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- Beyond Virtue Signaling on Ukraine and Russia
Just three days after the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to advance the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sweeping sanctions bill designed to force Russia to end the war in Ukraine, Vice President JD Vance called Ukrainian President Zelensky and asked him to stop bombarding oil tankers and terminals in the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. A key backer of the Graham bill, Republican Katie Britt of Alabama, defended the statute passionately on the Senate floor. “We’re going to cut off the flow of money to [Russian dictator Vladimir] Putin,” Britt declared emphatically. But the international partnership that owns the tankers and terminals Vance asked Zelensky to spare, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), generates more than $1.4 billion a year for, among others, the Russian Federation, which owns or controls nearly a 50-percent share. It’s not technically Russian oil that passes through the CPC’s thousand-mile pipeline and sprawling terminal complex—it’s crude from the vast oilfields in western Kazakhstan. But Russia profits handsomely from dividends, transit tariffs, and port fees. What’s complicated—and the reason Vance picked up the phone—is that U.S. energy giants Chevron and ExxonMobil also own significant shares of the Caspian pipeline. The timing of Vance’s call made for some confusing U.S. double-speak. But the episode underscores that sanctions are a tricky tool, especially when the target is a country like Russia deeply entwined across the global economy. As one of the world’s largest crude producers, vying for the top spot with Saudi Arabia and the United States, Russia is too connected to fail—which is why the West has had so much trouble using sanctions to punish it for the war in Ukraine without damaging Western interests, too. No one, Democrat or Republican, mentioned these challenges when the Senate passed the Graham bill by a whopping 86-11 last month. On the contrary, most lawmakers seemed supremely confident the measure would cripple the Russian war machine and end the conflict in Ukraine. Republican Senator Todd Young of Indiana was a little more honest, calling the legislation “an important moral signal” to the long-suffering Ukrainian people. But virtually no leader, in Ukraine or the U.S., went so far as to question the Senate’s hyperbolic promises. Part of the problem is that the Graham bill isn’t just a package of sanctions—it’s also a far-reaching tariff measure, giving President Donald Trump sweeping powers to impose 100 percent import duties on goods from countries… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 hours ago - Narrative Vehicles
“The driver weaponized his vehicle and drove toward the officer.” I’ve heard that language before. In less than one week this summer, ICE agents fatally shot two men in moving vehicles—25-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. In both cases, Homeland Security said the drivers had “weaponized” their vehicles against officers. Less than a month earlier, on June 14, 2026, police responded to a reported shoplifting outside a Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi. Vellesiya Wiley waited in the passenger seat of her friend’s car with her one-year-old son, Kohen, on her lap. Wiley’s friend returned with a bag of diapers and began backing out of the parking spot. An officer fired into the car multiple times, according to news reports. One bullet fatally struck Kohen. Police said “officers encountered two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle. [They] attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one.” Different agencies, different states, the same assertion: the vehicle was coming at the officer. For the last five years, I’ve analyzed police interviews, autopsies, forensic reports, press statements, and video evidence from shootings into moving vehicles. I’ve also interviewed dozens of mothers who lost children in police shootings. In city after city, I began to recognize the same language—not necessarily in the shootings themselves, but in the official accounts that followed them. Cars can, of course, be deadly weapons, and officers sometimes face drivers who are genuinely trying to hit them. The issue is not that police describe those threats. It is that, in the chaotic hours after a shooting, a department can present an officer’s account of the most disputed moment as an established fact. Every police shooting is chaotic, and officials often must speak before they know everything. The problem is that a preliminary account does not always remain preliminary. Since the official version usually arrives first—and carries the authority of the state—later evidence often has to dislodge a story already lodged in the public mind. In Mississippi, Wiley remembers her son’s shooting differently. “I raised my baby up trying to show them that he was in the car,” she said. Wiley recalled the officers stood on the right side of the car as her friend steered left. An independent… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 hours ago - The Roberts Court: Poised to Bless the Trump Ballroom
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has temporarily allowed President Donald Trump to continue construction of a 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom to replace the East Wing he demolished last fall. The order has no expiration date, but it will expire after the full court reconvenes in the fall. Administrative orders are usually intended to freeze the status quo pending hearing and decision. But this order reshapes the status quo, since construction of the ballroom will continue while the learned justices consider whether construction of the planned ballroom can proceed. One would have to do a full box score of Roberts Court opinions and rulings, but, reading the tealeaves, when this court goes along with a lower court, it usually denies an administrative stay. When it grants an administrative stay, it’s more likely than not to reverse the court below and side with the petitioner, in this case Donald Trump. This one has that feeling to it. Maybe the Court will find the gumption to buck the president as it did in the tariffs case or by refusing his appeals to overturn judgments favor of E. Jean Carroll or in its rejection of Trump’s efforts to reverse more than 150 years of birthright citizenship, but I tend to doubt it. Praising the Roberts decision on Truth Social, Trump gloated, “The Military/Ballroom Complex being built on the hallowed grounds of the White House, which is so vital for National Security, will be THE GREATEST OF ITS KIND!” A new report on Sunday from The Washington Post undercut the national security argument, noting that an extensive nuclear bunker was completed during the Barack Obama administration The president “has claimed that the White House needs a massive new ballroom because it would provide him and future presidents with a secure, hardened facility,” the Post reported. “But former officials say the argument fails to acknowledge that the presidential complex already has one.” The ballroom is a monstrosity, illegally paid for largely with public funds and without Congress’s consent. According to renowned architectural critic Paul Goldberger, writing in The New York Times, the plans reveal “a ballroom that is an enormous, banal box in a vaguely classical style that, if it goes forward, will overwhelm the White House and block the view between the White House and the Capitol that has been one of Washington’s signature vistas for more than two centuries.” Goldberger’s tone… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 hours ago - Jeffries And Kushner Reportedly Met In Private To Discuss Common Ground
The meeting, first reported by The New York Times, suggests Trump’s allies foresee Democrats retaking the House in the midterm elections. [TheTopNews] Read More.14 hours ago - ‘Let Me Finish’: NBC Host Clashes With MAGA Senator Desperate To Blame Biden...Sen. Tim Scott repeatedly tried to pass the buck off to former President Joe Biden, but Kristen Welker wasn’t having it. [TheTopNews] Read More.16 hours ago
- ‘Beer On The Mall’: Trump Officials Defend Freedom 250 Race ThatR...The president took part in an honorary lap and waved the green flag before the race cars zipped around the National Mall. [TheTopNews] Read More.17 hours ago
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