The GOP’s Midterm Convention Will Be the Worst Film Festival Ever

The focus of the GOP’s first ever midterm convention in September won’t be Trump’s dismal approval rating, how to end the war on Iran, or the stagnant economy. They will be spending their time, resources, and funds focusing on democratic socialism.

Axios reported Friday that the GOP has spent months pulling together an “endless” video trove of attack ads targeted at progressive commentators like Hasan Piker, and Democratic Senate nominees Abdul El-Sayed and James Talarico.  

This seems like it’ll be quite the spectacle. The convention ends on September 10—the one year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death—and will feature speeches from Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The convention plans to emphasize Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement and Vance’s anti-fraud task force, neither of which are particularly compelling. Trump is also expected to be in attendance. 

This is all occurring while the vast majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance, and blame him directly for their economic woes—all while he drives gas prices up higher as he drags his war on Iran on longer and longer. This event will almost certainly be an endless blooper reel of Republicans calling on the spirit of McCarthyism to try and convince Americans that it’s bad to want more affordability and less deadly bombs to Israel.  

“While everyday Americans struggle to pay their bills, fill up their tanks, or put food on the table, Republicans are hosting a multimillion-dollar celebration to satisfy Donald Trump’s massive ego and tie vulnerable Republican candidates closer to his failed agenda,” DNC spokesperson Kendall Witmer said to Axios.

While the GOP itself is leading the charge against democratic socialism, Democrats are leaving it up to their PACs, as the dark money centrist thinktank Third Way just committed $15 million towards punching to their left on Thursday.

Amazon is quietly trying to build the biggest gas power plant in the country. 

The Distilled newsletter reported Friday that the megacorporation has bought land and acquired permits in Pecos County, Texas, for an AI data center powered by a 7.65 gigawatt gas power plant. The plant will be completely separate from Texas’s power grid, at least in the beginning, the permits show.  

The site, known as GW Ranch, got a state permit allowing the proposed power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide, which would make it the biggest pollution site in the U.S., emitting more than the country’s biggest coal power plant, according to Distilled. That’s in sharp contrast to Amazon’s commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge.

Amazon filed three construction permits with the state of Texas this week to build three data center buildings immediately upon approval. Land clearing has already begun, according to satellite imagery. Amazon would join Microsoft, Google, and Meta in having its own off-grid gas power. 

Amazon says that it has 10 gigawatts of carbon-free energy across 40 projects to power its existing data center operations in Texas, and that the GW Ranch will use brackish groundwater that isn’t potable and thus can’t be used for irrigation or drinking. 

But that’s not likely to quell public opposition. Data centers are hugely unpopular across the country among Republicans and Democrats, both in rural and suburban areas. The centers don’t create many jobs or boost local economies. If connected to local power grids, they can drive utility rates up and cause black- and brownouts. Amid climate change and droughts, the claim that data centers will take advantage of unusable water will likely invite skepticism. 

The fact that Amazon is building its own power plant for the project will be a small comfort for residents worried about utility rates, but locals still will have concerns about pollution from a gas plant bigger than any other in the U.S. Rural Texas is deeply Republican, and despite President Donald Trump’s delusions about data centers’ popularity, opposition to them on the right is growing. Now that this project is public, a big backlash could soon follow. 

Representative Max Miller blamed a daycare after his daughter was rushed to the hospital last year with bruises.

Miller sued a Westlake, Ohio, daycare provider in February 2025, after the daughter he shares with his ex-wife Emily Moreno (the daughter of Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno) was taken to an emergency room with injuries “on her thighs, face, groin, and vaginal area of her body and she was caused to incur psychological trauma.” Her mother took the girl, then under two years old, to a hospital on January 27 after a daycare staff member alerted police as well as the Department of Children and Family Services.

The lawsuit doesn’t clearly state where her injuries came from, and Miller has a long list of abuse allegations against him regarding his ex-wife and daughter, even allegedly fracturing his daughter’s collarbone. His lawsuit, filed four months before his divorce was finalized, accuses the school and four named employees of “failing to properly train and supervise their staff in the proper treatment of children in their care. Defendants abused and neglected a child dependent upon them for protection.”

Miller is the only person named in the complaint, and Moreno isn’t mentioned. Miller claims in the lawsuit that an investigation from county authorities backs up his claims, along with video and audio evidence documenting alleged abuse and neglect. The school denied the allegations, stating that the toddler was not “injured, brutalized, or harmed in any manner while under the defendants’ alleged care and supervision.”

The case was dismissed four months ago, and if there was a settlement, it hasn’t been disclosed. In light of newly revealed allegations that Miller has a habit of holding his daughter’s beloved blue bunny hostage and his admission that he shared an inappropriate photo of her online, this lawsuit raises even more questions.

Women accounted for 100 percent of the decline in the labor force in July, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s latest dismal jobs report.

Overall, the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July: Women lost 32,000 jobs, while men gained 9,000. Many of the jobs lost were in local government and leisure and hospitality—real jobs that real women, who are already dealing with slowed wages and rising inflation, work.

Meanwhile, a whopping 165,000 women exited the work force last month, meaning they were neither working nor looking for a new job. The number of men in the labor force remained steady.

Jasmine Tucker, vice president of research at NWLC, warned that this latest jobs report was “not a sign of a healthy economy.”

“Women are leaving the labor force in alarming numbers, and many who remain employed are underemployed. This administration cannot celebrate an economy that is failing so many women,” Tucker said.

In fact, more than double the number of women have left the labor force than men since the start of the year. A total of 845,000 women have left the workforce since January, while 406,000 men have left.

It’s hard not to see these startling statistics as part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign to undermine women’s rights and autonomy.

Whether it’s making it harder for women to vote, sidelining women professionally, or endangering emergency pregnancy care—targeting women’s livelihoods just feels like part of the system that’s working as it was designed.

Marco Rubio is slowly choking Cuba to death.

The Secretary of State told Axios his plan to take over the island—long plagued by U.S. intelligence agency meddling and extensive federal sanctions—for good.

“What we’re trying to teach them is there are no escape valves … Every time they create a new mechanism in which they try to get out of the noose, we just close it off,” Rubio said. “They certainly can’t wait us out. Certainly this isn’t going to go away for the next [two and a half] years.”

The Trump administration has kept a constant thumb on Cuba, starting with a blackout-inducing oil blockade in January that has directly contributed to widespread food insecurity, economic collapse, and death, as infant mortality doubled on the island. The U.S. has levied 24 different attacks against Cuba, from accusing its doctor export program of human trafficking, claiming that it’s aiding international terrorism, and running an “irregular and covert” campaign against western ideologies. And military action is still a possibility.

“The Cuban Communist regime is a state sponsor of terrorism that spies on America, arms violent left-wing radicals, spreads poisonous Marxist ideology, and serves as a staging ground for Russia, China & Iran just 90 miles from our shores,” Rubio announced on Thursday. “Today I sanctioned five Cuban entities and eight individuals associated with procuring arms for the regime. As President Trump has said: The United States will not tolerate a rogue state harboring hostile military, intelligence & terror operations on our doorstep. Anyone supporting, sponsoring, or providing services to these sanctioned actors is at risk of being sanctioned themselves.”

The Trump administration (Rubio in particular) is leaning on Cold War, Red Scare rhetoric to justify perpetuating a full-scale humanitarian crisis in Cuba. On Thursday—the same day as Rubio’s announcement and four days after the most recent countrywide blackout—a panel of independent experts appointed by the Human Rights Council declared Cuba at risk of becoming a “silent Gaza.”

“The humanitarian consequences are already unfolding into a full-blown crisis, threatening the rights to health, to life, to food and to development.… Measures that knowingly deprive a population of the means to survive strike at the most basic guarantees of the rights to life and diminish the core of human dignity,” the report reads. “The U.S. Government must cease all threats and hostile acts against Cuba’s sovereignty and revoke all measures it has imposed on the country that stand contrary to international law.”