“President Donald Trump fired the new top US prosecutor in Seattle on Wednesday less than an hour after the attorney was unanimously appointed by the federal judges in the district, highlighting tensions between the courts and the president over the powerful positions. Roger Rogoff, a former judge and veteran state and federal prosecutor, was sworn in as US attorney before 8 a.m. at the courthouse in downtown Seattle. In a phone interview, he said he then went to the US Attorney’s Office and asked to meet with Charles Neil Floyd, whose 120-day interim term in the position ended in February. As he waited in a lobby, Rogoff said, he received an email from the Trump administration informing him he’d been removed. He is consulting with other lawyers about suing over his firing, he said.” (07/16/26)
“As a writer of murder mysteries, I often joke that making these stories believable requires making them profoundly unrealistic — simply because actual crimes and the investigation thereof have a way of being offensively uninspired. Readers want complex murder plots, twisted motives, a tough and passionate detective in dogged pursuit of a killer who is as brilliant as he is depraved. They do not want acts of impulsive violence committed by a guy with a room temperature IQ, one whose misdeeds are the product not of months of detail-oriented planning and plotting, but a single inauspicious moment in which he had a) a really bad idea and b) access to a gun. We think we want true stories; we don’t. We want good stories that just happen also to be true.” (07/16/26)
“What happens in America doesn’t stay in America—it reverberates around the world. American liberal democracy has never been perfect, but it was the best the world had. As the University of Hong Kong’s Alejandro Reyes noted last year, ‘For decades, U.S. democratic ideals—however flawed or inconsistently practiced—served as a global reference point. America’s constitutional architecture, civic pluralism, and free press, though deeply imperfect, represented a kind of aspirational horizon.’” (07/16/26)
“The Founders knew the untamed frontier abounded with bullies. They also knew about felons and cheats. But you can bet they never imagined a devious, half-literate bully/lawbreaker/cheat could be elected president — not just once, but a second time (with a large plurality of voters approving) following a criminal conviction. … Still, the Founders apparently thought, any miscreant in office would be bound by constitutional restrictions. Here, from several sources, are the 10 things a president cannot do while in office. Trump has played hob with all of them.” (07/16/26)
“South Korea’s central bank on Thursday raised its key interest rate for the first time in more than three years, aiming to tighten money supply to combat inflation worsened by the intensifying war in the Middle East and slow the growth of the country’s high household debt. Following a monetary policy meeting, the Bank of Korea raised its benchmark policy rate by a quarter percentage point from 2.5% to 2.75% in the first hike since January 2023. The bank had kept rates steady or lowered them in recent years despite concerns about soaring household debt and real estate prices, prioritizing support for the country’s trade-dependent economy in the face of geopolitical turmoil and U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff hikes.” (07/16/26)
“Condoleeza Rice confirmed once again this week that she has learned absolutely nothing: ‘When I hear, ‘Well, it wasn’t imminent,’ I think, ‘Do you really want to wait until it’s imminent, or do you want to try to degrade it earlier?’’ she continued. As George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor, Rice was one of the chief architects of the criminal war of aggression against Iraq. Decades later, she is still spouting the same nonsense to support Trump’s criminal war against Iran. It isn’t surprising that Rice falls back on the same arguments to defend the Iran war that she used when she was selling the invasion of Iraq almost a quarter of a century ago.” (07/16/26)
Source: The Erick Erickson Show
by Erick-Woods Erickson
“Here is the point that gets lost in the partisan scorekeeping. It does not matter whether each arrangement is technically legal. The swamp was never a legal problem; it was a trust problem. When the party that promised to end influence-peddling instead perfects it — when access to the president can be bought with a memecoin and a black-tie ticket — the lesson every ambitious operator learns is that the spoils go to whoever holds power, and restraint is for suckers. That is the real cost.” (07/16/26)
“You don’t have to like the outcome of the election to accept the fact that Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020. What this address to the nation appears to be about is sowing more division and casting more doubt on elections in the United States. Trump can’t accept that his approval rating is underwater because a) he’s not focusing on key economic issues that Americans care about, b) he started a war with Iran that drove up oil and gas prices, and c) he seems to be more concerned about vanity projects in the District of Columbia than anything else.” (07/16/26)
