curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Whose America Will We SAVE?, Donald Trump’s Birthday Grift, & a Questionable “Greatest Living American”
- Kareem’s Quote of the Day: What does it say about America that Frederick Douglass’s disappointment still rings true in 2026?
“What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.”
- Trump wants to SAVE Republican control no matter who it harms: …
- Trump’s Birthday Grift for America: …
- Senator Jim Banks of Indiana Calls Clarence Thomas the “Greatest Living American”: …
- Unforgivable Blackness: … a quintessential tale of American greatness and intolerance.
- “American Tune” Rhiannon Giddens & Paul Simon: …
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Jennifer Rubin: Not all the MAGA Supreme Court majority decisions this term are as morally and legally defective as Dred Scott.
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Whether you think the current situation is simply classic corruption (i.e., capture of the court by massive corporate interests under the tutelage of dark money impresario Leonard Leo) or part of an ongoing white Christian Nationalist crusade to roll back the entire post-Reconstruction era, we undoubtedly face a standoff. On one hand, we have elite power determined to impose — by anti-democratic means — a peculiar vision of America unacceptable to most Americans. On the other hand, we have those who adhere to the commitment to self-government that was articulated 250 years ago.
(Jennifer Rubin more…)Amanda Marcotte: Supreme Court’s social engineering
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Robert Reich:
Trump will cause some of you to die from the heatHis pick to head OSHA must start vigorously protecting workers — or be fired
(Robert Reich more…)
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Brian Allen: Trump’s Own DOJ Just Accidentally Released the Report Trump Has Spent Two Years Hiding
Here is the conflict of interest that should dominate this story: the man now running the Justice Department is the same man who personally defended Donald Trump in the classified documents case that Jack Smith’s Volume II was written to prosecute. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche did not recuse himself from decisions about a report he once fought to suppress as a private defense attorney. He now runs the office that accidentally handed that same report to defense lawyers in a related case. That is not an administrative footnote. That is the collision point.
(Brian Allen more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – Juky 3, 2026
And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish were locked into a lower status than white Americans. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”
(Heather Cox Richardson 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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