Suxco Tries To Save Its Few Remaining Trees. Decades too late:
After losing thousands of acres of forestland in recent decades, Sussex County is considering new rules to require builders to preserve a portion of the trees that sit on their land.
The Sussex County Council debated the proposal earlier this month during a meeting that was attended by more than 20 residents who said they came to “speak for the trees.”
Under the proposal, the county would require developers to preserve between 30% and 50% of the existing trees on their properties. In the county’s designated growth zones, where officials want to direct development, the percentage of preserved trees would be 30%.
The proposed rules came from the recommendations of the Sussex County Land Use Reform Working Group, which has been tasked by the County Council with recommending reforms to Sussex County development.
Delaware State Forester Kyle Hoyd said the state environmental agency recently conducted a study that found Sussex County has lost 21,000 acres of forestland over the past two decades — about half of an original estimate that had been based on federal data.
Hoyd called the decline “drastic”, even the loss of forestland was not as great as the agency originally believed,
The lost forestland is equal to 3.5% of the total land area of the county and about 16,000 football fields.
The ‘Putinization’ Of The American Military. As in, we’re depleting our arsenal due to the War in Iran:
Donald Trump’s Iran debacle is by no means the first war the United States has lost in modern times. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, America was similarly defeated by enemies that were nominally less advanced yet implacable. The humiliating images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon, and the chaos of the mad scramble to board the last plane departing in Kabul, are reminders of the folly of forever wars that are bound to lose the support of the American people.
But the loss to Iran is different: it is the closest we have come to outright military defeat. U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon and Kabul, not because they had been beaten in battle, but because the domestic political cost of propping up client regimes became too great.
Granted, U.S. forces haven’t suffered any conventional defeats at Iranian hands either.
But all indications are that the main reason the Trump administration is again calling off major operations against Iran is that America is running critically short of ammunition.
…(M)ost reports, like this one from the Wall Street Journal, say that Trump is backing down because military professionals have finally managed to convince him that U.S. stocks of advanced munitions are so severely depleted that the current rate of use will soon leave America critically weakened. Moreover, replenishing those stocks will take years once the shooting ceases.
For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the US has expended more than half of the Patriot missiles it had before the war, and that it will take until 2029 to replace them.
The ‘Irrelevant’ In The Room–The Democratic National Committee Chair:
Not only does (Party Chair Ken) Martin not represent billionaire funding; he represents no funding. As has been much reported lately, most dramatically in a brutal New York Times story that ran Sunday, the Democratic Party is broke. Not just broke. In debt. To the tune of $2 million. The Republican National Committee, by contrast, has $128.5 million cash on hand.
Martin became chairman of the DNC just 11 days after Trump returned to the White House. Here’s what he said at the time, per that Politico article I linked to above: “This is a new DNC. We’re taking the gloves off. I’ve always viewed my role as a chair of the Democratic Party to take the low road, so my candidates and elected officials can take the high road, meaning, I’m going to throw a punch.” And: “We have one team, one team, the Democratic Party. We have one fight, one fight. The fight’s not in here.”
To hear the Times tell it, most of the fighting Martin is doing is with his staff. And while I’m sure he’s probably tried to throw a lot of punches and the press just didn’t cover it, well … it’s his job to break through the noise. A party chair, when his party doesn’t control the White House, has two jobs. Raise money is far and away job one. But job two is, as Martin correctly said 17 months ago, to be a very public attack dog. Martin seems to have failed operatically at both.
It’s been surprising, at least to me. Before going national, he chaired the state party of Minnesota for 12 years. During that time, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party never lost a statewide race. When the party gained unified control of state government under Governor Tim Walz, it passed a boatload of solid liberal legislation that actually made a difference in people’s lives—12 weeks of paid family leave, a progressive child tax credit, free tuition for low- and middle-income families at public universities, free breakfast and lunch at public schools, and more. Martin didn’t have a direct hand in that, of course, but he led the way to electing the people who did. I interviewed him once during that time. I was pretty impressed.
But as DNC chair, he’s just been terrible. I’d been hearing things long before this Times article, and none of them were good. Back in March 2025, I wrote about how Democrats should create a shadow Cabinet to confront and critique the president and generate national news. I was briefly enthused when, in early April, Martin said he would do just that. But it’s been 479 days and nothing has materialized. And the only time he actually made big national news was a train wreck—that long-delayed “autopsy” of 2024 that he released under public pressure while announcing that “it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” Both the report itself and the handling of it were embarrassingly amateurish.
Martin defeated Wikler, the former Wisconsin party chair, with 246.5 votes out of 428 cast. Wikler did an amazing job as Wisconsin chair from 2019 to 2025. He built the party up not only in the large blue counties but in the purple ones and even some red ones. He led the charge to elect a liberal justice to the state Supreme Court, even as Elon Musk was spending a mind-bending $56 million—on a judicial race. And he just wrote a very good book, This Is the Plan, that’s all about how to out-organize MAGA. Every chapter of This Is the Plan oozes organizing smarts that meet this current grim, social media–saturated moment.
Democrats, it’s not too late! Correct your mistake. Fire Martin and hire Wikler (assuming he wants it). Clearly, it should have been Wikler in the first place. I remember being surprised that Schumer et al. backed him, because Wikler is both pretty progressive and an outside-the-box thinker. Not the kind of person establishment types usually back. But maybe they knew something about Martin that I didn’t.
Will The Supreme Court (Further) Rig The 2026 Elections? Trump is counting on it:
The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court Monday asking for an emergency ruling to let it overhaul mail-in ballots and assemble citizenship lists for the 2026 midterms.
The appeal came two days after a First Circuit Court of Appeals panel upheld a lower court ruling preventing the federal government from enforcing the executive order. It was the latest rebuke for President Donald Trump’s effort to exert control over the midterms, keeping on hold a directive he signed in March.
In the new appeal, the administration is doing some baby-splitting. It argues that the injunction blocking the order is premature, since the administration has only given out “guidance” so far, and also that the government needs to be free to get processes underway to enforce these changes by November.
“If and when the agencies take concrete actions that actually injure them, the States can pursue claims at that time, at which point courts can resolve any legal questions presented in a non-hypothetical posture,” the administration wrote.
If the Supreme Court followed its own guidance with any consistency, the Purcell principle — which prevents courts from changing voting procedures close to elections — would have some heft here, as the administration is demanding enormous and ill-defined changes when the midterms are already underway in many states. In recent years, though, the Roberts Court has tended to invoke or ignore Purcell in accordance with Republican preferences.
The Trump administration is also seeking an administrative stay, which would let the executive order spring into immediate effect.
Stating the obvious–Trump and the Rethugs know they’re toast this November w/o Supreme Court intervention. So do the Trump enablers on the Supreme Court.
Rogue DOJ Finally Dismisses Charges Against Labor Leader:
The Department of Justice has moved to dismiss charges against a prominent California union leader who was arrested while protesting against an immigration raid in Los Angeles last year, in the latest US government case against protesters to fall apart.
David Huerta, the president of Service Employees International Union United Service Workers West, was arrested at a June 2025 demonstration and has been fighting the charges ever since. On Monday, the US attorney’s office in LA filed a motion to dismiss the charges against him.
Huerta was initially charged with “conspiracy to impede an officer”, a serious felony, though prosecutors earlier this year downgraded those charges to a misdemeanor of “obstruction, resistance, or opposition of a federal officer”. The misdemeanor is now on track for dismissal.
The justice department in Los Angeles has aggressively prosecuted immigrants and protesters for “impeding” and “assaulting” immigration officers, but many of those cases have collapsed in court, with prosecutors facing a stunning streak of losses when the charges have gone to trial.
“This means the government is finally admitting what we knew from day one and what was obvious to anyone who saw the videos: the charge against me was baseless, meant to intimidate anyone who dares to speak out, organize, or demand justice,” Huerta said in a statement on Monday. “There was never a real case, only an attempt to punish and silence me for exercising my constitutional rights.”
Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesperson for the US attorney in LA, defended the prosecution in a statement, saying: “The Department of Justice does not arrest people for peacefully protesting.” McEvoy said the department had reached an agreement with Huerta stipulating that if he continued to comply with the terms of his pre-trial release, the case would be entirely dropped.
Why, yes they do. Just another blatant lie uttered with impunity. BTW, the courts now recognize the degree to which the Rogue DOJ has abandoned the rule of law:
Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.
From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.
Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.
ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.
“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.
“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”
In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.
“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”
Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump’s political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies.
In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.
What do you want to talk about?
