Forecasters warn of ‘dangerous’ heat conditions across US
Nature’s oven was on high Tuesday for millions of people in the Midwest and Great Lakes states as intense heat and humidity baked the regions with no immediate relief before the misery shifts to the eastern U.S. The National Weather Service was blunt: Conditions were “dangerous” as the heat index, a combination of air temperature and humidity, exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8…
Cloudflare to block cynical search-and-scrape bots from ad-supported web pages
E. Jean Carroll Moves to Collect the Millions That Trump Owes Her
E. Jean Carroll is wasting no time collecting the $5.8 million President Trump has to pay her after the Supreme Court refused to hear his effort to overturn his defamation verdict.
Following the court’s decision Monday, Carroll immediately moved to collect from the bond Trump deposited in the court’s registry. Carroll is requesting the $5 million ordered in the jury verdict in the defamation case, as well as nearly $800,000 in interest due to the delayed payment.
But even though the Supreme Court is supposed to be the end of the line, the president is still trying to delay paying up.
Trump should have no ability to delay the court decision, as not a single justice registered a dissent. But he has difficulty accepting when things don’t go his way, especially in his second term as president. After the court turned him down Monday, Trump crashed out on Truth Social.
“Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me by a woman I never met (Decades old celebrity photo line, standing with her husband, does not count!),” Trump posted.
“This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be!” Trump added.
Future presidents and candidates hopefully won’t have a long, dragged out case of sexual assault against them where they refuse to admit wrongdoing and repeatedly defame their accuser. Trump has made history in multiple ways as president, including a refusal to just take the L and move on. It’s not like he can’t afford the payout, anyway.
DRAM it! Cheap PCs being priced out of existence as memory cost bites
Slop-henge
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon Related | Police use of artificial intelligence grows as rules lag behind…
Citrix says it's back as a mainstream server virtualization player that won't send scary bills
Supervisors shelve battery storage ordinance after Watsonville project moves to state
The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to shelve a local ordinance regulating battery storage systems following a decision by the developer of a project proposed for outside Watsonville to seek approval through the state.
Brit competition cops fast-track £2B borging of Netomnia into Openreach challenger
Trump’s War in the Middle East Has One Clear Winner: China
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
China has emerged as the sole winner in Asia from the strait of Hormuz crisis, according to a report published on Tuesday.
The report by the geopolitical consulting firm Asia Group concluded that China had weathered the storm of the global commodities crisis resulting from the closure of the Middle Eastern waterway, and also stood to gain from the economic and geopolitical trends sparked by the wider conflict.
“China weathered the initial shock better than any regional peer.”
Iran virtually closed the strait, a vital waterway through which much of the world’s oil and gas flows, after the US and Israel launched joint strikes on February 28, targeting government and military sites and killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The ensuing crisis has sent global energy prices soaring, with Asia particularly exposed.
The report noted that before the strait’s closure, roughly 80 percent of the oil and nearly 90 percent of the liquefied natural gas transiting the waterway was destined for Asian markets, along with a significant share of other critical commodities.
The report looked at Asia’s largest economies—China, India, Japan, and South Korea—as well as emerging markets across south-east Asia. The researchers mapped the economic and political repercussions of the crisis and its impacts across key sectors including manufacturing, energy, and agriculture.
They concluded that China was a clear winner from the crisis caused by Donald Trump’s foray into the Middle East.
The country’s large stockpiles of oil and the hugely ambitious rollout of renewable energy mean it has been less exposed to the energy shock than other countries.
China has long maintained strategic reserves of energy, and last year took advantage of cheap prices to build up even bigger stockpiles. Its crude imports grew from 11.1 millin barrels a day to 11.6 million in 2025, with over 80 percent of that increase being sent to stockpiles, according to analysis by Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at the Centre on Global Energy Policy. As of January, China had enough stockpiled to cover 104 days of imports at the 2025 level.
The country has also been building massive amounts of renewable energy infrastructure in recent years. Last year it installed 315GW of new solar capacity, more than half of the world’s new solar. The year before, it added 277GW. Beijing is aiming for half of China’s energy to come from non-fossil sources by 2030, with the share from wind and solar reaching 30 percent, up from 22 percent in 2025.
Although China’s energy mix is still largely based on coal, which accounts for more than 50 percent, renewables’ share is increasing rapidly.
“It’s tempting to see any loss of credibility in the US as a benefit for China, but that’s not necessarily the case for Beijing.”
The Asia Group’s report said: “With 1.4 terawatts of operating renewable capacity already online and a reported 90-110 days of crude import cover in reserve, China weathered the initial shock better than any regional peer.”
China has also benefited from other countries reacting to the crisis by accelerating its clean energy buildout. Beijing dominates the global supply chain in solar and other clean technology industries and in recent years has been pushing much of this production overseas at low prices, to the chagrin of western leaders worried about their own industries.
China’s electric vehicle exports soared by more than 110 percent in May compared with the previous year, while solar shipments in April increased by 60 percent.
Beijing has called for a ceasefire in the Middle East, and when Trump visited in May and met China’s president, Xi Jinping, he claimed the two countries were united in wanting to find a settlement. But the Asia Group report noted: “The crisis allows Beijing to cast the United States as the destabilizing actor whose Middle East entanglements impose costs on the world.”
There are some risks to China from the instability. Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said: “It’s tempting to see any loss of credibility in the US as a benefit for China, but that’s not necessarily the case for Beijing, which does not want to supplant Washington as a Middle East hegemon or provider of security for the region.”
Wen-Ti Sung, a non-resident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, based in Taiwan, said the crisis could also make Beijing think twice about a future military assault on Taiwan because it showed the difficulty of navigating ships through hostile territory.
The Asia Group’s report concluded: “Ultimately Beijing views the pain points not as existential threats, but as challenges to be managed and even opportunities to be exploited.”
Purism launches supersized 16-inch laptop for buyers who put privacy before price
Transcript: Trump-MAGA Rage at Birthright Loss Erupts in Dark Threats
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 1 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump lost a big one when the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in a blockbuster ruling on Tuesday. But the way the ruling came down strongly suggests we’re heading into a much longer battle over this going forward. In that regard, MAGA’s furious reaction to the ruling was deeply unnerving. As many pointed out on social media, getting rid of birthright citizenship is going to become akin to Roe v. Wade for the right, especially the MAGA right. How should liberals and Democrats proceed?
We’re talking about all of it with Raul Pinto, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council. Raul, good to have you on.
Raul Pinto: Thanks, Greg. Good to be on. Quite a day.
Sargent: So the Supreme Court ruled by six to three against Trump’s executive order ending automatic citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. Five justices upheld the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship. Brett Kavanaugh voted with them, but not on the constitutional argument—he effectively said Congress can theoretically change this with legislation. So only five justices are with us on the constitutional argument. Good, but not good enough. Raul, what’s your immediate reaction to how this happened?
Pinto: Yeah, I would put it as a five-four decision, because it’s a razor-thin margin, right? And as you’re saying, five justices actually said that this was enshrined in the Constitution, that birthright citizenship is actually part of the Fourteenth Amendment. And it’s very discouraging to see that four other justices didn’t agree with that, and that at the end of the day, we may have to battle this again.
Sargent: So Trump and MAGA absolutely exploded in rage over this. Trump said that Congress can now act to end birthright citizenship, which is false, since five justices say it’s protected by the Constitution. But I want to read what MAGA personality Matt Walsh said:
“Now that SCOTUS has opened the floodgates for foreign invaders to flock across our borders and spawn, the only choice we have is to triple down on immigration enforcement, militarize the border, mass deportations, round every illegal up. Don’t pull back when the lesbian activists start screeching about it. Use whatever force is necessary.”
Whatever force is necessary—Raul, that’s a straight-up threat of mass violence, is it not?
Pinto: Yeah. And I do think that the concept of birthright citizenship as established in the Constitution—it’s historical. The decision today was based on historical principles and how the Fourteenth Amendment came about. And so I do find that those views are very extreme, and hopefully cooler heads prevail. But we know that that hasn’t always been the case—i.e., January 6.
Sargent: Right. I think Matt Walsh is essentially saying pretty explicitly that MAGA doesn’t give a shit about the Constitution, and especially the Fourteenth Amendment. They really have special disdain for the Fourteenth Amendment for all sorts of reasons. He’s essentially saying, screw the Constitution, let’s just use mass violence to, quote-unquote, protect the country against invaders.
Pinto: It’s sad that it’s being approached in this particular way. The decision today is rooted in historical precedent as to how the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted, as well as trying to correct some of America’s darkest periods, like the Dred Scott decision. It allowed—the descendants of slaves to become U.S. citizens, as well as Wong Kim Ark, the decision which allowed a descendant of Chinese immigrants to become a U.S. citizen as well.
Sargent: Well, here’s Stephen Miller:
“One of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court. American citizenship is not the birthright of the world. It belongs only and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration.”
Let’s talk about how deranged that is. Immigrants are not obliterating us. He treats that as a given. It’s complete fantasy. How does he think people become Americans? He personally is descended from people who immigrated here and were attacked with very similar language.
But, Raul, most important, I think this sets the stage for drastic action. Remember, Miller was already urging Trump to defy the courts if this situation is tantamount to national self-destruction. Surely Miller will expect Trump to do that here, yes?
Pinto: I don’t want to get into Stephen Miller’s head. I really don’t. But what I can say, right, is that immigrants are definitely not ruining the United States. And as a matter of fact, birthright citizenship was still a thing in the first Trump administration and the world didn’t end. And immigrant contributions continued throughout the darkest periods of the administration and beyond.
And so one of the interesting things that it’s important to know is the impact that this decision has on those children that would have been targeted by the executive order. It would have created a second-class system for them.
They wouldn’t have been eligible for Social Security numbers, passports, or any proof that they actually belong to a certain nation. And that’s also something that’s addressed by Justice Roberts.
Sargent: And it’s really good that he addressed that. Because I think at bottom, what MAGA really wants is that two-tiered system. They really want to end the Constitution’s guarantee of equality. That to them is really the big kahuna—ending equality. They want a hierarchical system.
What they want is a large subpool of stateless and rightless people that they can target with state violence. I think that’s the essence of this. And I think it’s good that Justice Roberts made it clear that that was off the table.
Pinto: It is why I think it’s important that the court today said that it is a constitutional right. And as you’re saying, that comes with certain weaknesses. And yes, it was a flimsy majority, but we do have decades of precedent that would have to be overturned for that to happen. I’m still worried. But today’s decision was important, and I think it was positive.
Sargent: One of the core tactics that this administration is using, that MAGA is using to try to ethnically cleanse the country, is to use whatever legal lever they can to make life fundamentally unlivable for immigrants. What they were really hoping for was to be able to create this new second-class caste that could then be subjected to all sorts of maltreatment and discrimination, and wouldn’t have any legal protections of pretty much any kind. Let’s listen to MAGA personality Tim Pool.
Tim Pool (voiceover): Kagan, Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson—we know exactly what they think, and they want to burn this country to the ground. Unfortunately, Trump won’t make the moves needed, Congress won’t make the moves needed, and Republicans should pack the court right now. Thirteen federal district circuits, thirteen Supreme Court justices. And Trump can add a good old four more conservative court members, which guarantees we will never lose another ruling again. But he won’t. So I can only say this: without men of action, your nation be damned. We do not have men of action.
Sargent: Note how he says they want to burn the country down—meaning you and me want to burn the country down, because we want to uphold birthright citizenship as a constitutional mechanism. And note how he says only men of action can save us. He’s basically saying we need Caesar, isn’t he?
Pinto: It’s such a dog whistle, right? But it is also extremely important to point out that many of the children of immigrants who would have been subject to the executive order—America is all they’re going to know as a home. And they are going to be rooting for the U.S. in the World Cup and part of the social fabric of this country.
And so I find it troubling that that is the rhetoric that happens on the other side, because they can become as patriotic as you and I and uphold those American values that we hold here.
Sargent: Right. America is the only country that many of these kids are ever going to know.
Pinto: Absolutely. Absolutely. And not only that, but ending birthright citizenship would have again left them without a real home, despite the fact that their parents may have been in the country for a long period of time. The Fourteenth Amendment is very clear. And Justice Roberts says, we are grounding this decision on the Constitution. And that’s important.
Sargent: Yes, it was really important that he said that. I just want to return to something that you said earlier, which really resonated with me, which is that Donald Trump has actually succeeded in, quote-unquote, securing the border. He’s used a lot of tactics that I think are obviously heinous and indefensible. But what’s interesting to me is that MAGA can’t even accept that as a victory.
Trump constantly says he’s reduced border crossings to zero or whatever—that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s true that he’s gotten them way down. And MAGA can’t say to themselves, well, we won on that, we got what we wanted, because they need to feel like they’re being invaded by immigrants at all times.
And here’s why. Their movement isn’t actually just about securing the border. It’s about ethnically cleansing the country. They want mass removals. They want to roll back the demographic evolution of this country and reverse-engineer it in some sense. And that’s why they can’t accept Trump securing the border as a victory, because it doesn’t count as ethnic cleansing, which is the thing they really want.
Pinto: Well, you also have to remember that this decision comes on the heels of two other immigration decisions that went in the Trump administration’s way. One of them limited access to asylum at the border, and the other allows the Trump administration to end temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people.
So the general rhetoric that the world is going to end because we have birthright citizenship is just incorrect. Or that this court is by any means sort of favorable to immigrants because of a birthright citizenship decision that is actually rooted in the Constitution—that’s just incorrect.
Sargent: Right. They can’t even accept the ending of TPS in effect as a victory, and the ending of asylum in effect as a victory. They want those things, but they don’t constitute the dramatic mass removals, the enormous ethnic purging that they really want. I think that’s the essence of this.
Pinto: Yeah. And I would say that, exactly what you’re saying—if you’re ending birthright citizenship, there are thousands of children who would have been undocumented and potentially subject to immigration enforcement with their family members. And so that is obviously problematic, because now you’re expanding the universe of folks who would be subject to removal.
Sargent: That’s exactly what they want to do. So let’s just close this out. What do Democrats and liberals do now? I mean, if you look at this situation, it’s now clear that this is going to take on the cast of a major cause—something like targeting Roe v. Wade the way the right did for decades. They are clearly going to set in their sights the ending of birthright citizenship. Do you think that that’s a major thing that we should take seriously, and how should we proceed?
Pinto: Yeah, as we said at the top, it’s concerning that the margin of victory was that small. I do think that precedent and history is on our side, and it will be going forward. But obviously we are concerned, and there are concerns with that.
I would say that ending birthright citizenship is not popular among the American population. Most Americans support birthright citizenship. So I take some solace in that. I take some solace in the fact that Justice Roberts, who sided with the majority on the other cases that went the other way on immigration—I would say that if he’s able to think through this issue and see it as a constitutional matter, I think that’s important. And if precedent continues to be important to the U.S. Supreme Court, then we will continue to get good rulings on this issue.
That doesn’t mean that we won’t see attempts to try to do this through legislative action. But it is a constitutional issue now. Granted, I will give you the fact that there could be a different interpretation and someone can come in and agree with the other four judges.
But it is important, then, for that majority of individuals who is in favor of keeping birthright citizenship for children born on U.S. soil, that we are expressing those views to Congress so that that doesn’t happen. Because I do think that at the end of the day, Americans are not going to stand for that.
Sargent: I’m going to choose to be optimistic about this as well. We won today, and that’s a big deal. Raul Pinto, great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Pinto: Likewise, Greg. Thank you.
Civil grand jury faults Santa Cruz transportation commission for decades of flawed rail planning
A new civil grand jury report faults the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission for decades of flawed planning on the coastal rail corridor. It says officials advanced proposals without adequately accounting for engineering, legal and financial realities, and recommends that the commission adopt stronger project evaluation and strategic planning processes.
Space, “Star Trek,” and Social Justice
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and ’90s, a daughter and granddaughter of social justice activists, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein fell in love with math and the physical sciences and developed a profound curiosity about the cosmos (though the smoggy night sky of her childhood blocked her view of the stars). She soon developed a detailed plan for her life that led to a career writing and teaching about physics and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire.
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Today, Prescod-Weinstein’s work stands out for the ways she weaves her identity as queer, Black, and Jewish into her work. In her latest book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, Prescod-Weinstein brings a Black feminist lens to cosmology, quantum physics, poetry, and popular culture to help unlock the mysteries of the physical universe.
“The Edge of Space-Time is a much more intimate book because this is my brain,” Prescod-Weinstein says. “This is how I see the universe. These are the things that I am passionate about in my quiet moments.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Prescod-Weinstein talks about the need for diversity and inclusivity in the sciences and puts science fiction’s various hypotheses for space travel to the test with host Al Letson.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
The Supreme Court Declares War on Woodrow Wilson
This week’s Supreme Court ruling giving President Donald Trump a free hand in firing government regulators is less about Trump than it is about President Woodrow Wilson. In the text of Trump v. Slaughter and its various concurrences and dissents, I count 15 Trump mentions compared to 23 for Wilson. Partly that’s because no brief to enlarge presidential power will benefit from too close a look at the crazy bastard slumped in the Oval Office today. But mostly it’s because the high court wants to repudiate a set of good-government principles associated with the Progressive era and articulated in some detail by the twenty-eighth president. In the right’s political typology, Wilson is the snake in the garden of limited government who proffered the shiny red apple of the administrative state. Trump v. Slaughter is meant to drive a stake through Wilson’s undead heart.
These days, liberals aren’t too crazy about Woodrow Wilson, either, because of his appalling white supremacist views and his 1913 directive to segregate Black and white employees in the federal workforce, which led to wholesale firings and demotions of Black employees and was a catastrophe for Washington’s fledgling Black middle class. Princeton took Wilson’s name off its School of Public and International Affairs in 2020, and in 2022 the District of Columbia took Wilson’s name off a high school built atop the ruins of Reno City, a Black neighborhood that federal authorities wiped off the map in the 1930s. I can’t quarrel with either decision. But life is complicated, and Wilson also helped bequeath a valuable legacy of government policy that drew on expertise and dispassionate analysis. Liberals take that legacy for granted, but conservatives have lately made that hard to do.
Liberal distaste for Wilson pales in comparison to conservatism’s loathing of the man. Wilson “ushered in a new view of government,” Charlie Kirk said in a February 2025 podcast. “That we’re gonna have these in-de-pen-dent agencies that exist regardless of political pressure.… He wanted to have these agencies be permanent. A tech-no-cratic class untouchable by the sovereign, untouchable by we the people.” The right’s Wilson-hating cult is about 20 years old and was first popularized by the former Fox News commentator Glenn Beck. “I have to tell you,” Beck said at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, “I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me.… He gives us the Fed.” (True.) “He gives us the income tax.” (That was really more President William Howard Taft, a Republican.) “Prohibition. So, he took away the alcohol.” (False. Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, and then Congress overrode him.)
Wilson did much less to invent the administrative state than his enemies profess. Only two major agencies were created on his watch. By contrast, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, created the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Corporations (forerunner to the Federal Trade Commission), the Food and Drug Administration, the Labor Department, and the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. In truth, the administrative state evolved, starting in the nineteenth century, alongside the growing power of industry, as a necessary check on that power.
What makes Wilson a favored target is that, as a political scientist, he wrote favorably about such developments. In his 1886 essay “The Study of Administration,” Wilson observed that democratic governance “does not consist in having a hand in everything, any more than housekeeping necessarily consists in cooking dinner with one’s own hands.” (Before you call this aristo presumption, recall that Wilson was writing at a time when middle-class families frequently employed full-time cooks.) “The cook must be trusted with a large discretion as to the management of the fires and the ovens.” In much the same way, civil servants with expertise in various technical matters should be given leeway to make regulatory decisions, with political appointees and the public, of course, looking over their shoulders.
Trump v. Slaughter repudiates that notion as antidemocratic. Previously, a subset of regulatory agencies called independent agencies, acting in quasi-judicial fashion and with top presidential appointees (typically a five-person panel) affiliated with both political parties, was protected from excessive partisan interference by legislative language stipulating that the president could remove these top officials only for cause. Nobody, including the high court, thought these independent agencies acted independent of politics. Because a majority of top slots were reserved for the president’s party, a Democratic Federal Trade Commission or National Labor Relations Board or Merit Systems Protection Board ruled differently than a Republican one. But the differences were somewhat muted and these independent agencies operated within an atmosphere of comparative professionalism; outright partisan hackery was frowned upon. And because the members had fixed (usually five-year) terms, there were no opportunities for empire building along the lines of J. Edgar Hoover’s half-century reign at the FBI.
That world is now gone, because under Trump v. Slaughter the president can fire any of these officials if he opposes their politics or suspects them of disloyalty. The same groveling demonstrations of loyalty to Trump that we see Cabinet secretaries put on nauseating display in photo ops will now be required of agencies tasked with protecting consumers, workers, investors, voters, and so on.
What has this got to do with Woodrow Wilson? Justice Neil Gorsuch—the biggest Wilson-hater on the high court—explains in his concurring opinion to Slaughter that Wilson belonged to a group of scholars who, inspired by what Gorsuch sneeringly describes as “the perceived competence of the Prussian bureaucracy,” called for bringing to American government “the utmost possible efficiency.” Central to this project was the hiring of scientific and technical experts and shielding them from excessive political control. But “those in charge of these new agencies often became very difficult to dislodge.”
No, they didn’t. They served fixed terms, and whenever a president of the opposite party came in, they lost majority status. Gorsuch’s real beef with independent agencies isn’t that they operate beyond presidential control but that they exist at all:
Independent agencies today hold tremendous sway over the Nation’s affairs. They regulate our businesses, and our financial markets. They set the rules for the internet and airwaves. They decide how we light our homes, how we run our elections, and the manner of our employment. They determine what toys our children will play with and how we interact with each other at work.… Often, these agencies do all this with hardly any statutory guidance, based on broad grants of legislative authority.
Translation: Repeal the Progressive era!
The majority opinion in Trump v. Slaughter, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, mentions Wilson by name only to acknowledge Wilson’s firing of a Portland, Oregon, postmaster, which occasioned the Supreme Court’s decision in Myers v. United States (1926), which voided a statutory requirement that Wilson had to secure Senate approval for such dismissals, which the high court argues should have prevented independent agencies from enjoying the job protection the Supreme Court now invalidates. But Wilson and the Progressive movement are doubtless what Roberts has in mind when he writes, “Placing the power to administer laws in officers who enjoy ‘freedom from Presidential oversight (and protection)’ does not deliver us to a promised land of technocratic governance [italics mine].” The high court wants you to know that no such techno-paradise exists. It’s uniquely galling to be lectured on the phoniness of expertise by a legal expert whom the president cannot fire.
But it would be untrue to say the high court rejects Wilson’s vision of technocratic governance in every nonjudicial context. On the same day it handed down Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court also handed down Trump v. Cook, which says the president can’t fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook because … I still can’t understand why not. I draw some comfort from the fact that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissenting opinion to Trump v. Slaughter (joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson), can’t understand it, either:
For most agencies, the majority here says, removal protections like the FTC’s make the President’s job “impossible” and so are unlawful. For [the Fed], however, the Court recognizes that the Founders were acutely aware “of the calamities that could arise from even the ‘suspicion’ of political manipulation of monetary policy” and that they therefore “guaranteed [such agencies] independence from Presidential control.” … What is unclear is why these principles should be limited only to agencies, like the Federal Reserve, that in some respects influence “monetary policy.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, coming from the opposite ideological direction, writes in her dissent to Trump v. Cook that she too can’t figure out this inconsistency:
The Court’s holding is in serious tension with Trump v. Slaughter, which we also decide today. Slaughter announces a categorical rule: Whenever “an agency ‘executes’ a congressional mandate against private parties, it exercises executive power” and must be subject to plenary executive control—“no ifs, ands, or quasis about it.” Yet here, the Court claims a special exception “sanctioned by history” and based on the Federal Reserve’s role in setting monetary policy. How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout?
Answer: It can’t. As is so often the case, it falls to the women to call bullshit on the men. But Wilson gets the last laugh because, as Glenn Beck rightly pointed out, Wilson signed into law the legislation that created the Federal Reserve. When it comes to protecting your 401(k), we’re all Wilsonians.
This Is the Week for Democrats to Start Saying “Climate Change” Again
The United States is bracing for another heat wave. More than 180 million people across the Plains, Midwest, and Southeast were under “major” or “extreme” heat warnings as of Tuesday morning. Temperatures are expected to peak above 100 degrees on the East Coast over the holiday weekend as a high pressure “heat dome” traps hot, humid air in place. The heat index, which takes humidity into account, is predicted to hit as high as 115 degrees in some places.
The elephant in the room here—the force making record-breaking heat a more common occurrence—is climate change. Last week’s deadly European heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without the greenhouse effect of fossil fuel emissions, concluded a group of researchers from Europe and the U.S. But coverage of that heat wave in U.S. media barely mentioned climate change, referring only vaguely to the fact that the European continent is “warming faster than any other,” per CBS’s evening broadcast. The media watchdog FAIR noted that NBC, CBS, and ABC news reports all “failed to mention climate change even in passing.”
This is not just a media failure. Fearing backlash from swing voters and Republicans, Democrats have largely stopped mentioning climate change too. A recent analysis by the nonprofit newsroom Inside Climate News found that mentions of climate change in congressional Democrats’ press releases started to taper off in 2022, following the by now received wisdom among party pollsters and pundits that talking about rising temperatures is a political death wish certain to turn off would-be Democratic voters. As I’ve written before, this approach is somewhat baffling considering that Democrats talked a lot about climate change in an election they won, in 2020, then lost an election four years later where they mostly avoided the subject.
Climate-fueled heat waves, storms, fires, droughts, and floods are becoming an unavoidable reality for tens of millions across the United States. Refusing to talk about climate change in that context means refusing to engage with the world as it is. If left-of-center politicians and ostensibly fact-based news organizations aren’t willing to accurately interpret our climate-changed reality, however, the right will be more than happy to do it for them.
Over the last few years, GOP politicians have chalked up deadly wildfires to Democratic mismanagement and Jewish space lasers. After flash flooding in Valencia, Spain, killed 229 people in 2024, the far-right party Vox capitalized on widespread frustration with the “political class” to pin the disaster on the country’s center-left governing coalition in Madrid. Much of the blame, meanwhile, lay with Valencia’s regional government, where Vox had just recently served as part of a governing coalition that undermined disaster response and emergency planning. During the recent European heat wave, when an estimated 1,300 people died from heat-related causes, right-wingers rushed—without evidence—to blame “degrowth” and climate concerns for the continent’s lack of air conditioning. Degrowth is, notably, not the law of the land in Europe, where air conditioning is not illegal and where the European Commission has recently dismantled several of its modest climate policy commitments.
People are baking to death in Europe for the same reason that whole towns are being zapped off the map by wildfires in California, and that home insurance is becoming a luxury in places now being regularly inundated by floods that should only happen every thousand years: Our societies are navigating a climate-changed world with last century’s infrastructure. That’s not the result of some surplus of climate policies but of a profound lack of them. A few years ago, it wasn’t impossible to imagine a more climate-conscious European Union embarking on a bloc-wide mobilization to create millions of jobs installing reversible air-to-air heat pumps, which cool homes efficiently too; readying the grid to meet increased summer electricity demand with as little imported oil and gas as possible; and retrofitting old housing stock built primarily to retain heat in the winter. That never happened because European politicians, like their counterparts in the U.S., decided that preparing for and mitigating the climate crisis just wasn’t worth the the hassle.
Widespread air conditioning will thankfully help the U.S. withstand this week’s brutal temperatures. But our country is no closer than Europe to having a plan for how to live with the climate crisis. Blasting the A.C. won’t keep roads and tarmacs from melting, droughts from lowering crop yields, coastal Louisiana from becoming uninhabitable, or Malibu from burning. Because the right has no intention of protecting most people from climate-fueled destruction, it’ll blame these things—like all things—on Democrats and leftist conspiracies. As they did during last week’s European heat wave, right-wingers will even go so far as to blame climate policy itself for climate-induced deaths.
There’s good evidence to suggest that mentioning climate change won’t kneecap Democrats politically. And as warming continues to destabilize our world, it certainly isn’t in anyone’s interest to let Republicans control the narrative. That way lies more inaction, and more deaths.
The Great American State Fair Is a Great Trumpian Disaster
“There are tons of people here,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former TV quack who now runs Medicare and Medicaid, at the Great American State Fair on Monday. He was speaking with Dean Cain, another former TV man—he played Superman on ABC in the 1990s—who has acted as a kind of hype man for the event, ostensibly a celebration of America’s 250th birthday, that is currently taking place on the National Mall.
Oz seemed to know he was lying—there were not tons of people there. “This is a huge space and it’s just going to be more and more crowded as the week goes on,” he added. He’s right that it’s a huge space, but videos showed he was speaking to a sparse crowd of maybe 100. Cain later shared a picture from the top of the Ferris wheel where you can literally count the attendees. There are a few hundred.
Dr. Oz on stage with Dean Cain talks about how great the crowd is at the Great American State Fair... so @hicharliecotton pans his camera to reveal quite the opposite. https://t.co/vZ3exnGWS3 pic.twitter.com/4e1ugj7AVw
— TMZ (@TMZ) June 29, 2026Just as President Trump insists his lackeys dress like him, he also demands they adopt his Norman Vincent Peale–inspired embrace of positive thinking—which is to say, the refusal to acknowledge politically inconvenient truths. But it’s hard to argue with the wealth of video and photographic evidence of the Great American State Fair. It may very well get more crowded, but right now it’s a flop. That’s no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to this administration, which is itself a total failure—a group of losers and buffoons so incompetent they … well, can’t even put on a state fair. If they can’t even manage a corn maze, no wonder they’re losing a war.
But the Great American State Fair is also failing because it’s the reflection of a president who has no substantive story to tell about the country he leads. While the U.S. is meant to be celebrating its semiquincentennial, Trump can only tell a story about himself. The centerpiece of the fair, after all, is a cheap scale model of a massive triumphal arch Trump hopes to build near Arlington National Cemetery. What triumph does that arch celebrate? When CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe asked Trump whom the 250-foot-tall structure is for, he pointed at himself and said, “Me.” The same could be said of the fair, the war, and so much else that this administration has done—while the World Cup offers a fitting counterpoint.
History, at least in an abstract sense, has always been a part of Trump’s political project. He did not invent the slogan that gave the name to his movement—Ronald Reagan used “Make America Great Again” in his 1980 campaign—but he now owns it. Of course, the genius of those four words for Trump is that they don’t really mean anything. They harken back to an earlier, supposedly rosier period without actually saying what period that is. It’s not hard to extrapolate, given Trump’s long history of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, that he is gesturing at a past when white supremacy went unquestioned. But the statement’s utility as a political slogan is entirely dependent on its vagueness. Trump wants to return America to greatness. When was it great? Let’s not get into specifics.
Trump, of course, has no genuine interest in history, not even America’s. Although some observers have floated supposed models for his presidency—Andrew Jackson in Trump’s first term, William McKinley in his second—he has never expounded knowledgeably on Jackson’s populism or McKinley’s protectionism, only gesturing at them half-heartedly in an attempt to explain his own xenophobia and imperial ambitions. No, Trump is only interested in history to the extent that he will feature prominently in it. He wants to be seen as a “great man” who changed the world.
This unbridled narcissism is how you get a fiasco like the Great American State Fair and the larger project of which it is a part, Freedom 250—an organization that Trump created despite the fact that Congress had already created an organization, America250, for the purpose of celebrating the country’s anniversary. The primary purpose of Freedom 250, which is not subject to congressional oversight and does not have to disclose its donors, is the elevation of Trump and his political movement. That’s why so many musicians withdrew from performing at the Great American State Fair, and organizers had to turn to Kash Patel’s girlfriend. With just a few days to go before America’s “birthday,” Freedom 250’s most notable event so far was the UFC fight held on the White House lawn on Trump’s actual birthday.
Under a different administration—one helmed by Kamala Harris, say, or even a doddering Joe Biden—it’s not hard to imagine a different, nonpartisan celebration of America’s 250th. The textbook narrative of American history has been increasingly contested on the left, so such a celebration would not have been without minor controversy, whether genuine or manufactured. But it would have actually reckoned with this nation’s history. It also would have featured much better music, and perhaps wouldn’t have attempted to gouge visitors with $25 pretzels.
Of course, there is another celebration happening in America at the same time as the debacle that is Freedom 250: a World Cup that’s primarily being hosted by blue cities. That tournament has, like everything else, been marred by the Trump administration’s incompetence and maliciousness. But it has largely been what the Great American State Fair ostensibly wants to be: a mass celebration where people come together in a spirit of unity and togetherness.
Of course, the tournament’s attendees—in spite of the Trump administration’s best efforts—aren’t just coming from all over America, but the world too. Still, if you look at stadium audiences or fan fests—or even just videos of fans celebrating in the street after their team wins, as happened with Morocco supporters in Queens last night—you can see a different story about America than Trump is trying to tell. This is not the story of an egomaniacal, fascist president who dreams of an all-white America, but of a country that embraces foreigners with generosity and respect. This July 4, that’s the only story we should be celebrating.
Dominican Hospital nurses and staff rally against proposed cuts
Dozens of staff members and supporters rallied outside Santa Cruz’s Dominican Hospital on Tuesday to oppose proposed layoffs and reductions to part-time status affecting 22 nurse educators, monitor technicians and unit coordinators, arguing that the cuts would undermine patient safety and place additional burdens on front-line nurses.
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Free Will Astrology
