Welcome, dear readers, to Thursday, July 9, 2026. Today is National Sugar Cookie Day. Quite a history behind this treat; it is a buttery, lightly sweetened cookie that Lutheran German settlers brought to Pennsylvania in the 1700s under the name "Nazareth sugar cookie." It's also National Dimples Day, National Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Omelet Day, and Call of the Horizon Day, bringing to mind Captain Jack Sparrow's famous command: "Bring me that Horizon." Finally, it is International Emergency Kit Day, established by the American Red Cross to encourage every household to prepare an emergency supply kit for natural disasters. Which reminds me, I need a new first aid kit.
Today in History:
1762: Catherine the Great overthrows her husband, Peter III, and begins her reign as empress of Russia.
1850: President Zachary Taylor dies in office; Vice President Millard Fillmore succeeds him.
1877: The first Wimbledon Championship begins in London, with Spencer Gore going on to win the inaugural men's title.
1893: Daniel Hale Williams performs one of the first successful open-heart surgeries in Chicago.
1943: Allied forces launch Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily that would eventually lead to Mussolini's downfall.
1955: Bill Haley and His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" becomes the first rock-and-roll single to top Billboard's pop charts.
1955: The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons, is released in London.
1958: A megatsunami strikes Lituya Bay, Alaska, producing a wave measured at 1,720 feet — the tallest ever recorded.
1962: Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans debuts at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, helping launch American Pop Art.
1981: Nintendo releases Donkey Kong, marking the arcade debut of "Jumpman," later renamed Mario.
1986: New Zealand's Parliament passes the Homosexual Law Reform Act, decriminalizing sex between men.
2011: South Sudan declares independence from Sudan, becoming the world's newest country.
Birthdays today include: Tom Hanks, actor (Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away); Jack White, musician, The White Stripes frontman ("Seven Nation Army," "Fell in Love with a Girl"); Courtney Love, musician (Hole frontwoman: Live Through This, Celebrity Skin) and actor (The People vs. Larry Flynt); Kelly McGillis, actor (Top Gun, Witness); Jimmy Smits, actor (L.A. Law, NYPD Blue); Fred Savage, actor (The Wonder Years); Chris Cooper, actor (American Beauty, Adaptation, The Bourne Identity); Kevin Nash, professional wrestler, WWE and WCW star; and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
And if today happens to be your birthday, too, happy birthday — hope it's a great one!
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Raise your hand if you still remember the name Andrew Gillum. Don't worry if your hand stayed down. I'm betting the Democrat Party would love for you to forget it, too. Anyway, now your co-workers or your other half would be wondering why your hand was up.
Fasten your seatbelts, kids.
Gillum, the former Mayor of Tallahassee, Fla., ran a genuinely electrifying campaign as the Democratic nominee for Florida governor in 2018, and he pulled off a real upset to win the primary in the first place. Barack Obama endorsed him. High-profile progressives lined up behind him. He came agonizingly close to becoming Florida's first black governor, losing to Republican Ron DeSantis by a microscopic 0.4% — fewer than 34,000 votes — a margin so thin, it triggered a statewide recount. Pundits floated him as the next Obama. People whispered "2024 ticket." The sky was the limit.
I said not to worry about Gillum's future when DeSantis won — he'd land on his feet at CNN. As it turned out, I was correct; he did exactly that. And then he ran headfirst into scandal almost immediately. It's worth noting that Tallahassee has since gone deep red. Your guesses are invited as to why.
The Mondrian Hotel meltdown
In March 2020, police found Gillum severely inebriated in a room at the Mondrian Hotel in Miami Beach — along with three bags of crystal meth. Two other men were in the room with him: a male escort and another man who had to be treated for a suspected drug overdose. Officers found Gillum in the bathroom, vomiting, "unable to communicate with the officers due to his inebriated state," according to the responding cops. The escort, Travis Dyson, told reporters he'd met Gillum two weeks earlier on Grindr and claimed the two of them had used drugs together — allegations Gillum emphatically denied, per the Miami Herald. He insisted he'd never touched meth. Nobody's fully explained what prompted the police to show up that night, but it's a safe bet things got loud. The New York Post even ran photos of the room. The evidence, in other words, isn't exactly thin.
No charges were filed, but the incident torched Gillum's public life anyway. He later opened up about the severe depression and alcohol abuse that followed his 2018 loss, checked into rehab, and came out publicly as bisexual.
Then the feds showed up
In 2022, a federal grand jury indicted Gillum on 21 felony counts, accusing him of conspiring with his longtime mentor, Sharon Lettman-Hicks, on wire fraud and conspiracy charges.
Lettman-Hicks isn't a name that most would know. She was Executive Director and CEO of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), a civil rights organization dedicated to empowering black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, which was supposed to be working for social justice, equality, and an end to racism and homophobia.
Turns out, federal investigators had been quietly circling Gillum's tenure as Tallahassee mayor for years, looking into allegations that he diverted campaign money into his own pocket. In May 2023, a federal jury acquitted him of lying to the FBI and deadlocked on everything else, and prosecutors eventually dropped the remaining charges rather than retry him. Gillum walked away, calling it vindication. Reasonable people can call it a very expensive coin flip that landed on "not guilty, technically."
He rebuilt from there, co-hosting a political podcast, Native Land, with Angela Rye and Bakari Sellers — good enough to win an NAACP Image Award in 2025.
Round three: Alabama
The comeback lasted about as long as you'd guess. On the night of July 2, 2026, police in Daphne, Ala., pulled Gillum over on U.S. Highway 98 after he was spotted driving erratically. An officer noticed a glass pipe sitting right there on the center console — probable cause doesn't get much easier than that — and a search of the vehicle turned up three grams of methamphetamine, eight pre-rolled marijuana joints, four cut straws, three pipes, and a bong, according to the arrest report. That's not a stash you forgot in your glovebox; that's a rolling head shop. Gillum was booked into the Daphne Jail on charges of unlawful possession of a controlled substance, drug paraphernalia, and marijuana possession, then transferred to the Baldwin County Correctional Facility. He was released the same day. Why seems like an interesting question.
He's 46 now, and if convicted on the marijuana count alone — a Class A misdemeanor in Alabama — he's staring down up to a year in jail and a $6,000 fine. That's before the meth and paraphernalia charges even get their turn.
Let's sit with that résumé for a second: hotel meth scandal, federal indictment, near-mistrial, and now a felony drug bust in a state he apparently just happened to be driving erratically through at 10:45 at night with a glass pipe in plain view. As a guess, I’d say "comeback story" might not be the phrase Democratic strategists reach for next.
The next big thing?
This is the man Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris all put their names behind. This was supposed to be the future of the Democratic Party. In hindsight, that "next Obama" chatter has aged like milk left on the Mondrian Hotel nightstand, next to the pill bottles and what was left of the meth.
And Gillum isn't even having a lonely week. Look at the company he's keeping in the "future of the party" hall of fame:
Eric Swalwell — the California congressman-turned-gubernatorial-frontrunner, who spent years insisting Donald Trump was a Russian asset, all while sitting on the House Intelligence Committee's CIA oversight subcommittee. He was reportedly a Chinese asset, personally cultivated for years by a suspected Chinese intelligence operative named Christine "Fang Fang" Fang, who bundled donations for him and helped place an intern in his office before fleeing the country in 2015. That scandal alone might have been survivable — the House Ethics Committee closed its probe in 2023 without findings — but Swalwell's 2026 run for California governor blew up entirely when multiple women came forward with sexual assault allegations that he called "flat false," forcing his resignation from Congress and the collapse of his campaign within days.
Graham Platner — the oyster farmer and Marine veteran who Bernie Sanders anointed as a working-class populist hero in the race to unseat Susan Collins in Maine, until a summer of revelations. These included: a Nazi-adjacent tattoo; resurfaced Reddit posts disparaging black people, LGBTQ people, and assault victims; and texts to other women during his marriage. The revelations culminated this week in a rape allegation from a former girlfriend that even Sanders couldn't get past. Platner suspended his campaign on July 8, denying the allegations while blaming "the political establishment" for ending a run he insisted was still viable a week earlier.
I’ve offered in this piece alone three of the “next big things." Three bunker-buster-sized implosions. These people are — well, were — considered to be the best the Democrats had to offer. The pattern is becoming harder and harder for even Democrat loyalists to ignore. If this is the bench, maybe we need to stop calling it a bench and start calling it what I called it last week: an empty folding chair.
Related: Platner, Increasing Democrat Apathy, Its Source, and the Midterms
Thought for the day: Given that it's National Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Omelet Day, this seems fitting: If you diversify your eggs across multiple omelets, you still end up with a lot of omelets. At some point, you just have to commit to breakfast.
VIP members: Have you heard about any of these issues Gillum has been having? Your comments are encouraged. Oh, and hit the heart, would you? Thanks.
Take care, gang. I hope to see you for tomorrow's visit.
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