The Saddest of Ferris Wheels - American Politics, July 2026

Here we go, 250 more!!

https://www.wlky.com/article/mitch-mcconnell-hospital-condition-louisville-kentucky/71768553

https://newrepublic.com/post/212595/mitch-mcconnell-found-unconscious-rushed-hospital

I managed to miss this back on June 14. And the Washington Post was already dead to me, but...way to piss on the Watergate legacy, Bezos!

From the old thread

Tomorrow we can open a new thread. If only it were as easy to move past the shitstorm called the Trump Administration, the 119th Congress, and the Supreme Court.

In Indian traditions, Saṃsāra refers to the cycle of life, suffering, death, and rebirth, from which we are all trying to escape. It is compared to a "cycle of aimless drifting, wandering or mundane existence."

Saṃsāra is contrasted with nirvana, a state of bliss in which the enlightened soul gains release from the cycle of torment that imprisons most of us.

It is often depicted, in religious imagery, as a wheel.

Rather like, dare I say, a Ferris wheel.

was inspired by this headline: A storm, overpriced food and a sad ferris wheel: inside Trump’s dreadful state fair

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/01/donald-trump-great-american-state-fair

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFx298i-FOc

https://preview.redd.it/i-thought-this-was-a-ferris-wheel-for-years-just-now-v0-pacxk64altbg1.jpeg

how is this gonna work... they can't just admit they lost

The Justice Department on Tuesday directed its staff to bring fraud charges in alleged cases of birth tourism as a response to their loss in the birthright citizenship ruling from the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

In the wake of the 6-3 ruling, a memo from the Justice Department’s office of the deputy attorney general said all criminal division staff should “prioritize the investigation and prosecution of birth tourism schemes.”

Don't there have to be laws against "birth tourism" before you can prosecute them?

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1812

S.1812 - Ban Birth Tourism Act 119th Congress (2025-2026)

Sponsor: Sen. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN] (Introduced 05/20/2025)
Committees: Senate - Judiciary
Latest Action: Senate - 05/20/2025 Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.

Doesn't seem to have passed

the golden boy brett kavanaugh will be pleased to revisit!

There are.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/birth-tourism-trump

I did hear about a place in Southern California where they were doing this (mostly women from China) but it was for a weird reason: so their kids could pay resident tuition at colleges! Like in 18 years... pretty crazy foresight

That should have said xp, but there are statutes in place that the government has used to prosecute “birth tourism.”

We should all go to the Dallas GOP convention in Sept... I don't think you have to be a delegate, you can just get your freak on

I don't want to get my hopes up, but an 80 year old man with numerous documented health problems and many secret health problems is promising to give a two-hour speech in 107 degree heat next week...

if it happens on July 4th the world may run out of fireworks

ive still never heard how citizenship would be determined birthright is dead but then i’ve not read much about it. anyone know)

https://medium.com/prismnpen/to-the-trans-girl-who-just-lost-at-the-supreme-court-so-did-i-26-years-ago-cb1603082d46

More of this please:

Dave Weigel: “When Fox News is booking you and covering you, might that be for the same reason Republican PACs spend to help progressive candidates? That they see you as easier to beat?”

Abdul El-Sayed: “It’s amazing to me how deeply they’re misjudging this. I’m like: You have never fought a counterpuncher. The number of times I’m gonna define and redefine Mike Rogers! We’re talking about an anti-charismatic old school politician who doesn’t even know what he believes, except for he wants to make himself rich off of the rest of us. You know what I’m gonna do to that man? By the time I’m done, his best friends are gonna look at him and think what I think, say what I say. I’m gonna define him into eternity. Good, help me beat the crap out of you. Little parts of your vestiges — politically — are gonna be scattered all over the state of Michigan, never to be seen again. You say “Mike Rogers,” it’ll be like: “Remember when Abdul just completely demolished that man’s political future?” By the time I’m done with him, people are going to be calling him Five Dollar Rogers.”

Weigel: “Why five dollars?”

El-Sayed: “Because of $5 gas and how he’ll do whatever you want him to do for five bucks.”

Ugh . Per NY Times ICE is upping arrests now but trying to do so without chaos and headlines of the past . But the new sweep has involved the arrest of a Nigerian nun based in South Texas which has gotten attention today.

Federal immigration officials have detained more than 10,000 people in the last five days, a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates.

Agency leaders in recent days ordered top ICE officials to focus more of their officers’ efforts on picking up immigrants they want to deport, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with federal officials. ICE officers have arrested people at check-ins, with immigration authorities, during traffic stops and on the street. The push has apparently yielded results, with recent arrest numbers roughly doubling from the 1,000 picked up each day earlier this year.

s. Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, pledged to mount a quieter enforcement campaign following the chaos of a monthlong operation in Minnesota, where federal officers killed two U.S. citizens.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/us/politics/ice-immigrant-arrests-surge.html

Yeah, there was a big operation the next county over from us a few weeks ago where they grabbed more than 100 people in a couple of days. It's completely terrified the local immigrant communities. But they were trying to keep it all pretty low-key, it only became news because local immigrants and advocate groups started spreading the word.

There's an Albania barber down the street from me that was picked up a week or so ago and sent to a detention center in ... Brazil, Indiana? He reportedly came over in 2005 with a fake visa and/or Italian passport, and was allegedly ruled to be deported back in 2008, but skipped. His wife is a US citizen and they have an 8 year old kid. There's a statement from ICE that breaks the record for the number of times it sneeringly invokes "criminal illegal." It's a fucked up situation exacerbated by a complete lack of empathy from assholes that would treat him like shit no matter his status.

That’s the thing, Trump and the Republicans kept saying they would deport everyone, the media kept saying “oh, he only means the criminals”. Tom Homan himself literally said “they’re ALL criminals”.

good morning!

Was glad to see in video clips that there were a number of folks with cowbells, drums, and more outside Malcolm X Park in DC at 8:45 am this morning where Hegseth and Stephen Miller were doing a thank you to a huge number of National Guards standing there. In video clips I have seen you can hear the noise from outside the blocked off park (called Meridian Hill Park by some) while Hegseth is speaking and he then calls the protesters ingrates. The National Guards who stand around DC doing nothing most of the time but looking at their phones cost taxpayers a million dollars a day. Miller referred to them as symbols of the virtues of "Civilization" . I had only heard that Hegseth was gonna be there late last night when I saw on Instagram some flyers about the protest. Malcolm X Park's water fountains that had been actually planned for repair for quite awhile have recently been fixed (via a National Park chosen contractor not a Trump one) and so are working fine and provide a better backdrop. Its disconcerting that Hegseth and Miller and company went to this park that is not down on the mall and is known better and used largely by locals and not tourists and politicians for its Sunday drummers circle, occasional house music events, a Fugazi show, and just hanging out

Florida continues its race to the bottom of humanity

Immigration advocates in Florida have decried a “cruel and harmful” new rule by education officials aligned to hard-right Republican governor Ron DeSantis to ban undocumented students from state colleges and universities.

The Florida board of education voted on Tuesday to bar access to its 28 state-funded institutions to anybody not a US citizen or “lawfully present” in the country. It follows Florida’s move last year to strip discounted in-state tuition rates for certain immigrant students.

Its disconcerting that Hegseth and Miller and company went to this park

It was a show of impunity, that they could come into a neighborhood take over a park named after Malcolm X and do whatever they wanted there. The message: we are the overlords here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/1ulpfy8/stage_falling_apart_at_great_american_state_fair

if it happens on July 4th the world may run out of fireworks

― frogbs, Wednesday, July 1, 2026 6:09 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think about this a lot, especially when I need a pick-me-up: while none of us will ever have the wealth or power of Trump, Elon, et al, it should comfort all of us to know that the response to our demise will not be the deafening sound of champagne corks being popped simultaneously all over the world

they're actually charging that olympic canoeist with a felony count of touching the peeled, floating pool paint

soon to be another L for Jeanine Pirro

They'll get about as far with that as the sandwich-throwing felony count.

well the story is that it's the vandals' fault, not the shitty no-bid contractor or the motorcade that drove across the curing paint

so he'll serve the purpose of supporting the lie until we've forgotten about this whole fiasco

xp why did they design the stage to look like a guillotine

They misread the guillotine order...

Musicology Duck went to the Fourth in DC so we didn’t have to:

https://bsky.app/profile/musicologyduck.bsky.social

NB i live only a couple miles from the fireworks and barely heard anything.

Musicology Duck went to the Fourth in DC so we didn’t have to

did anything interesting happen there which we should read about

sorry, no quite uneventful but everyone gets wet

ideal situation for the duck at least

Is Mitch McConnell dead?

The idea that he's in a coma and on life support in order to avoid calling a special election to fill his seat feels 100% on the nose.

Was Mitch ever truly alive?

Lizards are alive, so I'm thinking it's within reason to say Mitch was, too.

He's 100% dead, and we are being fucked over by the lack of clarity.

everone likes think that it’s an evil prez who ends up a living head in a jar, but not me. it’s instead a moriarty like mcconnell in the glass.

hi mitch— yah, i got you figgered you rat bastard

If he's a corpse on ice the hospital is required to fill in a death certificate and file it. otoh, he could be brain dead and intubated to the hilt, but if there's a heart beat, they can pretend he's alive and on the road to recovery.

David Morris, a journalist and author, also appeared to endorse the theory with a brutal jab at McConnell and his legacy.

“Mitch McConnell remaining technically alive for an extra three weeks because of a manipulative procedural maneuver is exactly how he would have wanted to go out,” Morris wrote in a social media post on X.

lol

in the case of bulwark not just vanity awareness of their game

Does he have a really bad opinion on Gaza or like age of consent or something?

Both of these, plus much more--like bro-ing around with Nick Fuentes. He also recently said he's going support Vance in 2028, so I don't think lefty/ish is even an accurate description.

file under who gives a shit

meaning why are we discussing or caring about what dude thinks not to mention the bulwark is mostly trash

i dunno. Not much else going on, I guess.

meaning why are we discussing or caring about what dude thinks not to mention the bulwark is mostly trash

because a poster brought in a shit source with shit thinkers again and we have to go through this every time instead of just ignoring what he says on the USpol thread.

why are we discussing or caring about what dude thinks

i continually wonder why the fuck anyone pays any attention to these youtube or podcast political idiots, I don't understand it. maybe I'm just old.

because there aren't really any credible news sources anymore

Hasan is probably more politically relevant right now than most Dem orgs.

While Dems may still get back control of the House in November (and maybe even the Senate), Trump encouraged gerrymandering has narrowed the margin in the House per the Cook political report analysts.

In late spring of 2025, it would have been hard to believe that ten states would have new congressional maps in place for the 2026 midterms. But the Trump White House's brazen strategy of pressuring GOP-controlled states to eliminate as many Democratic seats as possible to save the party's deeply endangered majority set off a chain reaction that has fundamentally altered the fight for the House in 2026 and beyond.

Although the White House didn't get everything it wanted — its efforts were rebuffed in several Republican-led states and Democrats successfully retaliated in California — the result is a 2026 House map that is more skewed towards Republicans and less elastic than before.

View the full 2026 Cook PVI map and district list.

The Cook Political Report has updated its Partisan Voter Index (PVI) scores for all ten states that redrew their lines for 2026. And although 80% of states didn’t redistrict, the shift is still dramatic: the median House seat now sports a Cook PVI score of R+3, two points redder than prior to this cycle's gerrymandering arms

https://www.cookpolitical.com/cook-pvi/introducing-2026-cook-pvi-re-redistricting-yields-more-republican-less-elastic-house-map

Hasan is probably mildly useful for pulling some Twitch addicts away from right-wing influencers & other varieties of certified boneheads that stream, but I feel like all these streamer dudes mostly just talk about themselves and their personal beefs/drama and it's very tedious

Hasan had his audience phone banking for the NY primaries and they made around 20 thousand calls.

This is from Alex Jones on Iran... he's obv still a horrible asshole, but:

“They want us in a total war so they can censor and take our freedoms, nationalize everything, and push us aside with AI — total liability, immunity, and protection. This is a disaster. We are facing tyranny, but the public’s awakening,” Jones said Tuesday.

“We’ve got to come together and transcend left and right, and we have to say no to an expanded war that will definitely destroy the economy and kill a bunch of our troops. They’re preparing a massive ground invasion. It’s all confirmed. This is going down right now,” he added.

I have the documents right here.

he told all this to a cashier at Dunkin'

Sir, this is a Wendy's

Wait I thought Alex Jones popped like a balloon?

DEI-cide

The Trump administration’s plans to stymie and defund bike lane plans in the US, on the unusual basis that they are DEI tools, will hurt efforts to improve roadway safety, non-motorized transportation advocates say.

The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, posted on X this month that he had redirected $1.73bn allocated for “Biden-era DEI pet projects” to “America’s actual backbone: ROADS, BRIDGES, AND SHIPPING PORTS”.

Duffy did not explain how the transportation department would determine which bike lanes support diversity, equity and inclusion. The administration also recently removed bike lanes and speed cameras from the Federal Highway Administration’s list of proven safety countermeasures.

Alex Jones is apparently shuffling all his monies around under his father's name and hasn't paid a dime to the people he's ordered to pay money to. He has lost infowars and other things but he is still active.

Still drunk too.

Trump is killing Medicare Part D (prescription drug subsidies/discounts for old people), which is a no-risk play because old people are famously not big voters.

why did Biden let him do that

Is this where you tell us again that everyone hates Trump and the Democrats are cruising to victory?

xp

The Democrat are up +7 on the new Quinnipiac generic congressional ballot poll. They probably need to be at +5 to pick up seats.

FBI Director Kash Patel’s lawsuit against a man who called him a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” and “blatantly incompetent chud” was thrown out by a federal judge on Tuesday.

^I hope that quote went out in an AP wire service story that will be widely reprinted and used as the basis of widespread television and radio news reports that dutifully incorporate it verbatim.

I’m glad a federal judge has confirmed that Kash Patel is in fact a googly-eyed Kremlin bitch

this is where I say the Dems will probably do well in the fall, but don’t worry they won’t do anything

this administration is getting positively hysterical about the emerging Red Scare, I wonder if they're doing focus groups on the messaging because it all sounds insane to my ears. Also I don't see how Stephen Miller should ever appear on TV

I can't even imagine how bonkers the midterms ads are gonna be, especially given that Elon is apparently bankrolling everything again

I'm in Southwedt Florida.on vacation. The ads are bonkers.

*Southwest

it’s crazy how one guy with a mutilated dick can help usher in authoritarian apartheid

Mandela Barnes just dropped out of the Wisconsin governor's race.

"The decision by Barnes came amid reporting by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel into allegations that Barnes was taking advantage of his role in the party to have sexual encounters with young adult women, which promoted an investigation last year by the state Democratic Party."

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2026/07/30/mandela-barnes-ends-campaign-for-governor/91101126007/

Latest poll had him running a distant second to Francesca Hong, but with a lot of undecided voters still: https://law.marquette.edu/poll/

xp

Hitler had an undescended testicle, coincidence?

fuck yeah that IS kash

Duffy did not explain how the transportation department would determine which bike lanes support diversity, equity and inclusion. The administration also recently removed bike lanes and speed cameras from the Federal Highway Administration’s list of proven safety countermeasures.

Not to be too stereotypical here but bike lanes code culturally for affluent white liberals (yes I know lots of people ride bikes). Calling them DEI is totally insane but reveals what it really means, which is just "anything for people we don't like."

Looks like Trump would prefer to lose Blanche as AG as long as he can keep his IRS audit immunity

xpost
Riding bikes = Caring about the environment
Guess who uses the environment? Minorities.
Therefore bike lanes = DEI

Cars are manly. Cars are weapons. Good cars, the cars Real Americans drive, are trucks. Bicycles are for the weak, the effeminate, and the poor.

They literally don't need more reasons than that. It's ALL culture war.

The WH just bought 250 Cadillac Escalades, for some reason... I guess to drive across empty reflecting pools

They're going to drive around DC in the bike lanes 24/7.

only YOORPEENS ride bikes therefore bikes are gay or something.

They're blocking off and walling off dc streets already for the upcoming Freedom 250 Grnad Prix Indy car series race August 22 and 23.

https://www.popville.com/2026/07/indy-car-race-prep-road-closures-freedom-250-grand-prix/

My commiserations; the Melbourne Grand Prix comes every March and I live 5km away. Every room in my house sounds like it is infested with angry wasps for 3 days. Indy cars are probably louder than formula one cars as well.

i admire Trump’s commitment to making DC his personal playground and unlivable for everyone else

And then there’s this-

Federal prosecutors on Friday acknowledged that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and sought to drop charges against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was one of several people accused of vandalizing the landmark

From NY Times

Classic: flood the zone with bullshit so that it has to be covered as a disagreement between competing truth claims. Quietly back down on a Friday afternoon and never speak of it again.

That tactic was already old hat in 2017. They keep turning that bullshit crank bcz it works so well.

August thread:

"You know, we have a life and grass has a life and the grass here died about 40 years ago. " American Politics, August 2026