“Careful What You Wish For” / “FLAG DAY (Trump’s Birthday)“
A batch of entertainers boycotted America’s 250th birthday on the Mall over the President’s involvement — and in doing so handed him the stage alone for as long as he pleases, which, as the article notes, could outlast the funnel cake stand. On Flag Day itself, the “No Kings” crowd chose the one day set aside to honor the Stars and Stripes as their protest backdrop, with Bette Midler and Jane Fonda headlining what the piece calls theater, not patriotism. The Flag has been on the books since 1949 and commemorates June 14, 1777 — it predates every political grudge any of us is carrying.
Five men who called Pueblo, Colorado home earned the Congressional Medal of Honor across four wars spanning the Civil War through Vietnam — a working-class steel town that produced more Medal of Honor recipients per capita than anywhere else in America. From Warren Dockum seizing a Confederate battle flag at Sailor’s Creek in 1865 to Drew Dix leading a 56-hour street-by-street assault to retake a city during the Tet Offensive, each story is the same at its core: when every reasonable person would have stopped, these men kept going. Eisenhower thought it was something in the water; it wasn’t — it was the people.
Trump Drinks 12 Diet Cokes a Day
Sixty years after a chemist accidentally licked his finger and discovered aspartame, the sweetener in Trump’s reported 12-daily Diet Cokes remains one of the most contested ingredients in the American food supply — and one of the most misunderstood. The FDA sets the acceptable daily intake at 50 mg per kilogram of body weight, which for a 150-pound adult requires roughly 20 cans of diet soda a day to reach; the 2023 WHO “possibly carcinogenic” classification that alarmed headlines was Group 2B, the same category as aloe vera extract and engine exhaust. The one population with a clear, established, non-debated reason to avoid it: people with phenylketonuria, whose condition is noted on every label — that warning is not a controversy, it is a medical fact.
“A Royal Dispatch from the Court of the Tater: Thank You, Loyal Subject P.T. Wood!“
Written in the voice of the “Royal Tater” — a satirical stand-in for Chaffee County’s top-down sustainability mandates — the piece mocks Commissioner P.T. Wood’s 3-0 vote pushing “Electric Preferred” building standards through without local data, local studies, or local cost analysis. The satire targets what it calls blind deference to out-of-county consultants and Aspen-adjacent politics over the lived reality of mountain winters and grid reliability. It names the pattern directly: loyalty to mandate over evidence, dressed in green ribbon.
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