Saturday Report 6/27/26 — The Supreme Court files its anti-democracy paperwork, California goes after 250 billionaires, and the DOJ stands guard over Trump’s sex secrets…

The Best of the Rest of the News

— 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…

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take

Six Unelected Justices Just Gave Trump the Power to Ignore Congress and Every American Should Be Terrified

Every U.S. taxpayer should be furious; not terrified. This is the time to take back our country. As J.D. Vance told E.U., “The real danger comes from within”.
~ US Taxpayer

When I saw the news about the Supreme Court rulings yesterday about immigration I became as angry as I have ever been. I cursed & shouted at the TV, I called my Representative, I cursed & shouted some more at the TV, not at my Rep!
~ return to normalcy

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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.