I apologize for not jumping right into the news of the day, but I have a couple of other topics I wanted to write about. The first is a personal experience, and the other is about Trump’s cognitive struggles.
A man surrounded by ghostly presences, Chris Dale, Getty Images
I’ve been having an interesting experience lately. It happens when a I wake up from a nap in the daytime. It has never happened when I wake up in the morning. What happens is that I get a sense that someone is in my apartment with me in another room. It is a very pleasant sensation that lasts for a few minutes.
When I think about who the person could be, it feels like my mother. Of course my mother is gone now, but there could have been times in the past when my mother and I were in the same house together and I had a comforting sensation of her being there when I was taking a nap.
I wondered if this sensation could be known phenomenon like deja vu, in which which we get a sensation of having already experienced something that is happening in the present. It turns out that the experience I’m having has a name: the “sense of a presence.”
But there are lots of different varieties of this phenomenon. Often, it is an unpleasant experience. One example I read about: You go into a dark basement to do laundry or something, and suddenly you sense there is someone there and you are so frightened you run back upstairs. The personal experience I described above has always been pleasant.
Here’s one example of this phenomenon I found on-line on Reddit:
How common is the sensation/phenomenon of sensing or feeling a presence?
I’m not necessarily referring to paranormal mediums who close their eyes and describe some person in the beyond; Feel free to bring that into it though. Also, this is not referring to the creeps we get turning the lights off in the hallway and reaching your bedroom before the boogeyman gets you scenario, but if you feel it’s relevant then please do.
I work in the construction/carpentry/finishing business. I’m in a lot of houses and buildings, new and old merely due to that fact. So, needless to say, people are in and out all the time and I’m familiar with the sensation of being approached or co existing etc.
It’s when the house is empty and all to myself, things are more k Lax or there isn’t much commotion going on that I’m referring to. Example 1) being alone in a room cutting in walls and just have the sensation someone was quietly walking through the house and stopped to watch you work on their wall… like you’re pretty sure the owner or builder is behind you only to turn around and no one be there. Like I said, it happens in New and old houses alike. Not in every house and not all the time. Sometimes multiple times in the same day.
I won’t go on and on about this–I’m supposed to be writing about politics after all. But if you’ve ever experienced something like this, I’d love to hear from you. I plan to keep researching about this phenomenon.
On Trump’s cognitive issues, yesterday he had difficulty finding a word during a press availability during an oval office meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun. He was talking about Venzuela and couldn’t retrieve the word “earthquake.” This is what he said:
“Venezuela is a very happy place. It had a tragic incident with the event that took place a couple of days ago, a couple of weeks ago. What a terrible thing that was, they had a movement, a shifting of earth that was unbelievable in nobody’s ever. They’d never seen anything like it. A lot of people were killed. So it’s all unrelated. And by the way, we were the first ones there to help. They had to help Venezuela. It was an earthquake. I guess you’d call it. It was a pretty massive earthquake. And we were able to do a lot of good. But they lost a lot of people.”
It took 20 seconds for Trump to come up with the word “earthquake.”
I’m 78 years old, and I sometimes have trouble retrieving words. Usually, the word will come to me if I wait a short time, but if I’m in conversation with someone I can’t pause for 20 seconds. I have to try to describe the world like Trump did.
But I’m not trying to be President of the United States. I’m retired and spend my time reading, following politics, and talking with friends and family. I’m functioning pretty well. I don’t wander off like Trump does sometimes. I don’t stare into space looking confused like he does at times.
Shouldn’t reporters be asking him about this or at least writing articles about all these dementia-type incidents? I guess that’s really intimidating, but that’s their job to speak truth to power, isn’t it?
OK, so that ends the off-topic section of this post. Let’s get to the news.
A scene in Venezuela 2 days ago.
The Financial Times has published an investigation of what happened to the money from Venezuela oil that Trump keeps bragging about. It’s behind a paywall, but here’s a discussion at The New Republic by Malcolm Ferguson: What Did Trump Do With the Billions He Collected From Venezuelan Oil?
The Trump administration has raked in about $13 billion after taking over Venezuela’s oil exports in the wake of its kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, according to a Financial Times analysis. But six months later, and one month after two devastating earthquakes, that money is nowhere to be found.
When Trump first seized the “millions of barrels” of oil back in January, he assumed complete control. His administration eventually proclaimed that it would use any profit from the sales for “the benefit of the American people and the Venezuelan people.” The State Department has since claimed that “billions of dollars have been disbursed to the Venezuelan economy” and that “financial monitoring is under way to ensure funds benefit the Venezuelan people.”
But none of that has been proven to be true. The Financial Timesreported Wednesday that there has been no evidence of oil money going back into the hands of the Venezuelans Trump claimed to care for, and that Venezuela’s first-quarter gross domestic product was the lowest it’s been in five years….
It seems clear that the most corrupt president in history is withholding oil revenue from Venezuelans who badly need it, as oil makes up nearly a quarter of the entire country’s GDP. In January, Semafor reported that Trump would be keeping proceeds from the first $500 million sale of Venezuelan oil in an offshore bank account based in Qatar. It might be worth checking up on that account.
That is another important topic that reporters could be asking Trump about.
This story is at the top of Memeorandum today, and it is crazy. It appears that the Department of Education may have rigged the outcome of the National Civics Contest.
The morning after the competition, Aangad Singh’s family was trying to figure out what went wrong. They were walking through the National Museum of Natural History, going over answers, doing the math.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said his mother, Ramandeep.
Aangad Singh, 15, competes in the Presidential 1776 Award competition. Jalani Morgan for NOTUS
Ramandeep was good at numbers. But she couldn’t make them explain how her 15-year-old son had missed the top three in the Presidential 1776 Award competition, the civics contest for high schoolers that President Donald Trump’s party planners had created to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. She had watched the first round, when the field was whittled from 20 to eight, and the second round, when it went from eight to three. There was celebrity host Mario Lopez, an exclusive broadcast deal with CBS and a Kennedy Center stage that mixed game show spectacle with civic pageantry. The only thing missing was a scoreboard.
She told herself not to complain. She didn’t want to be that mom, a sore loser whose kid could never fail. On their way out, though, other parents kept stopping them.
“Shocked,” said more than one.
Later, a boy stopped her and said a group of contestants had kept score themselves.
“We thought he won,” the boy said.
She approached an official from the Department of Education, which had helped run the contest, and asked for the final scores.
“Proprietary,” the official said.
The scores are secret? What the hell? Please read the whole thing. And here’s a clue: these are the top three contestants:
The three finalists meet with President Donald Trump alongside Education Secretary Linda McMahon and contest host Mario Lopez in the Oval Office. Molly Riley, Official White House Photo
In Iran war news, Trump is threatening war crimes again.
President Trump threatened on Wednesday to strike bridges and power plants in Iran if it targeted any more ships in the Strait of Hormuz, as the prospect of a prolonged conflict pushed the price of oil to its highest level in over a month.
An image taken from social media and verified by The New York Times showing a damaged portion of a bridge in Hormozgan Province, Iran, on Friday.Credit…Social Media, via Reuters
“Any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship” in the strait, Mr. Trump said on social media, U.S. forces would hit the sites, including in or near the capital, Tehran. Deliberate strikes on civilian infrastructure could be considered a war crime under international law.
Mr. Trump has escalated his threats through weeks of rising bluster and deadly military exchanges, in which the United States has failed to either stop Iranian attacks or force the country’s hard-line leaders, who want to prolong the war, back to the negotiating table.
The threats also reflected how much the focus of the war has narrowed into a fight over the strait, a critical passage for global oil and gas, even as Mr. Trump maintains that his wider objective is preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon. The strait was open and free to transit before the war began, but Iran has proved it can effectively control traffic with threats of strikes and, in doing so, gained powerful leverage over global markets.
The latest escalation came as Iranian officials had already reported recent strikes on bridges, and as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the United States would keep waging war as long as Iran tried to control the strait. Iran’s attacks on vessels there have brought ship traffic there to a near-total halt.
While Mr. Rubio left the door open for diplomacy after another night of U.S. and Iranian strikes across the Persian Gulf, he told reporters in Manila that Iran at this point was “not serious about talks,” arguing that Tehran had violated a preliminary agreement that says it should allow ships to transit the strait.
It’s too bad Trump can’t keep his big mouth shut for once.
The book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change, is doing very well, and Trump is not happy about it.
A book filled with damning revelations about Donald Trump’s second term is on track to be the bestselling nonfiction work of 2026, despite the president’s best efforts to undermine it.
The book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, has sold over 500,000 units since its June 23 publication and has topped the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for three consecutive weeks, Axios reported on Wednesday. The figure includes hardcover, audio, and e-book sales.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, authors of Regime Change, on Meet the Press last month. Photo Shannon Finney, NBC via Getty Images
The strong sales follow a furious public attack by Trump, 80, who lashed out at Haberman in a post on Truth Social shortly after the book’s release.
“Based on a very quick and boring briefing concerning the Magot Hagerman book about me, it is mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things she has written about me for so many years,” Trump, 80, wrote, intentionally using an insulting nickname for the veteran New York Times reporter….
He tore into Haberman, calling her “a third rate writer and intellect” without mentioning Swan.
According to Axios, Simon & Schuster has ordered a seventh printing of Regime Change, bringing the total number of hardcovers in print to 460,000. The publisher had already ordered an additional 150,000 copies on publication day to meet unexpectedly strong demand.
“Maggie and Swan pierced the veil of a White House that has been pretty locked down on scoops and scenes. ‘Regime Change’ is a unicorn of publishing. It goes well beyond political circles to people who are hungry for a narrative and frame to make sense of Trump 2.0. Even Trump and his team aren’t disputing the facts.”
Read some embarrassing tidbits from the book at the Daily Beast link.
PARIS, July 22 (Reuters) – Daniel Siad, a modelling scout with ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has been found dead at his home outside Paris, prosecutors said on Wednesday.
Siad’s body was discovered on Monday evening. An autopsy will be carried out to determine the cause of death, the Nanterre prosecutor’s office said.
Siad’s name appeared nearly 2,000 times in the Epstein files released by the U.S. Department of Justice.
According to French media, at least five women accused Siad, 69, of rape and human trafficking, allegations Siad denied.
Siad’s lawyer told Reuters in an emailed statement that the modelling scout was never formally the subject of judicial proceedings….
Siad told French broadcaster BFM in May that his relationship with Epstein was strictly professional.
“Daniel Siad never stopped proclaiming his innocence,” his lawyer, Meyna Arab-Tigrine, said. Siad had died of a heart attack, she added.
This seems like a very bad idea to me. Trump wants to let Saudi Arabia start down the road to owning nuclear weapons.
The Trump administration plans to announce Wednesday that it has reached a broad nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could lead to the country enriching its own fuel for nuclear reactors, U.S. officials said.
The accord is intended to further bind the United States with the Saudi government as the war with Iran strains the relationship. The Trump administration, according to officials, estimates it will provide billions of dollars for the U.S. nuclear industry — starting with Westinghouse, which designs many of the reactors sold abroad.
Trump and Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman in oval office
The Trump administration plans to formally sign and announce the agreement with the Saudis on Wednesday, said two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It would announce the details to Congress soon afterward.
Although the agreement likely would have support among many Republicans, some U.S. lawmakers from both parties along with Israeli officials have expressed opposition to such a plan, fearing that the kingdom could use a civilian nuclear project to eventually develop nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters traveling with him in Manila on Wednesday that he had nothing to say about any nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia. “Maybe later today, once Washington wakes up, there is an announcement,” he said. “I promise you’ll know about it.”
Asked about concerns that the agreement could lead to Saudi Arabia developing nuclear weapons, Mr. Rubio said, “Suffice it to say, the U.S. is not going to reach any agreement with any country in the world that leads to the risk of proliferation.”
The accord has been under discussion for years, and during the Biden administration it was envisioned as part of a broader deal that would include Saudi diplomatic recognition of Israel. But after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel by Hamas, that prospect receded. President Trump separated the proposal for U.S.-Saudi civilian nuclear cooperation from any demand that Saudi Arabia recognize Israel.
The agreement will require review by Congress, which under the Atomic Energy Act has the power to vote a resolution of disapproval. But as a practical matter, the agreement would likely pass, because Congress would have to assemble a veto-proof majority to override Mr. Trump’s initiative.
The Trump administration ignored warnings from career staff at the Commerce Department when it granted the United Arab Emirates sweeping access to advanced American semiconductors and other technology, according to three former officials with knowledge of the reports and two other people familiar with the matter.
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security announced on July 10 that it was loosening restrictions on sensitive tech exports to the UAE, a key ally in the war in the Middle East whose leaders pledged last year to invest more than $1 trillion in the U.S. over the coming decade. According to one of the people familiar and two former officials, the announcement surprised staff inside the agency, which is tasked with securing American tech from adversaries and criminals. It also ran directly against recommendations staffers submitted to senior Trump administration officials at the department last year.
The five people said agency staff compiled and circulated multiple internal reports and memos last fall documenting security risks tied to G42, the UAE’s state-backed AI giant, and its affiliated companies. In the assessments, which have not been previously reported, staff warned that expanding the companies’ access to U.S. technology — such as cutting-edge processors from companies like Nvidia, as well as the powerful AI models built with them — made it more likely the technology would get into the hands of adversaries. In particular, they flagged concerns about China’s influence in the Emirates.
“It is an open secret that the UAE is the primary diversion point for sensitive U.S. technologies in the Middle East — by orders of magnitude,” said one of the people familiar, who like others in this story was granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
But senior Commerce officials who were presented with the reports, including Jeffrey Kessler, the Commerce undersecretary in charge of BIS, ultimately brushed aside the warnings, the people said.
One more shocking story in this wide-ranging post:
The lettuce supplier at the center of the turbo diarrhea outbreak has spent millions of dollars to sway sentiment around food regulation and elect Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans, according to public filings.
Taylor Farms donated more than $2 million to conservative political groups in 2025, according to Federal Election Commission filings. That includes a $1 million donation to MAGA Inc., the Trump-centric super PAC, and $1.1 million to other super PACs dedicated to electing Republicans.
Bruce Taylor, CEO of Taylor Farms
From 2020 through the end of 2024, the company donated more than $1.6 million to conservative PACs, including a total of $850,000 to AFP Action, an anti-regulation super PAC with ties to the Koch network.
Bruce Taylor, the chairman and CEO of Taylor Farms, is also a longtime donor to Republican causes. Since 2020, Taylor has personally donated more than $900,000 to Republican PACs and candidates, including contributions to Texas senator John Cornyn and Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn.
Like many corporate giants, Taylor Farms has also spent big on lobbying related to industry regulation. In early 2025, it hired lobbyists at the firm Sidley Austin to advocate on behalf of the company on “regulation of food safety,” according to disclosure documents. Since then, the company has spent $810,000 on its lobbying efforts.
Marion Nestle, a food policy expert, said that Taylor Farms’ donations are part of a wider problem in the American food industry: that multibillion-dollar companies use their financial resources to push policies that would reduce food safety regulation and accountability when outbreaks occur.
“The FDA has regulations in place for what food producers are supposed to be doing, but nobody wants to do it—because it’s expensive and difficult,” Nestle told WIRED.
In a post on X, the US Department of Health and Human Services emphasized that Taylor Farms’ political donations did not influence the Trump administration’s response to the cyclospora outbreak.
“This is how the FAKE NEWS works: imply collusion, ignore the facts,” the HHS account posted on Monday. “Nothing influences our decisions except science and the safety of the American people.”
Riiiiiight. I don’t believe that for one minute.
That’s all I have for today. Thoughts? Are there other stories you’d like to share?
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Reporter: Mr. President, this plane does not have antimissile defense systems on it. Why are you flying it?Trump: Well, it has — it has a lot, you know it has a lot of capability, but as I understand it, in about a month or so, they're going to send it to have it be, uh, maxed out.
I've read three versions of this story — NYT, CNN, and this one.None reveals which journalist got Trump to confess to precisely the topic of the story DOJ subpoenaed 5 journalists over.
Rubio claims Iran and Cuba are aiding “antifa.” Seems like pretext to designate democrats a Foreign Terror Organization (FTO). abcnews.com/Politics/rub…
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley is asking the Department of Justice to launch a criminal investigation into Plan C Pills, calling the website a “dark money operation.”jessica.substack.com/p/josh-hawle…
“This is how America is Made Great Again!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I have to apologize for the delay in this post. Between trying to prepare for a tropical system, getting my Wi-Fi updated, and needing lots of sleep, I slept most of the morning. I upgraded my old wifi modem and doubled its capacity to 2 gig. I’m hoping the lag and sudden short downtimes go away. It’s always something.
I hate to have that Déjà vu feeling about Vietnam and all the Gulf Wars we’ve entangled ourselves in, but I do. This headline from the New York Times brings about everything I’ve felt about all the unnecessary wars we’ve had since the Korean War. “Pentagon Withheld Dozens of U.S. Military Injuries in Iran War. Central Command is not required to release information about injured troops, especially when they quickly return to duty, a military official said.” Eric Schmitt has the story.
In the week leading up to the Iranian attack on Friday that killed two U.S. soldiers and left one service member missing in Jordan, Iran carried out three other strikes against U.S. forces in the country.
Those attacks injured dozens of U.S. service members and damaged several helicopters, according to several U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
But the Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage they inflicted.
The episode is the latest example during the Iran conflict of the tension between what the Pentagon says is the need for operational security and the government’s obligation to inform the public about the conduct of the war.
Moreover, another U.S. military official added, why would the Pentagon divulge information that could help Iran zero in on its deadly ballistic missiles and drone attacks in Jordan and other bases in the Middle East where thousands of American troops are stationed?
Central Command has also stopped announcing how many sit.
Meanwhile, Trump is in full saber-rattling mode. This is from The Guardian. “Trump says Iran ‘will pay’ for killing soldiers ‘many times over’ after Pezeshkian says country fighting ‘full-scale war’ – Middle East crisis live.” Some how the word ‘crisis’ seems like a supreme understatement.
The US president wrote on Truth Social:
Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over! This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military.
The US military on Monday identified two soldiers killed in Jordan while defending against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks. An examination of remains is underway to determine whether they belong to a third service member who was reporting missing in that attack. And in Iraq, another US service member died after “a controlled detonation” of an Iranian drone.
It brings the total number of deaths in the war with Iran, which the US and Israel started in late February, to 17.
The article includes updates from Lebanon and more details on the incursion into Jordan. I just can’t believe that so many of these geriatric Senators we have, who have seen all of the wars in the Middle East and their results, won’t use their Constitutional duties to stop this mess. Well, there seems to be an attempt, but I seriously doubt it will go anywhere. This is fromPolitico. “House GOP leaders scrambling to set up a briefing on Iran war developments. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could possibly attend the House GOP Conference meeting Tuesday morning.”
House Republican leaders are making plans for a Trump administration official to attend Tuesday morning’s GOP Conference meeting on Capitol Hill to brief members on the latest developments in the war with Iran, according to four people granted anonymity to share private discussions.
Their hope is that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will be the special guest, one of the people said. He is already scheduled to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee later Tuesday regarding the administration’s supplemental funding request for more military aid as the conflict in Iran continues. Meredith Lee Hill has the lede.
It comes after violence in the region over the weekend culminated in the death of three U.S. service members. A growing number of House Republicans, including vulnerable incumbents, also have been asking GOP leaders and the White House for more information about the war before they vote Wednesday to advance a plan to free up $95 billion in additional funding for the Iran war, defense activities and farm assistance.
More military and war spending! Also, do they really think Peg Hegesth is going to give up on us testosterone testing for something that has historically enriched Congressional Members? You’d think an all-volunteer military would make them a bit more cautious about filling the ranks, but Trump and Hegesth must have below-average IQs, given the craziness they’ve pulled.
So, this is an amazing story from New Jersey. It will inform you exactly how far the Trump Family Crime Syndicate will go to enrich itself. The article can be found at The American Prospect. “The Kleptocrat Nesting Dolls Behind Trump’s Potemkin Gas Stations. How can Freedom Fuel afford to sell gas for $3.47 a gallon? That’s the wrong question to ask.” This excellent reporting was done by Maureen Tkacik. Beware of anything Trump labels ‘freedom’ anything.
Five years ago, a manager for a Virginia gasoline distributor opened an invoice for more than 200,000 phantom gallons of gas they had no record of selling. Truckers on contract with a chain of gas stations that had recently terminated its contract had been filling up their tanks using an emergency PIN that the distributor, Petroleum Marketing Group, Inc. (PMG), had designated for one-time out-of-contract gas purchases, effectively stealing $667,517 worth in just over a week.
Upon subpoenaing the gas station chain CEO’s bank records, PMG ultimately discovered he had no fewer than 28 other credit agreements he hadn’t disclosed on behalf of three or four alter-ego companies whose businesses he’d never listed on his application. The CEO and his brother/partner—two central New Jersey men in their thirties named Syed and Shamikh Kazmi, respectively—had outstanding default judgments against them in Wisconsin and Michigan, a business in Florida they had never disclosed, and legal disputes with landlords and franchisors from Circle K to Phillips 66 to 7-Eleven, the latter of which accused the brothers in a lawsuit of allowing a store they were operating to fall into such an alarming state of squalor it was forced to “disown” it, then exploiting a provision in the franchise agreement to order hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cigarettes in its last weeks of operation that they allegedly neither returned to corporate nor paid for. Another landlord was suing them for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent. The lawsuits would drag on and multiply while the Kazmi brothers bid on new assets under slightly altered names, then failed over and over again to wire over the required deposits.
Enter the high-flying Wall Street money manager Blue Owl, the reluctant owner of a vast portfolio of hundreds of gas stations across the country for which it had vastly overpaid. Prior to 2023, the gas stations and adjoining convenience stores had been run by an outfit called Mountain Express, which was forced into liquidation that spring after the founder sucked $130 million in ostensibly illegal fake dividends out of the stores and retired, leaving a trail of broken soda machines, failing refrigerators, disemboweled cash registers, and unpaid bills across the land. Blue Owl ended up paying $15 million to the bankruptcy estate for having enabled the grift.
You might assume that Blue Owl, a private credit behemoth founded by Wall Street’s titular best and brightest with $315 billion in assets under management, would attempt to find squeaky-clean, meticulous types to take over the leases at its service stations and start anew. LOL, no: For at least 17 of its stations in New Jersey, they chose the lawsuit-embroiled Kazmi brothers, a transaction formally announced last fall shortly after the trustee in another bankruptcy filed an amusing legal brief detailing Shamikh Kazmi’s effort to hire a locksmith to access a former Rite Aid store in Maryland on whose lease he had bid but never actually wired over the required $71,000 earnest money deposit. (A few months later, Kazmi placed an audacious $75 million all-cash bid on an iconic brutalist Philadelphia skyscraper complex, touting a plan to convert the 1.8 million-square-foot office complex into a Hard Rock Hotel, but he again failed to make the deposit.)
Earlier this year, the Kazmi brothers unveiled the latest makeover of their struggling gas station chain: a fast-food empire called Yum Grills, whose “$60 million expansion” Shamikh purported to be “self-funding” in a February Philadelphia Business Journal story that promised a breakneck rollout of 15 locations in 120 days. They appear to have successfully opened just one, not counting a related concept called Cousin’s Burger that boasts two others.
Head to the link to read the entire nasty business. I just couldn’t bring myself to watch the final game of FIFA because, damn, do we really need a fricking half-time event? Messi met with Trump all friendly-like, and Trump attended the shebang, got booed, and tried to upstage the winning Spanish team. I could mention a few more things, but anyway, I never thought I’d be pulling for Belgium and Spain in a series. This is from Raw Story. “Trump globally mocked as Spain seemingly edits his World Cup photobomb: ‘That’s awesome’.”
President Donald Trump faced global ridicule for photobombing Spain’s championship celebration after winning the 2026 World Cup — and he was hit with another round of mockery after the team seemingly edited him out of an official photo.
The official X account for the Spain men’s national team shared an image of the players and coach Luis de la Fuente celebrating Sunday’s 1-0 win over Argentina.
The picture did not feature Trump, despite the president spending most of the celebration lingering at the side while the winners jumped for joy.
The 80-year-old president had accompanied FIFA President Gianni Infantino onto the field for the trophy presentation ceremony, and he continued to remain onstage even as Infantino attempted to usher him aside for the team photos.
But the one shared by the victorious Spanish team on X had no sign of Trump, prompting speculation that he’d been digitally removed. At the least, the team made a decision not to use one of the many photos he was in.
Trump and Messi seemed to have jinxed the Argentina Team. The question of the Jinx is actually a USA Today headline. Messi’s eyes were all teary at the end of the game. You know the one about everything Trump touches, right?
In a pre-recorded interview with Fox’s Jenny Taft that aired before the game, Trump didn’t state who he wanted to win but made friendly remarks about the Argentinian superstar.
“I thought about it a lot. I knew that was a question. I hate to get involved, even though politically, it doesn’t matter so much,” Trump said. “I would say that it’s hard to bet against Messi … I won’t pick sides. I just think it’s very hard to bet against Messi. He’s great.”
“We don’t want to do any trade with Spain anymore,” Trump said. “Spain is a terrible partner in NATO.”
Trump attended the game and was booed when he stepped onto the field to present the trophies for the tournament. During the handing out of silver medals, the interaction between Trump and Messi was brief.
Trump has regularly attended sporting events and surrounded himself with sports stars while in office, with multiple examples of teams losing after being connected to him.
One last suggested read by Paul Waldman at Public Notice. “Trump would love to steal the election. But he’s floundering. Republicans would rather talk about almost anything else than his conspiracy theories.” I’m sure they would, given the polls.
Just as there are only so many times you can hear Trump say “It’s like nothing anyone has seen before” before the hyperbole loses all meaning, yet another allegation that elections are being stolen no longer registers as revelatory or urgent. That’s especially true when Republicans have worked so hard for so many years to prove that voter fraud is organized and widespread, with an enormous amount of time, effort, and money spent by the entire conservative movement, yet have come up with essentially nothing.
Everyone knew what Trump would deliver — some lies, some innuendo, some banal facts portrayed as deeply sinister. And no one was less enthusiastic about the speech than the Republicans actually trying to win elections this November.
“The people I talk to are scared shitless,” one unnamed former Trump administration official told Politico in advance of the speech. Trump’s 2020 obsession only served to remind voters that the president is unconcerned about the genuine problems they face.
The lack of support from the conservative propaganda machine was obvious in the response afterward. One might expect a dramatic White House address to be followed by a push to spread its message and multiply its effect — GOP candidates for office touting its importance, segment after segment on Fox News about it — but instead there was a deafening silence.
Fox could barely bring itself to discuss the speech afterward, mentioning it briefly on a couple of shows before moving on to more urgent culture war subjects like whether Caitlin Clark is being targeted for hard fouls by Black players.
“The unkindest cut came the next morning from Fox & Friends, long Trump’s media home and favorite program,” reported Media Matters’ Matt Gertz, “which did not discuss the speech at all — not even in a news brief.”
incredible — more than two hours into this morning's Fox & Friends, "fraud" has not been mentioned a single time and hosts haven't discussed Trump's big primetime speech at all. They have 787 million reasons to ignore it.
They know something Trump doesn’t: This isn’t helping him. In fact, it would be just about the worst strategy he could have come up with, if there were a strategy at all.
So it’s so late that I’m almost bumping into student time. I hope you had a great weekend. I’ll be facing Tropical Storm Bertha in a few days, so send out some good juju to all of us down here on the Gulf Coast!
What’s on your Reading, Writing, and Blogging list today?
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Taylor Farms has initiated a recall of all iceberg lettuce from central Mexico, which include Marketside-brand products sold at Walmart due to potential Cyclospora contamination.Updates will be provided as additional information is available. http://www.fda.gov/food/outbrea…
New: Late last night, Taylor Farms quietly posted an official recall noticeWe now know that the parasite-linked iceberg lettuce was shipped to Walmart & food distributors in 27 (!) statesIt was for some reason still being sent out up until Thursday July 16www.consumerreports.org/health/food-…
Given the lack of details provided by Taylor Farms thus far, Consumer Reports' food safety experts are advising folks in the 27 states implicated by the recall to discard ALL iceberg lettuce until we know more about where the parasite-linked products ended up http://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-…
There’s not a lot of exciting news today, and I’ve been sitting here in a daze trying to decide what to focus on. Dakinikat did a great job dealing with Trump’s idiotic speech on election tampering, but there are a few interesting follow-up articles. The Iran bombing has been back on for a week, along with Iran’s attacks on U.S. bases in the region. Then I’m going address Pete Hegseth’s plan to push testosterone shots for the troops. It turns out there’s a bizarre right-wing obsession with “T” levels in men.
As President Trump wrapped up a prime-time address in which he rattled off ominous and at times outlandish assertions about U.S. election vulnerabilities, he repeated his demand that Congress pass strict voting restrictions that have been stalled in the Senate.
That plea, which Mr. Trump implied was the reason behind the Thursday night speech, appeared to have landed with a whimper among Republicans on Capitol Hill and in campaigns around the country. Most had little to say in its aftermath about an issue the president called among the most urgent facing the nation.
Democrats immediately seized on Mr. Trump’s address with a frenzy of talking points to accuse him of trying to undermine the upcoming midterm elections. But the speech drew a muted response from members of the president’s party. He has spent months trying to pressure them into action on the election overhaul measure, which would require proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote and would severely limit voting by mail.
Though Mr. Trump’s most devoted loyalists in Congress quickly repeated his call to pass the bill known as the SAVE America Act — demands they have been making for months — most other Republicans stayed quiet, and at least one skeptic indicated that the speech had not moved the needle.
“If it was meant to influence people like me, it didn’t get me there,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican who has publicly opposed the measure, said in an interview on Friday. “What we heard last night was there are foreign interests trying to influence us, but they weren’t effective at basically hacking into our system. I don’t think there was much last night that would change views on whether we should pass the SAVE Act.”
Broadly, it was not clear that Mr. Trump’s message was resonating beyond the far right of the Republican Party that has long unquestioningly echoed his baseless and unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.
Republicans on the campaign trail did not seize on Mr. Trump’s remarks, instead focusing on issues they perceived to be of greater import. And conservative media outlets found other stories as compelling, if not more so, as Mr. Trump’s remarks about election security.
On Friday morning, “Fox & Friends,” the program that is usually a megaphone for Mr. Trump’s messages, shunted aside the speech. Instead, the hosts opened the three-hour show by highlighting the war in Iran, the wildfire smoke coming from Canada, flooding in Texas and the latest on the cyclospora parasite.
Fox already had to pay millions to voting machine companies because of their coverage of Trump’s false claims. They probably want to avoid that happening again. A bit more from the article:
“Re-litigating 2020 is a mistake,” said Representative Don Bacon, a retiring moderate Republican from Nebraska. “It’s a losing issue, and most people that are reasonable and aren’t so clouded by partisanship know it’s baloney.”
The lack of enthusiasm highlighted just how entrenched the political debate over Mr. Trump’s claims about election integrity have become, and how unwilling a Republican-controlled Congress has been to heed his command to act on them.
Mr. Trump has made baseless assertions of election fraud for years, largely pointing to the same set of concerns. But with no new evidence to support his claims, lawmakers have had little incentive to change their positions. That continued to be true after a speech that included a slew of claims, some exaggerated or distorted, about potential vulnerabilities to foreign election meddling that the SAVE America Act would not address.
Even Mr. Trump’s staunchest right-wing supporters, who have spent years sifting through documents and interrogating debunked claims about stolen elections, acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s speech on Thursday pulled from familiar refrains.
“Is this new information?” questioned Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and sometime adviser to Mr. Trump, in a post on X about 10 minutes into the president’s speech. (She then used Mr. Trump’s remarks to retread familiar territory, particularly warnings about China’s influence that she has been issuing for years.)
Election officials are warning that President Donald Trump’s assertion that America’s voting machines aren’t safe is far more dangerous than the vulnerabilities he highlighted in his Thursday night address.
Flaws in electronic voting machines have been well-documented for more than a decade by researchers, and states have poured money into bolstering security. Still, none have ever been exploited by malicious actors to successfully change the outcome of an election.
Now officials are worried that Trump’s latest comments — when he claimed that “Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including the security of electronic voting machines” — could undermine the electorate’s fundamental faith in voting. Without confidence in the system, the entire process could be called into question, as voters choose not to cast ballots or refuse to accept election results.
“There’s nothing wrong with pointing out vulnerabilities and therefore doing audits or therefore upgrading to a more modern system that uses a paper record,” said Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program. “What’s wrong is trying to use those vulnerabilities to spread distrust in elections.”
Colorado’s Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold stressed during a Center for American Progress event Friday that “nothing the president said was groundbreaking, new or actually a vulnerability that has been exploited or is not being addressed.”
There is no evidence that foreign or domestic hackers have ever exploited electronic voting machines to change votes or impact the outcome of an election. Investigators did find that Russian hackers successfully accessed the voter registration databases of a few U.S. states ahead of the 2016 elections, but they never changed any votes. To date, that’s the most intensive hacking effort documented by federal authorities involving U.S. elections.
President Donald Trump released a trove of documents during a primetime address to the nation that allies had hyped as a smoking gun that would prove his long-debunked allegations of mass voter fraud.
Speaking from the White House on Thursday night, he described shocking revelations, like Chinese meddling to undermine his failed candidacy in 2020 and a cover-up by the “deep state.” He claimed, “Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure.”
But a review by The Associated Press found no such confirmation in the collection of newly declassified reports, investigation files, intelligence analysis and assorted correspondence. Many pages are so heavily redacted that their findings are unclear. Others outline vulnerabilities and assessments that have been well-documented for years. There’s no evidence that China or any other foreign entity manipulated the vote in 2020 or any other year.
“The White House promised a bombshell, and they delivered a dud,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, who attended a White House briefing on the material ahead of the speech. Despite what appeared to be a concerted effort by administration officials, ”there was absolutely nothing here that was news, nothing here that even calls into question past elections and certainly not the 2020 election.”
Here’s a look at what the documents say….
China has our data. Lots of it
“Starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files,” Trump said Thursday night.
There is no evidence, however, that China actually used that information in any way….
Noncitizens may or may not be more common on voter rolls
In his remarks, Trump touted the release of a new Department of Homeland Security investigation, based on state voter rolls and public records, that he said had identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in federal elections.
The report said the agency uncovered more than a quarter of a million noncitizens illegally registered to vote in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada, based on public records, which are often erroneous or incomplete. Another 28,000 noncitizens, it claimed, were found on voter rolls in 25 states using the new Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.
There is no allegation, however, that any of those people actually voted, which would be a crime….
Documents detail Russia’s election efforts
Trump has spent years criticizing the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help him win. But the documents shed new light on the country’s ongoing efforts.
One declassified document from 2020 portrays Russia as the country that has tried the most to penetrate American election systems — but in an effort to defeat Joe Biden. It notes how Russia worked to amplify claims that Biden, while serving as vice president, engaged in inappropriate behavior involving Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that employed his son Hunter, a charge frequently repeated by Trump and Republicans.
“Their aim is to defeat the former Vice President and ensure the President’s victory,” reads the document from the National Intelligence Council.
The document went on to state that both China and Iran wanted Trump to lose. But it included a chart documenting each country’s known efforts. Only Russia was marked as having been known to have engaged in “targeting, accessing, or manipulating election processes or election-related systems.”
I’ve copied a lot, but there’s much more information at the AP link.
Last night, President Trump delivered a rare prime-time speech, but his address fell well short of the hype. Purportedly, the president was going to make a major statement about election integrity, but in reality, the speech was dense and hoarsely delivered. As my colleagues report, he provided no evidence to back up his long-standing lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The White House also released four tranches of documents meant to support the speech, but Trump’s claims were a farrago of recycled information, misrepresentations of evidence, and tendentious claims based on materials too heavily redacted to parse. Major news networks, apparently concerned that Trump would mislead, declined to air the address live.
So why even deliver it? The speech was a sign of desperation. Trump spoke now not only to distract from his sputtering Iran war and its effects on the economy, but also because his attempts to concretely interfere with the 2026 election thus far have almost all failed. As his opportunities to change the rules of the game before November slip away from him, the president is falling back on one of the few tools he has left: attempting to sow chaos and doubt among Americans.
Trump has been remarkably successful in his push to gerrymander ahead of the midterms. Several Republican states have redrawn their districts to add GOP-leaning seats, the Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais allowed other states to move forward with their own maps, and a state court in Virginia shot down retaliatory gerrymandering that would have assisted Democrats. In all, this has given Republicans several more likely seats.
But nearly everything else has faltered, including the president’s signature legislative initiative to overhaul elections by, in part, requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship. Last week, Trump refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill “in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.” This is a peculiar and ineffective gesture—the housing bill became law anyway—but he’s right about the prospects for the SAVE America Act. Yesterday, Senator Thom Tillis, a retiring Republican from North Carolina, vowed to block the legislation if it comes up again. As Tillis noted, it would now be too late to implement for the midterms anyway.
Most of the subversion methods Trump has tried, however, have been executive actions that don’t require Congress. But the president doesn’t have control over elections—that power is delegated to the states or to Congress. As a result, most of Trump’s big moves have either been blocked by courts or simply ignored by state and local officials.
The United States Army has launched a seventh consecutive night of strikes on Iran, as a military adviser to the Iranian supreme leader warns of a full-scale offensive if US attacks continue.
In a post on X on Friday, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said the strikes began at 19:00 GMT (10:30pm in Iran) and were “designed to continue degrading Iranian military capabilities at the Commander in Chief’s direction”.
CENTCOM later said the operation had employed “fighter aircraft, aerial drones and warships” to strike Iran’s “surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, and maritime capabilities”. It said locations targeted included Jask, Sirik, Bushehr, Bandar Abbas, Qeshm Island, Ahvaz and Yazd.
Five explosions were heard in the early hours of Saturday in Yazd, in central Iran, the state news agency IRNA reported. Iranian state television also said three explosions were heard in the southern city of Sirik, as another news agency, Mehr, said blasts were heard “in several provinces in the south”.
Iranian state media later reported that at least three people were killed and eight others wounded in attacks in Hormozgan province, which borders the Strait of Hormuz.
Pete Hegseth wants troops to take testosterone shots.
You’d think the “Secretary of War” would be busy with the war in Iran, but Whiskey Pete is worried that our “war fighters” aren’t manly enough.
The Defense Department will test the testosterone levels of service members 30 and older and offer voluntary testosterone replacement therapy to those with low testosterone levels, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced.
“We must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience and your long-term health,” Hegseth said of the country’s military in a video on X that was captioned “The High-T Department of War.”
Hegseth’s announcement Wednesday raised immediate questions about its impact on female troops and how this new policy would be folded into the Pentagon’s bigger focus on more rigorous fitness standards that critics have said are meant to eliminate women from combat roles.
Low testosterone levels have been linked to deployments, where poor sleep, high-stress environments and poor nutrition can take a toll, according to a 2020 study conducted by the Defense Department and other institutions.
Hegseth’s promotion of testosterone comes amid a broader embrace of the hormone and the contested idea, particularly among younger men, that maximizing testosterone levels can boost your health and fitness.
Some physicians and researchers questioned the move and said some of Hegseth’s statements on testosterone Wednesday were not backed by research. Testosterone levels vary naturally over time, and it is unusual to screen patients for low testosterone unless there are symptoms, they said.
“This is non-evidence-based and could cause harm,” said Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor in the department of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week ordered annual testosterone-deficiency screening for active-duty and reserve service members age 30 and older, which he says will help to maintain military readiness.
But many medical professionals warn it might do nothing of the sort and instead could increase service members’ risk of infertility or other consequences if testosterone is prescribed inappropriately….
Five of six men’s health experts contacted by Reuters for this story said they were puzzled by the announcement on testosterone testing and concerned it may lead to unnecessary — or even harmful — treatment….
Four of the six doctors said there was no solid evidence suggesting that screening for low testosterone in all military personnel aged 30 and older would optimize U.S. readiness for combat.
“We hear from patients that when you treat low T, things like cognitive alertness and stamina improve. But the evidence is not concrete, and it comes from patients who were treated because they were symptomatic,” said Dr. Kevin McVary, a urologist on the medical advisory board of Rugiet, a telehealth platform that provides testosterone supplements.
Under a new policy from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, all military service members aged 30 and up, including women, will receive annual screenings for low testosterone. Promoting the plan to soldiers as a way to “optimize your performance” and remain on the “leading edge of lethality,” Hegseth said in a Wednesday video announcement that anyone with testosterone deficiency would be offered voluntary hormone replacement therapy.
In a post on X, Hegseth laid out a pithy ambition for the policy: “the High-T Department of War.”
The framing fits neatly within a growing trend of hormonal obsession on the right. Over the past several years, in corners of the internet, media, and politics devoted to an exacting vision of masculine supremacy, testosterone has become a substance of mythical importance. Calling a political opponent or message-board adversary “low-T” is the new “soy boy,” “beta,” or “gay.” Right-wing influencers are touting dubious pills that promise to increase testosterone production for more energy, bigger muscles, and better boners. The Trump administration is bragging that the president has the highest T level Dr. Oz has ever seen in a man over 70.
All this is befitting of a political movement that wants to eliminate gender-affirming medical care and gets its health advice from the supplement ads on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. In the eyes of Hegseth and his peers, testosterone isn’t just a sex hormone present in most human beings or a potential gauge of underlying health issues. It’s a magic manly potion, an indisputable indicator of sexual power, a tool for turning matcha-swilling weaklings into musclebound superheroes incapable of expressing any emotion but rage.
The Defense Department policy comes amid a slew of other changes Hegseth has made to emphasize the aggressive aspects of the military: calling soldiers “warfighters,” defunding efforts to protect civilians from harm, reverting to the “Department of War” moniker that hadn’t been used since the 1940s. And it adds to other actions the administration has taken to get more men on T. Under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to ease restrictions on testosterone to make it easier for doctors to prescribe for a greater number of health concerns.
The arc of testosterone in today’s politicized marketplace contains echoes of the rising popularity of beef tallow, which began as a saturated-fat-laden craze among fringe health nuts who believed misinformation about seed oils. Soon, it turned into a MAHA obsession and the star of the new food pyramid; it has since been adopted by major food brands, including Utz and Conagra. Likewise, testosterone, once the domain of bodybuilders and men with actual medical disorders, became a favored elixir of the masculinity-worshipping right and is now a sought-after treatment for the general malaise of midlife.
OMG! These people are nuts. I saw in a post yesterday that Dr. Oz said Trump thinks drinking Diet Coke is good for him because if you pour it on grass, the grass dies. Therefore, Trump thinks it will probably kill cancer too.
Those are my offerings for today. What stories are you following?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Meanwhile, Trump is in full saber-rattling mode. This is from 
The article includes updates from Lebanon and more details on the incursion into Jordan. I just can’t believe that so many of these geriatric Senators we have, who have seen all of the wars in the Middle East and their results, won’t use their Constitutional duties to stop this mess. Well, there seems to be an attempt, but I seriously doubt it will go anywhere. This is from
More military and war spending! Also, do they really think Peg Hegesth is going to give up on us testosterone testing for something that has historically enriched Congressional Members? You’d think an all-volunteer military would make them a bit more cautious about filling the ranks, but Trump and Hegesth must have below-average IQs, given the craziness they’ve pulled.
Head to the link to read the entire nasty business. I just couldn’t bring myself to watch the final game of FIFA because, damn, do we really need a fricking half-time event? Messi met with Trump all friendly-like, and Trump attended the shebang, got booed, and tried to upstage the winning Spanish team. I could mention a few more things, but anyway, I never thought I’d be pulling for Belgium and Spain in a series. This is from 
Trump and Messi seemed to have jinxed the Argentina Team. The question of the Jinx is actually a 
One last suggested read by Paul Waldman at 
So it’s so late that I’m almost bumping into student time. I hope you had a great weekend. I’ll be facing Tropical Storm Bertha in a few days, so send out some good juju to all of us down here on the Gulf Coast!
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