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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – September 4, 2025

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Because of Kennedy’s history of repeating debunked lies and breaking promises he made to the Senate, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the highest ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, asked that the committee swear Kennedy in before he began his testimony. Committee chair Mike Crapo (R-ID) declined. Wyden said: “This committee’s unwillingness to swear this witness is basically a message that it is acceptable to lie to the Senate Finance Committee about hugely important questions like vaccines.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)

Al Jazeera: Fact checking Robert F Kennedy’s statements to Senate on COVID, vaccines

WSJ: RFK Jr.’s Operation Warped Memory

The health secretary can’t keep his vaccine story straight.
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Christina Pagel: Trump’s war on his perceived enemies is escalating: faster, broader, harsher

Trump is weaponising the presidency to punish critics, silence dissent, and brand whole states as ‘the enemy’.

Today I want to talk about the dramatic escalation in the Trump administration’s attacks on its enemies, using whatever means are at its disposal. To date, I’ve logged 172 actions against perceived enemies since Jan 2025. Over half of these actions have come in just the last two months.
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Ken Klippenstein: Los Angeles Troop Deployment Was Illegal, Judge Says

The battle over troops in America’s streets is just beginning.

When Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, a seasoned Army National Guard officer, questioned the way homeland security was carrying out its operations in Los Angeles earlier this year, Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino questioned his loyalty to the country.

That fascinating nugget is contained in the 52-page ruling by federal judge Charles Breyer, who today said that President Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a 150-year-old law that severely restricts how the military can engage in domestic law enforcement.
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Closer to the Edge: An Interview with Betty Osceola

On the edge of the Florida Everglades, where ancestral lands meet razor wire, a detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz” has become the center of a legal and moral battle. Just days after a federal judge ordered the site shut down, our editor-in-chief, Rook T. Winchester, spoke with Betty Osceola — Miccosukee tribal judge, and longtime protector of this land. What follows is a conversation about resistance, and the deeper currents beneath the headlines.
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Rook: Do you feel like people outside Florida understand what’s happening here?

Betty: No. I don’t think they do. Because if they did, there would be more outrage. There would be more people standing with us. There would be more media coverage. When the media ignores it, when the public ignores it, that’s when they get away with things like this. That’s when they bulldoze the land and say, “Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to.” And it’s too late. There are already environmental laws that are supposed to protect the environment. Those laws need to be upheld.
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Allison Gill: The Sooknanan Monologue

The trump administration attempted to remove 600 terrified unaccompanied minors to Guatemala in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend until Judge Sooknanan entered an order to stop it.
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“I am trying to do the best I can to fulfill my obligation as an Article III judge. I appreciate you all showing up today, and I particularly appreciate the government’s representation. But I’m going to put it on the record again, just so there’s absolutely no ambiguity…

“These children are going to be deplaned. They’re going to be returned to ORR custody. And no attempts will be made to remove them from ORR custody and remove them to Guatemala, in light of my order, while these preliminary emergency proceedings are pending.”
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Ancient Origins UNLEASHED: The Lost Knowledge of the Ancients: Were Humans the First?

Much of modern science was known in ancient times. Robots and computers were a reality long before the 1940s. The early Bronze Age inhabitants of the Levant used computers in stone, the Greeks in the 2nd century BC invented an analogue computer known as the Antikythera mechanism. An ancient Hindu book gives detailed instructions for the construction of an aircraft –ages before the Wright brothers. Where did such knowledge come from?
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One of the greatest handicaps archaeologists and historians are confronted with is a lack of evidence. If it were not for burning libraries in antiquity, mankind’s history would not have so many missing pages.
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Heron, an Alexandrian engineer, built a steam engine which embodied the principle of both the turbine and jet propulsion. If the library had not been burned, we might have had a plan for a steam-chariot in Egypt. At least we know Heron invented an odometer registering the distance travelled by a vehicle. Such achievements were not surpassed, only copied. The source of modern science lies hidden far back in time.
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Maria Peralta: Labor Day 2025: Workers will take to the streets to protest the billionaire agenda

Mobilizations will take place at over 1,000 “Workers Over Billionaires” rallies, demanding an end to wealth inequality amidst a deepening economic squeeze.
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“It’s hard to get ahead,” Dave Pinkham, an IBEW Local 520 journeyman electrician from Austin, Texas, told me. “I’m 40 years old, and I live paycheck to paycheck. In spite of all the volatility I’m OK because of the benefits I get through my union, but broadly speaking our members are struggling. When I look at someone with a spouse and three children, I don’t know how they’re doing it.” Pinkham worked for years in the food service industry but left after being disillusioned by what he said was the lack of respect and poor treatment given to workers.
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Jay Kuo: The Emperor Has No Claws

Trump is but a paper tiger in the very places he asserts he can act with impunity

On Wednesday, during a cabinet meeting, Donald Trump declared he has the “right to do anything I want” because “I’m the President of the United States.”

It was a telling summary of not only his state of mind but where we find ourselves as a nation: teetering on the brink of autocracy and fascism. Some argue we are already plunged deep into it.

But as many commentators have urged, we must watch what Trump does, and not get sucked into what he says. And when we zoom out a bit and examine strictly what he has tried to do, ignoring his constant lies and bluster, there’s quite a different picture than the monarch who can do anything he wants.

The markets understand that Trump’s word is not worth much. His constant threats and inevitable retreats on tariffs have led to the “TACO” presidency, because Trump really does “always chicken out” in the end.
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Today, I want to discuss four significant constraints upon the man who believes he can do anything simply because he is the President of the United States. These are powerful forces that act every day to limit his options and rein him in. I want to lay them out plainly, not only to give us some basis for hope that we can survive his second term (however long or short it winds up being) but also to highlight where we should focus our own attention and lend our support.
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RNS: First day of school in DC: Armed troops, terrified families, missing parents

What happens in the nation’s capital will have repercussions for the whole country and what comes next.

The first day of school often brings a mix of excitement and anxiety. Kids reconnect with friends and wonder what their classes will be like. Parents feel familiar pangs of pride and loss as they watch their children growing up. And teachers prepare to help new groups of students cooperate and learn together for another year. As the mom of two teenagers, now a freshman and a senior in high school, I’ve looked forward to the first day back to school every year with gratitude and joy.

But this year was tougher. This year, the first day of school in our home of Washington, D.C., included military troops in our streets and families so filled with fear they decided to keep their kids home. It included parent-led patrols on school routes and educator training on responding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. It included difficult conversations with children, trying to explain the unexplainable. A few days before school started, a family whose kids have attended school with my sons since kindergarten was torn apart when the father was surrounded by agents and detained on his way to work. “So, where is he?” my son asked. I have no idea.
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Heather Cox Richardson: The Nineteenth Amendment

…as right-wing Christian nationalists supported by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are calling for an end to women’s right to vote, it seems crucial to remember the history of the drive for women’s suffrage in the United States of America
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)

Jennifer Rubin: The Police State is Here

Miles Taylor: Trump installs czar to oversee U.S. elections

Conspiracy theorist hired for top U.S. “election integrity” job, hinting at broader White House plans to hijack 2026 vote
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