Opinion

First, full disclosure: I’m not a soccer fan. I'm a football fan, and a diehard Pittsburgh Steelers fan. So, having said that, let’s start with a hypothetical.

Say the Steelers are heading into a playoff game and their best defensive player just got suspended for a hit the league ruled illegal.

I've never been much of a gambler. I think it's a waste of time, and I just don't enjoy it. Money has never gotten my pulse up. And if I'm honest, the times I've proverbially thrown the dice, I've always lost.

Every time I've sat down at a table telling myself this is the round I get ahead, I've walked away further behind than when I started. So I quit playing, and I settled on the same line every time I walked out of a casino: "What a chump!"

Hundreds of people died last month across Europe from the heat; they’re a symptom of a larger problem that governments around the world have failed to address — that goes far beyond simply global warming — and that the Trump regime is making far worse.

Its foundation is one of the most troubling aspects of human nature called predation: while most people just want to live their lives, raise their kids, and have a comfortable old age, some small percentage of those among us have simply become, for lack of a better word, predators.

MAGA is raging about Trump “losing” after the Supreme Court voted to strike down his racist and xenophobic birthright citizenship ban. They’re also big mad at Melania Trump for not hating transgender women nearly as much as they do. The Red Hat Death Squad is so in love with their hate, and they hate it whenever they’re forced to face the truths they’ve been avoiding about Trump for years, so they’re currently very busy scapegoating “leftists” for yet another Trump fail.

However, they’re oddly silent over another L that SCOTUS handed Trump on Monday, because they just can’t bring themselves to admit that he’s an adjudicated rapist whose name appears in the Epstein Files nearly as much as Jeffrey Epstein’s.

Hooray, we're free! Screw you, England!

Now what?

America turns 250 this year. If you were around for the bicentennial in 1976 you probably remember it like I do. I was an 11 year-old preteen obsessed with presidents but not yet old enough to understand the experiment called democracy I was celebrating.

I remember red, white and blue everywhere. In our neighborhood, every porch or window had a flag. People proudly, and without partisanship, displayed them. I collected ‘76 decals and bumper stickers, the round ones, and stuck them on the wall above my bed, and on my bike.

This column grimly spent a spring predicting a dark summer of possible chaos and violence, an administration on the move, power grabs at every turn, one preparing for an unpredictable but authoritarian fall season. We would endure a lot of hot weather, late nights, some dangerous dynamics, and Kalshi had odds at 40% that Portland would be ashes by June 15th.

This worry followed protests in Minnesota, the fear of troops coming to Chicago, and everything else you surely remember. Well, the heat came to the East Coast. But nothing else, not yet.

Somewhere inside the White House right now, there’s a federal intelligence report sitting in a drawer, and Trump’s lickspittles who put it there are betting you won’t see it before you vote in November.

It’s an assessment of the security of America’s voting machines, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Reuters revealed last month that White House officials have spent months refusing to authorize its release, even as the 2026 midterms come barreling toward us.

The language of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution could not be plainer when it comes to birthright citizenship. It says that if you were born or naturalized here, you’re a citizen. Period. End of story.

There is no debate.

When Rep. Tom Kean went missing from Congress for nearly four months, the speculation ran wild. Where was he? Was he hiding something? Was his marriage in trouble? Had he done something to be ashamed of?

Reporters camped outside his New Jersey home. A colleague said he hadn't heard from him. The mystery became a campaign issue in a swing district that could help decide control of the House.