DL Open Thread: Saturday, September 6, 2025
‘He’s A Walking Disaster, He’s A Demolition Man’–Trump’s plan to turn the White House into a casino continues apace:
President Donald Trump needs to build his gold-plated monstrosity of a ballroom, and he can’t wait a minute more. So he got one of the numerous personal attorneys he has stashed in high-level administration jobs to say that Trump can just start demolishing parts of the White House, no pesky approval needed.
Not content to just wreck the country metaphorically, Trump has to wreck the White House literally. Will Scharf, who Trump named to head the National Capital Planning Commission, said that the NCPC has no jurisdiction over the demolition process. Instead, per Scharf, “What we deal with is essentially construction, vertical build.”
Sure sounds like he knows what he’s talking about with the construction slang and all. He must have a background in this sort of thing! Lol, of course not. Scharf represented Trump in his immunity decision and made the rounds on television to praise Trump during his hush money trial. So he got rewarded with the staff secretary job and now, apparently, gets to be in charge of how the White House looks.
The teardown for Trump’s stupid ballroom is no small thing and is expected to change the look of both the East and West Wings. But don’t worry, because you won’t actually know anything more about it. Scharf’s remarks came on Thursday, during the only public meeting the planning commission held before crews start tearing up the White House. Yes, this is the first time anyone has learned that Scharf was just going to give Trump the go-ahead with no oversight.
Besides speeding through the approval process by simply not having an approval process, Trump has also accelerated the building of this garbage by giving a $200 million no-bid contract to Clark Construction, a thing that is probably illegal. Finally, of course, this renovation is supposed to be donor-funded, which means we will never know who took this opportunity to bribe the president in a new, innovative way.
Grand Juries Reject Trump’s DC Mass Arrests. Good, we’ll take the resistance anywhere we can find it:
In what could be read as a citizens’ revolt, ordinary people serving on grand juries have repeatedly refused in recent days to indict their fellow residents who became entangled in either the president’s immigration crackdown or his more recent show of force. It has happened in at least seven cases — including three times for the same defendant.
Given the secretive nature of grand juries, it is all but impossible to know precisely why this has been happening, but the persistent rejections suggest that grand jurors may have had enough of prosecutors seeking harsh charges in a highly politicized environment.
Courthouse wits have long quoted Judge Sol Wachtler, the former New York jurist who said that prosecutors are in such complete control of grand juries that they could get them to indict a ham sandwich. But that old saw did not hold true in the rebellion in Federal District Court in Washington, where grand jurors seem to have taken a stand in defense of their community.
“First of all, it is exceedingly rare for any grand jury to reject a proposed indictment because ordinarily prosecutors use discretion in only bringing cases that are strong and advance the interests of justice,” said Barbara L. McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Detroit who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. “I have seen this maybe once or twice in my career of 20 years, but this is something different.”
“My guess,” Ms. McQuade went on, “is that these grand jurors are seeing prosecutorial overreach and they don’t want to be part of it.”
So. Trump now plans to invade the American city of Chicago. Perhaps Baltimore. Perhaps New Orleans. Oh, and he’s fundraising off of these invasions. Anyone think that grand juries in those cities will react differently? ICE agents are anonymous enemies. Grand jury members are anonymous heroes. Hey, at least he’ll have pocketed some more of the rubes’ money.
More RFK Jr. Weirdness. Claims it was the ban on DDT that stopped the polio epidemic. Ummm, just one problem with that:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now serving as Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, is facing renewed scrutiny after a resurfaced video showed him disputing the role of vaccines in eliminating polio. In the clip, Kennedy claimed it was “mythology” to credit vaccines with eradicating the disease, instead suggesting that the banning of the pesticide DDT was the decisive factor.
His remarks were quickly flagged on X with a Community Note correcting the timeline of events. The context provided noted that DDT was banned in the United States in 1972—nearly two decades after the introduction of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in 1953.
Which reminds me–Tylenol Causes Autism. Oh, you didn’t know? Our National Health Czar says it’s so, so it must be so:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to announce that the use of Tylenol by pregnant women may be linked to autism in children, according to a report Friday in the Wall Street Journal — which the Department of Health and Human Services said was “speculation.”
This comes after Kennedy said in April that HHS would undertake a “massive testing and research effort” to determine the cause of autism. Kennedy at the time said the plan was to release a comprehensive report in September. However, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said later that month the findings could take up to a year.
Kennedy has in the past made the unfounded claim that autism is a “preventable disease,” drawing heavy criticism from many medical experts.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in a statement provided to CBS News on Friday that “there is no clear evidence that proves a direct relationship between the prudent use of acetaminophen during pregnancy and fetal developmental issues.”
A Great Teacher Making A Difference:
Reading specialist Maddie Geller has been praised for her teaching that uses decodable books. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE DSEA.
Maddie Geller remembers how her childhood reading books would sometimes show detailed pictures of an orange or black cat. If she didn’t know how to read words, such as orange or black, she could look at the picture and guess a sentence based on the context of the image.
“It would be like, ‘Look at the orange cat. Look at the black cat. Look at the yellow cat,’” she said. “But you didn’t actually know how to read the words yellow, orange or black.”
Learning to read through the contextual clues of images became popularized in the 1970s, but recent research has shown that that system is not optimal. As the journal Education Week has reported, context reading can lower the chance of children being able to recognize a word “more quickly the next time they see it.”
Geller today advocates for teaching kids to read by sounding out a word. She does so at Lewis Elementary in Wilmington as a reading specialist, where for years she has used donated dollars to purchase what are called decodable books that focus on sounding out words.
And she says she has seen students’ confidence blossom after learning to piece together letters into words and words into sentences.
Her work has also attracted the attention of Delaware’s governor.
During his State of the State address in April, Gov. Matt Meyer called Geller a teacher who goes “above and beyond” to serve her students, noting her efforts to raise money for decodable books.
In the speech, he also spoke about his then-proposed budget, which included $3 million for an initiative that would send money directly to teachers and other educators to spend where they believe it is needed most in classrooms.
Ultimately, state funding for the initiative was included in Delaware’s final budget, which became law in June.
Now, the state is finalizing a contract with a vendor to run the new program and to create an “e-commerce-like platform for Delaware teachers to craft project descriptions for literacy-related projects,” according to contract documents.
What do you want to talk about?
If phonetics is so great, why isn’t it spelled with an F?
What was the word that Teddy Roosevelt used in demanding that words be spelled the way they sound?
That’s why we pronounce his name ROOS-velt. Oh, wait…
Maddie Geller isn’t just a great reading teacher…she’s an awesome union leader in Red Clay EA. She’s definitely a rising star with great leadership skills and potential and I can’t wait to see how her career continues to flourish!