The weeks-long obsession with this story can be attributed to the fact that the media is easily bored. The Epstein-files storyline is both salacious and inconsequential, which is why corporate media loves talking about it. It doesn’t require any work or journalism to pontificate on how the story affects the Trump regime, so it’s a lot easier than explaining how Trump’s spending bill will take away money and healthcare from Trump’s most ardent supporters.

For my part, I’m still stuck on Texas. In the wake of flooding and death, the Texas legislature sprang into special session this week to authorize… an anti-trans bill. And an abortion ban. They tacked both provisions onto their “flood relief” bill.

That’s a real story.

• Thanks to the Supreme Court, federal workers are bracing for a summer of firings. Although the court claims its rulings are temporary, anybody who thinks the court will force Trump to rehire these people if it ultimately determines the firings are unconstitutional is not familiar with the philosophical concept known as the arrow of time.
• Meanwhile, there are federal workers whom Trump would like to keep who are quitting anyway. Nearly two-thirds of the Federal Programs Branch, the office within the Department of Justice that is responsible for defending Trump’s positions in court, have quit or signaled their intention to quit. Makes you wonder about the third of the lawyers who are staying.
• Surely, some of those lawyers who’ve chosen to stay must be working for ICE. But even they seem to know they’re despicable and should be treated with ridicule and disrespect by the rest of civilized society. These lawyers won’t even give their names when representing Trump and ICE in court… which is a thing that happens sometimes in authoritarian regimes.
• The Supreme Court has sided with the Trump administration in almost every immigration case the court has heard on its “shadow” emergency docket. As I’ve said repeatedly, the courts will not save us.
• The Trump government is now straight-up burning food that was meant to be sent as foreign aid but is instead mouldering in warehouses because of the regime’s dismantling of those foreign aid programs. WE ARE BURNING FOOD instead of GIVING IT TO HUNGRY PEOPLE.

• Mark Hertsgaard describes Trump as “the Confederacy’s Revenge” in The Nation. It’s a good piece, and puts Trump in his appropriate historical context. Whenever Black people seem to be thriving in this country, whites create some force to stop us. Trump is just the latest. There’s no way he’ll be the last.
• Full disclosure: I did not know The Nation had a podcast called Tech Won’t Save Us. But we do. And this week, host Paris Marx talked to journalist Nathan Grayson about how Microsoft is gutting the video gaming industry. Learning about things is fun.
• So I’m going to link to a piece from Ramesh Ponnuru, which I ordinarily would not do, because Ramesh is a conservative jerkface who has bent his whole career around taking away abortion rights and (as I wrote about here) loudly supported Amy Coney Barrett because he thought it would be cool if a woman did his dirty work. But his latest column accidentally makes a good point: Liberals and progressives really need to decide if they want to reform the Supreme Court or prop it up. We can’t have it both ways. Either the court is the last bastion of hope against authoritarianism and needs to be strengthened to respond to the Trump-based threats to democracy OR it is a corrupt, antidemocratic institution that is in desperate need of reform. I am in the reform camp. I think we should be using the court’s complicity with the Trump administration as another data point for why the court should be reformed and rebuilt. I’d like for more people to join me instead of constantly trying to make excuses for this decaying institution.

First, he announced that he was leaning toward voting “yes” on Trump’s nominee for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Emil Bove III. Among other sins, Bove denies that January 6 was an attack on the government—a claim that Tillis had originally insisted was a “red line” for him. But the weak man has backtracked and is now likely to support Trump’s nominee.

Second—and the real pièce de résistance—is that Tillis cast the critical vote to defund NPR and PBS. Tillis said he anticipated that there would be “some things that we’re going to regret” in the $9 billion rescission package, but he voted for it anyway.

As noted by one Bluesky account, NPR’s Morning Edition recently aired a segment alleging that Tillis is now a “moderate”… before he voted to slash the network’s funding.

There are no “good” Republicans holding federal office in this country right now. There are no “reasonable” ones. There are none who can be counted on to put country over party. None. Stop looking for things that do not exist—and stop ignoring things that do exist to make yourselves feel better.

• Mahmoud Khalil should win his lawsuit against the Trump administration. But Neil Gorsuch probably won’t let him.
• The Supreme Court’s emergency-docket ruling allowing Trump to gut the Department of Education is maybe the worst ruling it’s made on behalf of Trump so far. And I say that as a person who has read all of the court’s pro-Trump rulings.

As it happens, I have a very good reason for being a late adopter: The movie is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, which is where my mother is from. She was born about 20 years after the (fictional, we think) events of the movie, but I wanted to watch it with her.

There’s likely no way for a person not familiar with that part of the world to know this, so please just take my mother’s word for it when she says that the movie is accurate to its setting. There were characters whom I swear I’ve met at family reunions. The accents were real; the characterizations were real. My mom and I were particularly gratified by the inclusion of Asian characters; my mom is half-Chinese, and there was a strong Chinese influence in the Mississippi Delta during that period, which most people don’t know about.

My kids aren’t quite old enough to see and appreciate the movie yet, but when they are, this movie will stand as a personal family history lesson. It’s about their grandmother, where she’s from, and what kinds of people she grew up with.

Then I’ll make them watch the original Ghostbusters, which is about where I’m from, and the kinds of people I grew up around.

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