curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Jason Sattler: When opposing fascism makes you a target, the real target is freedom.
This week, a federal judge in North Texas handed down sentences of 30, 50, 70, and 100 years to eight people who attended a July 4 demonstration at an ICE detention facility last summer. Chief District Judge Reed O’Connor said from the bench he was ordering the maximum in each case because “the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.” Melissa Gira Grant at The New Republic called the Prairieland sentences what they obviously are: a national emergency.
The defendants were convicted of “providing material support to terrorists” for printing and distributing leftist zines, joining an anarchist book club, and communicating on a shared encrypted app. …
The police state being built this week in Texas, Syracuse, and Washington has been under construction for sixty years. Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, said in 1994 what the drug war was actually for: “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.” …
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Federal agents tracked down a woman in Syracuse TO A POLLING PLACE and demanded she delete an Instagram post identifying the ICE agent who killed Renee Good. You’re apparently not allowed to tell people his name is Jonathan Ross. So be sure not to do that!
Six people were arrested in connection with alleged vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Trump is seeking 10-year sentences.
The National Guard is still occupying Washington, D.C.
And in Minnesota, a U.S. attorney indicted 15 people he called members of “antifa groups” — a designation with no legal definition for domestic groups — for a conspiracy whose evidence includes moderating a meeting, sharing a fundraising link, and repeatedly sending a Signal message. …
(Jason Sattler more…)
Kim Kelly: From Haymarket to Prairieland: How dissent has unleashed the long arm of the law
… But we can change the end of the current story.
Brett Wilkins: ‘Criminalizing Dissent’: Alarm Grows Over Extreme Prison Terms for Texas ICE Protesters
“Now anyone engaged in basic protests with the wrong political beliefs can be labeled a domestic terrorist, when they have no intention of violence,” said one attorney.
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Michael Fanome, Peter Rothpletz: The Leopard Finally Came For John Bolton’s Face
No Amount of Loyalty is Ever Enough For Trump
(Michael Fanome, Peter Rothpletz more…)
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Pete Buttigieg: A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family
Even in today’s climate, there should be one fundamental principle everyone respects: whatever you think about someone in politics, you leave their kids alone.
(Pete Buttigieg more…)
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Mitch Jackson: The Epstein Case Was Never Complicated. Here’s Exactly How You Prosecute the Men Who Walked. It Can Still Happen.
For Every Victim, a Perpetrator. For Every Payment, a Paper Trail. So Where Are the Charges?
(Mitch Jackson more…)Amanda Marcotte: Bill Gates’ testimony offers intriguing lead on Jeffrey Epstein
… Epstein threatened to blackmail Gates.
Jason Weisberger @ bOing bOing: Leon Black’s Epstein testimony ends with Congress demanding receipts
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Lisa Needham: Trump’s lawless witch hunt of Tim Walz crashes and burns
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Heather Delaney Reese: The Trump Administration wants us to think that corruption is normal
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While sitting inside the library of the only president ever forced to resign over abuse of power, Vance declared that Nixon’s “historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and I think deservedly so.” He then argued that if Watergate happened today, it would amount to “like a 12-hour news story,” calling it “crazy” that the scandal ever brought down a presidency. From there, he claimed that the same type of “deep state” institutions that brought down Nixon also tried to bring down Donald Trump in his first presidency, before comparing himself to Nixon, saying they were both young senators, vice presidents, bestselling authors, hated by the media, and concluding, “I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”
…… Nixon’s corruption didn’t become smaller. Our tolerance for presidential corruption became much larger because Donald Trump keeps pushing the boundaries of what Americans are expected to accept.
(Heather Delaney Reese more…)Dean Blundell: Bribery from a UAE spy chief. A shakedown of the Commerce Secretary. An extortion racket targeting Disney, CBS, Meta, Paul Weiss. Haberman and Swan documented all of it.
Jason Easley: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson admitted while addressing the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference that he is running a protection racket for Donald Trump and his family.
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Asawin Suebsaeng @ zeteo: After U.S. attacks on targets around the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for a ship strike on Thursday, administration sources voiced fears of worse to come despite the supposed ceasefire.
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A Trump administration official referred to the latest events as another instance of “peacetime bombings,” an intentionally ironic term that further underscores how Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attacks on Iran have produced perhaps the most Orwellian war of our lifetimes.
Lucian K. Truscott IV: The military problem of needing a roof over your head
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Roofs, in addition to protecting buildings from the sun and rain, make them visible from the air. When you fly over a city and look down, what you see are roofs. In big cities, you can identify buildings by their roofs. …The problem with roofs from a purely military standpoint is that their easy visibility from the air makes them targets. …
On military installations, some buildings contain command and control facilities filled with communications equipment and computers that control the complex weapons systems the military uses. Other buildings contain military equipment and weapons and military personnel. When during the first days of the war on Iran, the U.S. hit a girl’s school by accident, that was because its building used to be part of a complex of Iran Revolutionary Guard military command and control buildings. U.S. intelligence had identified the IRGC buildings by their roofs. The mission that was carried out using bombs and missiles destroyed all the buildings in the military compound, including the building that used to be in the IRGC complex but was now a girls’ school.
The Wall Street Journal published an extraordinary article yesterday on how the Iranian military damaged a major military installation in the Middle East, the Naval Support Activity (NSA) base in Bahrain. …
…The buildings at the naval base in Bahrain were not the only military installations destroyed by Iran using $5,000 drones. Iran hit every military installation in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait – 20 military and diplomatic facilities in all, according to the Journal.
…… This is the world we live in now. We are going to have to do a lot of things differently, or we will go broke on a “defense” that can’t defend and a system of “intelligence” that isn’t intelligent enough to know that a country like Iran can locate the roofs of our military installations and knock them out with weapons they make in underground bunkers for way less than what Trump just spent to ruin the reflecting pool on the mall in Washington.
(Lucian K. Truscott IV more…)
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Jennifer Rubin: Mike Lawler has some explaining to do
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If Conley sounds like a player-coach leading a “mission we begin together and we will finish together,” her opponent, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), invariably seems isolated, stressed (frequently hurrying down a hallway to avoid reporters), and dour. She embodies the ethos that “no one is coming to save us. We are the cavalry.” He conveys a near desperation to save himself from his own record of spinelessness, stuck justifying why his voting is indistinguishable from that of MAGA members from the Deep South.
(Jennifer Rubin more…)Jess Piper: Rural ballots don’t need a “Republican lite” on the ballot when we always have a Republican on the ballot.
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Paul Kedrosky: America’s Science No Longer Underlies China’s Tech
(Paul Kedrosky more…)
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James Eagle: China dominates global high-speed rail
(James Eagle more…)
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Katelyn Jetelina @ Your Local Epidemiologist: The irony of the hantavirus quarantine
(Katelyn Jetelina @ Your Local Epidemiologist more…)
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Timothy Noah @ TNR: The “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” May Be Saved!
(Timothy Noah @ TNR more…)
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Ewan Palmer @ Daily Beast: Trump, 80, Accused of ‘Very Unhealthy’ Relationship With Blonde Aide, 34
Trump’s closest aide—50 years younger than the president—follows him around day and night.
White House aide Natalie Harp’s obsession with Donald Trump has become so severe that her own brother has spoken out.
(Ewan Palmer @ Daily Beast more…)
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Isaac Yu @ Austin American-Statesman: Texas becomes first state to require students read the Bible with required literary list
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 26, 2026
Wednesday night, after President Donald J. Trump refused to sign a landmark bipartisan housing bill into law and melted down at a midday lunch at which he shouted at senators, Senate Republicans appeared to try to mollify him by voting against advancing a war powers resolution the Senate passed the day before.
The Republican senators’ apology for their brief flash of independence was not enough for House MAGA loyalists. …
…The turmoil in Washington, D.C., reflects the changing world of American politics as the Republicans become a far-right party that embraces white nationalism while those Americans standing firm on the nation’s historic democratic principles jockey to create a political system that will represent their movement.
…The once grand Republican Party has become a party of radical extremists, coalescing around white nationalism.
…Communism has never been popular in the United States, and the only politician calling for state takeover of private industries is Trump, under whom the government has taken stakes in at least nine companies involved in steel, minerals, nuclear energy, and semiconductors, costing at least $10 billion in taxpayer money.
Unlike communism, the sort of government both Democrats and Republicans embraced from 1933 to 1981 was very popular, and those opposed to the Trump administration appear to be starting to demand such a government again.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Jason Easley: Trump was meeting with evangelical leaders in the Oval Office as they talked about how he fought for them, but Donald Trump was completely asleep.
(Jason Easley more…)
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- June 4: Mamuka Artmeladze
- April 16: Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt
- March 25: Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
April 1 – Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz @ AP: Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide - January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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