Republicans, led by Donald Trump, now apparently want to rewrite the First Amendment's guarantee of the freedom of speech. Their interpretation of it seems to be that conservatives should be allowed to say whatever they want -- no matter how vile or vicious or hateful -- about whomever they want, while liberals should be locked up if they ever say anything negative about conservatives. That's how they want to define "free speech" these days: free speech for me, but not for thee.

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Remember when people on the right side of the political spectrum were so incensed about the left's "cancel culture"? It wasn't that long ago. Conservatives railed at how people were being held accountable for things they said by being "cancelled" in one way or another. They called the lefties "snowflakes" who couldn't take what they saw as merely robust and unbridled free speech. Any rightwing free speech should be consequence-free in the real world, they argued at the time.

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Donald Trump is driving the American economy straight into a ditch. That's a pretty simple concept, and it's (just barely) short enough to fit on a bumpersticker. Which makes it a dandy political slogan for Democrats to start hammering out relentlessly.

Doing so is pretty easy, since you can connect all sorts of dots to it: A soft jobs market. Inflation rising. Hamburger prices up. Electricity prices way up. Trump's tariff war, which has created a "Trump tax" on a whole bunch of products. Trump took hold of an economy that had achieved a "soft landing," and now he's driving us all right into a ditch. Everything he does seems to make things worse. See how easy that is to do?

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Congress is back in town, and so is the pressure to release the Epstein files. Immediately after the House of Representatives convened, Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna filed their discharge petition, which could soon force the speaker to hold a floor vote on their measure to force the Justice Department to release all its files on Jeffery Epstein.

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Just before the 20th anniversary of the impact of Hurricane Katrina, a group of current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency employees have signed an extraordinary letter warning America that we could be headed for a similar disaster. Not the hurricane itself, but the man-made disaster which followed, as George W. Bush's FEMA proved to be completely incompetent at disaster recovery in a big way. They even called their letter the "Katrina Declaration," to amplify their warning.

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Two stories dominated the political headlines this week: Texas Democrats fleeing the state to halt the Republican-dominated legislature's efforts to redraw their U.S. House district lines to hand Republicans five more safe seats, and Donald Trump letting incredibly high tariffs begin against over 90 countries worldwide.

We'll get to them in a moment, but what's more interesting is the dog that didn't bark today. Russia was supposed to have a "10-day deadline" to end its invasion of Ukraine, and steep tariffs were supposed to be slapped on them if Vladimir Putin hadn't manage to do so by today. However, nary a headline is talking about the tariffs that were supposed to appear, because once again Putin played Trump like a violin.

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A half-century ago, a piece of conventional political wisdom was born. President Richard Nixon was eventually forced to resign his presidency due to the Watergate scandal -- the first time this had ever happened in America -- and the phrase: "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" was born. The quote is not ascribed to any individual, it just became a commonplace way of talking about the scandal that engulfed Nixon and his administration. Today, in a sort of meta way, the White House is once again engulfed in a scandal, except this time it is once-more-removed. It's not the crime or the cover-up, it has now become "the cover-up of the cover-up" that bedevils Donald Trump.

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We have to begin today with an absurdity. It's been that kind of week....

This week, Donald Trump proved once again -- beyond the shadow of a doubt -- that his understanding of basic mathematics would be considered sub-par in any random fifth-grade math class in this country. Most 10-year-olds could spot Trump's glaring error, to put that another way.

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Back in the before-times... back when politics was fairly normal... we all had a special name for the time of year when Congress gives itself a 5- or 6-week vacation and political stories are thin on the ground. It was called the "Silly Season." It earned this moniker because in the dearth of actual political news being made, the mainstream media political types would zero in on some story that was (for one reason or another) just completely ridiculous. Mountains were made out of molehills. Idiotic stories would get blown out of proportion and enormous amounts of ink and airtime were devoted to dissecting whatever silly story everyone was obsessing about. A good time would be had by all, until Congress finally returned in September and started generating some actual political news once again.

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Congress is eagerly getting ready to take an enormous chunk of time off once again. The Republican House of Representatives even pushed their final day in session up by one day, to get a jump on their extended "August break." But to be fair, they didn't do this because they were over-eager to go on vacation, instead they did it out of political necessity, since they had earlier announced that there wouldn't be any more floor votes until after the break. And they did this because they are terrified of the entire Epstein files issue. So my question at this point is what are their own voters going to say to them when they do go back to their home districts? Are we going to see lots of videos of town halls where their constituents rake them over the coals for not forcing the public release of the full Epstein files, or will it be more of a non-issue?

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