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“The Anti-MAGA”: Blood-Soaked Bush Family Plots Revival Of Political Dynasty

The Bush family, whose neoconservative war-hawk policies dragged America into catastrophic Middle East quagmires costing trillions and countless lives, is plotting a brazen political comeback, even as voters from all sides have rejected their reckless globalist agenda.

Jonathan S. Bush, cousin of former President George W. Bush and nephew of former President George H. W. Bush is gearing up for a potential run for Maine’s governor, according to Newsweek, in a move that reeks of dynasty revival despite the family’s tarnished legacy.

Despite George P. Bush’s humiliating 2022 defeat in the Texas attorney general GOP primary, Jonathan, a former health care executive, is testing the waters with an exploratory committee and a new nonprofit, “Maine for Keeps,” aimed at tackling the state’s economic and housing woes. The Bangor Daily News reported that George W. Bush and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush rolled out the red carpet for their cousin at a swanky Kennebunkport fundraiser this week.

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Texas Is Preparing To Cut Off Power To Data Centers During Grid Emergencies

Over the Fourth of July, deadly floods swept across central Texas, disrupting infrastructure and causing widespread outages. Meanwhile, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has already seen multiple price spikes and conservation alerts — not because there wasn’t enough power, but because we couldn’t move it where it was needed.

These aren’t isolated events. It’s not just a Texas problem.

Just days after the shutoff planning was announced, the U.S. Department of Energy warned that blackout risks across the country could rise 100-fold by 2030.

All of this points to a deeper vulnerability: We’re still running the grid with tools and assumptions built for a different era — one with fewer storms, slower load growth and no massive data centers. 

Texas’s new normal demands smarter, faster and more adaptive grid operations. Long-term infrastructure investments are critical, but they won’t arrive in time to manage the next three summers.

Texas has made real progress in building new generation capacity, especially in solar, storage and wind. But the wires that carry that power haven’t changed. More importantly, the way we operate the grid hasn’t evolved to match the demands of either changing weather patterns or electrical load growth.

Now, surging demand from industrial expansion, electrification and AI data centers is doubling the strain. ERCOT’s own projections show that power demand in Texas may nearly double by 2030. And, other regions aren’t immune.

  • The Midcontinent Independent System Operator recently green-lit a $22 billion transmission buildout to relieve rising congestion.
  • The California Independent System Operator saw renewable curtailments surge nearly 30% last year.
  • The PJM Interconnection anticipates 3% to 4% annual peak load growth through 2035 driven by data centers and expects up to 70 GW of demand over the next 15 years.
  • Nationally, U.S. demand is projected to climb about 16% in five years — a pace not seen since the 1980s. 

That means more stress on an already-congested transmission system — one still being managed with decades-old assumptions about heat, wind and demand.

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Congress Spent At Least $27,500 on Poster Displays in 2 Months. Here Are 4 Ridiculous Examples and 1 Good One.

Congress can’t even debate a bill without wasting money. In the first two months of this year, it spent at least $27,500 “on printing charts, props, and posters, sticking them on easels (or making staff hold them up) and giving speeches about them,” according to FloorCharts, which has been archiving congressional charts and posters since 2012.

That figure was obtained by estimating the average cost of a chart at $50 and totaling the number of charts used by the House and Senate (550) over the two-month period. This number doesn’t include all committee charts, but the analysis found that Republicans “used about 20 more charts than Democrats.” FloorCharts notes that “this is napkin math, because there is no line item in the office budgets for ‘printed charts, props, and posters.'”

That total is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the national debt, but any wasteful government spending should be eliminated. And when you look at the posters the legislators came up with, you’ll see that this spending could be very wasteful indeed. Here are four of the most ridiculous posters—and one that we have to admit is pretty good.

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Scientists Say This “Strange Physics Mechanism” Could Enable Objects to Levitate on Sunlight

Designed for flight forty-five miles above the Earth’s surface, Harvard SEAS researchers have devised a nanofabricated lightweight structure capable of sunlight-driven propulsion through a process called photophoresis, capable of monitoring one of Earth’s most challenging locations to navigate.

Stretching between 30 and 60 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mesosphere has proven extremely difficult to study, as the altitude is too high for planes and balloons, yet too low for satellites. Achieving regular direct access to this long-out-of-reach portion of the atmosphere could be a major boon to improving weather forecasts and climate model accuracy.

Now, a new breakthrough technology could make it possible, by allowing lightweight structures to reach largely unexplored heights powered by sunlight alone.

Photophoresis

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the University of Chicago, and other institutions worked on the project, which was revealed in a new paper published in Nature.

“We are studying this strange physics mechanism called photophoresis and its ability to levitate very lightweight objects when you shine light on them,” said lead author Ben Schafer, a former Harvard graduate student at SEAS, now a professor at the University of Chicago.

Photophoresis is a physical process where gas molecules bounce off of an object’s warmer side more forcefully than its cooler side in extremely low-pressure environments. One such environment is the difficult-to-reach mesosphere.

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Texas Crime Labs Say They Don’t Have Enough Resources To Test Hemp Products For THC As Lawmakers Consider Ban

As Texas lawmakers debate whether to regulate or ban THC products, officials with the state’s crime labs say they don’t have the resources currently to enforce whatever law is passed.

“From a crime lab perspective, mercifully, we don’t have a dog in that fight. I really don’t care. Just tell me what I need to test, and then I need resources to be able to provide that result,” Peter Stout, president and chief executive officer for the Houston Forensic Science Center, told The Texas Tribune after he testified before the House Public Health Committee on Wednesday. “Otherwise, I become the reason the wheel falls off this wagon, which has basically been the last six years now.”

Wednesday’s committee hearing centered on House Bill 5, which would create a blanket ban on products containing any “detectable amount of any cannabinoid” other than cannabidiol and cannabigerol, better known as CBD and CBG, non-intoxicating components of cannabis. This bill would eliminate the majority of hemp products, including those that are legal under the federal definition.

”There’s been countless reports of artificial and synthetic cannabinoids and their effects on the consumer, and these products have become readily available,” said Rep. Gary VanDeaver, R-New Boston, the committee’s chair and HB 5’s author. “Some of these products are marketed in a way that is attractive to children, for example common food products, like candy.”

The Senate’s version of the bill also calls for a ban, but since Gov. Greg Abbott (R) earlier this year vetoed similar legislation that would have banned THC, some lawmakers have signaled they’d support more regulations over a ban.

Kim Carmichael, spokesperson for House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, told The Texas Tribune that the House hasn’t committed to a ban.

“HB 5 was filed as a similar bill to what the House passed in the regular session, because that’s the most logical starting point for negotiations,” Carmichael said. “Since it passed in that form, members believed they should resume debate where it ended up. It would still go through the process of a public hearing and floor debate, so where it ends up is unknown at this time.”

Experts invited by lawmakers on Wednesday to talk about THC largely focused on the health dangers of THC, the possible criminal networks that underlie the industry, and the impossible task of enforcement.

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Child Protective Services Investigated Her 4 Times Because She Let Her Kids Play Outside

Parenting expectations are often unreasonably high—and so is the number of people who believe that kids can’t handle anything on their own.

Passersby too often see an unsupervised child and assume they are unsafe. So they call the authorities, who also often share those super-sized fears. Then parents get investigated simply for trusting their kids with some age-appropriate, location-appropriate independence.

Because of this frustrating cycle, I frequently get letters like the one below. When people ask why I spend so much time trying to pass Reasonable Childhood Independence laws, it’s for people like Emily Fields and her children. Fields is a mom in small-town Virginia who responded to my nonprofit Let Grow’s call for parents willing to speak to child protective services about why such laws are necessary. (Virginia unanimously passed its Reasonable Childhood Independence law in 2023.)

This letter is presented as a stark example of how little trust our country has in its parents and children anymore—and how misanthropic neighbors can weaponize the state at will.

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Dept. of Education to cut funding for Va. school districts over trans locker room policies

Alexandria City Public Schools, Prince William County Public Schools, and Arlington Public Schools joined Loudoun County Public Schools on Friday in defending their policies that allow students to access and use school bathrooms and locker rooms based on their chosen gender identity.

The U.S. Department of Education gave the four school districts and Fairfax County Public Schools until Friday to respond to the Department’s demands to comply with Title IX. Their responses are listed later in this article.

After this story was published, the Education Department told 7News it would begin suspending or completely cutting off federal financial assistance to those school districts.

“The Virginia divisions will have to defend their embrace of radical gender ideology over ensuring the safety of their students,” a portion of the department’s statement read.

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‘Hilarious’: White House Mocks NPR Over Alaska Summit ‘Security Breach’ Story

The White House on Saturday dismissed and mocked a report by National Public Radio (NPR) that claimed US government documents containing sensitive and secretive details about President Trump’s summit with Russian President Putin were found in an Alaskan hotel.

The NPR story began, “Papers with U.S. State Department markings, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaskan hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Anchorage.”

It continued, “Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employee.”

But White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly has rejected that there’s anything relevant here, going so far as to call out NPR for exaggerating its significance. She characterized the documents as nothing more than a “multi-page lunch menu” and blasted NPR for sensationalizing the discovery.

“It’s hilarious that NPR is publishing a multi-page lunch menu and calling it a ‘security breach,’” Kelly told ABC News. She said:

“This kind of so-called ‘investigative journalism’ is exactly why people don’t take them seriously anymore – and why they’re no longer taxpayer-funded thanks to President Trump.”

NPR in its report observed that the documents went so far as to provide phonetic guides for Russian names, such as “Mr. President POO-tihn.”

The report further cited ‘experts’ who alleged this shows carelessness and lack of proper security protocols in handling sensitive documents involving top level meetings with the US president and world leaders.

A lunch menu and scheduling… pundits are framing this as some major scandal and breach…

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Massachusetts State Police spent $217,000 on luxury hotel stays, international flights, and more

Mass State Police shelled out more than $200,000 on stays at 4- and 5-star hotels from Aruba to Florida, along with international flights and other expenses during the last fiscal year.

The Herald is sifting through state agencies’ taxpayer-funded credit card expenditures — finding that Mass State Police racked up $217,957 in procurement card (P-card) expenses in fiscal year 2025.

That includes stays at Aruba’s Manchebo Beach Resort & Spa for a total of $6,050, and Aruba’s Bucuti & Tara Beach Resort for a total of $4,344. MSP also had a $1,320 bill for a rental car in Aruba.

Some of the other biggest hotel bills from the last year were at Champlin’s Hotel, Marina & Resort in Rhode Island for a total of $9,179; Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile for a total of $8,475; and Harborside Inn on Martha’s Vineyard for a total of $5,062.

Mass State Police, which has been emphasizing the importance of transparency as the embattled agency tries to restore trust following a string of scandals, will not provide details on these expenditures and the purpose for these pricey trips.

“We do not have a comment to provide on these State Police operational matters,” a Mass State Police spokesperson said in a statement.

Recently, the Herald shed light on the P-card bills for Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office and Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins, who was indicted last week on federal charges.

Some of the MSP charges are related to the governor’s executive protection, but not all of them.

“The Massachusetts State Police takes seriously our solemn obligation to keep elected officials safe during their tenures in office,” the MSP spokesperson said. “Constitutional Officers in Massachusetts and across the country have long had Executive Protection that travels with them.

“This is essential for ensuring the safety and security of our state’s top leaders, while also ensuring the safety of the general public,” the spokesperson added. “This security is all the more important in this moment when political violence is on the rise, with several recent and tragic attacks on elected officials. Due to operational concerns, we do not comment on resource allocations of protective details.”

The timing of Gov. Maura Healey’s office purchasing hotel stays in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere line up with some of MSP’s fancy hotel expenditures.

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