New Narrative

[Barb McQuade @BarbMcQuade]

Like most things Trump touches, the Reflecting Pool is now in worse shape than before. Adding cosmetic paint did not solve the underlying problem. And now he baselessly blames vandals for his failure.
https://t.co/MlW3Eeof4Y

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

for a charge like this, would you really need to hire a lawyer? since there is no statute in the US making the touching of public waters a crime, the arrest is bogus & any judge would vacate it.
also, if no signs are posted forbidding "touching the water," the charge is bogus.
presumably there are signs saying "no wading, swimming, boating"--etc.
why does T***p think this will help his polls? harassing innocent people, mostly tourists, just deepens the loathing many feel for him beyond mere dislike for his policies.

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

Lisbon Valley, Utah. North of Bears Ears is to be opened for uranium mining.

Still scarred from the last uranium boom, the one the EPA hasn't even finished cleaning up.

This week, the federal government decided to do it again.

The whole approval took 11 days. Tribes got a 7-day window to respond, take it or leave it.

One leader called it outrageous and indefensible. A Canadian company gets to mine it, royalty free, under a law from 1872.

That law lets companies pull minerals off federal land without paying the public a dime in royalties, a rule written for pickaxes and mules, still running the uranium industry today.

Here's the part most people will miss: the general public didn't get a say at all this time, the emergency order waived that requirement completely.

Tribal nations are legally different. The government owes them direct, government to government consultation because of treaty and trust obligations going back generations. That legal requirement still applied here. It just got squeezed into 7 days.

Who decided 7 days was enough to weigh in on land that's been theirs for generations?

#DemsUnited

[Daniel Davis Deep Dive @DanielLDavis1]

I hate to sound like a broken record, but yet again evidence provided by the president himself: he is either in *serious* cognitive decline now, or he is going full-on authoritarian.

Here he is, yet again, using the full weight of his office to suppress the media, so that they do not report anything besides what he wants to hear. And if any has the audacity to report events country to his personal preference, he threatens to destroy the institution or to bury them under lawsuits.

That is, black-and-white, destruction of free speech, which he claimed was going to be a “hallmark“ of his administration on his inaugural address. Obviously, that was also a lie.

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

For the next 135 days, our first and most important goal is to end Republican control of Congress, thereby limiting Trump’s reign of criminality, corruption, cruelty, and treachery.

This is a moral imperative for every one of us who believes in a decent society. https://t.co/Nj5gGbwD36

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

Trump is trying to shift the decision about who gets to vote from the states to his administration, using benign sounding administrative procedures, and an executive order that few people are paying attention to. There’s nothing more important to be aware of right now than this. Details here: https://t.co/8dvrOO8Zy6

[Democracy Now! @democracynow]

Federal prosecutors have charged 15 Minnesotans in connection with anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities. They are accused of “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers” during Trump’s so-called Operation Metro Surge.

“All 15 of the defendants are members of the community, active in mutual aid, union members, workers, neighbors,” says defense attorney Bruce Nestor, who represents one of the 15. “The point of this is to spread fear to try to divide us.”

https://t.co/P0YTE6yva9

[TheSteadyState @steadystate2025]

No declaration of war. No due process. No congressional authorization.

The UN’s top expert on counter-terrorism & human rights says the U.S. is committing extrajudicial killings at sea. 211 dead and counting.

Where is Congress?

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Simply, Israel's strategy has PATENTLY been to hit Shiite (& Palestinian) civilian structures & what makes an area interesting or rich in order to cause depopulation. Killing a turtle preservationist is just one of the manifestations of the strategy.Spraying olive trees as well.

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

BREAKING: Lawrence: “In the report by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in today’s NYTimes, @JDVance began a White House meeting last year by arguing that it was time to invoke the Insurrection Act which allows the president to deploy the American military to put down insurrections and rebellions inside the United States. He did this after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by Donald Trump’s federal agents in Minnesota, when video recordings of the incidents showed that they did not pose any threats at all to the agents who shot and killed them. The Times reports Mr Vance got to the point. They needed to invoke the Insurrection Act SWIFTLY to crush the unrest in Minnesota. It would be painful in the short term, he said, but the message it would send, that paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations, would make sure no one tried it again. There was no evidence that either Mr Pretti or Ms Good had been paid activists.” 😳

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Hot take: We have policies that can satisfy the poor, the problem is we have no policies to satisfy the rich.

Because the rich want to get richer. Enough is never enough.

Something I learned from my late great Tuft’s economics professor Linda Datcher Loury, when the split between capital and labor is roughly 50/50, shareholders and owners taking their share, workers taking theirs, the country does very well.

There are higher living standards and a stronger middle class.

When that starts to shift and capital takes more of the economic rent for itself, people get angry.

Right now we’re at 53/47 in favor of capital and you can see the results everywhere.

Teddy Roosevelt understood this intuitively.

He saw that there were one or two people sitting on two and a half percent of the entire GDP of the country.

So he told them to knock it off. We need that leadership again.

Someone willing to walk into the room and tell the people with all the money that the game has to be fair enough for everyone else to want to keep playing it.

[Democracy Now! @democracynow]

Environmental and conservation groups recently filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block a land swap approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that would give Elon Musk's SpaceX more than 700 acres of a national wildlife refuge in South Texas. SpaceX has conducted rocket launches for several years from an area known as Starbase, which was formally incorporated as a city in 2025. It is essentially a company town with officials and most voters tied to SpaceX.

With Starbase, “SpaceX has already burned down dozens of acres of wildlife habitat, is dumping polluted water on our beach, has sent rocket debris into our communities, into communities in Mexico,” says Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, which is part of the lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

https://t.co/ha9q7ShPLC

[New Narrative @NewNarrative]

@PeteButtigieg Stop the wishful thinking. If we nominate you for president or vp, we’ll lose. That majority will disappear. Maybe try to get appointed Interior Secretary or EPA head. That’s where you will do the most good. If Republicans win, they will keep laying waste to the land. #TruthHurts

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This would be a scandal that would have ended any other presidency.

Qatar gave a $400 million Boeing 747 to the Pentagon. Trump calls it a “free” gift. It is not free. The Air Force just spent months retrofitting it with secure communications, missile defense, and electromagnetic shielding.

The cost of that work is classified.

Estimates say north of a billion.

The number is enormous, and you are paying it.

Now the part they bury.

Under the memorandum signed by the Pentagon and Qatar, ownership of the plane transfers to Trump’s presidential library foundation when he leaves office. His own son says it will sit in the lobby of a future Trump hotel.

So follow the chain.

A foreign government hands a luxury jet to a sitting president. American taxpayers rebuild it from the inside out. Then Trump takes it home.

A gift you use for four years and then keep is still a gift. The Constitution bars foreign gifts to a president without the consent of Congress. This one never got that consent.

We are paying a fortune to gift wrap a luxury jet that ends up in his private collection.

Grift in plain sight.
https://t.co/RqGjdCjV6n

[Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew]

Trump donor Jeffery Hildebrand is the founder of Hilcorp, known for buying up stripper wells—which studies show account for roughly half of US oil and natural gas methane emissions.

Trump appointed a Hilcorp lobbyist to lead EPA and unravel methane rules.
https://t.co/nsuzWVgdvB

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

Everyone should note how frightened white supremacists are of American
history. This is an acknowledgment of the power of just the memory of Harriet Tubman & other heroic figures in our collective past.

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America.   

Trump’s DOJ just shut down a federal investigation into a coal company owned by Sen. Jim Justice, one of his closest allies, after it racked up tens of thousands of alleged violations for dumping dangerous chemicals into our waterways. A veteran federal prosecutor with 24 years on the job said he had never seen anything like it.  

The man who killed the case was Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer and current Acting Attorney General. This is the same guy who just gave Trump, his family, and his companies permanent immunity from IRS audits. Now Trump wants the Senate to make Blanche’s appointment permanent too.  

Equal justice under law was never supposed to come with exceptions for the President’s friends.  

The pattern isn’t subtle: protect Trump’s friends, prosecute his critics, and get rewarded with more power. That is corruption, plain and simple. Todd Blanche must not be confirmed.
https://t.co/95K8zIySPz

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

The Israeli defense minister outlines plans for permanent occupation and ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon. https://t.co/6jjqVPCyM4

[Reza Nasri @RezaNasri1]

Thomas Friedman's central charge is that Trump ended the war for domestic reasons, to bring gas prices down before the midterms. It is a revealing accusation, because the clearest example of Iran policy bent to domestic politics in this entire episode is not the agreement Trump signed. It is the column attacking it.

Consider the logic. Friedman insists Trump acted out of crass political self-interest, but his own premise undoes him. If ending the war was politically popular, that is only because the war had become a costly disaster for ordinary Americans. He has talked himself into faulting a president for doing the popular thing precisely because it happened to be the right one. That is not a disagreement about strategy. It is the frustration of a man whose side no longer owns the issue.

And that frustration is the real engine of the piece. For the Democrats and the commentators who speak for them, a peace that holds into November is a genuine problem: lower prices, no flag-draped coffins, a war stopped - all of it a gift to Trump, and all of it arriving at the worst possible moment in the political calendar. The incentive, then, is not to weigh the deal on its merits but to discredit it, to call it surrender before the ink is dry and to hope quietly that it falls apart, because a failed agreement is a campaign issue while a successful one is a Trump trophy. This is why one suspects Friedman would have attacked any deal at all, generous or punitive. The terms were never really the point.

It is worth asking, too, whose interests he is actually defending beneath all the American flag-waving. Friedman writes in the language of U.S. interests, but the losses he mourns belong to someone else: an exposed Netanyahu, a Lebanon left alone, Arab capitals he fears will now make their own arrangements with Tehran. The grief in the column is Israel's grief, recast as Washington's.

Nor should we accept too quickly his claim that he opposed this war. He may not have fired the first shot, but he spent two decades supplying the rationale for it. The image of a brittle, friendless government one push from collapse; of a captive people waiting to rise the moment help arrived; of a treasury drained on militias and mischief — these were his themes, written one column at a time, and they became the intellectual scaffolding others used to justify the bombing. It is hard to disown a war whose case you helped build.

The deeper irony is that the strategy ran in exactly the opposite direction from his telling. The architects of the war assumed Tehran was bluffing about the Strait of Hormuz; it was not. They assumed airpower could topple a state that has stood since 1979; it could not. They assumed Iran's neighbors would welcome a regional war; instead those neighbors reached for the telephone. Trump did not invent these facts to win Pennsylvania. He encountered them and adjusted. Friedman encountered the same facts and reached for stronger adjectives, because adjusting would have meant giving up the narrative his politics depends on.

For the war did the opposite of what it promised. It was supposed to expose a hollow state, and instead it exposed a hollow story. Iran was not brittle; it absorbed thousands of strikes and held together. Its government was not a despised "regime" clinging to power against its people; the population rallied around it. And the money so many were certain had gone to terror turned out to be visible in the roads, power grids and plants still standing after the smoke cleared.

I would have more sympathy for Friedman's lament if he had paused, even once, on the question his own reporting raises: what if Iran's leaders are, as Trump described them, rational people protecting their country's interests? He treats that as naïveté. A negotiator would treat it as the only ground on which a durable agreement can be built. You cannot sign a deal with a caricature. You can only bomb one, and we have just seen how that ends.

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

The U.S. Forest Service quietly approved spraying a cancer-linked chemical above Lake Tahoe.

The public didn't find out until two months later.

The chemical is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. The plan covers 11,700 acres burned in the 2021 Caldor Fire, with up to 3,600 of those acres slated for herbicide treatment.

The agency used an "emergency" authorization to skip the usual public objection process. The only comment window came and went in December 2025, before most locals even knew the project existed.

About 75% of the lake's watershed sits inside that national forest land. Part of the spray zone sits on mountains above the lake, where snowmelt feeds a tributary running straight into Tahoe.

Homeowners around the lake already have to follow strict rules about what they can put on their own lawns, no high-phosphorus fertilizer, no application near runoff paths - all to protect the lake’s clarity.

None of those rules apply to the Forest Service spraying herbicide in the national forest right above it.

Most residents only learned the scale of it from a magazine investigation in late April. A town hall to organize pushback didn't happen until June 11. By then, spraying had already taken place at one local ski resort.

Who's supposed to tell you what's happening in your own backyard, the federal government or a reporter?

#DemsUnited