From The Hill
President Trump’s announcement Thursday of a “historic” deal to disarm Hamas is drawing more skepticism than fanfare. Hamas said it was prepared to abide by the terms, but only with the buy-in of Israel, which remains skeptical about the deal, according to a U.S official invited into the discussions. The agreement would see Hamas hand…
It’s not a great time to be the head of the Democratic National Committee.
With fewer than 100 days until the crucial midterm elections, DNC Chairman Ken Martin is dealing with the fallout from a devastating New York Times story about the “troubled, broke” committee, comparing the party’s $2 million in debt to the Republican National Committee’s formidable campaign war chest.
Based on interviews with more than two dozen Democrats, the article includes some brutal allegations: the DNC asking vendors not to send bills until after the election to mask its debt problem, Martin throwing a phone at a junior aide and a staff paralyzed by fear of leaks.
I may not be a Democrat, but I feel Martin’s pain. As chairman of the Republican National Committee during the 2010 midterms, I faced similar criticism from the usual array of backseat drivers and Monday morning quarterbacks.
Rush Limbaugh lectured me to “go behind the scenes” and said “tens of millions of conservatives and Republicans” wanted “nothing to do” with the RNC under my leadership. Rep. Tom Cole — the former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee — demanded that I “apologize and resign” for questioning the war in Afghanistan. Major donors loudly announced they wouldn’t give money to the RNC as long as I led it. The Washington Post ran a report characterizing me as an “albatross for the GOP.”
Given all that, you would think we were headed for a historic loss.
Given all that, you would think we were headed for a historic loss. Instead, the opposite happened.
That cycle, the committee raised $164 million, even without having a president to help raise money. Republicans took 63 seats in the House — the most seismic shift of House seats in over 70 years. We gained six Senate seats, won six governor’s races and picked up the greatest share of state legislative seats since 1928, resulting in the most state legislatures switching to Republican hands since the 19th century.
I’m not going to claim that these wins were entirely my doing. But I know that I did a hell of a lot more to build the infrastructure for widespread electoral success than any of the naysayers or “anonymous insiders” catastrophizing the party’s chances that year.
Now, some of Martin’s skeptics risk making the same mistake. While no leader is ever above reproach or scrutiny, we should all be wary of questions asked in bad-faith or with ignorance as to what a national party is supposed to achieve. These do nothing to expand Democratic victories. Even if you aren’t a Democrat, it should also bother you that they are spreading confusion about how American politics works.
The role of a national party chair is simple: raise money and win elections. Deciding on the tactics and strategies to do that isn’t easy. Doing all that while also promoting yourself is even harder. That last task is the one where Martin could improve, but being bad at self-promotion isn’t the same as being ineffective.
While the RNC has a massive fundraising edge over the DNC, Democrats could take some reassurance from Martin’s recent context on those numbers. The committee has raised more money than any DNC without the White House in the party’s history. Since President Donald Trump’s second term began, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats to Republicans’ zero. The DNC is delivering “substantial monthly support” to every state party in the nation. While Democrats may not be taking note of any of this, trust me, Republicans are.
And while it may not be contributing financially to individual candidates — that’s the job of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — the DNC is spending vast sums to shore up broader campaign infrastructure and voter outreach to help those candidates win.
On strategy, Martin is emphasizing the importance of a continued Democratic presence on the ground, not waiting to do last-minute outreach when it’s time to begin casting ballots.
The final word on Martin’s effectiveness won’t be until November. It won’t be measured in off-the-record comments or damaging news stories. It will be measured in the number of Democratic victories he can mount on the walls.
Until then, Democrats need to keep their eye on the ball and their priorities clear. Maybe Martin should tell his critics what I told mine in 2010: “If you don’t want me in the job, fire me. But until then, shut up. Get with the program or get out of the way.”
For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Symone Sanders Townsend and Luke Russert, watch “The Weeknight” every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW.
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From MS Now.
In his comic book origin story, Spider-Man, aka Peter Parker, painfully learns that “with great power comes great responsibility.” The focal point of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is a corollary of that truism: True heroism often requires selflessness and sacrifice. Those old-fashioned values resonate all the more forcefully in this era of social media’s showboating and clout-chasing influencers.
Tom Holland’s fourth solo outing as Spider-Man features the requisite action sequences, including the best use of the Hulk on screen that we’ve seen in some time. At the movie’s core, however, we see a hero wrestling with loneliness, having given up relationships with his closest friend and the woman he loves in the previous installment, “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”
At the movie’s core, we see a hero wrestling with loneliness, having given up relationships with his closest friend and the woman he loves.
Those action sequences notwithstanding, “Brand New Day” is a more deeply personal film, and it comes at a particularly fraught time both for the comic book movie and — without sounding too high-handed about it — America. “Brand New Day” appears destined to become a big fat hit — to the anticipated tune of more than $250 million in North America for its opening weekend, and better than twice that worldwide — and to provide Marvel a lift before the larger-scale “Avengers: Doomsday.” For the country, it offers a welcome distraction from a seemingly endless barrage of dreary headlines and general anxiety.
The central theme empowering “Brand New Day” is subtle, but it shouldn’t be overlooked. Thanks to Holland’s sensitive performance as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, a genuine angst permeates the film, reflecting the emotional wounds that New York City’s guardian angel carries.
Stan Lee, who co-created Spider-Man with artist Steve Ditko in 1962, frequently discussed that angst as a fundamental aspect of the character. Indeed, Lee was fond of regaling interviewers with the story of his publisher calling his Spider-Man pitch “the worst idea I have ever heard.” That publisher said teenagers in comic books were strictly sidekicks (think of Batman’s Robin) and that the wall-crawling protagonist “can’t have personal problems if he’s supposed to be a superhero. Don’t you know who a superhero is?”
‘SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY’ has debuted with 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.Highest rated live-action Spider-Man movie, tied with ‘Spider-Man 2’ & ‘No Way Home’.Read our review: bit.ly/DFBND
— DiscussingFilm (@discussingfilm.net) 2026-07-28T13:28:36.229Z
Tellingly, Lee, Ditko and Jack Kirby — who collaborated with Lee on signature Marvel titles like “Fantastic Four,” “X-Men,” and “Avengers” — all came of age during World War II. Just this week, we heard Senate candidate James Talarico, a Texas Democrat, call for a return to “the values of the Greatest Generation,” describing them as “service, sacrifice, doing what’s right even when no one is watching.”
Those values have long formed the core of Spider-Man, but it’s especially true in “Brand New Day,” which finds the hero remaining quietly anonymous, stoically suffering alone and forgoing the accolades and rewards his powers could easily bring him.
Of course, most people flocking to “Brand New Day” will simply be looking for a good time, the same way the throngs seeing director Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” have mostly been drawn to its wide-screen spectacle, leaving the terminally online to debate its politics and ginned-up controversies.
That publisher said the wall-crawling protagonist “can’t have personal problems if he’s supposed to be a superhero. Don’t you know who a superhero is?”
Lee often noted that Marvel’s commitment to humanizing superheroes and conveying the personal struggles they face beyond overpowering villains defined that comic book universe during its breakthrough years in the 1960s.
Though those comic books were originally dismissed and disrespected by Hollywood, a generation of filmmakers weaned on them gradually gained enough clout to translate them as Lee and his collaborators intended, without campy flourishes and winks at the audience. One of those initial modern translations was “Spider-Man” starring Tobey Maguire in 2002. A revolution in visual effects clearly helped, but a more evolved attitude was actually pivotal in launching Marvel’s theatrical march with “Iron Man” in 2008 — even as the studio grapples with questions of “superhero fatigue” today.
Lee liked to call comics “fairy tales for grownups,” and there’s an element of that in this latest adventure, which portrays a more mature Peter Parker/Spider-Man, swinging into theaters at what feels like a crossroads for movies culturally and commercially.
In that sense, although “Spider-Man” the franchise might be near retirement-age eligibility, by nobly placing the welfare of others ahead of “likes” and fame, Spider-Man the character feels like a hero in the truest sense of the word, and one that we could especially use right now.
The post In ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day,’ great power comes with great loneliness appeared first on MS NOW.
From MS Now.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s refusal to answer questions during this week’s hearing on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic dominated headlines. But an underappreciated irony of the controversial hearing is that we are only capable of debating Fauci’s accounting for his pandemic performance because he preserved his records in the first place.
This same level of public scrutiny is rapidly becoming impossible across the rest of the federal government. Rather than engaging in genuine transparency, the Trump administration is selectively releasing records that align with its political priorities while actively shredding its own paper trail.
This week’s hearing focused on over a thousand pages of diary entries written by Fauci between 2019 and 2022 — which Fauci argued were personal — that were obtained by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and published online days before the hearing.
While the administration publishes Fauci’s unredacted diaries, it is simultaneously proposing a government-wide nondisclosure agreement to muzzle federal workers from sharing the very kinds of information Paul released.
Fauci condemned the release as an invasion of his privacy, and while it’s true that the government should never release information without proper vetting, the preservation of Fauci’s records on government servers complicates claims that the records were purely personal. It’s also worth noting that some entries were already memorialized in Fauci’s 2024 memoir, or reiterated in media interviews, making them fair game for disclosure and demonstrating genuine public interest in the records.
A far better way to balance privacy rights and public interest in the records would have been through the Freedom of Information Act, where career professionals could redact sensitive personal details while disclosing matters of legitimate public concern.
But while Kennedy was able to marshal agency resources for eight months to search for Fauci’s notes, he has refused to invest in transparency in almost any other area. Instead, he eviscerated the FOIA offices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, contributing to the department’s abysmal FOIA performance, with more delays and withholdings than in previous years.
HHS isn’t alone in failing on FOIA. As a recent New York Times investigation underscored, federal agencies across the board are getting worse at releasing records to the public.
This degradation isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s occurring alongside a government-wide assault on record preservation and accountability.
President Donald Trump’s Cabinet officials routinely flout federal record-keeping laws by utilizing disappearing messaging apps, with recent revelations exposing that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are among officials who continue to use Signal’s auto-delete function — even after the Signalgate fiasco, when Trump administration officials discussed war planes using a private app and apparently unwittingly invited Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg into the chat.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency operated almost entirely without a paper trail, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought told Congress the White House has no plans to publish an after-action report on what the short-lived government agency actually did.
These secrecy tactics extend to law enforcement and national security agencies as well. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which has had 22 people die in its custody this year alone — has refused to mandate its agents wear body cameras. To make matters worse, the FBI will no longer investigate the immigration agency’s confrontations with the public, further diminishing evidence of ICE’s activities. And at the Department of Defense, officials are attempting to hide “controlled unclassified information” from FOIA requests, potentially hiding hundreds of millions of records forever.
Paul is right about one thing: The government withholds far too much information from the public, and Congress can be more active in releasing agency records.
The White House is also embracing ever-higher levels of secrecy. The Justice Department recently issued a damaging legal opinion declaring the law that governs public access to presidential records, the Presidential Records Act, unconstitutional, saying Trump no longer needs to abide by it. This is an unprecedented move that could make all future presidents less transparent. That’s why my organization, Freedom of the Press Foundation, is currently fighting in court to stop it.
To top it off, while the administration publishes Fauci’s unredacted diaries, it is simultaneously proposing a government-wide nondisclosure agreement to muzzle federal workers from sharing the very kinds of information Paul released.
This transparency double-standard creates a toxic information asymmetry. The public will suffer if employees stop memorializing crises altogether, terrified their records will later be weaponized out of context, while their colleagues’ records are unlawfully deleted without repercussion.
Paul is right about one thing: The government withholds far too much information from the public, and Congress can be more active in releasing agency records. But true oversight isn’t about selectively releasing records for political points, and he and his colleagues must ensure every agency official follows the preservation and access laws already on the books.
Otherwise, this will not be the last administration that trades democratic accountability for cherry-picked releases and show trials.
The post Fauci faced a grilling because he preserved his records. The Trump administration doesn’t. appeared first on MS NOW.
From MS Now.
President Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general permanently and renominate him again after recalcitrant Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis are out of the Senate underscores what this confirmation process is really about.
It is not about who will run the Justice Department but whether the Senate will endorse what Blanche has already done there.
Rejecting the nomination would not immediately remove Blanche from the department’s leadership.
Blanche, the acting attorney general since April, was previously the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general, overseeing the department’s criminal and national security work. If Trump withdraws the nomination, Blanche could remain in control — potentially well into 2027 — under federal statutes governing succession and acting appointments. Rejecting the nomination would not immediately remove Blanche from the department’s leadership.
Set aside, for a moment, that the Republican opposition publicly blocking Blanche’s confirmation currently consists of two senators — both acting only after their political futures were settled. The context leading up to this week’s confirmation standoff is important.
Blanche was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer from 2023 through 2024. As a former federal prosecutor, Blanche gave legal vocabulary and professional credibility to Trump’s grievances about investigative “witch hunts” and “corrupt” prosecutors. Blanche helped turn Trump’s belief that prosecution is political warfare into a theory of law enforcement.
Then Trump placed him in charge of law enforcement, and the defense theory became the governing philosophy.
Consider the record: Under Blanche, the DOJ has repeatedly pursued people Trump publicly identified as enemies. Cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were dismissed after a judge concluded that the Trump-picked prosecutor who brought them had been unlawfully appointed. Other efforts directed at Trump’s perceived adversaries have likewise failed: A federal judge rejected a subpoena aimed at the Federal Reserve; the DOJ abandoned its effort to prosecute former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell; and a grand jury refused to indict Democratic lawmakers for sedition.
Far from reassuring the public that presidents do not choose investigative targets, Blanche has defended Trump’s involvement. At his first news conference as acting attorney general, Blanche tore down the firewall between presidential grievance and federal prosecution, saying Trump had not merely the right but a “duty” to identify people he believed should be investigated.
Now consider what Blanche’s theory means: When prosecutors investigated Trump, their actions “proved” the DOJ was weaponized. When Trump tells Blanche whom the department should investigate, that is the president performing his constitutional duty.
The only consistent principle in this is who controls the machinery.
That same inversion appears in the controversy holding up Blanche’s nomination. The DOJ entered into an extraordinary settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The case was sharply criticized by the federal judge overseeing the suit, and Trump signaled Friday he plans to appeal. The agreement included plans for a roughly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that could compensate people saying they were victimized by federal law enforcement, potentially including Trump supporters prosecuted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Blanche has testified that the fund is dead, though Trump defended it on Friday, and payouts have proceeded to people claiming government persecution. Cornyn and Tillis want that assurance memorialized in binding documents.
They also object to provisions insulating Trump, his family and affiliated businesses from certain tax enforcement. Blanche personally signed an addendum stating that federal agencies are “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing broad categories of claims arising from earlier tax returns — even though DOJ ethics officials reportedly advised him to recuse himself from matters involving Trump personally.
There is something almost surreal about Republican senators demanding documentary corroboration from the nation’s chief law enforcement officer because they do not trust his sworn assurances about the government’s commitments. But Trump has already vacillated over whether the fund should survive, and Blanche has shown repeatedly where his loyalties lie.
Cornyn and Tillis are right to insist that the government cannot create an open-ended fund for favored political constituencies or negotiate special tax protections for the president. But those provisions are not isolated drafting problems. They are manifestations of the DOJ’s deeper transformation.
A department that settles the president’s personal lawsuit, shields him from enforcement, pursues people he denounces and accepts his identification of investigative targets is operating according to a simple worldview: Law enforcement is legitimate when it protects Trump and corrupt when it constrains him.
There is something almost surreal about Republican senators demanding documentary corroboration from the nation’s chief law enforcement officer because they do not trust his sworn assurances.
Sadly, the only two Republicans willing to interfere with Blanche’s confirmation are two senators Trump can no longer meaningfully punish. Tillis is retiring. Cornyn lost his Republican primary after Trump backed his opponent. Apparently, senatorial independence begins where political ambition ends.
Even then, Cornyn and Tillis are bargaining over two grotesque provisions rather than confronting the department’s overall record under Blanche. Eliminating the “anti-weaponization” fund and narrowing the tax agreement are proper demands. But satisfying them would not restore the DOJ’s independence, reverse its pursuit of presidential enemies or repair its damaged safeguards.
The legitimacy of federal prosecutions depends on the understanding that charging decisions begin with evidence and law, not with a president’s list of friends and enemies.
Blanche knows that. He also knows that federal prosecutors possess powers that can destroy reputations, bankrupt families and take away liberty. That makes his conduct all the more disturbing.
The Senate cannot necessarily prevent Trump from keeping Blanche in charge. Trump can withdraw the nomination, leave Blanche in place as acting attorney general and wait for more compliant senators.
But the Senate can withhold its approval. A vote against Blanche would say that senators refuse to confer the legitimacy of Senate confirmation on an acting attorney general who has converted his former client’s criminal-defense theory into the operating philosophy of federal law enforcement.
A vote to confirm him would say the opposite.
That is why confirmation matters even if the title does not. The Senate may be unwilling — or at this point, unable —to stop the Blanche DOJ. Senators can still decide whether to endorse it — and whether to share responsibility for what it has become.
The post The Senate has already endorsed Todd Blanche’s abuse of power appeared first on MS NOW.
From MS Now.
A New Jersey nurse who says Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers attacked her outside her mobile health clinic has filed a claim against the federal government alongside the American Civil Liberties Union.
Dr. Norma Bowe says she was running her mobile health clinic outside Delaney Hall — an ICE detention center now infamous for its alleged mistreatment of detainees — when federal agents threw her to the ground as she attempted to render aid to another person over Memorial Day weekend. Bowe confirmed that she was filing a tort claim against the government for $500,000 over her injuries.
Bowe told MS NOW on Friday that seeing bloodshed at the hands of federal agents amid Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown has shaken her spirit.
“I don’t even recognize our country at the moment with all of the violence going on,” she said.
The claim, filed in partnership with the ACLU of New Jersey, is part of a sweeping legal campaign by the organization in response to the Trump administration’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement tactics. The ACLU has filed 54 claims like Bowe’s across the country.
Delaney Hall is an ICE immigration detention facility at the center of national and local protests, where elected officials and activists have reported poor living conditions, inedible food and delayed medical care.
Bowe said she decided to bring a mobile clinic to Delaney Hall in support of families visiting their loved ones after hearing one of her students’ experiences with ICE.
“One of my students was about to graduate, a really amazing student, and she called me in a panic because her husband had just been picked up by ICE on his way to work, and you know he’s never had so much as a parking ticket. She’s an American citizen. His paperwork was in progress. It was a bit shocking that he ended up in Delaney Hall,” she told MS NOW.
Bowe said her team performs screenings for diabetes, cancer and mental health, while also providing basic first aid to those near the facility.
“It’s a very distressing place, especially if you’re trying to visit someone. And so a lot of times, people will come to us for basic health screening or a band-aid, and we’re there also to listen. So I’ve been going, you know, twice a month for this entire year.”
But everything took a turn on May 25, 2026, when Bowe said she went to help a woman who was on the ground.
Video of the interaction circulated on social media and was verified by Bowe and her legal team.
“I see these ICE agents who had just shown up, pushing people back with batons and dragging people on the ground, and I saw a young woman getting dragged on the ground with her arms up over her head, and they ripped her entire shirt off. So she was laying on the ground in her bra and yelling, ‘Help me! Help me!’ And I have daughters, you know. I have a granddaughter. I have students who are women, and this just really disturbed me,” Bowe said.
As she moved toward the woman to help, Bowe said she herself was knocked to the ground by ICE agents.
“An ICE agent grabbed me by the back of my shirt. Another ICE agent was next to that one, and they both kind of threw me through the air. And my head slammed the sidewalk on my left side. My left eye orbit was completely abraded and bruised. I had injuries to my knee. My shoulder hurt,” she said. “As I was going down, I thought about Alex Pretti, who was also a nurse, who was also trying to help someone up.”
She described the scene as completely chaotic, and said that it appeared everyone who was there was at risk of being targeted by agents.
“I was clearly a medical person. I was not a protester. I was not in the protest area. I was off to the side until they ripped that girl’s shirt off,” she said.
When reached for comment, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson sent MS NOW a statement defending officers and decrying the ACLU.
“Officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training,” the statement read in part. “When will the ACLU acknowledge the chaos and cruelty of anti-ICE agitators, criminal illegal aliens, and recognize the victims of illegal alien crime?”
Despite her injuries, Bowe said she still routinely serves at Delaney Hall.
“I am not one to scare easily. I really feel very dedicated to serving the families,” she told MS NOW.
She called on more civilians to activate and help their local communities in the face of Trump’s crackdown.
“Anyone can be an upstander. You do not need to be a bystander. You can use your phone. You can use your camera. You can document. You can write everything down. You can talk to your elected officials,” she said. “We have an election coming. Go vote. The only thing we have left now is mutual aid. We have to help each other, and we have to be courageous about it.”
The post ‘I thought of Alex Pretti’: Nurse files federal claim alleging ICE agents attacked her appeared first on MS NOW.
From MS Now.
Thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children are set to lose legal representation. The federal contract that pays for legal access expired Friday.
(Image credit: Michael M. Santiago)
Source: NPR.
Uefa says it has lost confidence in Gianni Infantino’s Fifa leadership as the fallout from the scrapped controversial investment plan intensifies.
Source: BBC.
Uefa says it has lost confidence in Gianni Infantino’s Fifa leadership as the fallout from the scrapped controversial investment plan intensifies.
Source: BBC.
The governing body of European football says Fifa president Gianni Infantino has “failed to deliver” on promises he made when elected 10 years ago.
Source: BBC.
Source BuzzFeed.
England’s netballers miss out on a place in the Commonwealth Games gold-medal match after a 61-54 semi-final defeat by a powerful New Zealand side.
Source: BBC.
