Source: RealClearPolitics - Homepage · Bias: Center Right
Summary
At 207 minutes into Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony, host Conan O'Brien began stage-whispering to the attendees in the first row awaiting the night's biggest trophies.
At 207 minutes into Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony, host Conan O'Brien began stage-whispering to the attendees in the first row awaiting the night's biggest trophies.
Some 163 million people in the U.S. live in areas that experienced dangerous heat on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service — sending “heat risk” forecasts in major cities (including New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Atlanta) into the most extreme risk category through Saturday. Part of the reason is the planet is warming dangerously, but Trump calls climate change a “hoax” and is encouraging more use of fossil fuels. Especially endangered are workers toiling under the hot sun, or in stifling warehouses, or in delivery trucks with no AC.Yet Trump’s pick to run the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, David Keeling, is weakening the agency’s own heat standards by removing specific inspection goals. OSHA’s Heat National Emphasis Program expired on April 8. Its proposed heat standard has been stalled.For many workers, heat standards are literally a matter of life and death. Every year, workers collapse, suffer permanent injuries, and die while doing their jobs in extreme heat. Years ago, when I ran the Labor Department, we had the toughest Occupational Health and Safety Administration in history, run by a truly committed worker advocate named Joe Dear. We made workplaces safer — reducing worker deaths and injuries.Since its inception in 1971, OSHA has reduced workplace-related fatalities by almost 63 percent. It has slashed the rate of serious workplace injuries and illnesses by 75 percent. But OSHA under Keeling is retreating from worker safety. Before Trump picked him to head OSHA, Keeling was Amazon’s top safety executive. During Keeling’s tenure at Amazon, a Senate report found that Amazon warehouses were twice as dangerous as those of its competitors.This year, we’ve already seen reports of Amazon workers dying on the job on a near monthly basis, including incidents in Oregon and North Carolina. Why would we trust Amazon’s safety head with the country’s workers?Before he was at Amazon, Keeling was in charge of safety at UPS. How did he do there? OSHA repeatedly cited UPS for exposing drivers to excessive heat. Federal investigators found at least 100 drivers were hospitalized for heat-related injuries between 2015 and 2018. UPS delivery trucks had no air conditioning until 2024, when it was won in a landmark collective bargaining agreement with the Teamsters.Now Keeling is head of OSHA, and OSHA is weakening its heat protection standards. Workers are already paying the price. Reports of worker deaths during extreme heat continue to emerge across the country. Heat exposure can trigger heat stroke, organ failure, and chronic kidney disease. These are among the most predictable workplace hazards, which means they can often be prevented with strong safety standards and rigorous enforcement.But instead of strengthening those protections, OSHA under Keeling has weakened them. At a time when record-breaking temperatures are becoming more frequent, retreating from enforcement sends a dangerous message that worker fatalities are a cost of doing business.When he was in charge of safety at Amazon, Amazon became notorious for dangerous warehouse conditions. When in charge of safety at UPS, UPS resisted providing air conditioning for delivery vehicles. Now, when the agency responsible for protecting millions of workers should be leading the fight against preventable heat deaths — it’s backing away from its most basic responsibility to protect people over profits.Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
The large-scale attack with ballistic and cruise missiles and drones damaged buildings and civilian infrastructure across the city. Many residents took shelter at metro stations.
MAGA followers were livid after first lady Melania Trump issued a rare statement voicing her support for the LGBTQ+ community on Tuesday.Trump shared her comments in a post on X following the Supreme Court's decision to uphold laws in West Virginia and Idaho that bar transgender girls from female school sports. The ruling was considered a setback for the transgender community, according to The Associated Press.In her statement, Trump cited an excerpt from her own self-titled book "Melania" — and the page number."The U.S. Supreme Court has now legally confirmed this opinion: 'Under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, may schools maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females? ... The answer is yes.' America, we can support the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community and also protect opportunities for female athletes. Respect everyone and keep girls' sports fair. Both ideals are essential," Trump wrote.Loyal MAGA fans expressed their outrage in response to the first lady's comments."What is ideal about men claiming they can become women? What in that do you actually support?" User Debbie, who self-describes as "MAGA," wrote on X."I support the trans community getting the mental health treatment they need to recognize they are not members of the opposite sex," Matt Van Swol, a MAGA commentator and former nuclear scientist for the U.S. Department of Energy with more than 527,000 followers, wrote on X."Wrong," the account The Waitress, which frequently posts MAGA-related content, wrote on X."Respectfully, I don’t want my FLOTUS to support a community of people with a severe mental illness. They need God, and mental help," user JJ, who self-describes as "MAGA" and "America First," wrote on X."I’m thoroughly disappointed with this post. LGTBQ+ (sic) (alphabet soup) is an Anti-God movement. Sorry to say, but I’ve lost respect," user Lori Smith, who self-identifies as a "small business owner" and often shares Trump-related content, wrote on X.
We’re closing in on July Fourth and the nation’s 250th birthday, and right on time, the all-knowing digital algorithm deposited a memory from 2015 on my screen: That year, burning the Confederate flag on Independence Day was in vogue, sparked by the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. My fondness for desecrating rebel iconography is not restricted to either a national holiday or a national tragedy—we should have fully conquered the Confederacy when we had the chance, instead of allowing them to commemorate their traitorousness. Maybe those nine parishioners would be alive today if we’d done a better job discrediting that toxic ideology.That’s some food for thought here in 2026, as an ailing, flailing President Donald Trump sets his sight on being the ringmaster of the clown show he has planned for the Fourth. When Trump’s not losing wars or setting the economy on fire, he’s busy turning the nation’s capital into an orgy of self-aggrandizement ahead of next week’s semiquincentennial celebration. At Wednesday’s kick-off event for his “Great American State Fair,” Trump announced that “America is back.” Where had it gone? The president proclaimed that “a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.” As a thin crowd made for the exits, he also touched on the matter of state that’s consumed most of his time lately: “The Reflecting Pool that you’ve heard so much about, which is so incredible, it’s been gruesomely vandalized by thugs, bad people, but soon will be looking as beautiful as it looked just two weeks ago,” Trump said. “In fact, I looked at it just a little while ago. It looks perfect already, but we’re fixing it.” As it happens, the Reflecting Pool is still green, still peeling, and half-assedly stashed behind some chain-link fence. It may be a federal crime for me to report this, it’s not really clear.All of this is definitely a product of ego, but it’s also highly reminiscent of Confederate kitsch. Trump’s drive to commemorate himself, which has even run afoul of some of his fellow Republicans, is animated by the same idea as the Lost Cause: to lend legitimacy to a period of betrayal and to ensure this malevolent force lives on. Allowing the Confederacy to commemorate itself was a profound failure on our part, and it seeded the earth for the weakening of our democracy. As Trump plans to sully the District of Columbia’s skyline with his triumphal arch (now with more fist!), I can see history repeating: Trumpism as the new Lost Cause.I am hardly the first to evoke this comparison. As The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote back in 2020, Trump spent his Independence Day marinating in a variety of Lost Cause grievances: the decision to remove the Confederate iconography from the Mississippi state flag and NASCAR events, the renaming of the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, along with the usual suspects (“the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing”). As Graham noted at the time, Trump’s Lost Cause fetish was his campaign schtick, the red meat he used to rally his base. In 2020, that playbook failed, in no small part because the Covid-19 pandemic was foremost on the minds of voters. But Trump played the same game in 2024 and won back the White House. And as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Rivka Maizlish wrote last year, the “unrelenting propaganda of the Lost Cause” returned with a vengeance. The names of Confederacy luminaries stricken from U.S. military bases were restored, there was a renewed push to whitewash the sins of slavery, and the Civil War era’s insurrectionists were conflated with the nations’ Founders. It’s no accident that Trump believes our latter-day insurrectionists should be the ones to get government reparations.As Maizlish noted, ’twas ever thus:Lost Cause mythology is central to Trump’s movement. He romanticizes the gender and racial hierarchies of the Old South, valorizes Confederate leaders and symbols, and demonizes those who would remove Confederate memorials as “angry mobs” trying to “wipe out our history.” The Confederate anthem “Dixie” played at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27, 2024, an event filled with racist harangues and ridicule.Trump is now deep into his dotage (and perhaps his inexorable decline). He has no campaigns left to run and no further need to worry about uniting the American people to build some kind of sustainable electoral coalition. These days, the president is motivated entirely by thoughts of his legacy. But the Lost Cause schtick remains the same—only now it’s manifesting itself in his relentless pursuit of various vanity projects and alterations to Washington, D.C.
An MS NOW host argued Sunday that President Donald Trump squandered a rare political gift — a bipartisan housing bill that could have eased financial pressure on millions of Americans — because he "threw a temper tantrum," choosing instead to hold the legislation hostage to his voter ID agenda.In an opening monologue, the host laid out what they framed as a baffling self-inflicted wound. Trump, he said, "had the opportunity to actually do something that could ease the financial burdens for countless Americans" and could have signed "the largest housing affordability bill in a generation" — a rare bipartisan measure that would have handed his own party something to campaign on in November."It could have taken an easy W, which doesn't come often in this political climate," the host said.Instead, the host argued, Trump "threw a temper tantrum" and is "now holding that bill hostage" until Congress passes the SAVE Act, his voter ID legislation that critics say could disenfranchise millions of voters. The host summed up the dynamic bluntly: "holding affordability hostage to leverage voting restrictions."The host was joined by Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), who offered a withering read of the president's priorities."We're talking about a guy who pretends to love America," Lee said. "They love the symbolism, the ideology, but they don't love the people."Lee argued that when given a genuine chance to help "his own voters, for all voters across America, for poor and working class people, he won't do it." The reason, she contended, is that the administration's goal "is to help and enrich themselves, their own people, and we're all just along for the ride," whether Democrat, Republican, or independent.Pressed on whether she had spoken with Republican colleagues furious about Trump torpedoing the bill, Lee acknowledged she hadn't directly, but said the political reality was obvious — that lawmakers in both parties need something to show voters, and the housing bill "would have done so."Lee also drew a sharp contrast between the money available for the military and the funds denied to domestic programs, pointing to a $1.5 trillion defense request and "a request for a war that the vast majority of Americans and the rest of the world do not want," even as the administration says the country "cannot put people in housing.""Americans lose," the lawmaker said, arguing Republicans "have nothing to go back to run on" but cautioning that political self-interest "shouldn't be the reason that they do it."She closed by warning that voters squeezed by grocery and housing costs are "starting to get pissed off" and demanding answers — a reckoning, she said, that "every elected official is going to have to answer for, not just in November, but ongoing."
