The Week in Review - July 4, 2025

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Jul 04, 2025

“Where freedom is, there is my nation.” ~Benjamin Franklin

“Today marks 249 years since the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Founding Father and second president John Adams expected it would be celebrated on July 2—the day delegates voted to break from Great Britain—but the idea didn't catch on. Today, the Fourth of July is synonymous with fireworks and barbecues, though some celebrate in more peculiar ways.

Since July 4, 1776, the US has grown from 13 colonies with 2.5 million people to 50 states and 14 territories with over 342 million people connected by roughly 5,000 airports, 4 million miles of roads, 140,000 miles of train tracks, and 5.5 million miles of power lines.

The economy has prospered to nearly $30T. Public health advances have dwindled the child mortality rate to under 1%, and Americans live over three decades longer on average. Meanwhile, homegrown scientific achievements have delivered everything from the light bulb and modern flight to the internet and air conditioning. We’ve also sent over 300 citizen astronauts to space—the most of any country.

Since last Independence Day, an American infant was successfully treated with a novel gene-editing technique, computers are becoming exponentially faster problem solvers, and the James Webb Telescope photographed its first new planet.

America’s story is still unfolding, with new milestones to reach and new challenges to overcome. Today invites us to reflect on our progress and draw inspiration for the next 249 years.

PS–Challenge your friends and family to some patriotic trivia.”

(Source: 1440 Daily Digest)

This morning in my email was a notice from the Social Security Administration with the headline:

Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors

Project 2025 seems to working. Our government is moving backwards to a politicized civil service. Getting this notice made me incredibly sad.

I’m not sure how much I want to celebrate the 4th of July today.

BUT… I find this article helpful… Please read:

The Self-Evident Truths of Freedom—and of Tyranny

In America, the rule of law is king.

Living through these times…

Rise of campfire therapy

Sitting by campfires brings down blood pressure and boosts relaxation, which can foster more social interactions.

The Conservative Attack on Empathy

But the current ascendancy of this anti-empathy worldview, now a regular topic in right-wing social-media posts, articles, and books, might be less a reasonable point of argumentation and more a sort of coping mechanism for conservatives confronted with the outcomes of certain Trump-administration policies—such as the nightmarish tale of a 4-year-old American child battling cancer being deported to Honduras without any medication, or a woman in ICE custody losing her mid-term pregnancy after being denied medical treatment for days.

7 Ways to Find Meaning at Work

David Brooks and Arthur Brooks have both studied these dynamics. And in a session at the Aspen Ideas Festival they offered advice on how to make work more meaningful.… they pushed back against the notion that the discussion was only relevant to a privileged few. “Loving your job ... is not predicted by having a college degree and is not predicted by having above or below average income,” Arthur Brooks said. “You’re just as likely to love your job if you’re making $30,000 a year as if you’re making $300,000 a year.”

Finding the humor…

With the Big, Beautiful Bill, You Can Now Sponsor a Billionaire of Your Choosing

…The Big, Beautiful Bill assigns each American a billionaire who will live the American dream for you. You can check in on your billionaire at intervals and see how he is using your money. Maybe he’s building a 19th pool. Maybe he’s buying himself some formerly public land! Maybe he’s taking a Supreme Court justice on a dream vacation! Maybe he is reupholstering the Statue of Liberty to hide the poem…

New Trump portrait donated by White House hangs in Colorado Capitol after earlier one drew his ire

A presidential portrait with Donald Trump’s approval now hangs in the Colorado Capitol after his complaints got a previous one of him taken down. Last spring, Trump posted on social media that Boardman “must have lost her talent as she got older” and “purposely distorted” him, criticisms the Colorado Springs artist denied. The next day, lawmakers announced they would remove the portrait from a wall of past presidents. By the day after that, Boardman’s painting was gone, put into museum storage.

President Trump’s Approval Rating: Latest Polls

Thought for the day in honor of his birthday…

“Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge any one to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws.”

~Calvin Coolidge

Must Read Article:

Guess Who Else Sent Troops to Quell Protests in American Streets

A decade before America’s original No Kings movement, Ben Franklin stood in London before the House of Commons and — while attempting to explain in some small way the American mind — warned against sending troops to America to quell unrest. “I do not see how a military force can be applied to that purpose,” Franklin declared, adding, prophetically: “They will not find a rebellion. They may indeed make one.” His words fell on deaf ears. In October 1768 nearly a thousand redcoats marched into Boston, a trail of artillery behind them.
Protests are as much a part of the American experiment as baseball and barbecue. And nothing more effectively powers a low-simmering resistance than disproportionate force. Many Bostonians, who regarded a standing army in time of peace as a deep violation of American rights, believed the Crown was doing its best to make the colonists look like insurrectionists. It had manufactured a crisis, dispatching troops on dubious charges to establish arbitrary power and, as one paper noted in mid-March 1770, “to quell a spirit of liberty.” It can be dangerous to mistake a protest for a rebellion. Insurrection was nowhere in the air when those troops arrived. Eight years later, the imposition of troops would figure among the grievances enumerated in the Declaration of Independence….
This month, President Trump deployed over 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles. “We’re going to have troops everywhere,” he declared, vowing to “liberate” the city from protesters, or what he called “animals” and “insurrectionists.” If Ben Franklin had not been sufficiently explicit with his warning in 1766, John Adams was in 1770, when he defended the beleaguered Boston redcoats at their trial. “From the nature of things,” he observed, “soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace!”

Born on the Fourth of July

America’s civic life is sewn together by words. The longest and best thread of those words started in Philadelphia in 1776 with the American creed that laid out the idea of the new nation: “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Beginning a war of rebellion, the signatories said, was worth the price in service of those ideals…
Not one word of what Coolidge said is out of place for us Americans nearly a century later. We worship the power and wealth of our nation but are much inclined to forget that those things are a byproduct of the ideas of the founding, not the purpose of the nation.

Highlights

Federal judge blocks Trump's plan to limit access to asylum at southern border

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked President Trump's plan to sharply restrict access to the nation's asylum system, a blow to the president's sweeping crackdown on immigration into the United States. U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled in favor of 13 individuals seeking asylum in the U.S. and three immigrants' rights groups who argued that a proclamation signed by Mr. Trump on his first day back in office — which has been a pillar of his immigration agenda — is unlawful.

Solar project reimagines railway network as clean energy lifelines

A Swiss firm is on track to solve the conundrum of where to site industrial solar farms, by turning railways into power plants. Switzerland needs to boost solar energy output seven-fold by 2035 to meet climate goals, but a scarcity of land available for large-scale PV plants poses a serious hurdle to scaling up. Concerns over land use, aesthetics and environmental impact have mired solar projects in controversy, with as many as a third proposed for construction in the Alps derailed by local opposition, red tape or funding woes.

Widow of D.C. officer who died by suicide after Jan. 6 says $500,000 verdict was "a relief that all the fighting was worth it"

Following her husband's death, Smith became a reluctant but impactful advocate. She successfully lobbied Congress to pass a bipartisan law in 2022 to allow some police deaths by suicide to be designated as "official line of duty" deaths.

Quotes of the week:

“This is the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress.”

~ Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT).

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“The MAGA movement’s thirst for trauma is what connects …slashing the social safety net; firing federal workers; deporting immigrants; defying judicial orders; punishing political rivals; curbing rights to speech, protests, and academic freedom; rolling back hard-won rights for Blacks, women and other marginalized Americans; celebrating Confederate traitors who defended slavery — these and other own-the-libs policies are retribution for decades of grievances (many real, some imagined) harbored by a plurality of voters drawn to Trump’s hate-fueled populism.

It’s less about making America great than making fellow Americans pay.”

~Charlie Sykes

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“This reckless Republican budget is an immoral document... We are standing up and pushing back with everything we have, on behalf of the American people.”

~ Hakeem Jeffries

Lowlights

Trump Is Breaking American Intelligence

The United States possesses an intelligence community that is the envy of the world. But under President Donald Trump, some of the same pathologies that make authoritarian regimes prone to intelligence failures are making the U.S. system similarly vulnerable. His populist, personalist style has led him to disregard the value of intelligence and abuse the agencies that produce it. In late June, the day before he sent U.S. bombers to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, Trump dismissed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s congressional testimony that Iran was not close to developing a nuclear weapon—an assessment that conflicted with the president’s own claims. “I don’t care what she says,” Trump said. After the U.S. strikes, he triumphantly declared that the targeted Iranian nuclear sites were “completely and totally obliterated,” whereas a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report made a more conservative estimation of the damage.
The problem is not just that Trump himself belittles intelligence. His administration is also creating conditions in which senior officials tailor their assessments to please him.

The Supreme Court decision that unshackled Trump

In a 6-3 decision whose consequences continue to reverberate today, the six Republican appointees on the court ruled that Trump was entitled to criminal immunity in connection with the Justice Department’s prosecution of the then-former president over his effort to overturn the 2020 election. The decision dealt a practical death blow to the Justice Department’s hopes of putting Trump on trial before the 2024 election.
That is all decidedly in the past now, but the decision continues to reverberate.

A Real Cancer in Washington

The CFPB shielded taxpayers from romance scams, Ponzi schemes, excessive fees, unbreakable contracts, and confiscatory interest rates. Romatowski specialized in artificial intelligence. She studied how criminals used deepfaked voices to rip off the elderly and how biased banking algorithms charged Black families more for mortgages than white families.
The bureau didn’t require a single penny of taxpayer resources. It generated some of its budget through fines; the Federal Reserve covered the rest. Yet DOGE fired 70 newly hired or recently promoted employees at the CFPB two days before Romatowski’s mammogram, sending each one an email composed so carelessly that it hadn’t bothered to replace [EmployeeFirstName], [EmployeeLastName], and [JobTitle] with the recipient’s own name and title. “The Agency finds that that you are not fit for continued employment,” the typo-laden email read.
…“Is there any way that we can do it tomorrow?” she asked, choking back tears. “I work for the federal government, and I think Elon Musk is going to fire me.”
…she told me that she worried about scammers stealing grandparents’ retirement savings, thieves hacking people’s bank accounts, sports-betting apps bleeding young men dry, and ‘buy now, pay later’ companies targeting poor consumers. I worried about her. She had dyed her hair pink, but little of it remained. She moved slowly. I kept asking how she was doing. Losing your job, getting cancer, and moving back in with your parents—it was a heck of a punch line, she told me, as well as a gut punch. The thing that really upset her was the way (CFPB’s acting director) talked about his own colleagues in government. In a leaked video, he’d said he wanted “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” He wanted them “to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” He wanted to “put them in trauma.”

To Bribe or Not to Bribe?

Paramount had a slam-dunk defense—but chose to settle with Trump anyway for $16 million, most of which will go to his, ahem, presidential library. Coincidentally, Paramount also has a merger pending that requires the approval of his administration. Fight or flight: What would you have done if you needed to curry favor with a head of state who’s proudly vindictive and more than willing to abuse regulatory power to settle a personal grudge?

The most surprising victim of Trump’s terrible tax agenda

According to polling by Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, Americans in 2024 believed that the GOP would be better than Democrats on the economy and cost of living — but worse on income inequality and the environment — and considered the former issues more important.
But the GOP’s priorities aren’t as advertised. President Donald Trump’s agenda does not ask Americans to accept a dirtier atmosphere and more inegalitarian social order in exchange for cheaper goods, faster technological progress, and national industrial dominance. Rather, it asks us to accept not only greater inequality and environmental degradation, but also, higher prices, slower technological progress, and worse industrial performance for the sake of…I’m not sure what. Perhaps the conservative movement’s cultural grievances? Or Trump’s odd ideological fixations?

Military Domestic Violence Convictions Skyrocketed After Commanders Were Removed from Process

While many incidents still go unpunished, the new legal system, which removed commanders from decisions on prosecution and handed authority to the services' independent Offices of Special Trial Counsel, is seeing success after just 17 months of existence.

Hundreds of thousands in North Carolina at risk of losing health care coverage

Among the states whose rural areas could be hit hardest by the proposed legislation is North Carolina, which expanded Medicaid just two years ago and has one of the largest rural populations in the country.
The legislation would also trigger a state law that rolls back Medicaid expansion, under which nearly 700,000 North Carolinians have coverage.

A Classic Childhood Pastime Is Fading

As fewer kids venture out, however, neighborhoods can lose those social ties. Many people blame smartphones for this trend. But as Esther Walker, the research leader at the nonprofit youth-cycling organization Outride, told me, “I’ve never read or heard a student say they just would prefer to be on their phone.” Kids do want to bike, Nancy Pullen-Seufert, the director of the government-funded program the National Center for Safe Routes to School, told me—but conditions on many streets don’t exactly inspire confidence. Walker regularly speaks with middle schoolers in Outride’s programs, and she told me that although they crave mobility, many also say that the traffic in their neighborhood makes riding too dangerous or that their parents won’t let them go on their own.