Five puppies found outside a Walmart

McPherson Animal Shelter/Faceboook

Five puppies found abandoned in a bag outside a Kansas Walmart are awaiting adoption. The pups were estimated to be just one week old when they were found and required around-the-clock care from shelter volunteers.  The pups, now six weeks old, were reunited with their mom, Shrimpy, when she was brought to the shelter as well

Acting as though the Constitution doesn't exist

Heather Cox Richardson - From the time he took office in January 2025, Trump and his cronies have not simply challenged laws or constitutional provisions. They have acted as if the Constitution doesn't exist.

That's an important distinction. The former accepts the constitutional order by working within it to challenge it. The latter rejects the constitutional order entirely.

Their actions align with the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings seem lately to have captivated leaders on the American right. Schmitt opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies. As J.D. Vance described Schmitt's ideas in 2024: "There's no law, there's just power."

Much of Schmitt's philosophy centered around the idea that the power of a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump-who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself-asserted this view in August 2025 to justify deploying troops to American cities. "I have the right to do anything I want to do," he said.

Middle East

https://freeportfunfacts.blogspot.com/

Meanwhile. . .

 The Guardian - How has Katy Perry become embroiled in debate over the war? The pop star has condemned the White House after it used her hit song Firework in a TikTok video showing US military strikes on Iranian targets, saying: “I did not approve this, I was not asked, and I absolutely do not condone it. I wrote this song to be an anthem of hope, healing, and inner strength … my music is for bringing people together, not celebrating warfare.”

TALES FROM THE ATTIC: Eugene McCarthy

Wikipedia - Eugene Joseph McCarthy was an American politician, writer, and academic who represented Minnesota in both houses of the United States Congress for over 22 years, then in the U.S. Senate from 1959 to 1971. McCarthy sought the party's presidential nomination in the 1968 presidential election, challenging incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson on an anti–Vietnam War platform. He ran for president four more times.

Sam Smith, 2011

OVER A QUARTER CENTURY or so, Mark Plotkin and I would have occasional lunches with Eugene McCarthy. Plotkin had been Senator McCarthy's campaign manager when he ran as an independent for president in 1976. The lunches were at such places as Duke Zeibert's - a haven for the untight powerful - and later in the Progressive Review’s conference room at La Tomate Restaurant - AKA the table just southwest of the bar. Between lunches, Gene McCarthy would write poetry, books of essays, columns (which I happily published in the DC Gazette), drink coffee at the H&J Grocery in Sperryville, Virginia, and, when the mood struck him, run for president. During or after lunch I would invariably find myself scribbling a few words on a napkin or in my butt pilot, the small note pad I keep in my back pocket. Here are some the things these notes recall. . . 

ONCE WE WERE having lunch at Duke's when Rob Reiner came into the room. McCarthy rose to greet him and the much shorter Reiner, clearly delighted to see him, rushed forward and then hesitated, asking "Do you do hugs?" Gene did.

 []

 ON ANOTHER OCCASION former Indiana Senator Vance Hartke sat down with us. Hartke had been one of the first senators to come out against the Vietnam war, but after leaving the Senate he lowered his sights somewhat, lobbying for riverboat gambling and getting caught at the age of 77 violating state election laws. He was convicted and put on probation. Hartke told us of visiting Governor Roger Branigan one morning. The governor was on his second whiskey and said to Hartke, "You know, I never wanted to be governor, I just wanted to be elected governor."

 []

 LONG BEFORE JERRY FALWELL, there was the colorful Catholic television character, Bishop Fulton Sheen, who not only spread the gospel but gave the future star of 'West Wing' his stage name. Sheen stayed in character off the set. McCarthy recalled sitting with him in a restaurant as a waitress took the orders. When she came to the customer in the fancy robes, she said, "And what do you want, cock robin?" 

[]

GENE BELIEVED that the Senate was like a herd of cattle while the House acted more like hogs. The former would willing follow one steer with a sense of direction but the latter needed to be stampeded.

 []

 PRESIDENT EISENHOWER, recalled McCarthy, always asked God to care for the country while he was asleep. Gene said this was one reason he liked nighttime the best although he worried about those on the west coast because of the time differential.

 []

 GENE TOOK TENNIS LESSONS from Allie Ritzenberg at St. Alban's School in the shadow of the National Cathedral. Many of Washington's most prominent went there to release whatever aggressions were left over from their day job. Ritzenberg, when he wasn't winning titles himself, coached people like Jackie Kennedy, Katherine Graham and Robert McNamara. McCarthy viewed McNamara as a coward for showing up on the courts early in the morning when no one was around to see how badly he played. Gene told Ritzenberg that he was responsible for the Vietnam War because he kept hitting to McNamara's strength thereby boosting his ego. Then McNamara would go to the Pentagon and escalate the real battle.

 []

 SOMEONE asked what Gene would do if he were to become pope. He replied that he would cut the Ten Commandments down to four and reorder them.

 []

 HE LIKED PRINCIPLES YOU COULD FOLLOW: "An old Congressman - I think it was Brad Spencer - said, 'I'll tell you, young men, you may make a mistake once in a while, but vote against everything that starts with 're.'

 He said, 'Vote against all reorganizations.'

 'Vote against all recodifications.

 'Vote against all resolutions.'

They hadn't started to reinvent government then but he would have said, 'Vote against all reinventions.'

 And, he said, 'Vote against all Republicans.' That was the last word and rather a good bit of advice."

 []

 GENE AND I both owned property in Rappahanock County, Virginia, about two hours away. If DC had the population density of Rappahanock, it would have only 2,000 people living in it. I bought the place in the early 1970s from G. Brown Miller, who once told me, "You know, partner, your friend Erbin is a mighty fine fellow." I agreed. "He gave me one of them marijuwana cigarettes the other day." "How'd you like it, Brown?" I asked. "Well, it seems like to me, for a man who's lived on moonshine all your life, it don't do much."

 I once entered the H&J Grocery store in Virginia and found a group of men drinking coffee, including a fully uniformed and armed game warden holding his coffee in one hand and a copy of Foreign Affairs in the other. It was explained to me that Gene McCarthy had been in earlier.

 []

 DESPITE ALL HIS LOSSES in presidential races, his defeat in the 1982 Minnesota senatorial race sometimes appeared to bother him most. And Rappahanock County was partly to blame. It seemed his opponent had depicted McCarthy as a stranger who lived amongst the Virginia gentry and the horsey set. Gene tried to explain the difference between, say, truly horsey Middleburg, Virginia, and Rappahanock - such as the roughness of the latter's terrain and its groundhog holes. Challenged to explain who did live there, "I went on to explain that the men of my acquaintance in the county were country lawyers, well diggers, preachers, horse trainers and traders, orchard men, cattle breeders and horse breeders, wood cutters, timber men, a game warden, at least three country store owners, an auctioneer, two filling station operators, the keeper of the hounds, a real estate man who encouraged people to eat rutabagas, a county supervisor, one or two persons suspected of being moonshiners and bootleggers, poachers, a coon hound trainer and hunter, and one suspected of keeping fighting chickens, and a few scattered United Airlines pilots."

 []

 FINALLY IT WAS TIME to go to a retirement home. As Gene had said when he turned 80, he was "beyond the reach of the scriptures" with their lifespan of three score and ten. But he didn't think all that much of his new form of exile. For one thing, there had to be at least three people at each table in the dining hall: "You need one to eat, one to talk, and one to hear." And he learned early not to sit at the same table with Victor Reuther who had developed an endless capacity for describing his near death in an attempted murder while a labor leader. Gene's view of retirement: "I feel like I'm on a cruise ship on the River Styx." And: "The line between assisted living and assisted dying is very thin."

 []

  The memorial service for Gene McCarthy ran a bit long, considering it was a tribute to a man who had once suggested reducing the number of commandments from ten to four. And it was disturbing to see Bill Clinton shamelessly delivering a tribute to a man of integrity, especially one who had once suggested, as a reform, that "we fire all the Rhodes and Oxford scholars and everyone from Arkansas." But then there was also Peter Yarrow singing moving memorials and the brass section of the National Symphony and, most of all, the guy sitting next to me in the National Cathedral pew who was wearing a baseball cap and a sports jacket. 

 With pleasant earnestness he had turned to me before the service and asked, "Tell me, what did he do? He ran for president, didn't he? And was he a senator?" I was stunned, wondering what had led him to enter the cathedral in the first place.

 The man was interested and noted, "I wasn't here back then but I just liked the way he stood up for the truth."

 

A light clicked. "You were in Vietnam," I said.

 

"Right. It really screwed you up. Every day you thought you were going to die. I'm still screwed up."

 

During the service, my neighbor made copious notes and took photos with his camera. At the end of the service, I shook hands and said I had been glad to meet him, adding, "Was it worthwhile?"  He smiled. "It was unforgettable. I feel alive again."

TALES FROM THE ATTIC: An island I owned for awhile

Sam Smith, 1964 - There are several places in this world that I own. Not because I paid cash for them, nor because I can produce any deed to support my claim. I own these places because when I go to them no one is there. No one seemed to want them. So, until another made a claim, they were mine.

Someone has made a claim on one of my places. I only went there once, but I immediately decided that it would be mine. Now I must give it up, and I'm a little sorry. Hurricane Island lies close to the Vinalhaven, the large island that guards the entrance to Maine's Penobscot Bay. It once had a small village and a quarry.  But when I visited the island, it was empty. I climbed to the highest point of the island and, from that massive, moss-coated rock, stood a long time looking between the islands that line Hurricane Sound to the sea beyond that changed its color as it reflected the slowly descending rays of the sun.

Below, and it seemed very far below, lay the little 40-foot  cutter on which I had sailed to this place. I stared down the sheer face of the rock. The drop, as close as I could figure it, was a hundred feet almost straight down, until it met with the soft mattress laid by years of falling softwood needles, twigs, and loose bark. I would, perhaps, someday build a house here. In fact, the house was partially constructed. The rock face was as sturdy a wall as one could desire. The ground was as comfortable as the most expensive rug. Three more walls, one of them with a huge window from which to look down the sound, a roof, and the house would be complete.

I returned to the boat and told the others I wished to spend the night here. They shrugged; I gathered up my sleeping bag and returned ashore. There was much to see on my new property and little time, for we were sailing on the next morning. I walked over the land making a mental list of my assets: A huge tree that had been recently struck by lightning and was lying on the ground with a moist yellow scar running a full fifty feet along its proud, straight length. It looked brutal then, but I knew that in a few months the scar would fade from prominence as the tree died. Tough little bushes that had fought their way up through cracks in the granite. Various berries. Some were bitter and some tasted sweet, but all gave a pointilist's touch to small sections of the island. A few boards, held together by fragile and rusted nails, with a purposeless strand of wire reaching out, but finding nothing to hold to, and so ending in the grass a few feet away. A battalion of softwoods standing at attention, ready to defend the ground from the sun and the rain.

I slept on top of the rock that night, making a soft bed out of pine remnants on which to place my sleeping bag. The next morning, I awoke damp and a little cold, but very much awake. The sun had passed to the other side of the island during the night and now it was rising to my left as I looked toward the sound. I walked down to the rocks from which the water was slowly receding as it did twice each day, dropping 9 feet then returning to the same place. The boat was near. I returned to it.

We set sail, floated down the sound, then, with the sun, moved slowly to the west. That was nearly ten years ago. I never had a chance to return to Hurricane Island. I sometimes felt guilty, being an absentee landlord, but I felt sure the island was safe. Then, recently, I read a brief announcement somewhere : "Outward Bound, a system of survival schools which originated in Great Britain, will be doing preliminary work on a new school to be established on Hurricane Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine) this summer.”

Another claim had been made. I had no receipt, no deed, to show that it was still my island.  Hurricane Island could no longer be one of my places. Now it belonged to others. I’m a little sorry, but also happy, for it would be selfish to prevent others from gazing down the sound or tracing to its source the thin rivulet I had found. The new owners sounded like good people, people who would understand the reason for the island, people who would tend it, perhaps, far better than I. I have other places, but Hurricane Island was one of my favorites.

Polls

CBS POLL: Financial conditions

Via Interactive Polls

Better off: 13% Worse off: 58% The same: 29% 75% say their income isn’t keeping up with inflation —— Who does the U.S. economic system favor? The wealthy: 74% Middle class: 7% The poor: 3% — % who say the U.S. economic system favors the wealthy By Party • Republicans: 51% • Democrats: 91% • Independents: 80% — By Age • 18-29: 72% • 30-44: 76% • 45-64: 76% • 65+: 71% — By Race/Ethnicity • White: 73% • Black: 86% • Hispanic: 75%

Health

 Study Finds -  A 70-year British study found that adults who repeatedly faced financial hardship scored lower on memory and processing-speed tests by age 53, years before most people worry about cognitive decline. Decades later, brain scans showed those with a history of persistent low income had larger fluid-filled spaces in the brain, a sign of tissue shrinkage.

Men, people from working-class or lower-income childhoods, and carriers of the APOE-e4 Alzheimer's risk gene showed stronger brain changes, though these subgroup findings are still preliminary.The study only shows a link, not proof of cause, but researchers say chronic financial hardship may be a modifiable factor worth addressing for long-term brain health. 

NPR - Nursing is the largest healthcare profession in the U.S., yet only about one in eight nurses are men. The low number is still double what it was a couple of decades ago. As opportunities in traditionally male-dominated fields like manufacturing and software engineering decline, schools like the University of Alabama at Birmingham have made efforts to recruit men into nursing, a career that has emerged as a stable alternative and a reliable pathway to achieving a middle-class lifestyle.

5 experts on how to get a book published

Religion

Washington Post –  The Supreme Court agreed last month to hear a case that asks a remarkable question: Can the government require a homeowner to obtain a permit before inviting friends to his house for prayer?

Grand v. City of University Heights centers on an Orthodox Jewish minyan — a prayer quorum consisting of at least 10 adult men — but the legal principles at stake extend well beyond one faith.

The case will arrive at the court after years of neighborhood intrigue and municipal politics, where attempts to convene a minyan in a private home devolved into allegations of anti-Jewish animus, police surveillance, zoning hearings and cease and desist orders.

In January 2021, Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jewish homeowner in University Heights, Ohio, emailed roughly a dozen friends inviting them to his house for a Shabbat minyan. Soon afterward, a neighbor informed the city about Grand’s email, complaining and asking the mayor to “put a stop to this.” Under the city’s zoning ordinance, “houses of worship” require a special-use permit. Acting on the complaint, the mayor called Grand regarding what he described as an “urgent matter.” Later that day, a city official ordered Grand to “immediately cease and desist” using his home as a “place of religious assembly” until he obtained the permit.

Climate

The Guardian – Unrestrained wildfires in Spain and France have forced more than 250,000 people to flee, authorities from both countries have said, as they struggle to contain the blazes.  About 70,000 people were evacuated from central Spain, while 197,000 people fled in France, including tens of thousands from the wine region city of Bordeaux.

Spain declared a national emergency, the first time the country has ever done so over a wildfire. France’s evacuations constituted “probably” the biggest peacetime evacuation the country has ever seen, its interior minister said.

Middle East

The Guardian - The US has paused strikes on Iran for a second night as diplomatic negotiations to avoid a return to all-out war continued on Sunday.  Donald Trump is said to be weighing up diplomatic and military options in the nearly five-month-old conflict, with Benjamin Netanyahu expected to visit the White House on Tuesday. The Israeli prime minister is a vocal critic of Washington’s negotiations with Iranian leaders.

Netanyahu is under considerable political pressure to show that his military campaigns against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon have yielded results before elections scheduled for October.

….Senior officials in the Trump administration are reported to have warned the president about dwindling munitions stockpiles that could hamper a sustained military campaign in the region. The lull in fighting, which began on Friday evening, follows nearly two weeks of strikes against Iran and the collapse of a ceasefire brokered by Trump. Washington blamed Iran for strikes on US forces and allies in the region and its closure of the strait of Hormuz, a conduit for an estimated 20% of the world’s oil and gas.

Our erratic posts

Sam Smith -  Through August 2, our service may be somewhat erratic thanks to your editor’s two sons, their wives and three grandchildren showing up.  

Whatever happened to the Democrats?

Sam Smith – The thing I don’t understand about our current politics is not what’s wrong with Donald Trump, but why the Democrats are so pathetic dealing with him.

For example, over the past 90 years we have had Democratic leaders like FDR and Lyndon Johnson who poured out good legislation, while the most significant GOP presidents have been Herbert Hoover, Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan. Nearly all the positive bills has been produced by Democrats.

I suspect that part of the problem is that we don’t pay much attention to history Further, America has decayed from a time when it was seen as the decent leader of the world.

One indication of the change in our national perspective is the recent rise of “socialism” as a presumably positive term. Democrats traditionally avoided that word and little of what they accomplished was labelled with it. My father was on the staff of the New Deal and  he never mentioned socialism. Until recently the positive changes were credited to liberalism. Now,  the Democratic Socialists of America, for example, has more than 250 offices in 40 states.

Although I have no problem with socialistic legislation if it improves life, but in America it should be credited instead to the Democratic Party tradition.  Trump has destroyed the Republican Party and he should not be allowed to kill the Democrats as well.

Climate

The Guardian - About 70 million people in the US are set to face excessive heat advisories as dangerously hot temperatures scorch much of the country’s southern and central states.  The third major “heat dome” event to hit the US in the past month is gathering strength over the weekend, spanning a vast swathe of the country, from the Gulf of Mexico coast to the Great Plains and the midwest. 

Temperatures of 95-105F (35-40C) are expected, with some areas of the south-western US desert potentially reaching 120F (48C). The elevated heat is expected to linger into the coming week, held in place by the heat dome, which is when a high-pressure atmospheric system acts as a sort of lid, trapping heat in place over a region for days or even weeks.

Inside Climate News -   After 13 years, Texas and New Mexico have finally reached a settlement in a Supreme Court case over Rio Grande water management. Now comes the hard part.

Texas sued New Mexico in 2013, arguing that its upstream neighbor was hogging water on the river that millions depend on for irrigation and drinking water. The settlement requires New Mexico to reduce the amount of water drawn from wells that deplete the flow of Rio Grande water to Texas.

The agreement also introduces a new accounting method to determine how much water New Mexico owes Texas. And for the first time, the volume of water flowing into Texas will be measured at the state line. Compliance will cost New Mexico upward of $150 million. If the state fails to meet the settlement’s requirements, it could face harsh penalties or another taxing lawsuit.

New Mexico officials hope that buying water rights from farmers and shutting off their wells will be enough to comply. But if climate change continues to drive drier conditions in the Rio Grande basin, those initial voluntary measures will likely fall short. The state expects to have 25 percent less water in 50 years because of rising temperatures.

If New Mexico has to make further reductions to water use, the possibility of mandatory water cuts looms over the region. Behind closed doors, major water users, including farmers and the city of Las Cruces, are negotiating contingency plans. The Lower Rio Grande in New Mexico shows how difficult it will be to fairly reduce water use among farmers, industry and residents as the climate gets hotter and drier.

NY Times - Fast-moving wildfires in France and Spain have forced nearly 300,000 people to evacuate or shelter at home as of Saturday, as blazes moved closer to major cities like Bordeaux and Madrid during the peak of the summer holiday season. In France, the authorities have ordered the evacuation of around 197,000 people from the Gironde and Landes regions in the country’s southwest, where the fires have burned through an area about three times the size of Paris.

Appeals court rejects Trump bid to curb mail-in voting in 23 states

The Guardian - A federal appeals court on Saturday declined to allow Donald Trump’s administration to implement in 23 states his executive order that aims to tighten rules for mail-in voting before the November elections that ?will decide control of Congress.

The Boston-based first US circuit court  of appeals rejected the administration’s request to lift an injunction several Democratic-led states secured on 25 June from a lower-court judge who concluded that key parts of the Republican president’s order were unconstitutional. In asking the court to ?pause the US district judge Indira Talwani’s ruling while it pursues an appeal, the Department of Justice argued that because government agencies had yet to finalize actions and policies to implement Trump’s directive, any lawsuit challenging his order was premature.  The appeals court, in a 2-1 ruling, rejected that argument

Polls

Donald Trump

NY Times -   When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.  But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The admission showed how President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

NBC News - President Donald Trump ordered that “warning” signs be placed in front of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to inform visitors of the “inaccurate information presented in the Museum.” The directive is the latest front in the president’s bid to gain control over the institution.

Alternet  - President Donald Trump does not appear to be the entertainer he once was, reports CNN’s Brian Stelter.  The president’s insult-laden speech drew mostly stunned silence from the audience as he attacked a bunch of journalists at the pared-down recap of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Friday.

“Trump bombed at the ... Dinner Friday night. He knew he was bombing, too, and he even tried to meta-joke his way out of it,” reports Stelter. “But no. Even the president’s jokes about his bad jokes fell flat, and he was widely ridiculed for the comedy routine afterward.”

In a “rambling hour-long speech,” Stelter said Trump insulted journalists by name, “repurposed old nicknames for political opponents, made a strange number of fat jokes that weren’t funny at all, and sounded mad at his unnamed writers for giving him weak material to work with.”

“Does anyone understand this stuff?” he said at one point during the razzball speech. The answer, said Stelter, was “generally no. But more than anything, the speech was just … boring.” ….Many journalists refused to attend, and the dinner was a small-scale redo of the April 26 black-tie affair that got called off after a gunman tried to rush into the ballroom of the Washington Hilton hotel, so Trump joked about bullet proof vests and how attendees hid under their tables while his staff bravely stood on tables and directed crowds.

Ecology

 The Roadless Rule has been in place for nearly two decades and keep millions of acres of national forests intact — but now, the Trump administration wants to trade our beloved public lands for expanded logging, new road construction, and increased industrial activity in some of our nation's most ecologically important forests.

Gas prices

Independence Journal-   U.S. gas prices have jumped to their highest levels in nearly four years as the Iran war drives crude oil above $100 a barrel.  Attacks, shipping threats, and closures near the Strait of Hormuz are squeezing global supply and pushing pump prices sharply higher.

AAA data show average U.S. gasoline prices up roughly a dollar a gallon since before the conflict, with many states now well over $4. Economists warn the surge will raise inflation and household costs, while analysts say the crisis exposes America’s ongoing energy vulnerability.

Maine's Troy Jackson picked to against Susan Collins

The Hill -  Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson formally clinched the Democratic nod to take on Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in November, giving the party just 100 days to quickly turn the tides in the must-win race.

Jackson handily won on Saturday with 566 votes during the Democratic nomination convention in Bangor, Maine. His only challenger, biopharmaceutical executive Saundra Pelletier, nabbed the remaining five votes.

….Democrats in the state largely consolidated around the former state senator ahead of the convention to replace scandal-ridden Graham Platner, who exited the race earlier this month. The contest, which Decision Desk HQ and Cook Political Report rate as a toss-up, could prove decisive in the party’s chances of clinching the upper chamber this fall

Rural folk have shorter lifespans

 Nautilus - People who live in rural parts of the United States have significantly shorter lifespans compared to those in urban areas.  In fact, rural working age adults (aged 25 to 54) are 43 percent more likely to die from natural causes than those who live in cities, according to data from 2019. The gap has widened from a 9 percent difference in mortality when the trend first emerged three decades ago. Now a new study in the journal Economics & Human Biology is attempting to unravel the multifarious causes. 

Todd Blanche

POGO- Todd Blanche, acting attorney general of the Department of Justice (DOJ), had his confirmation hearing last week to take on the role permanently. You deserve an attorney general who answers to the Constitution — not one who prioritizes loyalty to the president. Blanche was a personal lawyer to the president, defending him in several criminal cases. As deputy and acting attorney general, his continuing fealty to the president has shown itself in his actions and even in his words. Todd Blanche seems to think the role of attorney general is no different than being the president’s personal lawyer, and we cannot have that. The Senate Judiciary Committee is currently set to vote on Blanche’s nomination in the coming week. We have a few days to change the outcome.

• Blanche is responsible for creating the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund for the president as part of a settlement on the Trump v. IRS case. He also intended to give the president and his family sweeping immunity from audits of their past taxes. Just last week, a federal judge recommended disciplinary actions against him over the case.

The case for publicly funded art

In These Times -  Beyond jobs and entertainment, decades of research links arts education in public schools to better outcomes in literacy, critical thinking and social-emotional development. When we defund the arts, we don’t just lose performances and exhibitions— we lose one of the primary means by which we understand each other. The arts are how a culture makes sense of itself.

….Arts and cultural industries contributed $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2023, about 4.2% of GDP, and employed nearly 5.4 million workers. Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts has been shrinking for decades. Adjusted for inflation, the NEA’s budget has dropped from roughly $592 million in 1980 to $207 million today. In 2025, the Trump administration proposed eliminating it entirely and canceled hundreds of active grants overnight via email. The private sector won’t fill the gap on its own, which is why federal support is so important: Every dollar the NEA puts out is matched 9-to-1 by nongovernment funds. Everybody wins.

 

World's most dangerous cities

Compare the Market Australia has analysed the figures for cities across America and the world, as rated by users online based on crime levels, to see which are the most dangerous cities. The main takeaways were:

Memphis was ranked the most dangerous in the US.

Detroit was ranked second, while Baltimore was third.

Irvine had the biggest increase in crime concern scores, followed by Raleigh and Portland.

The index consisted of user-submitted crime ratings over the last seven-and-a-half years, spanning 411 cities across the globe.

Donald Trump: A few facts

Debrina Elkins -  Ladies & Gentlemen; Please meet the President of the United States:

·       Flew on Epstein’s plane at least seven times. Just friends, I guess.
·       Pleaded the Fifth more than 400 times in a single deposition. Nothing says “innocent” like refusing to answer a single question about your own business.
·       34 felony convictions. A record most people would call disqualifying.
·       91 criminal charges.
·       Accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 26 women. But sure, tell me again how he’s a great guy.
·       6 corporate bankruptcies. The self proclaimed greatest businessman alive somehow keeps running out of money.
·       5 draft deferments. Funny how the toughest guy in the room never actually showed up for duty.
·       4 criminal indictments. ..
·       2 impeachments. A club of exactly one president.
·       2 of his own companies convicted of criminal tax fraud. Convicted. Not accused. Convicted.
·       1 fake university shut down. 1 fake charity shut down.
·       Paid 25 million dollars to settle the Trump University fraud lawsuit because scamming people who believed in you costs money eventually.
·       Ordered to pay 5 million dollars in the first E Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict, then hit with 83.3 million more in the second.
·       Ordered to pay 2 million dollars for looting his own so called charity.
·       Stealing from a charity with his own name on it.
·       Found liable for business fraud and originally slapped with a penalty topping 450 million dollars, later thrown out on appeal while the fraud finding itself stuck to him anyway.
·       First president in modern history to increase the deficit every single year of a full term.
·       Kept the debt to GDP ratio above 100 percent for his entire first term.
·       Presided over the largest single day point drop in Dow Jones history at the time.
·       Set the record for the longest government shutdown in US history in his first term at 35 days, then couldn’t resist beating his own miserable record in his second term with a 43 day shutdown, followed by yet another shutdown just months later. Encore nobody asked for.
·       Added roughly 2.25 trillion dollars to the national debt in his first year back in office alone, pushing the debt past 39 trillion dollars.
·       Pushed through the largest defense budget increase since World War Two while the debt kept climbing anyway.
·       Purged more than 300,000 federal employees in his first year back.
·       Pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6 Capitol rioters on his very first day back in office, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy.
·       At least 40 of those pardoned rioters have already been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for new crimes since walking free.
·       His family’s crypto ventures, including a meme coin and World Liberty Financial, pulled in more than 1.4 billion dollars in disclosed earnings while he sat in the Oval Office.
·       Sent the National Guard into American cities at a cost of nearly 500 million taxpayer dollars in 2025 alone.
·       His own tariffs are projected to cost the average American household more than 2,500 dollars this year.

Polls

InteractivePolls

Newsom: 20% (-4) Ossoff: 16% (+11) AOC: 14% (+4) Harris: 7% (-1) Buttigieg: 5% Shapiro: 5% Beshear: 2% Kelly: 2%