughter across the country. In an interview with Dasha Burns of Politico, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said, “I don’t view the FCC as the speech police.” His statement does not mean, however, that he’s backing away from investigating the license renewals of ABC stations that didn’t carry Trump’s election fraud speech. The speech police live on even as they deny their own existence…

— To live long, adopt these habits. “Blue Zone” residents between 70 and 101 in Sardinia don’t just share the Mediterranean diet and lots of exercise. Researchers recently did a larger analysis of them versus nearby people who shared the same eating and exercise habits but didn’t live as long and found that the longest-lived people almost universally also had positive attitudes toward life. Curiosity and optimism — both characteristics that can be learned and reinforced regardless of age — had a big effect, according to the researchers. Time to dig out your copy of one of my favorite books, Pollyanna, and get some inspiration!

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— Is this going to be Trump‘s and the GOP’s strategy this fall? New York Times columnist David French published a truly alarming op-ed yesterday, pointing out a strategy that Republicans are apparently considering as we approach this November’s election. In Article I, Section 5, the Constitution says that both the House and Senate will decide who they’ll seat as members: “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” In other words, if the House — which right now is in Republican hands — determines that they want a Republican who lost an election for the House or Senate to a Democrat this fall to be the person seated as a member of Congress rather than the duly elected Democrat, they can make that happen with a simple majority vote. They can literally overrule or simply ignore the results of any election for any House or Senate seat if they don’t like it. Of course, to give the process a patina of legitimacy they’d probably point back to some squealing Laura Loomer-type back home in the state to claim that there were “irregularities,” but they can do it and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. In fact, it’s been done over a dozen times in this country’s history, and the Supreme Court itself has, as French points out, in a 1972 case called Roudebush v. Hartke, ruled that, “Which candidate is entitled to be seated in the Senate is, to be sure, a nonjusticiable political question.” In other words, No court can rule on this; there is no possible appeal. They’d probably only try to pull this off it the election is close and control of either body is hanging in the balance; that’s the circumstance that’s provoked such an action in the distant past. This is one more solid reason — in addition to overcoming the GOP voter suppression efforts I wrote about yesterday — why the ultimate and arguably only solution we face this fall to preserve our democracy is to show up in such overwhelming numbers that nobody can deny the results.

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— Bernie Sanders explains the appeal of democratic socialism to a Fox “News” reporter. I’ve told the story before about how, in 2016, when Louise and I lived on a boat in a marina in Washington, DC surrounded by lots of Navy and Coast Guard Republicans, most all of them were debating whether to vote in the primaries for Trump or Bernie, either being preferable to Clinton or any of the mainstream Republicans running. At least since 2000, I believe Americans have been looking for real change, a break with the neoliberalism that Reagan rolled out and Bill Clinton embraced, and both Bernie and Trump promised that change. But Trump has failed to deliver real change, so the question still hangs over our electoral processes. Which is why probably a lot of ears perked up when a Fox “News” reporter caught up with Bernie in the halls of the Capitol and asked if democratic socialism would hurt Democratic candidate chances this fall. Bernie was blunt: “The American people are disgusted with an economic system in which one guy on top, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom half of American society. They’re tired of a situation where 60% of our people live paycheck-to-paycheck... they are tired of a corrupt political system in which billionaires buy elections.” Amen! Hopefully a lot of those Fox-watching Republican-voting guys who lived in boats around us were watching…

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— Affordability is tanking under Trump. When it rains, it pours. American families were still reeling from the price increases on imported goods caused by Trump’s early tariffs when he let Netanyahu talk him into stupidly — and illegally — attacking a country that had not attacked us. The war of aggression against Iran led to the closure of the Gulf of Hormuz which spiked oil and gasoline prices early on and again over the past week. And now, after the Supreme Court told Trump that the Constitution says only Congress can impose tariffs, he’s gone and done it again, this time using the excuse that Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and around 80 other countries are using forced or slave labor in their factories to hit them with 10% to 12.5% tariffs. One immediate result was a jump in bond yields, meaning that home and car loan rates will soon be rising; mortgage rates could easily hit 7 percent in the near term. And there’s even speculation that Kevin Warsh, the guy he put into the Fed to replace Jerome Powell, will oversee an increase in the Fed-determined interest rates in coming weeks. This is all bad news for Republican candidates, which probably explains why the Trump administration is threatening to jail election officials and strip FEMA funds from states that won’t go along with their latest voter suppression efforts.

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— Republicans want legislation to force people to work in deadly heat if that’s what their employers demand. The Biden administration proposed OSHA rules that would prevent employers from forcing people to work under dangerous circumstances, including extreme heat events (the rule was dropped when Trump came into office). But leave it to Republicans, presumably responding to big lobbying money from the ag industry, to go an extra step to screw the workers. The Heat Workforce Standards Act, introduced by Indiana Republican Congressman Mark Messmer, passed the House Education and Workforce Committee in a straight party-line vote this week. The proposed new law would ban OSHA from putting into place any sort of national heat protections for working people. These guys don’t care who lives or dies, they just want to be sure they can cash the oligarchs’ checks.

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— “Explosive Trumparreah” spreads across the US, along with measles, while Bob Kennedy says, “Everything’s under control.” An estimated 11,500 cases of Cryptosporidiosis have now shown up in 41 states, but ever since the CEO of Taylor Farms gave Trump a million dollars and visited him in the White House last week the CDC continues to play dumb. Bob Kennedy says the outbreak is “under control,” although this is the guy who got a brain worm from eating roadkill and has no medical background whatsoever. Meanwhile, because of the MAHA-spread skepticism of immunizations, America is now experiencing the largest number of deadly measles cases since the disease was declared eradicated from America two decades ago. These Republicans sure know how to run a public health service, eh?

— The Social Security reckoning will become a BFD as the trust fund runs low. Until Reagan’s “reform” of the Social Security system, it had always operated on a simply pay-as-you-go system; the money coming in from FICA taxes funded the money going out to retirees and people on disability. Seeing the baby boomer generation’s retirement coming down the road, Congress increase the FICA tax to essentially double-tax the boomers to build up a massive ~$2.5 trillion trust fund to deal with this “rabbit through the python” problem; the idea was that the boomers would have all retired by the time the fund was exhausted and Social Security could go back to pay-as-you-go. Reagan also put an income tax on Social Security earnings, slowed the cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs), and raised the retirement age to 67. None of those things, however, have worked and now the trust fund will run out of money within the next six years, long before the last of the boomers are dead. The solution to the problem is simple: right now people only pay Social Security taxes on the first ~$180,000 of their income, so millionaires and billionaires pay a tiny fraction of their income into the fund compared to average work people. Lifting that cap so everybody pays the same percentage would make the program solvent for the next 70 years (the maximum the government can calculate) and even allow for a $2000/year increase in benefits across-the-board for everyone. But Republicans hate the idea of taxing the morbidly rich even a tiny bit, so they’re floating a bunch of other suggestions, including privatizing the system and giving it to the big New York banks, raising the retirement age to 70 or even 72, and cutting benefits by as much as 20%. Keep an eye on this one, as most younger people don’t really understand the system so the GOP’s hustle is still working. It’s going to take all of us to educate our friends and neighbors to the simple realities of the situation.

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— Forever chemicals may be causing ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and colorectal cancer in young people. A new peer-reviewed study just published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology looked at mother-child pairs from birth through age 11 and found a clear association between gut inflammation and PFAS exposure. These chemicals are popping up everywhere; they’re used in everything from paint and pesticides to processed foods and coffee cups. They’re most commonly used to make paper waterproof, so those carry-home food containers and the carry-out coffee cup are likely lined with them. It appears this is a good candidate for answering the questions about why so many young people are now coming down with these GI-related diseases, particularly cancers, that typically only used to hit older folks. Beware.

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— The Trump administration has now openly threatened to imprison American election officials who won’t let it “help” run this fall’s elections. Thursday night Trump went on prime time to inform the nation that our elections have been rigged for years and the evidence was hidden from us, a 26-minute performance that news organizations from PBS to the New York Times shredded in real time. Friday morning his Homeland Security Secretary, former plumber Markwayne Mullin, took a friendly question from a Daily Caller reporter and ran with it: states that decline to hand their voter rolls over to his SAVE program will find their election officials held accountable “by fines, by penalties, and even ... prison time.” He asserted his agency had found 250,000 noncitizens on the rolls in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada, though as election experts told The Guardian, he declined to share anything so inconvenient as a methodology. Non-citizens on the rolls aren’t generally an issue (and usually the result of errors processing driver’s licenses with “sign me up” checkboxes) because those people who aren’t citizens don’t want to risk five years in jail just to vote. As Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state noted, noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare in his state. Gavin Newsom’s entire response was two words: “Try us.” He’d already called Trump’s speech the “ramblings of a mad king,” adding that the only missing prop was a tin foil hat. Understand what’s happening: they’re laying the predicate now, in July, for contesting or seizing an election in November that they can see they’re going to lose. This is how they do things in Putin’s Russia, but no American administration has ever done this. Not one...

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— Turns out that when you spend 45 years transferring the nation’s wealth to the top, the people at the bottom eventually notice. The new CNBC All-America Economic Survey finds Americans as gloomy about the economy as they’ve been since the pandemic years, with Trump’s approval down to 40% and just a quarter of the country optimistic about the future, with all this despite a booming stock market, (which explains who that market is booming for). Today 60% of Americans earning under $30,000 are cutting back on essentials, versus 35% of those making six figures or more. Over on CNN, chief data analyst Harry Enten went to the videotape and came back visibly rattled: among households under $50,000 — the very voters Trump won by a historic margin in 2024 — a mere 16% think groceries are affordable, and his 16-point advantage over Kamala Harris on the economy has become a 39-point deficit. That’s a 55-point swing. “The working class have turned against Donald Trump,” Enten said. Of course they have. This is the party that broke the unions, froze the minimum wage into a fossil, and has installed a union-busting lawyer atop the Labor Department in every Republican administration since Reagan. These are not Eisenhower’s Republicans, and they never intended to be. As Warren Buffett told Ben Stein back in 2006, “It’s my class, the rich class, that’s making [class] war, and we’re winning.” The only question left is whether the GOP can run the old play one more time — point at a migrant caravan, a Willie Horton, a trans teenager, anything shiny — and get voters to forget that 10 of the last 11 recessions started on a Republican president’s watch.

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— And here’s the punchline the consultant class is going to spend all weekend trying not to say out loud: “democratic socialist” now polls better than “MAGA.” The same CNBC All-America poll that found the country miserable about the economy also asked what labels move votes. A candidate calling herself a democratic socialist makes 32% of registered voters more likely to support her. A Trump endorsement: 29%. A MAGA identifier: 27%, with 57% saying it’s disqualifying. So after eighteen months of Republicans screaming “communist” at every Democrat who can fog a mirror, the slur is testing better than the brand doing the smearing. The reason isn’t complicated, though you’d never learn it from the billionaire-funded media and think tanks: since Mamdani won New York, the candidates wearing that label have talked about rent, groceries, wages, and medical bills more or less nonstop — while everyone else talks about Venezuela and burn bags. It’s the economy, stupid. That was on Clinton’s own war-room wall, and it never stopped being true; it just got inconvenient once Clinton and Obama made their peace with neoliberalism and decided the donor class was a coalition partner rather than the problem. Capitalism still outpolls socialism in America, as CNBC notes. It’s just doing so by a shrinking margin, and 45 years of Reaganomics is the reason why. The billionaires spent two generations proving Keynes’ point better than Keynes ever did...

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— Fox “News” covered Trump’s election-fraud address the way a cat covers what’s in the litter box. For three straight hours Friday morning, Fox & Friends did not mention it once — not a syllable — while every other network in America was taking the president’s claims apart line by line. Instead Kilmeade, Earhardt, and Lawrence Jones gave their viewers the Iran airstrikes, the air quality crisis, the Texas floods, the World Cup, and a lovingly extended appreciation of a Marco Rubio speech about “left wing violence.” Then they handed off to Dana Perino, who also didn’t mention it. The network carried the speech live, mind you; as it ended, Bret Baier told the audience Fox “is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statements.” Translation: we know exactly what that was, and our lawyers are in the room. Because Fox has been here before: in 2023 it wrote Dominion Voting Systems a check for $787.5 million rather than let a jury hear what its own hosts said in private about the last round of stolen-election fantasies. So the Australian billionaire Murdochs are impaled on the horns of a dilemma entirely of their own manufacture: tell the truth and lose the audience they spent thirty years training, or tell the lie again and lose another three-quarters of a billion dollars. Their solution, apparently, is to pretend the President of the United States didn’t speak. Somewhere in the Fox legal department, a partner is billing $1,400 an hour to explain the concept of “silence” very slowly...

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— Texas has decided that five million public school children will study the Bible whether their families are Christian or not, and Jewish leaders are pointing out — politely, which is more than the state deserves — that this always ends badly. The Republican-controlled State Board of Education voted 9-5 to impose a mandatory reading list larded with scripture on every K-12 English classroom in the state, effective 2030. Board member Brandon Hall, a Republican and a youth pastor, explained the theory at a press conference: “Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state.” That will be news to the Baptists who fled Virginia’s established church, to Jefferson, and to the Senate that ratified Washington’s and Adams’ Treaty of Tripoli. The Telegraph reports that the curriculum’s Lamentations unit invites eighth graders to weigh “whether the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the sins of the Jews” — an actual lesson plan, in an actual American public school, in the year of our Lord 2026. A Texas rabbi, testifying as both a clergyman and the father of Jewish kids, begged the board to keep the line between teaching about religion and simply teaching religion, a line, he warned, this list forces teachers to cross. The board declined. Trump, naturally, is delighted, announcing that religion is back, bigger and stronger than ever. The Supreme Court settled this in 1963 in Abington v. Schempp, but of course that was a different Court, back when we had one with a shred of integrity still intact. Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple; Texas Republicans are marching the temple into the schoolhouse and billing the taxpayers...

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— Senate Republicans just voted to let an AI algorithm with a financial stake in saying “no” decide whether your mother gets her knee fixed. On Thursday, a Democratic resolution to kill the Trump administration’s WISeR program went down 46-50, every no vote a Republican. WISeR — “Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction” — a name a Bond villain would reject as too on-the-nose — went live January 1st and imports the single most hated feature of the Medicare “Advantage” scam, prior authorization, into traditional Medicare, with AI making the call on things like knee arthroscopy and nerve stimulator implants. As the Medicare Rights Center notes, the private contractors running the algorithm share in the savings generated by the care they deny. They get paid to say no. Sen. Cantwell’s office found Washington seniors waiting two to four times longer for doctor-ordered care since the program started there, from about two weeks to as long as eight. The GAO ruled the whole thing should have come to Congress first; the administration shrugged. Rep. Suzan DelBene, who’s been chasing this thing for a year, called it what it is: “a back door to privatizing Medicare.” Republicans have loathed Medicare since LBJ signed it in 1965, when Reagan himself cut a record warning it would end American freedom. They can’t repeal it — the voters would burn Washington down — so they’re doing it the modern way: outsource the killing to a machine, take a cut of every denial, and call it efficiency. One campaigner summed the Republican Party up as “a group of millionaires working for billionaires who will rip healthcare away.” Sixty years of trying, and they finally found a hit man who doesn’t leave fingerprints...

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— Congress is about to make you permanently jet-lagged, and the science says don’t. The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act 308-171 on Tuesday, locking the whole country into daylight saving time forever, with Trump cheering it on and demanding Congress “push hard for more daylight at the end of the day.” One problem: pretty much every sleep scientist in America thinks this is backwards. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s position, as lead author Dr. Muhammad Rishi explained to Scientific American, is that “permanent standard time is the best option from a human biology standpoint.” Your body clock is set by morning light, not evening light; take away the morning sun and you get worse sleep, worse metabolic health, worse mood, and more heart attacks, as the Washington Post laid out this week. We’ve run this experiment before, in 1974, and Congress repealed it within a year once parents saw their kids waiting for the bus in pitch darkness. So why are we doing it again? Follow the money: the lobbying muscles behind year-round DST are the golf industry, retail, tourism, and the convenience stores, all of whom would like one more hour of afternoon daylight in which to sell you something. Reps. Mary Gay Scanlon and Pat Harrigan have a bipartisan alternative that does it right, and Scanlon’s argument to her colleagues was almost quaint: “we should follow the science and prioritize Americans’ health.” Bless her heart. In this GOP-run Congress, the sun rises when the CEOs say it rises...

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— Geeky Science Alert! The stick shift is dying, and it’s taking something with it that we’re going to miss more than we know. The Washington Post reports that the manual transmission is finally circling the drain, and the numbers are brutal: manuals were 35% of new American cars in 1980 and are under 2% now, and even in Europe they’ve collapsed from 91% of registrations in 2001 to 29% in 2024. That brief 2023 uptick that had enthusiasts comparing sticks to vinyl records turned out to be a dead-cat bounce; J.D. Power’s Tyson Jominy now says that promise was false, the march to the dustbin of history has resumed, and Americans — measured strictly by what they buy to drive — have simply gotten less fun. EVs don’t need gears or transmissions and self-driving cars don’t need you, so the clutch pedal is a dead end. But Edmunds’ Ivan Drury put his finger on the real story: “The more the car becomes your couch,” the less you want to shift it yourself. That’s it exactly. A stick shift demands that you pay attention: that you listen to the engine, feel the road, and participate in the machine instead of being carried by it. We are being gently, profitably relieved of the requirement to pay attention to anything, and we’re paying a premium for the privilege. Rest in peace, third gear. You made us better drivers, and maybe better citizens, but progress marches on...

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— The Trump DOJ has decided that monopolies are people too, and they deserve a break. For forty-five years — ever since Ronald Reagan’s antitrust chief strolled into the Justice Department in 1981 and effectively hung a “Gone Fishing” sign on the merger-enforcement desk — Republican administrations have treated corporate concentration as a feature rather than a bug. It led to the “M&A Mania” (Mergers & Acquisitions) and the “Masters of the Universe” who were crushing companies together while laying off newly-redundant workers as a competitive sport: it began the death of local malls and Main Streets where local businesses could prosper; everything’s now big chains. But even by Reagan’s dismal standard, what’s happening now is something new. As MS NOW first reported and Common Dreams amplified, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward — a Trump loyalist whose apparent chief qualification for supervising antitrust law is that he once represented a Trump valet in the classified-documents case, and who has never actually enforced antitrust law — has been quietly ordering career attorneys to stop suing corporations and simply rubber-stamp their mergers. Bill Baer, who ran the division under Obama, called it “unilateral surrender on antitrust enforcement.” The deals now getting waved through include a merger of two big discount airlines and a tie-up of the world’s dominant subsea-oil-equipment firms — which, experts warn, will raise the price of both your flight to Cancún and your gas at the pump. The antitrust division was created under FDR precisely because Americans had learned the hard way that unchecked corporate power is a threat to democracy itself. Ninety years later, one DOJ lawyer summed up the consumer’s new position: “We’re getting screwed.” So much for “America First”…

— Donald Trump promised to cut your electric bill in half. Instead he’s spending your tax dollars to guarantee it goes up. In just the past four months, as the Guardian reported, the Interior Department has paid four companies a combined $2.7 billion to cancel eight offshore wind projects, while shoveling another $1.13 billion toward propping up coal, the dirtiest and, these days, most expensive way to boil water to make electricity. The Energy Department is forcing utilities to keep aging coal plants running years past their retirement dates; keeping just one Michigan clunker on life support for seven months cost ratepayers $135 million. A new analysis from Energy Innovation finds Trump’s war on cheap power will pile roughly $650 billion onto Americans’ energy bills over fifteen years, cost some 800,000 jobs a year, and — because coal smoke is not, it turns out, good for children — add $43 billion in health costs, much of it new childhood asthma. All to repay the morally criminal fossil fuel fatcats for the hundreds of millions they threw his way in the 2024 election. Former Washington governor Jay Inslee named the racket precisely: Trump is “fattening the wallets of his cronies” with billions of our dollars while forcing our bills higher. This is Reaganomics distilled to its essence: socialism for the fossil-fuel donor class, the brutality of the “free market” for the rest of us. The punchline? Even with Washington’s thumb jammed on the scale, solar just outproduced coal on the American grid for the first time in history…

— In the middle of the worst housing-affordability crisis in a generation, Trump refused to sign the biggest housing bill in a generation, all to throw a childish tantrum. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act cleared Congress with almost comic bipartisanship — 85–5 in the Senate and 358–32 in the House — because even this Congress noticed that the median existing home just hit a record $440,600 and rents have jumped 40% in seven years. The bill funds new construction, expands modular homes, and — mark this — restricts Wall Street’s private-equity giants from hoovering up the nation’s single-family homes to rent them back to the very people they outbid. So naturally the president announced on his Nazi-infested social media site that he wouldn’t sign it, in protest, dismissing the whole thing as “a yawn.” His actual grievance? The Senate won’t pass his SAVE Act, a voter-suppression bill demanding documentary proof of citizenship to fix the imaginary crisis of noncitizens voting, that could also make voting and registering to vote extremely difficult for some 90 million American women who changed their names when they got married but never went before a judge to do it officially. (Women are more likely to vote Democratic than men.) And here’s the ironic part: it didn’t matter. Under the Constitution’s presentment clause, a bill the president neither signs nor vetoes becomes law anyway — which this one did, at the stroke of midnight — denying his own party the signing-ceremony photo op they’d begged for, four months out from the midterms. As Elizabeth Warren, who helped write it, put it, Trump “cares so little about bringing down YOUR housing costs” that he’d sulk through its passage. Forty-five years of Reaganomics handed the housing market to speculators; the one modest bill to claw a little of it back, Trump couldn’t even be bothered to sign…

— With one more purge, Trump moved to seize the machinery that referees American elections. Late Thursday, as ProPublica broke and Common Dreams reported, Trump forced out the last three members of the Election Assistance Commission — the small, deliberately bipartisan agency Congress created after the 2000 Florida fiasco to help states run their elections. The two Democratic commissioners were fired by a four-o’clock form email; the lone Republican was invited to resign. The agency now sits leaderless and legally unable to make a single decision, four months before the 2026 midterms. This isn’t subtle. Less than two weeks earlier, the Supreme Court’s six corrupt, neofascist Republican appointees handed Trump the power to gut independent agencies at will in Trump v. Slaughter, torching ninety years of precedent; the White House cited that very ruling as its authority. And the prize is obvious: a commissioner-less EAC can be ordered to rewrite the national voter-registration form to require proof of citizenship, that driver’s licenses and birth certificates have the exact same name, exactly what Trump’s 2025 executive order tried and failed to do, and exactly what the stalled SAVE Act would mandate. Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, called the move “irresponsible and dangerous.” Connect Thursday’s two headlines and the strategy is naked: hold affordable housing hostage to a voter-suppression bill, and when the bill stalls, simply seize the agency that could impose it by fiat. They’ve been chipping away at the vote since Reagan cut that corrupt deal with the Ayatollah to hold onto the US hostages (destroying Jimmy Carter’s chances for reelection) and Jeb Bush threw over 10,000 Black voters off the rolls just months before his brother George W. “won” Florida’s 2000 election by 537 votes. They’ve just stopped pretending that they care about democracy, an honest vote, or a clean election…

— ICE thugs went looking for one man in Houston, found someone who sorta resembled him, and killed him instead. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — a 52-year-old father of three who’d lived in the United States for nearly thirty-five years, held no criminal record, and was weeks from a work permit — was shot dead Tuesday morning while picking up the last of his construction crew on the way to a job site. He was not the target of the operation; agents in unmarked black SUVs were hunting a different person, saw a similar white van, and stopped him. DHS’s story is that Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle,” rammed an officer, and was shot in self-defense. The three men who were in the van with him tell a different story: their attorney says the ICE vehicles rammed them, and that an agent stepped out and opened fire almost immediately and that “at no point did they use the van to ram into the ICE agents” and no agent’s life was ever in danger. There is, conveniently, no footage: none of the agents had body cameras, which DHS dishonestly blamed — I promise I am not making this up — on “back-to-back Democrat shutdowns.” The Harris County Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide. This is the most recent fatal ICE shooting since agents killed U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis: As Qasim Rashid notes, “ICE has now killed 10 people we know of: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was just the latest.” A “targeted operation” that shot the wrong man, then reached for the oldest excuse in the authoritarian playbook: “He made us do it…”

— Vladimir Putin assumed Siberia was too far away to feel his war. Ukraine just corrected him. On Monday, Ukrainian drones flew some 1,500 miles and slammed into Russia’s largest oil refinery, in the Siberian city of Omsk — the deepest strike of the entire war, and one the Kremlin never saw coming, because it had bothered to defend the place about as much as it defends the truth. Ukraine’s new homemade Fire Point drones can now reach roughly 2,100 miles, which, as the Wall Street Journal noted, puts Russia’s Arctic gas terminals, western-Siberian oil fields, and pipeline nodes all inside Kyiv’s reach. President Zelensky, understating it beautifully, said the strikes had put “Siberia within reach.” The results are already biting: Russian gasoline production is down roughly a quarter, more than half of Russia’s regions have imposed fuel rationing, Kazakhstan has thrown up fifty-nine checkpoints to stop fuel smuggling, and — for the first time in decades — the world’s great petro-state is importing gasoline. Putin waves it off as “temporary.” And in perhaps the finest irony of the week, even Donald Trump, fresh off another chummy phone call sucking up to and getting his weekly instructions from the man in the Kremlin, allowed that the strikes are “an escalation that can help lead to an end.” One does wonder whether the president is more troubled by the drones or by whose refineries they keep finding and taking out…

— While the administration burns coal and blesses monopolies, an entire species is quietly starving to death off our coast. Scientists are now calling it a “Catastrophic Mortality Event”: 145 Pacific gray whales have washed up dead in 2026 — and because most carcasses sink unseen, that grim number probably represents barely a tenth of the true toll. The eastern North Pacific population has collapsed from about 27,000 a decade ago to roughly 13,000 today, the lowest since the 1970s, with only 85 calves counted this year, the fewest since anyone started counting. The cause is no mystery: as the Arctic warms and its sea ice vanishes, the algae that feeds the tiny crustaceans that feed the whales is disappearing, and these animals — which migrate 10,000 miles a year to that dinner table — are arriving to find it bare. Conservationists like Rick Steiner have been begging NOAA since last August to relist the gray whale under the Endangered Species Act, which would unlock real protections. NOAA’s legally required 90-day answer is now approaching a year of criminal silence, while PEER warns that continued inaction will drive the West Coast population into an “extinction spiral.” A species in “very, very serious trouble,” then, meeting a corrupt regime that treats the Endangered Species Act the way it treats every other guardrail: as an inconvenience to be ignored until the thing it was protecting is gone…

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— Two hundred and fifty years on, the real fight over the Declaration of Independence isn’t about fireworks: it’s about who gets to own it. Trump has spent the run-up to the semiquincentennial draping himself in the founding parchment like a gold-lamé toga, but as a sharp New Republic essay reminds us, that document has been contested since the ink was still wet. And it was never a birthday card: it was a fighting manifesto. Its most radical line isn’t the bit about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that gets cross-stitched onto throw pillows; it’s the part where Jefferson insisted that when any government “becomes destructive of these ends,” it is the right of the people “to alter or to abolish it.” The men who signed it weren’t celebrating a king. They were firing one. So it’s a rich spectacle to watch a president who muses aloud about third terms, pardons his own insurrectionists, and stamps his face on everything but the currency (give him time) claim Thomas Jefferson as a hype man. The Declaration doesn’t belong to the guy building the throne room replica of Putin’s in St. Petersburg: it belongs to the people it was written to protect, and it still comes with instructions.

— Nothing says “Happy Birthday, America” quite like a heat dome trying to kill a hundred million of us. As the nation fires up the grills, the National Weather Service warned that record-shattering temperatures would drive the heat index as high as 115°F from the Midwest to the East Coast, with more than 100 million people in the path, a drought gripping 45 states, and El Niño pouring gasoline on the whole thing. Across the Atlantic, Europe had just finished burying roughly 2,000 people in Spain and France after a June that hit 44°C — and the scientists at World Weather Attribution confirmed, in the dry prose of people who are quietly furious, that burning fossil fuels made it dramatically worse. That’s the fossil-fuel barons’ whole business model in one sentence: privatize the profit, socialize the corpses. And now the bill is coming due for our history itself, because Jamestown, Virginia is literally drowning. The site of the first permanent English settlement, the first representative assembly in 1619, and the arrival of the first enslaved Africans that very same year has watched the sea rise 1.6 feet in a century, with another three feet projected by 2075. As one archaeologist grimly put it, do nothing and we go “from Jamestown Island to Jamestown Islands.”

— And right on cue, a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration can keep throwing the signs explaining all of that down the memory hole. On July 2, the First Circuit lifted a judge’s order that would have forced the National Park Service to reinstall dozens of exhibits on slavery and climate change it had torn out under Trump’s executive order to “restore truth and sanity” to American history. The district judge, Angel Kelley, had accused the administration of trying to rewrite the nation’s story “with a white-out pen,” which is about as gentle as that description gets. Savor the double erasure: at Jamestown the rising water is dissolving the physical evidence of both American democracy and American slavery, while a thousand miles away the Trump regime and its employees are prying off the plaques that would explain either one. They pulled the climate signage out of Acadia last fall, presumably because a placard about rising seas might “disparage” the sea. And here’s the tell: even a panel of judges appointed entirely by Democratic presidents waved it through on a procedural technicality, which is the surest measure of how far the goalposts have already been dragged. The plaintiffs at Democracy Forward called it a “temporary procedural setback.” History is very much hoping they’re right.

— Good news! The world got nearly 11% richer last year. The bad news is you can probably guess who’s holding it. UBS’s new Global Wealth Report found global personal wealth jumped 10.8% in 2025 — the fastest pace since 2017 — minting close to a million new millionaires at a clip of some 2,680 a day, with the United States alone cranking out more than 440,000 of them and the billionaire count swelling 13% to 3,302. Champagne all around. Except for the “fly in the ointment” the bank tucked a little further down: median wealth actually fell in most countries even as the average rocketed upward — because “average” is the number you get when a few thousand people vacuum up the gains while the person standing in the exact middle just treads water. America ranks second in the world in average wealth and a humbling 28th in median wealth: the mathematical signature of an oligarchy wearing a middle-class Halloween mask. The World Inequality Report sharpens the knife: the top 0.001% — roughly 56,000 people — now control more wealth than the poorest four billion human beings on Earth combined, and their share has nearly doubled since 1995. That’s not a bug in the system: that’s forty-five years of Reaganomics and neoliberalism performing exactly as it was engineered to.

— Speaking of the folks who did get richer: the President bought 327 stocks the day before he personally moved the entire market. Buried in Trump’s new 927-page financial disclosure is the revelation that his investment accounts made 327 stock purchases on April 8, 2025 — worth as much as $12.8 million in names like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet — exactly one day before he announced the tariff “pause” that sent the S&P 500 up nearly 10% and restored some $4 trillion in market value in a single session. The trades were disclosed more than fourteen months later than the law requires. The penalty for filing a year past the deadline? Two hundred dollars: roughly two D.C. parking tickets levied against a nearly $13 million bet. Remember when Martha Stewart did five months in a federal prison for a single well-timed phone call to buy some stock? The Founders wouldn’t have been shocked in the slightest at Trump’s corruption: as a companion New Republic piece lays out, the men who built this republic warned obsessively that concentrated wealth would one day swallow self-government whole, and those warnings have now “come appallingly true.” They wrote our Constitution to stop a king from looting the treasury; they just never imagined one who’d do it through a brokerage app.

— The headlines insisted Trump “lost” at the Supreme Court this term. Down in the fine print, though, King Trump is doing just fine. Yes, the 6–3 conservative majority rejected his bid to end birthright citizenship and struck down his emergency-powers tariffs, which are genuine losses, worth every bit of the celebration. But look at what those same justices handed him on the way out the door: they overruled a 91-year-old precedent to give him the power to fire the heads of independent agencies at will, gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, and — because Citizens United apparently didn’t finish the job — struck down limits on coordinated party spending mere months before the midterms, flushing still more dark money into the GOP’s massive, billionaire-funded machine. Layer on the “shadow docket,” where a run of unexplained emergency orders keeps quietly clearing Trump’s path, and the pattern is unmistakable. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe warned the republic is now “hanging by a thread”; Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele compared this bench to the pliant courts Putin and Orbán packed with loyalists. And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said it plainest of all, accusing her own colleagues of contorting the law so that Trump “always wins.” The scholars say next term’s target is the professional civil service itself, as I mentioned earlier this week when discussing the history of the Pendleton Civil Service Act.

— Meanwhile, the agency Trump just funded to the eyeballs handcuffed a 56-year-old nun on her way to Mass. Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja — a Nigerian-born Catholic sister who has spent a decade working as a registered nurse in South Texas — was walking the single block from her home to Our Lady of Sorrows in McAllen for Sunday Mass, in her habit, when ICE agents stopped her, took her rosary, cuffed her, and hauled her to a detention center an hour away, where she reportedly was held without the medication she needed. She was released the same day only after a frantic bipartisan scramble including Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, who allowed that “a Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat.” You don’t say! This is the same MAGA/GOP movement whose IRS just blessed partisan politicking from the pulpit and whose DHS quietly struck houses of worship from its “sensitive locations” list back in January: the self-styled defenders of Christendom who clutch their crosses at the prayer breakfast and then zip-tie a nurse holding a rosary. As one local official warned, if they’ll grab her, “even the best of us are not safe.” Somewhere, Jesus is flipping over a table.

— Geeky Science Alert! Want to outlive the billionaires? Turns out you should eat like a peasant. A new study written up over at StudyFinds — drawn from research in Cell Metabolism — finds that a mostly-plant “longevity diet” with a little fish, modeled on the old Mediterranean and Okinawan patterns, trimmed body fat and frailty, while the fashionable Western and keto diets did the opposite: more fat, more frailty, worse metabolic numbers all around. In other words, the beans-grains-olive-oil-and-sardines menu that kept Blue Zone grandmothers spry into their hundreds beats the influencer steak-and-butter regimen, and it does it without a single supplement bought from one of Bob Kennedy’s buddies. The through-line is the one your great-grandmother knew for free: eat the plants, skip the processed junk, and don’t let anyone sell you longevity in a bottle. The billionaires can keep the caviar.

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— There’s no longer any mystery about whose side the Supreme Court is on; the only mystery is why it bothers pretending otherwise. The Roberts Court has turned its so-called shadow docket — the emergency pipeline once reserved for death-row stays — into a drive-thru where Trump places an order and the six Republican justices hand it out the window, usually with no explanation and no signature. The Brennan Center counts more than thirty such applications since Trump returned to office, granted roughly 80% of the time, while George W. Bush and Obama combined asked for emergency relief eight times in sixteen years. Just this term the Court greenlit Texas’s racially rigged maps — over the objection of a Trump-appointed lower-court judge — and cleared the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians who’d registered, paid fees, and passed background checks. Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, warned we now live in a country where the government can “seize anyone who looks Latino.” Which, of course, is the entire point for the GOP’s white supremacists. Rep. Jamie Raskin has introduced the SHADOW Act to force the justices to simply show their work within seven days, a bill that wouldn’t be necessary if the Court hadn’t decided that explaining itself is beneath it…or it has something to hide. This is the same institution that gave us Citizens United and corporate “personhood,” the legal scaffolding that turned 45 years of Reaganomics into one-dollar-one-vote (my new book Who Killed The American Dream? The Greatest Crime Ever Told, out in a week, explains where this came from and how to fix it). The robes were always a costume. Now they’re not even bothering with the theater of impartiality or a concern for the Constitution shtick that Scalia and Rehnquist used to do so well…

— Somebody finally proposed making California’s 250 billionaires chip in, and you should hear them scream. Organizers announced Thursday that a one-time wealth tax has been officially certified for the November ballot, surviving a furious last-minute effort by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and an armada of billionaire money to strangle it before the deadline. The measure would levy a 5% tax on residents worth more than a billion dollars, raising an estimated $100 billion to plug the holes Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Medicaid cuts blew in the state’s health system, and it qualified with more than 1.6 million signatures, double what was needed. “The billionaire tax will be on the November ballot, and we intend to win,” said union spokesperson Debru Carthan. The opposition tells the story all by itself: Google co-founder Sergey Brin bankrolled competing initiatives and physically fled the state to dodge the levy, while a billionaire coalition has raised north of $100 million to confuse voters with copycat measures designed to cancel the real one out. Newsom — eyeing the White House in 2028 — reportedly wouldn’t even entertain a watered-down 2% version as he’s presumably planning to imitate Clinton and Obama and lean heavily on billionaire contributions (a situation that prevented even one single bankster prosecution for the bank-crash-and-theft of 2009 and the ACA handing our healthcare system off to massive insurance companies). As Rep. Ro Khanna put it, there are 250 billionaires right now in a state of 40 million people. Just between 2023 to 2025, the wealth of those Californians surged 144%, but they’re hysterical about coughing up 5% so the rest of the state can get healthcare. Forty-five years after Reagan promised the riches would trickle down, the people are simply asking to turn the faucet around…

— Senate Democrats noticed that traditional Medicare is the only insurance in America with no limit on what it can cost you, and decided to do something about it. Sen. Ron Wyden and 14 co-sponsors introduced legislation Thursday — the Medicare Cost Cap Act — to put a $5,000 annual ceiling on out-of-pocket spending for seniors in traditional Medicare. Right now, beneficiaries owe 20% of their medical bills with no upper bound, which means a cancer diagnosis or a long hospital stay can run into tens of thousands of dollars; that terror is precisely why 43% of enrollees shell out for separate Medigap policies whose premiums keep climbing each year. (As I document in shocking detail in The Hidden History of American Healthcare, that 20% hole was put in there by Southern conservatives to keep Black people from using the system.) Every other corner of the insurance world — employer plans, the ACA — already has a cap. Wyden framed the coming fight as Democrats trying to give Medicare patients “a fair shake” while the other side runs interference for billionaires, and Protect Our Care hailed it as a direct answer to the Trump-era affordability crisis. Yes, it would cost the Treasury real money — perhaps $50 billion a year — and yes, the bill is a long shot in this GOP-run Congress. But that’s the whole point: it draws the line in bright paint heading into November. Following Reagan’s old “Two Santas” strategy, a Republican-run government that found trillions for billionaire tax cuts suddenly developed a “steely concern for the deficit” the moment a middle class grandmother with cancer might benefit. That reflex, too, is a 45-year-old GOP inheritance…

— A federal judge just told Trump’s Justice Department to stop hiding the files on the woman who says Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Trump’s own former criminal-defense lawyer — to either release unredacted Epstein documents by July 2 or explain in court why he won’t. The order came in a suit by journalist Katie Phang, who accused Blanche of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act by publishing only about half of the six million pages the government holds, much of it blacked out. At issue are FBI notes from interviews with a South Carolina woman who told agents — over four separate sessions the Bureau found credible — that Epstein introduced her to Trump in the 1980s, when she was about 13, and he then forced her to perform oral sex on him and hit her when she bit him. Trump denies it. Remember the sequence: Trump spent much of last year leaning on Republicans to kill the Transparency Act, and only after it passed did his DOJ start slow-walking and redacting. Phang says Blanche now has to “put up or shut up.” Sullivan also ordered the department to produce a log of every redaction it’s made, which is the bare-minimum transparency the law already requires. For a White House that keeps insisting the files “totally exonerate” the President, they sure are fighting like hell to keep us from reading them…

— Trump’s mentor Vlad may be plotting a poke at NATO, and he’s picked the perfect moment, because the man in the Oval Office treats the alliance like a protection racket he resents paying into. Two countries on NATO’s eastern flank warned this week that Russia is preparing a “provocation” against the Baltics or Poland: not a full invasion, but a hybrid jab of missiles, drones, or sabotage designed to test whether the West will actually honor its mutual-defense pledge. Latvian intelligence said flatly that it sees indications Russia is “preparing military provocations against the Baltic countries or Poland.” The calculation is coldly logical: with Ukraine now landing deep-strike drones on Moscow and St. Petersburg, a cornered and humiliated Putin has every incentive to “roll the dice” on Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania to see if Article 5 still means anything, especially when he suspects Trump might shrug. And why wouldn’t he suspect that? This is a President who has spent years flattering and sucking up to Putin, virtually lick-shining his shoes in Helsinki and Alaska, trashing NATO, and turning American security guarantees into a giant question mark. The alliance holds its annual summit in Ankara this month under a cloud of doubt about U.S. commitment, doubts that Trump manufactured personally. Putin isn’t testing NATO’s resolve; he’s testing Trump’s, and he likes his odds…

— While Trump was busy feuding with Giorgia Meloni over a photo op, the woman actually positioned to end Meloni’s career was quietly building her case. Meet Elly Schlein — the 41-year-old socialist who leads Italy’s official opposition and whose Democratic Party smells blood after Meloni’s flagship rightwing judicial “reform” was crushed in a March referendum, with 54% of Italians voting no. Schlein counts Bernie Sanders, Brazil’s Lula, and Spain’s Pedro Sánchez among her allies, and she offers Italian voters a mirror-image of Meloni’s culture-war act. To Meloni’s trademark chant — “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a Christian!” — Schlein answers simply: “I am a woman. I love another woman.” Her real pitch, though, is bread-and-butter: the right crows about “traditional families” while gutting the kindergartens those families need. It’s working well enough that Meloni is reportedly weighing an early election for as soon as April, terrified her approval will keep sliding. The global right has always been better at coordinating than the global left because Trump, Meloni, Putin, Modi, Erdoğon, Orbán, and the rest treat each other as franchise partners. Schlein is betting Italy is ready to franchise something else…

— The hellscape currently broiling Europe is not weather, it’s a receipt for fifty years of lies from the fossil fuel industry. Scientists with the World Weather Attribution group reported Friday that the record heat dome roasting the continent is the most severe ever recorded there and would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change; as a result, the brutal nighttime temperatures are now made dramatically more likely than they were just two decades ago. Britain logged its hottest June day in history, 36.4°C (97.5°F) in Somerset, and nearly half of the 850 cities studied are enduring their worst-ever “heat stress,” the deadly combination of heat and humidity that defeats the body’s ability to cool itself by sweating. For scale: more than 60,000 Europeans died from heat in the summer of 2022, and Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average. UN climate chief Simon Stiell pinned it precisely on the world’s “addiction to burning coal, oil and gas.” The fossil-fuel barons knew all this decades ago and spent fortunes telling us it was a hoax, running the same playbook of privatized profit and socialized catastrophe that the tobacco and asbestos companies pioneered and Reagan’s deregulation perfected. The corpses are real now. The denial is still on the payroll to the GOP…

— Geeky Science Alert! The $300 ring you bought to fix your sleep may be the thing keeping you awake. Sleep researchers have a name for it — orthosomnia, coined back in 2017 at Rush University — and it describes exactly the trap the Washington Post just flagged: you obsess over a bad “sleep score,” the anxiety wrecks your actual sleep, the next score is worse, and around you go. Northwestern’s Dr. Sabra Abbott defines it as “an unhealthy or excessive concern with achieving the perfect sleep.” The cruel joke is that the wrist gadgets aren’t even measuring your brain: they’re guessing from motion and heart rate, and they routinely overstate how much you slept while flunking at detecting when you were awake. So the industry sells you a device that misreads your night, generates a number that frightens you, and then — naturally — has a premium subscription to help you cope. Capitalism found a way to monetize a function our ancestors performed for free with their eyes closed. The fix, doctors say, is radical: take the damn thing off…

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, delivered right to your inbox every morning at CommonwealthReport.news:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is out next week in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— Trump just handed America’s spy agencies to a man with no intelligence experience and no security clearance and that’s the whole point. With Tulsi Gabbard suddenly “stepping down,” Trump installed billionaire homebuilding nepo baby Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence, then delayed the Senate hearing for his actual nominee, Jay Clayton, just so the unqualified Pulte could get his hands on our voting data. This is the same Pulte who, running the federal housing agency, made a name for himself accusing Trump’s enemies — Letitia James, Adam Schiff — of “mortgage fraud.” A former deputy chief of the CIA’s Russia operations went on CNN and called him a political arsonist, and the arsonist showed up early to his first day reportedly eyeing hundreds of firings. Pulte will inherit the Fulton County ballots and voter rolls that Gabbard hauled out of Atlanta back in January; he can then selectively leak whatever he needs to “prove” the fraud that justifies purging more Black voters off the rolls. When this happens, it fits the larger play: Trump is holding FISA renewal hostage to his SAVE Act voter suppression bill and openly warning he’ll “be the last” Republican president if it doesn’t pass. After 45 years of Reaganomics hollowing out the middle class, the GOP can’t win on policy anymore. So they’ve stopped trying to change minds and started trying to change or openly suppress the electorate and Pulte proved at Housing that he is just the hit-man to do it.

— The head of the Justice Department cannot bring himself to tell a federal judge the truth in writing. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — formerly Trump’s personal criminal-defense lawyer — is refusing to commit on paper to Judge Leonie Brinkema that Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund is actually dead, preferring the slippery passive-voice dodge that it’s merely “not moving forward.” Analyst Scott MacFarlane summed up the lawyering on MS NOW as “all kinds of sus”: language built to leave wiggle room. Now even Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (who, unlike our Acting AG, manages to keep his story straight from one sentence to the next) says he’s got a slush-fund problem with Blanche heading into the confirmation fight. A man who treats candor as strictly optional is exactly the man you’d want running the Department of Justice if your actual goal was to weaponize it and use it against American democracy.

— Trump’s closest friend in Europe just learned the lesson everyone who has ever worked with him eventually learns: flatter the man-child or get smeared. Giorgia Meloni — the right-wing Italian prime minister who was the only European leader to show up for Trump’s 2025 inauguration — posted a video calling his claim that she “begged” him for a photo at the G7 is completely fabricated. Trump had told Italian TV she “wanted a picture with me so badly” and that he only obliged because he “felt sorry for her.” Meloni’s reply was withering: “Neither I nor Italy ever beg.” Her foreign minister promptly canceled a U.S. trip in protest. Watch the pattern, because it never changes: governing bores him, diplomacy bores him, the entire job is just a mirror that has to tell him he’s right 100% of the time, and anyone who won’t hold it steady, especially a woman, gets recast as weak, desperate, and begging. This is statecraft reduced to ego maintenance, and our closest allies are finally saying so out loud.

— Washington, D.C. just elected a democratic socialist mayor, and the pearl-clutchers are missing the point so completely it’s almost impressive. Janeese Lewis George swept the Democratic primary, making the nation’s capital the latest big city — after New York and Seattle — to pick a democratic socialist, which sent Fox “News” into its usual fainting spell about the Soviet Union. Spare us. Nobody is proposing gulags or breadlines. The “socialist” countries the right loves to wave around — the Scandinavians — aren’t socialist at all; they’re capitalist democratic republics that simply decided their citizens deserve healthcare, childcare, and a wage one can live on. That’s the entire pitch. Echoing New York’s Zohran Mamdani, Lewis George ran on one relentless message: everything costs too much and Trump is making it worse. She ran up the score in working-class Black neighborhoods and lost only the city’s wealthiest enclave. This is what 45 years of Reaganomics actually built: a middle class so gutted that “restore the safety net, the minimum wage, and the right to join a union” now gets branded as dangerous radical socialism. It isn’t radical or socialism. It’s just 1965, when the minimum wage was (in today’s dollars) around $15 and a third of us were union members, and voters remember it was a better time for most all but the morbidly rich (who “suffered” under a 90% top income tax rate).

— A scientist looked at Trump’s new research rule and said the quiet part right out loud: “the purpose of the rule is fascism.” That blunt verdict — from the Guardian’s reporting on researchers mobilizing against the administration’s planned rule — is simply the logical destination of the deceptively named “Restoring Gold Standard Science“ project, which hands political appointees the power to decide which findings get to count as real. Peel off the golden branding and what’s underneath is a machine for making inconvenient facts vanish on climate, vaccines, or anything else that might dent a donor’s bottom line. The American right has been at war with science since the Scopes monkey trial, but this proposed rule — that replaces scientists with political appointees to approve scientific research — is something new: not arguing with the results, but smashing the very tools that produce them. The bill comes due in cures that never get discovered, in America’s scientific edge handed to our competitors, in the talent already packing for Toronto. Destroy the instruments that measure reality, and you get to tell people that reality is whatever Dear Leader says it is. That’s not an accident of the policy. That is the policy.

— Good News Alert! Being out of shape may be deadlier than smoking and, believe it or not, that’s the cheerful part. A new Cambridge perspective paper in Frontiers in Nutrition argues that very low cardiovascular fitness is tied to roughly a 400% higher risk of death, dwarfing the roughly 50% bump you get from smoking. And here’s the genuinely good news buried in all that mortality data: fixing this is wildly easier than quitting cigarettes. A long, brisk walk every day and a few pushups in the morning, and you’re already doing more for your odds of living long and healthy than any nicotine patch ever managed. No superhuman willpower required. Just lace up your shoes and go.

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— Forty-five years of Reaganomics finally rolled off the assembly line this week with its crowning achievement: the world’s first trillionaire. When SpaceX shares hit the public markets in the largest IPO in human history, Elon Musk’s net worth sailed past one thousand billion dollars, a figure with so many zeroes you need a calculator to count them and a heart of solid granite to defend them. Back in 1981, Reagan promised that if we just showered the wealthy with tax cuts and stopped enforcing antitrust laws, the blessings would trickle down onto the rest of us. Forty-five years later, the trickle has arrived: one man now commands more money than most countries while the people who actually build his rockets and bolt together his cars are still scrapping for a living wage and desperately begging for a union. Within hours, calls went up for an aggressive wealth tax, with one campaigner noting that a fortune this size “requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression” as well as a tax code lovingly written by and for the man it enriches. The critics are right that trillionaires shouldn’t exist, and not out of envy: no human being earns a trillion dollars, they extract it, a dime at a time, from everyone standing below them. Musk didn’t break the system to get here. The system performed flawlessly, exactly as Reagan and the GOP’s billionaires designed it. The only question left is whether we keep calling this capitalism or finally admit it’s a just the 21st century version of a feudal estate with modern branding.

— The Trump administration has a bold new idea for Americans who can’t afford their medical bills: borrow the money from the very insurance company that’s already refusing to pay them. Under a White House proposal floated this week, cash-strapped patients would take out loans from their health insurers to cover the bills those same insurers helped inflate. It’s a scheme one Democratic congresswoman warned could “ruin people’s finances” while handing insurers a shiny new incentive to deny your care and then collect a fortune in interest on your desperation. I suppose we should admire the elegance of the GOP’s newest scam: the massive Republican donors win when you get sick, win again when you borrow, and win a third time when you default and they get a court to take away your house to repay your loan. That’s not a healthcare system that any other country in the world would recognize; it’s a payday-loan window with a stethoscope hanging in it. And before anyone wrings their hands about how we “simply can’t afford” something humane like Medicare for All, note that the Republican increase in Pentagon spending this year alone dwarfs the entire projected Social Security shortfall for 2034, which is the very “crisis” they keep invoking to justify gutting your retirement. We have bottomless money for missiles and putting Trump‘s name on everything, but not a nickel for Grandma’s knee replacement, and somehow the corporate media never quite finds the column inches to mention it. Forty-five years after Reagan taught us that government was the problem, we’ve finally built a GOP-run government that fulfills his claim.

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— It turns out the “Advantage” in Medicare Advantage belongs entirely to the insurance companies. A pair of reports from the HHS inspector general released this week found that the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage plans — UnitedHealthcare, CVS Health, and Humana — rejected prior-authorization requests for long-term and rehabilitative care at rates that, in some cases, sailed past 70 percent. Across the industry, denial rates for long-term care ran anywhere from 8 percent up to a jaw-dropping 80 percent, a spread the inspector general’s office found genuinely alarming, and one University of Pittsburgh health-policy professor called “quite staggering.” Here’s the detail that most clearly shows what a scam this is: when patients actually appealed, the plans reversed their own denials a remarkable 95 percent of the time, meaning that first “no” was wrong almost every single time anyone bothered to take the (considerable) time and effort necessary to challenge it. Medicare Advantage plans collect a flat fee per patient from our government and then pocket whatever they don’t spend on your stroke recovery or your shattered hip, which means saying “no” to your care is, quite literally, how they enrich their shareholders and pay their senior executives with their multi-million-dollar-a-year salaries. Nearly 20 million Americans are enrolled with just these three companies, most blissfully unaware that their “coverage” is engineered to refuse first and pay later, if ever. For-profit insurers, the report found, deny more than nonprofits, because of course they do. And all of them deny more than real Medicare, which doesn’t even do pre-clearance so it never denies anybody. This is what you get when you hand Wall Street the keys to Grandma’s hospital room: the corporation always wins, and the patient always loses.

— A federal judge just slammed the brakes — again — on Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for his violent, murderous cult members. This week, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema extended her block on the grandly titled “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a $1.8 billion pile of your money that Trump’s Justice Department invented to compensate “victims of weaponization,” a category that conveniently sweeps in the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, smeared shit on the walls, and killed four cops while trying to “hang Mike Pence.” The whole thing sprang from Trump’s preposterous $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his own tax returns (total tax bill $750), and even congressional Republicans gagged hard enough to force acting Attorney General (and Trump criminal defense lawyer) Todd Blanche to declare “we’re not moving forward with the fund, period.” But hold the champagne. As Reuters reports, Trump’s allies already have a Plan B teed up: funneling payouts to loyalists through the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act, which lets aggrieved insurrectionists file claims and lawsuits against the government and quietly settle out of court. “At my level, the fund is dead,” shrugged one senior DOJ official, all while leaving the back door propped wide open for the same money to stroll out a different exit. Hundreds of January 6th defendants have already filed their claims. With the Trump Crime Family and their shock troops, the grift doesn’t die; it just files an amended complaint.

— Nothing says “law and order” quite like masked federal agents tackling a man to the pavement at his kid’s preschool graduation while toddlers scream. That is precisely what unfolded in Baltimore this week, where ICE agents arrested two parents in the parking lot of Commodore John Rodgers Elementary School during a graduation ceremony as witnesses filmed and children wailed. The parents had their kids in the back seat when they were “ripped from the car,” according to Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson, and teachers rushed the children indoors to spare them the spectacle. A parent recording the scene can be heard shouting that the agents were on school property, a fact that registered not at all with these masked, murderous thugs who increasingly treat the Constitution as if it were merely a polite suggestion. Baltimore had passed an emergency ordinance barely a month ago barring federal agents from arrests at “sensitive locations” like schools; doing their best imitation of Putin’s secret police, ICE shredded it like confetti while spitting on the graves of the authors of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Mayor Brandon Scott condemned the raid as a “disturbing incident” and made plain this kind of enforcement isn’t welcome in his city, while Governor Wes Moore noted that terrorizing children at their own schools makes precisely no one safer. But safety was never the point for these fascists. The point is the fear: the theater of masked, unidentified, armed, uniformed men snatching parents in front of weeping four-year-olds and broadcasting it as a warning to every family in America. This is what a fascist secret police force looks like in its toddler-traumatizing phase.

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— Citizens United Alert! Maine’s Susan Collins — the senator who has elevated the furrowed brow of “deep concern” into performance art all while reliably voting however her biggest donors prefer — is mounting her reelection bid with the backing of nearly 100 billionaires. Her campaign has become an oligarchs’ support group project! Her opponent, Graham Platner, points out that his own operation runs on an average donation of $26 from actual human beings, even as corporate dark money floods into Maine to keep Collins right where the donor class wants her. This is the exact world five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court conjured when they ruled 5:4 in Citizens United that money is speech and corporations are people: sixteen years on, a hundred billionaires can simply buy a senator and call the receipt “democracy.” Concerned yet, Susan?

— Strange Alert! Our nation’s heroin addict health secretary, Bob Kennedy, is now actively cheering on clinics that inject autistic children — some as young as 18 months — with umbilical-cord stem cells in unapproved, unproven “treatments” that can run $20,000 a pop, occasionally after sedating the toddler with ketamine first. Desperate parents are promised near-miracles; what the FDA actually documented back in 2021 were reports of “blindness, tumor formation, infections” and worse. In sixteen months on the job, Kennedy has fired thousands of health officials, defunded $31 million in autism research, and waged open war on childhood vaccines, all while rolling out the welcome mat for the snake-oil salesmen he apparently regards as colleagues. The quack is coming from inside the house.

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— In eight days, the People’s House becomes a pay-per-view fight venue, and the symbolism is doing overtime. On June 14 — Flag Day, and not coincidentally Trump’s 80th birthday — promoter Dana White will bolt a UFC cage onto the South Lawn for “Freedom 250,” a seven-fight card sponsored by Crypto.com and Ram and headlined by Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje. There are no tickets for you or me. There are, however, $1.5 million VIP “sponsorship” packages for high rollers — one PR expert called it “pay-to-play dressed up as a birthday party” — with the President personally deciding which donors and allies get a seat, and Gulf money reportedly circling the way it circles everything in Trumpworld. Nobody’s sure where the money goes. Fighter Belal Muhammad looked at the guest list and compared it to The Hunger Games. Middleweight champ Sean Strickland says he was banned from the grounds for criticizing Trump and Netanyahu; apparently, he cracked, he’s not “Netanyahu-loving enough” for American Freedom 250. And just steps from the octagon sits the half-built ballroom whose corporate donors, a new Public Citizen report found, reaped more than $50 billion in fresh federal contracts in six months — Lockheed alone grabbed $43.8 billion — while their pending enforcement cases quietly got eased. That haul is larger than the entire GDP of Iceland. As watchdog Jon Golinger put it, these firms “aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts.” Forty-five years after Reagan taught Washington that government can become a vending machine for the rich, here’s the logical endpoint: blood sport on the lawn, billionaires in the skyboxes, and the rest of us watching the disgusting, Caligula-style spectacle in horror as millions of American children go hungry and lack healthcare or school lunches, all to pay for billionaire tax breaks.

— Fox “News” spent months hunting a Maine sexting story while ignoring a Texas crime spree, and that tells you everything. As Daily Kos lays out, the network treated Democrat Graham Platner’s consensual texting lapse — which he owned and his marriage worked through — as a national emergency, even mining old Reddit jokes for front-page outrage. Meanwhile Ken Paxton, the Texas AG and Republican Senate nominee, carries a 2015 securities-fraud indictment, a Texas House impeachment for bribery and abuse of office, a years-long FBI probe, a multimillion-dollar whistleblower settlement, and such awful serial adultery that his wife is now divorcing him “for Biblical reasons” — and seven Republican senators just co-hosted his fundraiser. Senator Roger Marshall explained that keeping the Senate majority makes Paxton “absolutely necessary.” One party forgives anything for power, including daily lies, convictions and adjudications for fraud and rape (Trump); the other puts its own candidates on trial before the voters even get a vote. And the seat Platner is fighting for is held by on-the-take Susan Collins, named among the nation’s most corrupt politicians; she’s the “concerned” moderate who cast the deciding vote for Brett Kavanaugh and the billionaire tax cut that gutted Medicaid and SNAP. Democrats and progressive media: stop doing the GOP’s oppo for free!

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— In the richest nation in human history, we have circled all the way back to pandemic-level hunger, on purpose. A new Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis finds “food insecurity” — hunger in America — back at levels not seen since the peak of COVID, driven by inflation at a three-year high and the SNAP and school lunch cuts Trump and congressional Republicans rammed through last summer, which stripped food aid from tens of millions. The Fed researchers describe “a remarkable increase in food insecurity,” concentrated among the poorest households and families with young children, even as the topline jobs numbers look fine. Household incomes are now falling year-over-year, collapsing fastest for the bottom 50% of us (who own 3% of the nation’s wealth while the top 1% own 38% of everything in America). So connect the dots from the story above: the same government writing $50 billion in contracts to ballroom donors is also deciding that hungry kids are a price worth paying for tax breaks for billionaires. That’s not a glitch in the system; after 45 years of Reaganomics, that is the system, working exactly as these GOP sociopaths designed it.

— The administration drew up plans to declare 2.7 million living Americans legally dead — and very nearly pulled it off. A 25-year Social Security executive, Jeremiah Schofield, has disclosed to the Senate that Musk’s DOGE crew schemed to dump 2.7 million living people — including U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, teenagers, and at least one widow collecting survivor benefits — into the federal “death master file.” If you’re on that file, your bank automatically closes your account (and no other bank can open one), no paychecks can be processed, you can’t get any government benefits or services, can’t fly, lose your drivers license and passport, and lose your home. The point was to prevent them from voting, freeze their bank accounts, stop their paychecks (processing requires an active SS number), and benefits so citizens would miss their vote this year or, if a legal alien, either “self-deport” or show up at a Social Security office where ICE could grab them. Agency lawyers warned it was flatly illegal; Schofield refused to do it, and says the call laying it out was the most disappointing of his career. But it’s entirely possible Trump will find somebody else to do it this October or November. For four decades the GOP has worked to “demolish” Social Security by starving and discrediting it while gutting our right to vote. This is the next stage: weaponizing Social Security’s most sacred database not to serve the living, but to erase them.

— For the first time in the internet’s history, bots now outnumber humans. Cloudflare reports that automated bots and AI agents have overtaken human web traffic — 57.4% bots to 42.6% humans worldwide, and a stunning 71.5% bots inside the United States. CEO Matthew Prince admitted the crossover “happened faster than I predicted,” years ahead of schedule. Odds are high that that person you’re arguing with on X or Facebook is actually a bot run by a rightwing-programmed AI program. The web that millions of us built is now mostly software talking to software, scraping the work of human creators for free to feed the next trillion-dollar AI valuation. We’ve seen this movie before: a thing the public makes gets quietly enclosed and monetized by the handful of oligarchs who own the pipes. The only question is whether anyone left is aware of the trend to notice.

— A heavily mutated COVID variant is spreading through 25 states right as Trump turns off the lights we use to see it. The BA.3.2 strain, nicknamed “cicada” because it lurked underground for years, carries mutations that help it dodge existing immunity and is showing up disproportionately in kids and teens. A Johns Hopkins virologist calls them “concerning mutations.” And the timing is almost too perfect: Trump’s budget slashes the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System from roughly $125 million to $25 million, with the money gone entirely after September 30. So at the exact moment a mutating virus needs watching, the early-warning maps go dark. We are about to fly blind into the next wave, not by accident, but by line item dictated by the Trump regime. And it’s not just COVID: they monitor for dozens of diseases, including bird flu, measles, polio, etc. As one fascism scholar warned back when Bob Kennedy first started canceling vaccine meetings: a sick population is an easier population to manage.

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— Crazy Alert! The man who spent four years sneering about “Sleepy Joe” appears to have nodded off and started mumbling during his own 3 p.m. Oval Office event this week, a clip the press promptly dubbed “Commander-in-Sleep” as it went viral. Recall the years of stopwatch journalism over Biden’s gait and pauses? Jake Tapper’s near hysteria? Funny how the same outlets, handed footage of a tilting, drifting 80-year-old president, suddenly discover the virtue of looking away.

— Cult Alert! Trump bought his entire Cabinet matching $145 black Florsheim dress shoes — without bothering to ask their sizes — and aides told the Wall Street Journal they’re afraid not to wear them. To test the depth of their slavish devotion, a Slate writer walked ten miles in a pair and shredded his feet into “misshapen blisters.” Marco Rubio was caught on film swimming in oversized clompers, mocked on the floor by Rep. Sara Jacobs, and gamely insisted they “fit fine.” This is the same Cabinet that, per a new analysis, pathetically praises the boss roughly once every six sentences. As the Slate writer concluded: the emperor may have no clothes, “but he does have Florsheims.” And his ministers will mangle their own feet to prove their groveling, lickspittle status.

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— Jared Kushner wants to make Tehran the next Trump Tower, and you’re paying for it. Buried inside the emerging US–Iran memorandum of understanding to end Trump’s catastrophic Iran war is a quiet little provision that should make every American taxpayer howl: a $300 billion postwar “investment fund” that the United States would help “facilitate” to rebuild the country we just finished bombing. And whose bright idea was it to shovel hundreds of billions of dollars into Iranian reconstruction? Per The New York Times via Mediaite, the concept reportedly emerged from Trump’s Mideast envoy billionaire Steve Witkoff and son-in-law billionaire Jared Kushner, two real estate developers who, according to mediators, had floated “promoting real estate projects in Tehran” as part of the package. So let’s get this straight: Trump bombs Iran, Americans pay $59 billion in extra gas costs for the privilege, and then Jared and Steve get to develop the Tehran Riviera with our tax dollars while the family takes its 20%. After 45 years of Reaganomics hollowing out the American middle class so the morbidly rich can stuff their pockets, this is the natural next step: outsourcing the grift to Persian Gulf oligarchs and Iranian mullahs. The mullahs get cash, Jared gets ground-floor real estate, and you get to keep paying $5 a gallon. Welcome to the Trump Doctrine.

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— A federal judge just told Trump he can’t pay himself $1.8 billion of your money — at least not yet. In a refreshing breath of judicial sanity, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema temporarily blocked the Trump administration from spending a dime out of its “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush bucket Trump conjured up by settling his own $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Seriously. The President of the United States sued the federal government, then — as President — settled the case against himself, and the “settlement” requires the federal government to pay him and his designated “victims” nearly $2 billion of your money. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington aptly called it “a jaw-dropping act of presidential corruption.” Even more deliciously, AG nominee Todd Blanche wouldn’t rule out that January 6th rioters who assaulted Capitol police could collect from this fund, turning cop-beaters, cop-killers, and wannabe VP assassins into federally-compensated “victims.” Two Capitol officers who actually defended democracy on January 6th have already sued. Judge Brinkema, a Clinton appointee, scheduled a June 12 hearing. Let’s hope she sees this for what it is: the most brazen self-dealing scheme an American president has ever attempted.

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— Boom for the banksters, bust for everybody else: this is what 45 years of Reaganomics looks like. This week brought the perfect split-screen of American oligarchy. On one screen, the WSJ reports that the nation’s largest banks are “raking in profits” as Trump’s chaos roils the markets, because while you panic, JPMorgan and Goldman trade. Volatility is their oxygen. On the other screen, Americans are drowning under $1.25 trillion in credit-card debt at an average 21% interest rate — up from 14.6% just four years ago — with 5.6% of cardholders now 60-plus days delinquent. Translation: working families are borrowing at loan-shark rates from the same banks posting record profits, then falling behind, while Jamie Dimon collects another $39 million bonus. When asked if the financial stress on Americans factored into ending his Iran war, Trump said, with characteristic empathy, “not even a little bit.” This is exactly the K-shaped economy Reagan promised in 1981 when he sold America on trickle-down: the top of the K soars on the backs of the bottom. Forty-five years in, the only thing trickling down is credit card interest.

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— Republicans, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that dying younger is a form of liberty. A striking new study in Nature Human Behaviour by researchers Elizabeth Elder and Neil O’Brian finds that conservatives in America didn’t used to have worse health outcomes than liberals, but starting in the 2010s, they suddenly did, and the gap is widening. The reason? Republicans are increasingly avoiding doctors, refusing vaccines, and ignoring medical advice, and the mortality data prove it. Even excluding COVID deaths, conservative Americans are now dying earlier than their liberal neighbors. And it gets worse: KFF polling found that 81% of Republicans trust Bob Kennedy’s health advice as much as they trust their own doctors, a jaw-dropping endorsement of a brain-wormed conspiracy theorist lawyer who thinks vaccines cause autism and raw milk cures everything. The conservative counterargument, of course, will be: “Personal freedom! We don’t trust Big Pharma!” Fine. But personal freedom doesn’t repeal biology, and when Fox News tells Grandpa that the measles vaccine is a Jewish space-laser plot, Grandpa dies of measles. Republicans are literally killing their own voters faster than Democrats can register new ones. As a long-term electoral strategy, this seems… suboptimal.

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— Brooke Rollins, the Marie Antoinette of Big Macs, says starving Americans are “moving into the American Dream.” Agriculture Secretary and multimillionaire Brooke Rollins this week celebrated kicking 4.3 million Americans off SNAP food assistance by proclaiming that the newly-hungry are “moving into the American Dream.” As one expert dryly responded: unless the administration has redefined the American Dream as “losing the help your family needs to afford groceries,” she may have her metaphors confused. On the very same day, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a stunning analysis documenting a “remarkable increase in food insecurity” across America, with 10% of households now reporting they don’t have enough food, up from 4% in 2020. More Americans are going hungry today than at the height of the COVID pandemic. Food banks are slammed. Kids are skipping meals. And the woman in charge of feeding America is on TV gushing that they’re living the dream. After 45 years of Reaganomics teaching Republicans that compassion is weakness and cruelty is policy, this is what you get: a wealthy Cabinet secretary literally telling hungry children that hunger is freedom. Orwell couldn’t have written it sharper.

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— Speaking of starving the poor to feed the rich: Trump just handed Corporate America another $40 billion tax-dodge gift. While Brooke Rollins was busy explaining how empty refrigerators build character, the Treasury Department was quietly carving new loopholes into the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, that 15% floor that was supposed to stop companies like FedEx and T-Mobile from paying negative tax rates. Treasury Secretary billionaire Scott Bessent’s interim guidance notices will let America’s largest corporations dodge an estimated $40 billion in taxes over the coming years, on top of the $1 trillion in tax breaks Republicans already shoveled to corporations and their oligarch owners in last summer’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” As one House Democrat put it: “While working Americans struggle to put food on the table, Trump has found another way to cut costs for the ultra-wealthy. Same story, different day.” Even the conservative Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is screaming foul. Forty-five years ago, Reagan promised that slashing corporate taxes would unleash a tidal wave of prosperity for working Americans. Forty-five years later, corporate profits are at record highs, wages have flat-lined, and the only thing trickling down is Brooke Rollins telling you that going hungry is patriotic.

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— Say What?!?Alert! The Pentagon has issued a fatwa: no fatties at the President’s birthday cage match. In what may be the most surreal news item of the entire Trump 2.0 era, Mediaite reports that the Pentagon is scrambling to recruit hundreds of service members to fill the seats at Trump’s “UFC Freedom 250” cage-fighting extravaganza on the White House South Lawn on June 14, a date which, by sheer coincidence, happens to be Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. But not just any troops. According to internal Air Force memos, eligible attendees “MUST MEET CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO” — specifically, a ratio less than 0.55 — and “current physical fitness standard,” and will appear in short-sleeve dress uniforms. Oh, and they have to pay their own travel costs. One internal Facebook post bluntly described the policy as “no fatties at UFC White House event.” Because nothing says “support our troops” like demanding they audition based on waistline and then making them buy their own bus ticket to your birthday party. But wait — it gets even better. HuffPost reported yesterday that on March 25th, Trump quietly purchased between $15,001 and $50,000 of stock in TKO Group Holdings, UFC’s parent company: the very same company whose event he is now using the White House, the military, and the presidential bully pulpit to promote. As CREW’s Jordan Libowitz put it: “one of the worst conflicts of interest you could imagine.”

So to recap this week’s grift: Trump bombs Iran so Jared can flip Tehran condos, sues the IRS to give himself $1.8 billion, lets corporations dodge $40 billion, kicks 4.3 million hungry Americans off food stamps, and orders the Pentagon to bus skinny soldiers to his birthday party so he can pump the stock he just bought. If this isn’t peak banana republic, I don’t know what is. Pass the popcorn — but only if your waist-to-height ratio is under 0.55.

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— Why doesn’t anybody mention that Trump himself is the biggest recipient of his “settlement” $1.776 billion fund? The New York Times exposed this in an article with the headline “With Trump’s Deal, a Possible $100 Million I.R.S. Penalty Melts Away.” Back in 2010, the IRS busted him for allegedly claiming a deduction for his failing Chicago tower twice, a crime, and has been trying to collect around $100 million (plus interest) from him ever since. But this new Thug Fund will eliminate all claims against him, his kids, and his “affiliated entities” and businesses, for all past, present, and future times. So he gets to keep the $100 million (plus interest). And the media — other than that one reference in the Times — seems to have completely ignored it. Where’s the outrage? Can you imagine what would happen if Obama had tried to give himself $100 million out of our Treasury?

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— America is officially traumatized, and the diagnosis is in. Robert Reich, writing at Raw Story this week, points out what every therapist, primary care physician, and exhausted spouse already knew: we are a nation with full-blown PTSD. The American Psychological Association now reports that 76 percent of Americans cite the future of the country as their leading source of stress, outpacing the economy, work, and money. As Reich notes, “anxiety has moved from being a psychological disorder to becoming part of a seemingly natural order.” After 45 years of Reaganomics gutting job security, shredding the safety net, and concentrating wealth at the top — followed by a decade of Trumpism’s daily firehose of cruelty, corruption, and constitutional vandalism — the American nervous system has simply checked out. Marriages are postponed, births are falling, and pharmacy shelves groan under the weight of antidepressants and stomach pills. The Founders wrote in the Preamble that the goal of the rule of law outlined in the Constitution is there to “ensure domestic tranquility.” That bargain has been broken by a strongman who promised to fix the anxiety and instead became its single largest source.

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— Welcome to the Golden Era, where six in ten Americans can’t afford lunch. A grim new New York Times analysis finds that 61 percent of Americans are cutting back at the grocery store — skipping the meat, downgrading the produce, swapping name brands for generics, and in some cases just skipping meals — while a companion interactive Times piece lays out exactly what Trump’s Iran war is costing every American household at the pump and on the dinner plate. Brent crude is hovering around $110 a barrel, gas has rocketed from $2.98 to over $4, and diesel — the lifeblood of every truck hauling lettuce from California to your Safeway — is up more than 45 percent. The American Enterprise Institute, hardly a leftist outfit, estimates that gas alone will cost the average household an extra $550 by the end of September. Trump, who once promised to lower prices on Day One, shrugged this off as “a small price to pay” for doing whatever it was that Netanyahu wanted him to do to Iran. But the cost of groceries and gas is no big deal for the guy who’s golfed 21 percent of his second term on the taxpayer dime, had a chauffeur since he was a toddler, and always had the maid do the shopping. It’s far more problematic, though, for the family rationing pizza to pay for the war he started.

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— The Trump administration tried to ban voting machines in half the country, and we’re only finding out now. A bombshell Reuters investigation, summarized at the New Republic, reveals that White House adviser Kurt Olsen — whose actual job is finding ways to retroactively prove Trump’s stolen-election fantasies — spent last year pushing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to declare Dominion Voting Systems software a “national security risk” in order to force 27 mostly blue states into hand-counting ballots, which would have slowed down returns and produced chaos in those states. The plan only collapsed because Lutnick’s team couldn’t manufacture even a fig leaf of justification. There is, of course, zero evidence that any voting machine has been hacked in recent days. But why let facts get in the way? The same administration sued and raided the Fulton County, Georgia election office in December, and has filed lawsuits demanding voter rolls from more than 30 states. The Trump/GOP strategy is transparent: poison the well in advance so that any Republican loss in November can be declared fraudulent on cue, and then they can refuse to seat in the House any Democrat from a “fraudulent” district next January. This isn’t election security. It’s a slow-motion coup with paperwork.

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— Marco Rubio is about to inherit a starved island, and he’s calling it a legacy. The Guardian reports that Secretary of State Rubio — the Cuban-exile hardliner who built his entire career on the dream of toppling Havana — is now days or weeks away from achieving it through what his own staff calls a “starvation campaign.” One former Rubio chief of staff told reporters that regime change would be “the capstone of his political career.” Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Cubans rallied at the U.S. Embassy in Havana on Friday, as the government distributes evacuation maps and stages civil-defense drills. “Cuba is a small and poor country, but one with experience confronting US imperialism,” said lawmaker Mariela Castro, daughter of Raúl. Trump, never one to dial down the menace, floated a “friendly takeover” in February — the same word “friendly” he used about Venezuela right before Maduro was hauled off. We’ve seen this movie before. It opens with sanctions, builds through CIA cables and oil embargoes, and ends with body bags. Forty-five years of Reaganomics taught us nothing about Latin American adventurism; apparently, neither did sixty years of Cuba policy.

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— If you wanted a green card, the new rule is: leave the country to get it. On Friday afternoon — the timing was not accidental — USCIS quietly issued a memo requiring nearly all green card applicants already inside the United States to pack up and finish their applications from their home countries. Mediaite reports the new rule guts the “adjustment of status” process used by 820,000 of the 1.4 million people who got green cards in 2024: the spouses of American citizens, the H-1B engineers, the farm workers, the nurses. USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler insists the policy will stop people “incentivizing loopholes.” Translation: “Since the law changed in 1965 and we ended racial immigration quotas, the majority of immigrants are not white people, and that’s all the Trump administration wants to come into the US. Too many Black and Brown people have already arrived, and it’s time for them to leave.” Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS analyst now at Third Way, warned the New York Times that the already-overburdened consular system “could have families separated for months or years.” Years. Of separation. By design. Stephen Miller’s white supremacist project to ethnically re-engineer the country runs faster every week, and the courts are the only thing left standing between a child in Pittsburgh and a parent stranded in Karachi.

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— Trump, acting like a 10-year-old bully, posted an AI video of himself beating up Stephen Colbert and throwing him in a dumpster. The White House posted it too. As Mediaite documented, the president of the United States — and then the official @WhiteHouse account, with the chipper caption “Bye-bye 👋” — distributed a fake clip showing Trump physically assaulting the Late Show host just hours after Colbert’s emotional final episode with Paul McCartney. Earlier that morning, Trump posted that other late-night hosts would “soon follow” and added: “May they all Rest in Peace!” Amazing: if you posted that about Trump, you’d probably get booted off a social media channel and possibly have a visit from the Secret Service. The president of the United States is publicly fantasizing — in AI-rendered video, on official White House channels — about violence against a private citizen who told jokes about him. And this is the same administration attempting to jail James Comey for posting a picture of seashells. The asymmetry isn’t a glitch; it’s the entire system. In an autocracy, the strongman’s violent fantasies are policy, and the citizen’s beach photo is a federal crime.

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— So the bombs, the dead Iranians, the smashed cities, and the trillions in regional chaos were all just a PR campaign? Like something to redirect our attention? That’s essentially what Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox “News” Thursday night when he bragged in a senior moment that the entire push to seize Iran’s enriched uranium — the ostensible casus belli for the deadly bombing campaign that’s killed so many children and 15 Americans — is, in his own words, “more for public relations than it is for anything else.” Bloomberg captured the moment while Trump was conveniently in Beijing, far from any uncomfortable reporters who might ask why he started a war over nuclear material he now says he doesn’t really need. The estimated 400 kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium are buried under the rubble of the sites he bombed, and the U.S. has nine satellite cameras watching the rubble around the clock. So why did Americans bleed and pay for this war? Two unflattering possibilities: this is the Trump “get out of the Epstein jail free” card — wave a shiny mushroom cloud and pray the country forgets the stories from then-13-year-old girls accusing him of rape — or it’s Trump’s quiet capitulation that he never understood what Bibi Netanyahu and Marco Rubio talked him into. Most likely, of course, it’s both. Either way, somewhere Bibi is smiling and Vladimir Putin — Trump’s mentor in the art of bombing first and lying later — is taking notes for the next time he wants his orange toady to do something stupid.

— Pete Hegseth, the cable-news weekend host with drinking and infidelity problems and a Signal habit, has now blindsided his own Pentagon by canceling the deployment of 4,000 American troops to Poland, the country Trump himself just called a “model ally.” No notice to NATO, no notice to Congress, no notice apparently even to the building Hegseth supposedly runs but is now apparently being directed by Russia. As Politico reported, one stunned defense official said flatly, “We had no idea this was coming,” while Pentagon staff spent the next 24 hours frantically working phones across Europe trying to figure out which ally gets stabbed in the back next. This follows Hegseth yanking 5,000 troops out of Germany earlier this month after Chancellor Friedrich Merz had the temerity to suggest Trump’s ridiculous Iran adventure was making the United States look, well, ridiculous. The Poland-destined troops were already arriving — equipment unloaded, deployment underway — when the order to halt came down. So why is the United States humiliating one of its most loyal allies, at the exact moment Russia is rebuilding its army on Poland’s eastern border? Easy: Putin has wanted American troops out of Eastern Europe for 25 years, and his terrified lickspittle in the Oval Office is delivering. Coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of strategic gift that would appear on Putin’s birthday list, right between “destabilize NATO” and “humiliate Warsaw.” Hmmm, why indeed?

— The Trump administration is now openly preparing to indict 94-year-old Raul Castro, and if you’ve been watching the Putin Doctrine playbook, you already know how this movie ends, too. Reuters broke the news Thursday that Trump’s corrupt DOJ is preparing charges against Fidel’s brother over Cuba’s 1996 shootdown of the “Brothers to the Rescue” planes, with one official describing the indictment as “imminent.” The script should look familiar: in January, Trump indicted Maduro, then bombed Caracas, then kidnapped him, then handed Venezuela’s oil to American donors. Now the same playbook is apparently being dusted off for Havana. Trump warned back in March that Cuba “is next” after Venezuela, and Marco Rubio — whose parents left Cuba two full years before Castro came to power, but has nonetheless spent his entire career pretending to be a Cuban refugee child — appears to be driving the bus. CIA Director John Ratcliffe even slipped into Havana Thursday to deliver the diplomatic equivalent of a ransom note: engage on “economic security” by letting wealthy American businessmen to take over Cuban companies and resorts or get the Maduro treatment. So is Cuba about to become America’s newest Trump colony? Or, given that Trump keeps musing about Canada as the 51st state, Greenland as a U.S. possession, and Panama as our birthright, does Havana get the consolation prize of becoming the 52nd? Either way, the Castro family must be having the same conversation Maduro had right before the special forces showed up at the Miraflores Palace. Watch the Florida Straits.

— In what may be the most spectacular self-own of the week, Trump told Sean Hannity that America needs 500,000 Chinese student visas and that the Chinese Communist Party should be allowed to buy American farmland. This from the man whose entire 2024 campaign was built on the premise that China is eating our lunch, stealing our jobs, and grooming our children through TikTok because the Democrats are “weak.” As Mediaite documented, Hannity actually tried to throw him a lifeline, noting that Beijing would never let Americans buy land near a Chinese military installation. Trump shrugged it off and defended the farmland sales anyway, because the GOP donors who own massive factory farms matter more than the American people. The MAGA Twittersphere immediately had a collective aneurysm: influencer Mike Cernovich howled, “Has China defeated our country?” while Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott vowed her state’s laws would block any such purchases. These are, as one of his own ghostwriters whined, “95-5 issues” inside MAGA world. The most charitable interpretation: Trump, freshly humiliated and out-negotiated by Xi Jinping at this week’s Beijing summit, came home parroting his host’s talking points. The less charitable interpretation: 45 years of Reaganomics have produced a Republican Party so utterly captured by agribusiness, fossil fuel, and big banks that even the supposedly America-first president now reads from Wall Street’s China-friendly script. Either way, the body double theory is starting to look less crazy.

— JD Vance — Yale Law graduate, venture capitalist, couch-lover, and current Vice President of the United States — has officially rolled out the GOP’s 2026 update of Ronald Reagan’s Black “welfare queen”: she now drives a Lamborghini. Speaking to a MAGA crowd in Bangor, Maine — chosen because Gov. Janet Mills dared to stand up to Trump — Vance asked the audience, as Daily Kos recounted, why “people driving Lamborghinis” are pulling down low-income housing assistance and food stamps. He had no example. None. Not one Linda Taylor who, as Josh Levin demonstrated in his 2019 book The Queen, was the one-off serial fraudster Reagan turned into a national caricature to slander every Black welfare recipient in America. Vance also told the same audience that dead people are voting for Democrats and getting food stamps, a remark that drew laughter, though it shouldn’t have, because the federal SNAP eligibility rules cap household assets at $2,750. If you own a $250,000 Italian sports car, you do not, in fact, qualify for food stamps. But Vance isn’t trying to win an argument; he’s manufacturing resentment and hate so Trump’s billionaire Cabinet can finish gutting SNAP, Medicaid, and federal housing assistance to pay for the next round of tax cuts for people who actually do own Lamborghinis. The welfare queen rides again, this time inside JD Vance’s fevered Hillbilly Elegy imagination.

— Speaking of billionaires hunting the social safety net, they just notched their biggest scalp yet. On May 11, former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin — a Yale-educated corporate lawyer backed by Wall Street — won the Connecticut Democratic Party’s endorsement against 14-term Rep. John Larson, the ranking Democrat on the House Social Security Subcommittee and author of the Social Security 2100 Act. That bill — co-sponsored by nearly 90% of House Democrats — would expand benefits for the first time in over 50 years by lifting the FICA cap on income above $400,000, so that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison would finally pay into Social Security like the rest of us instead of finishing their annual contributions by 12:15 a.m. on January 1st. Naturally, billionaires loathe the bill, and they’ve poured shadowy outside money into Bronin’s challenge, as Social Security Works’ Alex Lawson detailed in Common Dreams. Larson, who grew up in the Mayberry Village housing project in East Hartford, called the August 11 primary “Mayberry against Greenwich,” the perfect frame for what is in fact a referendum on whether ordinary Americans get to keep the one program that lifts 22 million people out of poverty, or whether Wall Street finally cracks Social Security’s $2.7 trillion trust fund open and starts feeding it to BlackRock and Citadel. Pay attention to Connecticut’s First District this summer because if the billionaires can pick off Larson, they can pick off any Democrat standing between Goldman Sachs and your retirement check.

— You Just Can’t Make This Up Alert: As Hantavirus Threat Grows, Trump Turns to a Penile Implant Expert to Reassure America. The Trump official Bob Kennedy trotted out this week to calm Americans fears about the growing hantavirus scare is a urologist whose medical specialty is penile implants and who hosted a YouTube show called Erection Connection. That is not a typo. CNN’s KFile revealed Friday that Admiral Brian Christine, MD, the Assistant Secretary for Health and now the public face of America’s infectious disease response, came directly from a private penis-assistance practice in Alabama with no public health background, but plenty of COVID vaccine skepticism, plenty of election-denial commentary, and plenty of conspiracy theories tying George Soros and the World Economic Forum to the pandemic lockdowns. He stood at a podium in Omaha this week and promised a response “grounded in science.” From the man whose previous claim to fame was a media brand built on erectile dysfunction. So when your loved ones ask why the country is staring down its third major infectious-disease scare in a decade with a phallic-surgery enthusiast at the helm of HHS’ pandemic response, just tell them what Kennedy’s boss tells his cabinet officers when reality intrudes: “It’s going to be better than you could ever believe.” Or, as my late mother might have said: G-d help us.

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— Donald Trump just openly threatened to nuke Iran on national television. Asked Thursday whether the ceasefire with Tehran still held, our stable genius president told reporters that, without one, you’d just see “one big glow coming out of Iran.” That isn’t a slip: that’s a sitting U.S. president casually musing about committing a massive war crime involving nuclear weapons. The National Iranian-American Council asked the obvious follow-up: whether this man is mentally fit to make decisions affecting millions of lives. Meanwhile, a confidential CIA assessment delivered to the White House this week concludes that Iran can outlast Trump’s Hormuz blockade for 90 to 120 days at minimum, has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile inventory, and has reopened almost all of its underground weapons storage. Iranian retaliatory strikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures at U.S. military sites across the Middle East, far more than Trump or Pete Hegseth have publicly admitted. And as ex-Undersecretary Richard Stengel pointed out on MS NOW, the bombshell wasn’t the report itself but the fact that it blindsided Trump’s own White House. Forty-five years of Reaganomics and grievance politics have produced a Republican Party that confuses chest-thumping with strategy. Now its Dear Leader is hurtling toward an oil-crisis cliff at the end of the month with one hand on a nuclear threat button he doesn’t even begin to understand and the other on a phone tweeting about butterflies falling beautifully into the sea. Vladimir Putin, watching Trump rattle nuclear threats while his own CIA reports the war is already lost, must be sleeping like a baby.

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— GOP-dominated courts have decided that “voting” is now optional. This is the start of the fascist/Republican takeover of America. On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to throw out a voter-approved congressional redistricting referendum on procedural grounds after voters had already passed the thing. Trump celebrated. Democracy Docket called it a terrifying moment: a court canceling an election after the fact. Republican-led states like Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee now are perfectly free — just like during Jim Crow — to gerrymander aggressively at Trump’s personal request, but when Virginia’s voters tried to fight back, four state justices invented a paperwork problem to stop them. Two of those four are up for reappointment by the legislature within two years. Religious-violence scholar Thomas Lecaque didn’t mince words: he warned this trajectory could lead us to a second civil war. And in Tennessee, GOP Gov. Bill Lee just signed a map dismantling the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, prompting the NAACP to file an emergency petition calling it a direct attack on democracy. The new rule of American politics, based on the cruel, racist politics of six corrupt members of the Supreme Court is now simple: Republicans are free to do whatever they want, and Democrats are free to do whatever Republicans permit. Having gutted the middle class, the GOP is unable to win on policy so they’ve stopped pretending to try.

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— Sam Alito’s voting-rights ruling was based on data Pam Bondi’s DOJ apparently cooked. When the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais last week, Justice Alito assured America that Black voter turnout had exceeded white turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. This was proof, he claimed, that the discrimination the VRA was designed to fight had finally evaporated. As the Brennan Center and the Guardian have now shown, that line was lifted almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Trump’s Justice Department, and it depends on phony junk methodology that calculates turnout against the entire over-18 population, including non-citizens and people with felony convictions who legally cannot vote. Use the methodology experts actually use, and Black turnout in Louisiana exceeded white turnout in only one of those five elections: 2012. The two years Alito cherry-picked were 2008 and 2012, the two times Barack Obama was on the ballot. Roberts pulled the same slick trick to claim there’s no more racism in America in Shelby County back in 2013. This right-wing Court isn’t reading evidence; it’s writing the conclusion first and then shopping the DOJ or 17th century witch-burning judges for numbers or examples that fit. And Roberts apparently has the gall to whine that it hurts his feelings when people call his Court partisan. Save the tears, Mr. Chief Justice; save them for the millions of Black voters whose ballots your project just helped the Confederate states dilute.

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— A billionaire is reportedly negotiating with Trump over which CNN anchors he should fire. Two press freedom groups — the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders — filed with Delaware a demand on Thursday for Paramount Skydance’s internal records, citing reports that Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, who’s bankrolling the Paramount/Warner Brothers Discovery merger with his nepo-baby son, told White House officials he’d “implement the CBS playbook” at CNN if regulators wave his deal through. Translation: axe the anchors Trump hates — Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar were the names floated — and run the newly-rightwing CBS’s 60 Minutes on CNN’s air as a kind of pro-Trump-regime consolation prize. We’ve already watched the CBS version of this. Days after Stephen Colbert called Paramount’s settlement of a bogus Trump lawsuit a “big fat bribe,” CBS canceled The Late Show. High-profile reporters have walked, ratings have crashed, and now they want to do it again at CNN. This is what state-aligned media looks like in real time: billionaires offering up newsrooms as personal favors to a corrupt neofascist president who, like Stalin and Hitler, calls journalism “the enemy of the people.” The First Amendment was not supposed to come with an unless Trump complains clause.

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— ICE apparently just murdered a man in custody and we only know because a witness refused to be silenced. In January, Cuban immigrant Geraldo Lunas Campos died in a Texas ICE facility. The Trump administration immediately ruled it an attempted suicide. But a fellow detainee, identified by Zeteo only as “Texas” for his protection, tells a very different story. He and roughly nine other detainees in the adjacent room could hear Campos repeatedly begging for his medication, then officers entering the room and grabbing him. The last words “Texas” says he heard from Campos were that he was being choked. Days later, an ICE officer reportedly threatened him for talking, then made good on the threat by relocating him to another facility. He has yet to be interviewed by a single law enforcement official. This is exactly what authoritarian regimes like Russia (Trump‘s role model) do: they detain people without due process, kill some of them in custody, and silence the witnesses. The only thing standing between us and the full version of that picture right now is the courage of one man who decided he wasn’t going to keep quiet and the journalists at Zeteo willing to publish him. Remember their names when this is over.

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— Forget corporate Democrat Rahm Emanuel: Maine’s Graham Platner is what the future of the Democratic Party actually looks like. Robert Reich makes the case at Common Dreams that the corporate-funded Democratic establishment desperately wants you to believe nominating recycled triangulators like Emanuel is the route back to power. Maine voters say otherwise. Platner — a Marine with four combat tours, an oyster farmer who’d never held an office higher than town harbormaster — is running for the Senate seat Susan Collins has occupied since 1997, and his viral August launch raised $1 million in its first nine days. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ruben Gallego, Martin Heinrich, Ro Khanna, and Reich himself have endorsed him (you can include me on that list, too). Schumer’s hand-picked alternative, Gov. Janet Mills, was forced out of the primary entirely. Platner’s pitch is the one establishment Democrats have refused to make for 45 years: that the real enemy isn’t the other party: it’s the oligarchy itself, the billionaires who fund both sides, and the politicians (Collins very much included) who sell out their voters to keep getting paid. That’s the lesson the DNC has been refusing to learn since 1992. You don’t beat fake populism by running corporate cardboard. You beat it with the real thing.

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— While the FAA was collapsing, the Transportation Secretary was filming a reality show. Former B-lister reality TV and Fox star Sean Duffy revealed Friday on Fox & Friends — the same way he announces most things — that he and his wife, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy, spent seven months shooting a road-trip reality program called The Great American Road Trip while he was, in theory, running the Department of Transportation. The corporate sponsors are a cabinet ethics nightmare laid out in a press kit: Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Google, Comcast, and United Airlines, meaning the airlines and defense contractors he’s supposed to regulate were paying him to bring their cameras on family vacations. This is the same Sean Duffy who presided over historic air traffic controller shortages and a government shutdown that forced 13,000 controllers to work without pay, with 10-percent flight reductions at the country’s 40 busiest airports. People nearly died this winter because his agency couldn’t keep towers staffed while he spent more than half his cabinet tenure shooting infomercials for the industries he’s supposed to be regulating. In any functioning government, this would be a forced resignation by Monday morning. In Trump’s America, it’s a Friday Fox segment with the kids.

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— Ted Cruz just admitted out loud what Republicans have been whispering about Social Security for 50 years. At the Milken Institute’s billionaire-studded global conference in California this week, the Texas senator dropped what he himself called the “dirty little secret” of the GOP’s so-called Trump Accounts: they’re a Trojan horse for Social Security privatization. Cruz waxed nostalgic about 50 years of conservatives trying — and failing — to get their hands on payroll tax revenue, lamented the collapse of George W. Bush’s 2005 privatization push, and predicted that within five years, parents will demand to divert their Social Security contributions into Wall Street-managed Trump Accounts “just like” the ones their kids got under the 2025 budget law. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent already said the quiet part out loud last summer, calling the accounts “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.” And as an SSA insider told The New Yorker this week, the playbook is two-handed: gut the Social Security Administration with one hand while pointing at the smoking ruin with the other and saying, “See? It doesn’t work — let Goldman Sachs run it.” Just 15 percent of Americans support privatizing Social Security; even the MAGA base wants their checks to keep coming. So Republicans, true to form, are doing it anyway; they’re just lying about it until the trap snaps shut. Ted Cruz, drunk on Milken Institute champagne, finally admitted what FDR warned us about back in 1936: the same Wall Street crowd that crashed the economy in 1929 has been trying to get its hands on Social Security ever since the day it was signed. Eighty-nine years later, they’re closer to privatizing all of Social Security than they’ve ever been.

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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— So, we’re back to firing squads. In the year 2026, the United States government has officially decided that lining up human beings and shooting them to death is an acceptable use of federal power, as Todd Blanche announced this week. And the loudest voices cheering it on are the same hypocrites who never shut up about being “pro-life.”
Joe Biden got this right when he suspended the federal death penalty, and he got it right for exactly the reason he said: he’s a Catholic, he’s a Christian, and he actually believes what those traditions teach about the dignity of human life.
The Catechism is not subtle on this. Pope Francis called the death penalty inadmissible, full stop. John Paul II spent years pleading with governors and presidents to spare condemned prisoners. When the government kills someone in our name, we’re part of it. Our tax dollars buy the bullets, our flag flies over the chamber, and our silence is the permission slip. It coarsens us, and drops us into the category of brutal dictatorships that routinely kill their own people. Strapping a man to a chair, shooting him, or pumping him full of chemicals while witnesses watch through glass, isn’t justice: it’s ritualized brutality.
Firing squads. In America. In 2026. G-d help us, because we are clearly not going to help ourselves.

— Trump’s approval rating and Americans’ economic sentiment collapse together. We’re not yet in a depression or even a recession, but 45 years of Reaganomics — gutted unions, frozen minimum wage, taxes on working people but not billionaires or giant corporations, jobs sent overseas, student debt, exploding medical and housing costs — have left people feeling like we are.
Trump promised to fix it. Instead, he’s made it so much worse that he’s set a record no president wants. His net approval on the economy has cratered to minus 32 — the lowest of any president at this point in any term in modern polling history. Biden, whom Trump mocked relentlessly on the economy, was at minus 25 — seven points better. George W. Bush, also minus 25. Jimmy Carter, the punching bag Trump has invoked for a decade, was at minus 22, a full 10 points better.
Trump entered his second term at plus six, elected because voters trusted him over Kamala Harris on the economy; that’s a nearly 40-point collapse in just over a year. Tariffs, chaos, family grifts, and billionaire giveaways are the economy he’s delivered, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better because of his blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Reagan built the trap. Trump inherited it, promised to smash it, and instead sprang it on the very suckers voters who elected him.

— Has Trump’s mental health deteriorated so badly he’s a danger to the world? Even his longtime friends are saying yes, now on national television. On Morning Joe Friday, Rev. Al Sharpton — who has known Trump for decades as contemporaries in New York City society — told co-host Jonathan Lemire that Americans should be worried about the president’s state of mind. The trigger: a 79-year-old president posting on Truth Social well after 2 a.m., only to resume again five hours later, ranting about prosecuting the Clintons and whatever else crossed his mind.
Sharpton called the behavior unstable, which is an understatement. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is doing a better job managing the White House than anyone did in term one, but as Sharpton put it, “they’re not containing him.” In the middle of the night, alone with his phone, the president can flip everything from policy to prosecutions to war. America now has a sleep-deprived, paranoid 79-year-old with the nuclear codes who’s awake at 2 a.m. posting rage into a phone and nobody can stop him. What could possibly go wrong? It’s long past time for Congress and his Cabinet to act.

— Brown skin, speak Spanish, even US citizens get deported by Trump’s ICE. Brian José Morales García, 25, was born in Denver and spent much of his life in Mexico where his family lived. When ICE picked him up during a “routine traffic stop” looking for brown-skinned people (now authorized by Pillsbury Doughboy/accused-rapist Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court), he begged to be allowed to go home to get his birth certificate and ID. They said no and shipped him to Mexico.
Here’s the kicker: no U.S. citizen is legally required to carry proof of citizenship while riding shotgun to a job site in Fredericksburg. Morales had his birth certificate, his Social Security card, and hospital records from the Denver hospital where he was born: his lawyer has them all. DHS still insists he’s lying and hasn’t bothered to explain away a single document. A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by ICE in just the first nine months of Trump’s second term. Morales is the first we know of who was actually deported. He won’t be the last.

— Trump continues to help Putin by coming up with ways to “punish” NATO allies as he tries to fracture the alliance. The Reuters-obtained memo, reportedly drafted by Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, floats suspending Spain from NATO for refusing to let the U.S. use its Rota and Morón bases to strike Iran, and even includes reviewing the U.K.’s claim to the Falkland Islands, a gift-wrapped favor to Trump’s buddy Javier Milei in Argentina. NATO’s own charter has no mechanism for expelling a member, so this is pure vandalism. Every headline about Washington threatening Madrid or London is another night Putin sleeps well in the Kremlin.

— DeSantis wants to further rig Florida’s electoral maps for Trump. Florida’s constitution flat-out bans drawing congressional districts with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party,” a rule Florida voters themselves approved. But on Tuesday, Ron DeSantis is calling lawmakers to Tallahassee to do exactly that. His plan is a three-tiered end run: draft the maps in secret inside the governor’s office so there’s no paper trail, hide behind executive privilege when the lawsuits come, and run out the clock under the Purcell Principle, which discourages judges from fixing maps close to an election. Republicans already hold 20 of Florida’s 28 House seats even though in the last statewide election Trump got 56% of the vote, not the 71% representation Florida Republicans already have in the US House. DeSantis wants three to five more.
This is what the national redistricting war Trump launched in Texas actually looks like up close: elected officials openly admitting they can’t win a fair fight and plotting how to avoid one. Virginia Democrats just punched back with voter-approved new districts of their own, up to four more Democratic-leaning seats, because, sadly, when one side is cheating, refusing to cheat back is called “losing.”

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