“The Republican Party’s new favorite talking point is calling Democrats communists,” Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) said yesterday on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Really? Communists? Did we accidentally step into a time machine?”
Like millions of you, I spent many hours in the past month watching the World Cup. As usual, I was pulling for Uruguay, a place I’ve never visited but have admired for being the first South American country to legalize same-sex marriage, marijuana, abortion, and to outlaw salt shakers from being placed on restaurant tables in their capital, Montevideo.
Last week, in an update about efforts to save the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building—a.k.a. “the Sistine Chapel of the New Deal”—I mentioned in passing the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, or ACHP.
Federal agents detain a person after a court hearing at immigration court in New York City on 1 July 2026. Photograph: Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images
Here are two ways an American can make a citizen.
1. Take your partner out for a nice dinner and a romantic dance.
2. Once home, with no light but candles, remove unnecessary clothing, and let Nature guide you.
3. Roughly nine months later, a citizen arrives…
…OR,
1. Spend $75 online to set up a Limited Liability Corporation in Delaware.
A bridge destroyed by a US attack is seen in Iran’s Hormozgan province on July 19, 2026.
Nolan Wells’s mother Christine Wonsley held a press conference on July 10, 2026, in New York City after her son’s mysterious death over the Fourth of July off the coast of Mississippi. Photo: Steve Sanchez/Sipa USA via AP Images
The deaths of Nolan Wells and Kohen Wiley are symptoms of a nation retreating from any pretense of equal rights.
There is a tangible heat to being Black in America this summer.
manatee swims in the Haulover Canal waterway on June 4, 2024, in Mims, Florida.
Smoke from massive wildfires in Canada engulfed the New York City skyline on July 16, 2026.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Policy Studies’ Phyllis Bennis about the costs of the Iran War for the July 10, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House, July 16, 2026, in Washington. (Saul Loeb/Pool via AP)
I laughed when Trump announced that the Chinese “hacked” a hundred million US voter files — voter’s address, party preference etc. If China spent money to hack this info, they overspent because THIS INFORMATION IS PUBLIC, available to anyone on request — tho’ some states simply post a big fat DOWNLOAD LIST button.
On Monday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in the town of Biddeford, Maine, shot into a car and killed the driver, a man named Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
The Wingspan ran a cartoon in January by Aidan McClaren, comparing modern-day actions of ICE with the Palmer Raids against American radicals in the 1920s and the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans.
As Republicans rammed their so-called One Big Beautiful Bill through Congress last year on the way to President Donald Trump’s desk, opponents of the legislation sounded the alarm over the pain it would inflict upon working families for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans. One year in, those warnings have borne out—and experts say the worst is yet to come.
Just moments ago, a federal judge ruled that the Trump regime’s attempt to weaponize the United States Postal Service — and prevent eligible voters from casting their ballots — violates the settlement in a lawsuit Public Citizen brought on behalf of the NAACP during Trump’s first term.
In other words, Trump cannot enlist the USPS in his campaign to disenfranchise Americans who rely on mail-in voting.
It seems like progressive patriots are still stuck in the rut of responding 1x1 to Trump’s daily outrages – from a failed war to a botched pool renovation – even as he tries to kidnap this week’s Semiquincentiennal. Yet there’s no modern Tom Paine – at least not until presidential aspirants speak up post-Fall – with a unifying theory-of-the-case to renew an unpopular Democratic party. Not for enactment now but in case a Blue Backlash provides it with a working majority.
Here’s one possible framework…in case:
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