Hello and welcome to Wednesday, July 29, 2026. Halfway through the week, and the news cycle shows no sign of easing up.
My calendar says it's Lipstick Day, Lasagna Day, Chicken Wing Day, International Tiger Day, Cheese Sacrifice Purchase Day, Rain Day, and the Army Chaplain Corps Anniversary. So paint your lips red, order wings and lasagna in the same sitting, admire a tiger from a very safe distance, sacrifice some cheese to the summer gods, and salute a chaplain—just maybe not all before lunch.
Today In History:
1588: The English navy defeats the Spanish Armada at the Battle of Gravelines.
1836: Paris unveils the Arc de Triomphe in a hastily arranged, barely attended ceremony.
1851: Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis discovers the asteroid 15 Eunomia.
1858: The United States and Japan sign the Harris Treaty, opening trade and diplomatic relations.
1890: Painter Vincent van Gogh dies in Auvers-sur-Oise from a self-inflicted gunshot wound suffered two days earlier.
1900: An anarchist assassinates King Umberto I of Italy.
1909: General Motors purchases the Cadillac Automobile Company for $4.5 million.
1914: Transcontinental telephone service debuts with a test call between New York and San Francisco.
1921: Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the Nazi Party.
1948: King George VI opens the London Olympics after a 12-year wartime hiatus.
1957: Nations establish the International Atomic Energy Agency to promote peaceful nuclear use.
1958: President Dwight Eisenhower signs the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA.
1967: A rocket misfire aboard the USS Forrestal ignites a fire that kills 134 sailors in the Gulf of Tonkin.
1981: Prince Charles marries Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
Birthdays today include: Alexis de Tocqueville, French historian and author (Democracy in America); Dag Hammarskjöld, Swedish diplomat and second United Nations Secretary-General; Peter Jennings, longtime news anchor; Elizabeth Dole, senator and former cabinet secretary; Jenny Holzer, conceptual artist; Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker (The Civil War, Baseball, The Vietnam War); Tim Gunn, fashion educator and Project Runway host; Geddy Lee, Rush bassist and vocalist ("Tom Sawyer", "Limelight"); Patti Scialfa, E Street Band vocalist; Martina McBride, country singer ("Independence Day", "Concrete Angel"); Wil Wheaton, actor (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Stand by Me); Wanya Morris, Boyz II Men vocalist ("End of the Road", "I'll Make Love to You"); Stephen Dorff, actor (Blade, Somewhere); Josh Radnor, actor (How I Met Your Mother); Dak Prescott, NFL quarterback; Fernando Alonso, Formula One driver.
If today's your birthday too, happy day!!
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As we head toward the midterms, Democrats are investing heavily in keeping the DOJ out of state voter rolls. Appearances suggest they're worried about what the DOJ will find. In my own experience, appearances seldom lie.
Since mid-2025, DOJ's Civil Rights Division has demanded statewide voter rolls from all 50 states plus D.C., citing its authority under the NVRA and HAVA to ensure states maintain accurate lists. Six Republican-leaning states—Idaho, Utah, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Georgia—also refused to hand over their data, so spare me the "strictly partisan divide" narrative, even if the pattern leans that way. DOJ has sued 30 states and D.C. for refusing.
The DNC sent letters urging officials in 10 states to reject DOJ's proposed agreement, arguing it violates federal election law and the National Voter Registration Act. Democrats claim DOJ's setup hands federal officials drivers' license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, birth dates, party affiliation, and voter participation history.
Wait a second. Does anyone seriously believe that DOJ doesn't already have drivers' license numbers through NCIC, or Social Security numbers through a program it oversees? And let's be honest about the rest of it: What's the actual harm?
In a March hearing over Rhode Island's voter file, DOJ's Civil Rights Division stated it plans to run collected voter roll data against DHS's SAVE database—the same system that verifies immigration status. There's the real rub. That data would let DOJ confirm only actual citizens can vote. Democrats call this "interference." Enforcing eligibility law—making sure only citizens vote—is "interference." The argument is laughable, but that's what they're running with.
The DNC's stated objection holds that the agreement DOJ wants states to sign would put drivers' license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, birth dates, and voting history into a federal database, and that this exceeds what "list maintenance" requires. Critics like the ACLU and Protect Democracy argue this turns a "clean the voter rolls" request into infrastructure for a nationwide purge, potentially flagging naturalized citizens or people with outdated DHS records as ineligible.
I find the argument nonsensical. Democrats are using a real federalism/privacy argument as cover to stall an audit they fear for entirely separate political reasons. They know they can't win elections without a healthy supply of manipulable, ineligible names on the rolls—noncitizens, the deceased, take your pick.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill disclosed that roughly 6,600 noncitizens got (she says "mistakenly") registered to vote in New Jersey between June 2023 and June 2024, and fewer than 400 of them actually cast ballots. A software error in the state's Motor Vehicle Commission system caused it; it's their story, and they're sticking to it. They're saying when people answered "no" to the citizenship question, the system registered them anyway instead of rejecting the application.
Sherrill's predecessor's administration supposedly found and fixed the software problem in June 2024, but the state sat on it, telling neither the public nor the roughly 6,600 people affected until this week. That's a red flag, and it suggests bigger problems with deep-blue New Jersey's voter rolls. As a matter of logic, if the problem was systemic as they suggest, you'd think the totals of "mistaken" voters would be much larger.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin thinks so too—he sent letters to New Jersey and three other states alleging tens of thousands of noncitizens on the rolls, as many as 35,152 in New Jersey alone. That pushed Sherrill into responding, rather sheepishly I thought, with her 6,600 figure. Translation: "Yes, there's a problem, but it's not that big." Forgive me if I don't take her word for it, not with the integrity of elections on the line.
Picture the roles reversed: a Democrat in the White House demanding voter data from a Republican-controlled state. Would Democrats accept what they're refusing to accept now?
We've actually seen that reversal. The Obama DOJ picked its own voter-roll and election-administration fights with Republican-controlled states, though the specifics differed—those fights centered on voter ID laws and Section 5 preclearance under the Voting Rights Act, before Shelby County v. Holder gutted preclearance in 2013, rather than mass data collection. Texas and North Carolina fought DOJ hard over those interventions, and conservatives at the time made almost exactly the argument Democrats make now: federal overreach into a function the Constitution reserves for the states.
So Democrats discover federalism the moment they lose federal power? Forgive my skepticism.
The real rub, in my view, is "motor voter"—the program that added millions to the voter rolls with minimal verification. Add the growing number of illegal immigrants obtaining drivers' licenses, and you've built a reliable pipeline for slipping people into the system who have no business being there. Watch the vote count at midnight and you'll know exactly how many phantom votes it takes to win an election. That stack of "voters" that can be manipulated is a never-ending source of manufactured, "miraculous" 3 a.m. comebacks.
This is just one angle of a larger, systemic vulnerability to voter fraud. And here's the thing: the demand DOJ is making tracks the law establishing the modern voter-roll framework. Don't take my word for it—read it yourself:DOJ's authority to demand these records isn't seriously in dispute. Where Democrats plant their flag is elsewhere: keeping DOJ from cross-referencing each voter record against other known data, the step that would actually expose fraud. Democrats know exactly why they can't survive that test.
Thought for the Day: Like a good lasagna, the truth gets built in layers—rush it, and all you end up with is a mess nobody wants to eat. (Ya know, I used to have a good recipe for Buffalo Chicken Wing lasagna... hmmm.)
VIP members: Your voice matters. Let's hear your thoughts.
Have a great day today, gang. Glad you made it here. Let's do this again tomorrow.
Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.
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