The family of English teacher Aijalon Gomes, 31, whose release from North Korea was secured by Pres. Jimmy Carter this week, released this statement:
First, we want to express heartfelt gratitude to former President Jimmy Carter and the staff of the Carter Center for taking on Aijalon’s release as a private humanitarian mission. Thank you, President Carter, for traveling to North Korea to bring Aijalon home…
For Aijalon, although returning home, the journey toward healing really just begins today. Our family hopes that everyone will understand our strong need and desire to secure Aijalon the privacy necessary to recover fully from this episode in his life. We thank you in advance for respecting that privacy and sharing in our joyful homecoming today.
Boston.com has more about Gomes and his homecoming here.
They’re gathering on the Washington Mall,
The right-wingers, tea-baggers and all.
No matter how peaceful it seems,
This wasn’t MLK’s dream —
It’s the nightmare of Glenn Beck’s goddamn gall.
In Florida, the primary was hot,
With candidates trading potshots.
The voters, of course,
Might feel some remorse,
When they sell the governorship to Rick Scott.
Via Roger Ebert, Wednesday, amid the other goobledy-gook he spews, GOP-Fox News’ Glenn Beck uttered this barely comprehensible string of phrases:
We are from Washington, D.C., where this Saturday, we will be gathered here at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial and we are going to be — as you see in the corner — oops, in this corner. Can you put it back up? This corner is the merit badge. I have been wearing it. I’m all screwed up because I can’t — television is backwards.
The merit badge — there it is in the bottom of your screen. It is George Washington’s original Purple Heart, but it was just given for merit, for doing something of honor. We didn’t even know about it until 1933 when FDR found three. There were only three of them in existence.
Okay, so that made no sense, but it certainly sounded like he planned to wear George Washington’s Purple Heart to his konklave at the “feet of” the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow, which Andy Borowitz has dubbed the “Million Moron March.”
Actually, Beck has invented a new “badge of merit” (not, mind you, a merit badge) to replace the Purple Heart which he dislikes, he says, because it rewards people for being victims, which is Beck’s Orwellian newspeak for being wounded in the line of duty.
— Known bigot and old school Jewish comedian Jackie Mason, speaking at a protest rally at the Empire State Building. The skyscraper’s owner, Anthony E. Malkin, declined to light the landmark to honor the 100th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s birth, leading anti-Islamic voices to claim a link to plans to build a Muslim community center in Manhattan.
George Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Monday, Aug. 29, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall at 7 a.m. Of course, he wasn’t completely off duty — he had some politicking to do in the west that day. During the morning he spoke with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff who was in Washington — but the topic was not the disaster, it was immigration. At around that same, mid-morning on Monday, the first levee failed and the flooding began, but it would be 24 hours before Chertoff was made aware of it.
Meanwhile, Bush stopped briefly at the Phoenix airport to cut up for the cameras with GOP Sen. John McCain, his bitter rival from the 2000 presidential primaries. It was McCain’s 69th birthday, and Bush’s people had supplied him with a birthday cake to use as a prop. Later, Bush stopped at two senior citizens centers for some politicking — he was out promoting his unfunded Medicare drug benefit.
Bush made a quick stop in Phoenix to clown around with his frenemy Sen. John McCain, whose birthday is Aug. 29. Inset: Meanwhile Americans were drowning in New Orleans
That day, Bush received an urgent request from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, that read, “Mr. President, we need your help. We need everything you’ve got.” But that night, as thousands of Americans huddled in the attics of their flooded homes in New Orleans, Bush turned in early without responding to the governor’s request.
The next morning, Aug. 30, Bush gave a speech promoting his status as a wartime president at a naval base in Colorado. About noon, Chertoff was finally informed that the levees had failed 24 hours earlier.
Tuesday afternoon, Bush promoted his unfunded Medicare drug benefit at another senior center. After the event, at around 2 p.m., Bush was photographed goofing around with a guitar given to him by country singer Mark Willis.
Left: Bush plays a guitar presented to him by Country singer Mark Wills, right, backstage after Bush gave a political speech. Right: At the time of the speech, people were wading through the flooded streets of New Orleans
Aides will later claim that Bush had refused to watch television news coverage of the disaster. At 4 p.m., he made his first public statement, during which he seemed “casual to the point of carelessness,” according to the New York Times. At 7 p.m., Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice attended a performance of “Spamalot,” the Monty Python musical, on Broadway.
The votes today have been tallied and I accept the voters’ decision…No one could have anticipated the entrance of a multimillionaire with a questionable past who shattered campaign spending records and spent more in four months than has ever been spent in a primary race here in Florida. While I was disappointed with the negative tone of the race, I couldn’t be more proud of our campaign and our supporters for fighting back against false and misleading advertising…
— Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, conceding victory in the Republican primary for the governor’s seat, but not endorsing former opponent tea bagger Rick Scott, despite attempts by Florida Republicans to claim unity after the slugfest.
Well, you know, take the consideration, though, that’s Massachusetts, and perhaps they’re not going to look for such a hardcore constitutional
conservative there, and they’re gonna put up with Scott Brown and some of the antics there. But up here in Alaska, and so many places across
the U.S., where we have a pioneering, independent spirit, and we have an expectation that our representatives in D.C. will respect the will of
the people and the intelligence of the people — well, up here, we wouldn’t stand for that.
— Sarah Palin, in an interview on Fox Business News, responding to whether Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) is “on notice” for voting with Senate Democrats on recent legislation.
The recent news out of Kentucky was just awful,
They found the senator unconscious and horizontal.
And since his hospitalization,
There’s been little news about his condition,
But now everybody’s having a 20-minute conversation with Mitch McConnell.
“We are done, Americans are done with endless conflict in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars, American lives… this is insane and we have to call it for what it is.”
An Associated Press-NORC survey found that 44% of American Jews hold a favorable opinion of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, compared with 39% who view him unfavorably. By contrast, just 32% of respondents said they have a favorable opinion of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while 59% said they have a negative view.
“Their New Deal is socialism for the super-rich (and their own enrichment) even if it means increasing poverty, inequality, and illness at home and around the world. They also want to rewrite history to ignore and outright deny our past flaws while banning books that say otherwise from our libraries. And they select even our military leaders based on their version of political correctness over ability.”
— Former President Bill Clinton, quoted by Deadline, in his July 4th message.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
A new American Research Group poll finds just 30% of Americans say they approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 67% say they disapprove.
Wall Street Journal: “Around 40% of voters in the 2024 election said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other matter. And those voters favored Donald Trump by 60% to 38%. Many say they were moved by his pledges to tame inflation, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, cut red tape and trim government waste. … About a year and a half later, more voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy than approve, 61% to 35%, an average of polls by the Cook Political Report found this month.”
A Reuters analysis of Trump’s public comments from June 23 through July 6 (13 days) — when a string of left-wing Democratic candidates won their party’s primaries in New York — found he invoked communism 81 times.
Via 
