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Daniel Villarreal (he/him) at LGBTQ Nation:

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) successfully pressured Connecticut Children’s Medical Center (CCMC) end its gender-affirming care programs for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, in a settlement the DOJ announced Wednesday. GLAD Law, a leading LGTBQ+ legal advocacy organization, said the center’s settlement “betrays families” seeking care for their trans kids. The center agreed to pay a monetary penalty and an additional $500,000 in medical care for “individuals living with the harmful consequences of ‘gender-affirming care,” the DOJ wrote in an August 5 statement. The statement ignores the fact that 97% of trans youth don’t regret transitioning, even a decade after receiving such care, and that only 1% of trans teens detransition.

“The Department of Justice will stop at nothing to protect America’s children,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in the DOJ’s statement. “This resolution is a reminder to hospitals, medical providers, and pharmaceutical companies that the Justice Department will vigorously enforce federal law, especially where the lives of children are endangered.” But while the DOJ’s statement referred to methods of gender-affirming care as “discredited practices,” the practices are recommended by literally every major American medical association as a safe, effective, and life-saving way to treat trans youth and improve their overall wellbeing. The medications used in such care have also been safely administered to children for decades, and multiple studies have found that gender-affirming care improves the lives of trans youth. In a statement, the center said, “We can confirm we have reached a resolution that allows our organization to remain focused on our mission of improving the health and well-being of children. Most importantly, patient privacy remained our foremost concern throughout this process and we were able to resolve this matter without disclosing any protected patient information to the US government.” “Connecticut Children’s Medical Center has once again betrayed Connecticut families,” said GLAD Law Staff Attorney Hannah Hussey, who is currently suing CCMC on behalf of families seeking care for their trans youth, in a statement criticizing the settlement.

Shameful action by the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center to cave into the anti-trans policies of the Trump Regime by ending gender-affirming care for trans minors.

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Mike Nellis at Endless Insurgency (08.05.2026):

This morning I woke up at the crack of dawn to do a hit on Newsmax, and I’ll be honest with you — I was surprised when they asked for my take on the allegations against Max Miller. So many right-wing outlets have spent months pretending this story doesn’t exist. But we’ve reached the point where it’s unavoidable. Even MAGA media can’t look away anymore. So I said on their air exactly what I’ve been saying for months: Max Miller is a scumbag. He is an abuser. He broke his daughter’s collarbone and lied about it. He needs serious help, he has no business serving in the United States Congress, and he should probably be in prison. And then I said the part they didn’t want to hear: the Republican Party tolerates this. Abuse of women is baked into their movement, and they’ve made their peace with it. There is no cleaner example than what happened yesterday, when Donald Trump stood in front of cameras and once again called Max Miller “a very good person.” Of course he did. Trump carries water for every protégé, every loyalist, every sycophant who kisses the ring — with zero regard for the wreckage those people leave behind. Because Trump himself is a known abuser. He’s all over the Epstein files he is working overtime to hide from you. A jury found him liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll and made him pay her millions. He surrounds himself with unstable, miserable men who hurt people — Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, the Tate brothers, on and on and on.

Max Miller might as well be another son to him. That is why the Republican Party is terrified to say a single word about what he did to Emily Moreno. The only Republican in Congress I’ve seen say anything is her father — a sitting United States senator from Ohio — and even he is holding back. Think about that. A man’s own daughter is allegedly beaten, and her father, a senator, has to measure his words because he’s afraid of what the President of the United States might do to him for telling the truth.

Now, say what you want about how my party handled Graham Platner. A lot of mistakes were made. There are Democrats who’d take back plenty of what they said and did. But when push came to shove, when Platner was credibly accused of violence against women, every single Democrat came out and said he had to go. Every one. Republicans won’t even say Max Miller’s name out loud. That’s the difference. And that’s the country we live in now — Donald Trump’s America, where we shrug and tolerate an absolutely disgusting piece of shit in Congress because the man at the top demands loyalty over decency every single time.

I want the theme of 2026 to be simple: the American people are done letting scumbags run this country. And I don’t believe for one second that’s a partisan issue. I was glad to see Platner go. I was glad to see Eric Swalwell go. I’ll be glad to see every abuser in my own party go too, and there are more we don’t know about yet — we’ll learn their names as brave people find the courage to step forward. I want Max Miller crushed in November. I want Ken Paxton crushed in November — another scumbag who protected child sex predators and got himself impeached by his own party. They deserve to lose everything.

Donald Trump’s favorite kind of men are the ones who sexually abuse or physically abuse women.

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Public service announcement: DO NOT attempt to take panoramic photos of your pet. The results are traumatic.

On August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

The road to that resignation began in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg, who was at the time an employee of the RAND Corporation and thus had access to a top-secret Pentagon study of the way U.S. leaders had made decisions about the Vietnam War, leaked that study to major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The Pentagon Papers showed that every president from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson had lied to the public about events in Vietnam, and Nixon worried that “enemies” would follow the Pentagon Papers with a leak of information about his own decision-making to destroy his administration and hand the 1972 election to a Democrat.

The FBI seemed to Nixon reluctant to believe he was being stalked by enemies. So the president organized his own Special Investigations Unit out of the White House to stop leaks. And who stops leaks? Plumbers.

The plumbers burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California, hoping to find something to discredit him, then moved on to bigger targets. Together with the Committee to Re-elect the President (fittingly dubbed CREEP as its activities became known), they planted fake letters in newspapers declaring support for Nixon and hatred for his opponents, spied on Democrats, and hired vendors for Democratic rallies and then scarpered on the bills. Finally, they set out to wiretap the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in the fashionable Watergate office complex.

Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Watergate security guard Frank Wills noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. Wills called the police, who arrested five men ransacking the DNC’s files.

The White House immediately denounced what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and the Watergate break-in gained no traction before the 1972 election, which Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7% of the popular vote.

But Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young Washington Post reporters, followed the sloppy money trail back to the White House, and by March 1973 the scheme was unraveling. One of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing claiming he had lied at his trial to protect government officials. Sirica made the letter public, and White House counsel John Dean immediately began cooperating with prosecutors.

In April, three of Nixon’s top advisors resigned, and in May the president was forced to appoint former solicitor general of the United States Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor to investigate the affair. That same month, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, informally known as the Senate Watergate Committee, began nationally televised hearings. The committee’s chair was Sam Ervin (D-NC), a conservative Democrat who would not run for reelection in 1974 and thus was expected to be able to do the job without political grandstanding.

Anthony Orrico at HuffPost:

A federal judge in California on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to release roughly $65 million in previously withheld funds for legal services provided to unaccompanied immigrant children facing deportation. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin ordered that the Department of Health and Human Services release the funds owed to various nonprofit organizations by 12 p.m. PT on Friday. Legal service providers told the Los Angeles Times that half an hour after the deadline, the administration had released the funds and that payments would begin going out on Monday. “We are closely monitoring to make sure that happens,” Bilal Askaryar, spokesperson for the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice, told the Los Angeles Times. The nonprofit organizations representing unaccompanied migrant children in their deportation cases had been owed the money since December 2025, according to court documents. “The court has affirmed what we have said from the beginning: Congress funded these legal services, the law calls for them, and no administration gets to weaponize levers of government to attempt to override legislation and strip children of effective access to their lawyers,” the Acacia Center for Justice said in a press release on Friday.

The Acacia Center for Justice is the prime contractor tasked with distributing the payments to its subcontractors and has held a contract with HHS for years to provide legal services for immigrant children. However, the organization did not renew its contract after the Trump administration included a clause that would’ve required legal service providers to disclose confidential information about their clients to the government.