The founders threw out the Redcoats. So why does America's 250th birthday feel like they're back in charge? Tomorrow America turns 250 years old, and instead of a celebration of the republic those 56 men who signed the Declaration risked the hangman’s noose to create, we’re getting a MAGA rally. Donald Trump has taken the nation’s 250th birthday, the once-in-a-lifetime anniversary that belongs to all of us, and rebranded it as a tribute to himself. He shoved aside the bipartisan “America 250” commission that Congress created a decade ago, stood up his own White House-controlled operation ironically called “Freedom 250,” and steered our taxpayer money toward his own vanity celebration while the congressional commission was left begging for the funds it was promised.

An afternoon in East Berlin became the lens through which today's America suddenly makes terrifying sense... In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car. He couldn’t have been much past twenty, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself. That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.

Hundreds died in this week's heat wave. But the real killer is a political & economic system that rewards predators, turns citizens into prey, & leaves governments protecting power instead of people… Hundreds of people died yesterday 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.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — There’s no longer any mystery about whose side the Supreme Court is on; the only mystery is why it bothers pretending otherwise. — Somebody finally proposed making California’s 250 billionaires chip in, and you should hear them scream. — Senate Democrats noticed that traditional Medicare is the only insurance in America with no limit on what it can cost you, and decided to do something about it. — A federal judge just told Trump’s Justice Department to stop hiding the files on the woman who says Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13. — Trump’s mentor Vlad may be plotting a poke at NATO, and he’s picked the perfect moment, because the man in the Oval Office treats the alliance like a protection racket he resents paying into. — While Trump was busy feuding with Giorgia Meloni over a photo op, the woman actually positioned to end Meloni’s career was quietly building her case. — The hellscape currently broiling Europe is not weather, it’s a receipt for fifty years of lies from the fossil fuel industry. — Geeky Science Alert! The $300 ring you bought to fix your sleep may be the thing keeping you awake.