Everybody’s tabbing for the weekend …
“Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances,” Trump added.
Ed: Medvedev is Putin’s toady, and to a certain extent his alter ego in politics. Usually he’s best ignored, but this time he threatened war over sanctions, and Trump doesn’t want to normalize that. Medvedev quipped that Russia is not Iran as part of those threats; Trump could have said in reply that the US and NATO are not Ukraine either. This will drive the point home to Putin to put a muzzle on his toady, or perhaps allow him to be the next unfortunate victim of the Moscow Window Flu.
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News: Some White House officials are joining conservatives in Congress to push for a year-long CR, per multiple people familiar
GOP not on the same page: Senate Republicans want bipartisan appropriations bills
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— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) August 1, 2025
Ed: Eh … what? I figured we’d have to do a CR, thanks to the delay in appropriations work caused by the rescission debate. I expected at most a 2-month CR while the normal 12 appropriations bills went through regular order. This would at least freeze spending at the rescission levels, but that wasn’t much of a DOGE victory as it was already.
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“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” said CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison in a statement. “CPB remains committed to fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities and supporting our partners through this transition with transparency and care.”
The organization said in a statement that it told employees that a majority of staff positions will “conclude” when the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, 2025. A “small transition team will remain through January 2026 to ensure a responsible and orderly closeout of operations,” the organization said.
Ed: John wrote about this earlier, but it’s remarkable enough to include here. The Center for Public Broadcasting had claimed that federal funding only accounted for a small part of the NPR/PBS operating budget, that it had reserved enough cash to continue operations for at least a year if funding got interrupted, and that its listeners would step up and keep their doors open. All of that turned out to be a lie, or at the very least, sorely mistaken.
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🚨 BREAKING:
France suspends all evacuations from Gaza after a Gazan refugee student was caught posting “Kill Jews everywhere,” glorifying Hitler, and calling for Israeli hostage executions.
She had been welcomed to France as a humanitarian case and her account was only… pic.twitter.com/Oq477WnIw0
— Yehuda Teitelbaum (@chalavyishmael) August 1, 2025
Ed: Isn’t this what Emmanuel Macron endorsed? These are the people that he wants to recognize as a valid state. He can’t claim to be surprised by this, not after the last two years of violent intifada and intifada-cheering.
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Democrats are eager to turn the page on their 2024 losses — but their central figures from the last election keep stepping back into the spotlight, complicating their efforts to forge a new identity. Many in the party are wary of elevating the people who led them to defeat in 2024 and exasperated to see the drama of that election repeatedly relitigated when they want to keep the focus on pushing back against Trump’s second-term agenda and identifying new leaders.
“The shadow of 2024 is long, and I think all perspectives in the mix believe we need something fresh,” said longtime Democratic consultant Donna Bojarsky. Many Democrats do not blame Harris for what went wrong last cycle, she said, “But nobody’s saying, let’s go back to 2024.”
Ed: This is panic. There’s no reason to fear a recap by the major players in 2025. By the end of next year, though, the party should see leadership emerge to take control and chart a new course. There’s just one problem with that, however …
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Kamala doesn’t seem to know who the leader of the Democrat party is.
Is it AOC or Mamdani?pic.twitter.com/cY3LAMAonD
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) August 1, 2025
Ed: I don’t think Colbert meant this as a trick question. And it really SHOULDN’T have been. The current functional leaders are its highest-ranking elected officials — Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. That’s different than when the party nominates its next presidential candidate. Why not just give the two Dem caucus leaders the shout-out and leave it at that?
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By the late summer of last year, Harris’s conspicuous refusal to subject herself to probing interviews had become a liability for her campaign. Indeed, by mid-September, she had only just begun to expose herself to probing inquiries “if you look closely.” It wasn’t until mid-October that she sat down for a genuinely adversarial conversation with Fox News’s Bret Baier, which only revealed the degree to which she needed practice. Trump held 21 public campaign events in September. JD Vance hosted 14. By comparison, Harris headlined just 13 events. Tim Walz, a paltry seven. That pace continued into October, when “anxious” Democratic operatives began to fret over Trump’s ubiquity and the contrast it struck with the Harris-Walz ticket’s “risk-averse” approach, which ensured that the Democratic Party’s candidates were far less visible.
They say that it’s best practice for candidates to “run scared,” and Harris did just that. But she seemed more afraid of success than failure. Whether her campaign’s caution was due to insecurity or lethargy, it conveyed to voters that she just wanted it less than Trump. And the voting public tends to want their presidents to relish the role — or, at least, not actively resent it.
Ed: This is precisely correct. Trump made himself nearly ubiquitous both politically and culturally, while Harris and Walz mainly hid from the world or had celebrities do their talking for them. They half-assed it, and made themselves into asses doing so. That did a lot of damage, which is still ongoing ….
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HOO BOY: CNN is now reporting that new polls reveal that the Democrat party is a “complete and unnter mess!” pic.twitter.com/LSAp0gc494
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 1, 2025
Ed: That’s what happens when your sole principle as a party is to obsess over the other party’s leader. To an extent, they are building Trump up more than he realistically is by making him into such a bete noire.
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Harris also complained that she’s “always believed that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles.”
But then those stupid voters went and gave Trump a solid electoral college win, every swing state, and the popular vote, too.
When the voters choose a Democrat, the system is working. When we choose a Republican, the system is broken.
And if you proles don’t understand that your job is to choose the Democrat, then you’re the ones destroying our sacred democracy.
Ed: When Republicans get elected, then the system is broken and democracy is over. Only when Democrats are allowed to rule no matter the outcomes of elections is democracy saved.
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