Hello everyone. What a morning. I got up at 4 am and the plan was to power through the cartoons / memes / news post for tomorrow and then dive into the comments. I understand from what I have been told some are pretty contentious. However … the best laid plans of mice and men I think is the phrase. It is now 1:14 pm and I am just getting back to my computers since 8:30 am.
Ron got up late around 8:20 am and he was struggling. I offered to make breakfast which he really wanted me to do. But at 9 am my news programs via over the air waves broadcasts of Sunday news programs came on. But the TV in the kitchen is a very simple plain TV with no features. The apple box attached to that TV has bluetooth so I can use earbuds. However again I can’t for broadcast stuff so if Ron doesn’t want to hear it I can’t use the TV.
Nevertheless Ron said go ahead and watch the news and while I cooked a breakfast of thick sliced bacon, sausage links, and a large bratwurst sausage Ron wanted. Normally I would do potatoes, but I was not up for that today. Along with the meat I made 8 hard boiled eggs. And toast.
While I was doing this Ron tore apart the bedroom window A/C unit. It was a dirty mess even though he cleaned the filters regularly. But as he took it apart it was good he had asked me to order a special A/C cleaning liquid. Decon 30 I got from Amazon and what a mess he got into as he deep cleaned the unit and then cleaned everything up.
After I made breakfast and we ate he went back to working on the A/C. I started cleaning up and doing dishes along with setting up the coffee stuff for tomorrow. We finished at the same time. 1:20 pm about. Ron and I then discussed what to do for supper. It was decided I would make tacos with extra beans and other seasonings while Ron started doing the laundry, both to finish the stuff we had not gotten to and to clean the towels / wash clothes he used to clean the unit. Ron wanted me to get time to finish the post for tomorrow and I will. However the comments are a wait and see. However I pushed sharpening the knives until tomorrow but other than that I have no appointments so should be able to get to comments if I don’t today.
Last thing I want to mention. The week after the 4th I had many doctors visits. As I am a person who engages with the people behind the counters the question kept coming up “What did you do for the 4th”. Many people complained about the heat and how they tried to either go out or find other activities. However when they asked me what we did they were surprisingly supportive of what Ron and I did to celebrate the holiday with many saying they wished they had done so as well.
Ron and I stayed home and we did one of the things we enjoy. Something we have enjoyed all our time together but much more as we aged. Cooking and making things in the kitchen together. When we knocked the walls out and made the extra large kitchen, we did it with just this in mind. We used to make christmas gifts of baked goods we would work together on for days.
We made a meatloaf. I have never liked meat loaf before but Ron and James loved it. They would have it and I would have something else. But as I have aged my tastes have changed and in truth so has the way we make the meatloaf. So we made a meatloaf together with Ron doing the making work and me doing the seasoning work. I then made the potatoes and side dishes. I will admit at 63 years old it is one of the best 4th of July’s I have ever had. Hugs
I find it weird that we learn that tRump had a long phone call with Putin with no aids on the line and then goes to a NATO summit and calls for everything Putin wants. Putin wants his puppet in control of the region where Greenland is so he can have access to the area, and Putin wants US troops pulled from Europe, and Putin wants NATO weakened. Hugs.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday resurrected his push for the U.S. to acquire Greenland.
He suggested the U.S. could pull its troops from Europe in response to the Continent’s continued pushback on the issue.
Trump’s comments came shortly after he arrived in Ankara, Turkey, for a NATO summit.
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) gestures as he speaks during a bilateral meeting at the Bestepe Presidential Compound as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (R) looks on, following Trump’s arrival to attend the annual NATO Summit on July 7, 2026 in Ankara, Turkey.
Win Mcnamee | Getty Images
President Donald Trump on Tuesday resurrected his push for the U.S. to acquire Greenland, and suggested the U.S. could pull all of its armed services members out of Europe in response to the Continent’s continued pushback on the issue.
The island territory “should be controlled by the United States,” Trump said shortly after he arrived in Ankara, Turkey, for a NATO summit.
The 32-member alliance — which includes Denmark, of which Greenland is a part — fell into a crisis in January, as Trump demanded that the U.S. must take control of the island territory on national security grounds.
In a bilateral meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday afternoon Ankara time, Trump vented that Europe’s refusal to go along with his expansionist desire is “what hurt my relationship with NATO.”
“Because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark. Denmark doesn’t spend money to really help Greenland, but it’s an important part for the United States,” Trump told reporters.
“And it’s surrounded by China ships and Russian ships, and that’s not going to happen, the ships, is, it’s not going to happen,” he said, repeating claims about foreign military threats against the self-governing island that experts on Greenland have denied.
Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” Trump went on. “And when they wouldn’t go along with it, and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia — we don’t have to spend any money.”
“We could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe,” he said. “Because as you probably noticed, Europe’s a very different place than it was 20 years ago.”
“And they better be careful,” Trump went on, speaking broadly about Europe, “with immigration and energy. If they’re not careful with those two things, you’re not going to have a Europe anymore.”
He then ended the portion of the meeting that was open to the press.
Working group talks
Trump’s comments thrust Greenland, a vast, sparsely populated and largely frozen Arctic island, back into the geopolitical spotlight.
The U.S. president’s pursuit of Greenland had become a major trans-Atlantic issue at the start of the year, sparked by Trump’s repeated claims that the U.S. needed to acquire the island. Greenlandic lawmakers have insisted the island is not for sale.
Trump, who had refused to rule out the use of military force to annex Greenland, abruptly announced in late January, however, that he and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had formed a “framework of a future deal” with respect to the territory.
A working group of representatives from the U.S., Denmark and Greenland have since been meeting to discuss the way forward.
Residential apartment buildings in Nuuk, Greenland, Jan. 25, 2026.
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen reportedly said late last month that he expects the working group to find a solution by the end of the year.
Asked Tuesday about Trump’s latest comments on Greenland, Finnish President Alexander Stubb told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick: “Be more Arctic, be more cool. If it is about Arctic security, we have seven countries that are Arctic nations in the alliance.”
He added: “Finland has trained 1 million soldiers in Arctic conditions; we basically live in Arctic conditions. Let’s keep that in mind. Let’s, you know, continue the process that the Danes, the Americans and the Greenlanders have.”
tRump is desperate not to have anymore files or information released. His personal lawyer / attack dog is now the person in charge of the DOJ. He will do or say anything to protect tRump and the wealthy abusers. I fear that this was very close to saying to the court “go fuck yourself, we are not going to obey the court”. Hugs
The Department of Justice on Thursday declined to turn over additional information from the Epstein files as ordered by a judge, arguing the materials include sensitive victim information or were appropriately redacted as required by law.
Hours ahead of the deadline to turn over the materials or explain why they were properly withheld, Associate U.S. Attorney General Stanley Woodward asked the judge to delay the deadline by 60 days or disregard it entirely by accepting the DOJ’s reasons for withholding the materials.
“Although the Government strongly disagrees with the Court’s ruling that the [Epstein Files Transparency Act] is enforceable by private parties through the Administrative Procedure Act, the Government welcomes this opportunity to resolve any confusion regarding the records at issue in this case,” Woodward wrote.
Close up image of a tablet screen displaying a portrait of Jeffrey Epstein beside the official U.S. Department of Justice website page titled Epstein Library in Washington District of Columbia United States on February 11, 2026.
Veronique Tournier/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
According to Woodward, some emails in question — which had their senders and recipients concealed — were redacted to protect the names of victims. For one of the emails, Woodward claimed that some of the information was withheld because “many communications written by victims, without context, can appear disturbing on their face.”
Woodward also claimed that the redactions to a draft 2007 indictment from the Southern District of Florida were present in the original file obtained by the Department of Justice and that they have been unable “to locate an unredacted version of this specific photocopy.”
Regarding the interview notes from a woman who made unsubstantiated assault claims about President Donald Trump, Woodward claimed that the materials were “deemed duplicative of the typewritten reports memorializing the interviews.”
“Their handwritten nature further complicates the redaction process and increases the risk of inadvertent disclosure of victim [personal identifiable information] — including because of technical limitations on the Department’s ability to run meaningful quality control checks for victim PII across handwritten materials,” he wrote.
The claims made by the woman were uncorroborated, and Trump has denied the allegations. The DOJ has released the interview reports from some of those interviews, but not the underlying notes.
The U.S. Department of Justice logo is seen on a podium before a news conference, Monday, May 4, 2026, in Washington.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
Woodward also pushed back on the U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan’s conclusion that the Department of Justice effectively conceded that they violated the law passed by Congress to force the release of the Epstein files.
“Indeed, the Department has not knowingly violated, nor has it ever acknowledged violating, the EFTA as it continues working to comply with statutory requirements,” he wrote.
In his order last week, Sullivan rejected the DOJ’s arguments against releasing the materials and concluded that the Public Integrity Project, a public interest law firm, demonstrated that independent journalist Katie Phang was harmed by the materials being withheld.
The DOJ began releasing thousands of pages of documents related to Epstein late last year, following the release of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
However, the department faced criticism from some lawmakers who questioned whether the department violated the act by withholding some materials and missing the deadline to release the files.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has stated repeatedly that the DOJ has complied with the law.
House Democratic subcommittee report outlines web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes
The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).
The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.
‘A sanitized view of America’: inside Trump’s campaign to erase US history from national parks
Read more
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“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects”.
How Trump is making the US’s 250th anniversary about himself – video
In 2016 Congress established the US semiquincentennial commission, operating as the non-profit America250 Foundation, to plan the nation’s 2026 celebrations on a non-partisan basis. However, under Trump, the White House launched a sustained pressure campaign to subsume the commission.
When America250 leadership resisted its demands to shift focus toward partisan, campaign-style spectacles, the Trump administration created Freedom 250 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the congressionally chartered NPF.
The interim report finds that, by taking control of the NPF board and installing key campaign operatives such as Meredith O’Rourke and Chris LaCivita, the White House secured an opaque vehicle that enjoyed the NPF’s non-partisan credibility and tax-exempt status while operating outside standard government transparency laws.
Jared Huffman, a California congressman who is the top Democrat on the natural resources committee, said: “I can’t, in my time here in Congress, remember anything even remotely like this: watching this trusted, venerable charity organisation, the National Parks Foundation, literally be hijacked for a craven political agenda that tries to steal the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and turn it into something that’s all about Trump, advancing this very divisive agenda and even enriching Trump and those around him.”
The interim report alleges that Freedom 250 surreptitiously diverted resources intended for America250 for its own benefit, leaving America250 scrambling for funds.
Sources interviewed by Democrats on the committee said fundraisers including O’Rourke misled prospective America250 donors by providing them with Freedom 250’s banking and routing numbers instead. The report finds this could constitute wire fraud and charitable solicitation fraud under federal and District of Columbia law.
This deceit extended to the entertainment industry. Artists recruited for the kickoff of the Great American State Fair – including Martina McBride and Young MC – were assured the event was non-partisan, only to face social media backlash when the event was revealed to be a Trump-backed rally. In the words of Young MC, the booking was a “bait and switch”.
The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.
The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a huge Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Fighters received bonuses in “USD1”, a cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial, a trust run by the president’s children, and Trump personally bought up to $50,000 in stock in the UFC’s parent company weeks before the event.
Freedom 250 has also functioned as a conduit for steering federal funds to Trump campaign loyalists. Event Strategies – the same firm that planned the January 6 rally that preceded the US Capitol attack – was awarded 18 federal contracts totalling roughly $40m, along with an indefinite delivery master contract worth up to $100m.
Beyond lucrative contracts, the administration is accused of building a partisan political database disguised as a government domain. Freedom 250’s website, initially managed by former “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge) employees known for past data leaks, extensively logs user data.
Event registration is powered by Campaign Nucleus, a firm founded by Brad Parscale, a veteran of Trump election campaigns. Campaign Nucleus openly boasts about using artificial intelligence to analyse personal data and target “persuadable” voters. Unsuspecting visitors, such as attenders of a free Fifa World Cup Fan Zone on the National Mall, unwittingly fed their personal information directly into this Republican campaign apparatus.
The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.
A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.
Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.
Concurrently, the administration aggressively moved to erase historical realities, removing national park signage detailing slavery, forced removal of Indigenous peoples and climate change. Huffman said it amounted to an attempt to reshape American identity to fit a narrow rightwing agenda.
“It’s a fantasy that airbrushes out the more complicated parts of our history – slavery, the Native American genocide, the actual secular ideals on which our government was founded. It wasn’t the opening of the clouds and some revealed covenant with God as they would have you believe.”
As Washington barrels towards Fourth of July, with another Trump speech and a big fireworks display planned for the national mall, Huffman acknowledges that Freedom 250 is unstoppable. But his goal now is exposure.
“The one thing we can do is make sure the American people know what they’re doing in our name and with our tax dollars,” the congressman said. “We should do that because what they have pulled off here is a potential template for other betrayals of public trust that they and maybe future generations will attempt if we don’t challenge them.”
Where are all the cries of stolen valor the right likes to throw at real military service? This is the nation’s highest military honor for draft dodging tRump to even mention it soils it. His sons never served either. No one in their family has. They are takers not givers. Typical dictator behavior, giving awards and medals to themselves, rewriting history to prove their greatness hoping to hide what slimy unworthy people they are. As someone who is proud to have served in two branches of the US military this makes me both angry and sad. Hugs
President Donald Trump suggested that he would give himself and either Eric Trump or Donald Trump Jr. the Congressional Medal of Honor to become part of what would be the third father-son pair to be given the award.
“I see my two beautiful sons sitting there. I think I’m going to give one to myself, one to them, and we’ll have a threesome,” Trump said at the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, on July 1.
The Medal of Honor is the nation’s highest military honor and is intended to honor servicemembers that distinguish themselves in combat “conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.”
Fox news host claims that capitalism is working and mocks that it is said it is not working. Of course for him and the other wealthy host it is working great. He is paid to promote a very unfair wage distribution of the country’s wealth, moving it upward to the upper incomes. Sam points out we do already have a capitalist / socialist country. Thefox host quotes the theme song from the sitcom Friends as if it were the manifesto of a generation. Hugs
Key Points
Illustration: Guardian Design
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