The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — The Trump administration has now openly threatened to imprison American election officials who won’t let it “help” run this fall’s elections. — Turns out that when you spend 45 years transferring the nation’s wealth to the top, the people at the bottom eventually notice. — And here’s the punchline the consultant class is going to spend all weekend trying not to say out loud: “democratic socialist” now polls better than “MAGA.” — Fox “News” covered Trump’s election-fraud address the way a cat covers what’s in the litter box. — Texas has decided that five million public school children will study the Bible whether their families are Christian or not, and Jewish leaders are pointing out — politely, which is more than the state deserves — that this always ends badly. — Senate Republicans just voted to let an AI algorithm with a financial stake in saying “no” decide whether your mother gets her knee fixed. — Congress is about to make you permanently jet-lagged, and the science says don’t. — Geeky Science Alert! The stick shift is dying, and it’s taking something with it that we’re going to miss more than we know.

Control information. Intimidate opponents. Capture institutions. Rewrite reality. And the final box may be closer than Americans think... Tonight at 9 p.m., Donald Trump will commandeer prime-time television for what he’s billing as a speech about “free and fair elections,” promising “really big news” and reportedly planning to unveil what his people describe as “newly declassified intelligence” about “foreign (Chinese Communist Party) interference” in the 2020 election. Two days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson stood at a podium and told America why the Pentagon needs an extra $350 billion: “We’re fighting communism on our own shores.” He followed that up on social media with, “THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE!” The communists and barbarians, in case you’re wondering, are you and your neighbors, and the proof is how we voted in Democratic primaries this spring. Just the idea of returning to the McCarthy era of redbaiting like Johnson is doing here is obscene.

One year after Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," millions have lost food assistance and healthcare while billionaires pocket massive tax cuts. The bigger question is: why? Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history. They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

Every American schoolchild learns about the Boston Tea Party, and most also learn it was about “taxation without representation.” That’s true, but hugely incomplete. The Boston Tea Party was, in reality, fundamentally a rebellion against raw corporate power. The tea being dumped belonged to the British East India Company, then the world’s largest corporate monopoly. The tyranny being resisted was a new form of corporate tyranny corruptly backed by Company stockholder King George III’s government force. The Founders of this nation, then, fought a revolution every bit as much against a corporation as against the British military. Understanding this history explains why they would’ve been horrified by the idea of corporate constitutional rights.