“While it is unfortunate that the federal budget is off the rails, it is hard to get too worked up about this program when (a) it is a drop in the bucket compared to our broader fiscal problems, and (b) so much of our debt-financed spending benefits older Americans. If we’re going to keep borrowing, why not direct at least a small share toward expanding opportunities for children?” (07/16/26)
“For all its claims to represent the interests of the People, the far right sure doesn’t appear to like a lot of them. The movement’s list of enemies is so capacious it would put Richard Nixon’s to shame. Some days, it seems as though it encompasses most of the human race. You might wonder how to square this with the right’s commitment to tradition and order. How can a society be justly ordered if it has been set up to exclude most people? The answer is that much of the far right’s social vision is fundamentally volkisch: Homogeneity and unity are goals that override democratic inclusion, and this is where the movement’s resentful agonism comes from. ‘Resentful’ is a key term here: Anyone who has read or listened to the movement’s leading figures is familiar with the tone of endless aggrievement.” (07/16/26)
“There are plenteous reasons not to confirm [US attorney general nominee Todd] Blanche, as I’ve written. He’s the man behind the Epstein files cover-up, vindictive prosecutions of Trump enemies and Trump’s $10-billion lawsuit against the IRS, litigation that was purportedly ‘settled’ in exchange for a $1.8-billion slush fund for Jan. 6 rioters and tax immunity for the Trump family. This week a federal judge skewered that suit as having been filed for ‘improper purpose’: the president’s self-dealing.
On top of that sorry record, Blanche is the architect of Trump’s ICE impunity. … Conventional wisdom says that Republicans won’t vote against a man so close to Trump. But that’s exactly why Blanche should not lead the Justice Department. The people’s representatives in the Senate could see that he doesn’t.” (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)
“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)
“President Donald Trump failed in his efforts to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court into upholding his executive order on birthright citizenship, which would have stripped that constitutional guarantee from millions of babies born on U.S. soil. Now a Republican lawmaker is hoping to effectively overrule that Supreme Court decision with a proposed bill that would resurrect Trump’s unlawful order and place it in the federal statute books. As The Hill reports, ‘Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks on Monday introduced a bill that would codify President Trump’s Day 1 executive order reshaping the definition of birthright citizenship in the U.S.’ There’s just one problem with Banks'[s] scheme: Trump lost the birthright citizenship case Trump v. Barbara on constitutional grounds, which means that any federal law repeating Trump’s already rejected position would be equally unconstitutional under the very Supreme Court precedent that Banks is now hoping to evade.” (07/16/26)
