Hello, and welcome to July 2, 2026. Hope you like disco and/or extraterrestrials, because today's calendar has range. My calendar says it's World UFO Day, National Disco Day, Made in the USA Day, I Forgot Day, and the Fast of Shiva Asar B'Tammuz — so somewhere out there today, someone is apologizing to their mother, buying an American-made disco ball, and scanning the sky.
Today in History:
1776 — The Continental Congress votes to adopt the Lee Resolution, formally severing ties with Great Britain. Independence Day is actually today; July 4th just has better PR.
1881 — Charles Guiteau shoots President James Garfield at a Washington train station; Garfield would linger for eleven mismanaged, infection-riddled weeks before dying that September, largely thanks to his doctors' enthusiasm for unwashed hands.
1937 — Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan send their last radio transmission over the Pacific during their attempted round-the-world flight, then vanish — kicking off nearly a century of theories, expeditions, and documentaries that have found everything except Amelia Earhart.
1962 — The first Walmart opens in Rogers, Ark., with over 500 people waiting to get in. They had no idea.
1964 — President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
1979 — The Susan B. Anthony dollar enters circulation, becoming the first U.S. coin to depict a real woman — and promptly gets confused with a quarter by the entire nation for the next several decades. Mostly, the only place you ever saw them was at the Post Office.
Birthdays today include: Hermann Hesse (b. 1877), German novelist (Siddhartha, Steppenwolf); Thurgood Marshall (b. 1908), first black U.S. Supreme Court justice; Larry David (b. 1947), comedian and writer, (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm); Lindsay Lohan (b. 1986), actress (Mean Girls, The Parent Trap); Ashley Tisdale (b. 1985), actress, (High School Musical, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody); Margot Robbie (b. 1990), actress and producer (Barbie, I, Tonya); and Alex Morgan (b. 1989), U.S. women's national soccer team forward.
By the way, in response to some chatter in my mailbox, I've tightened up a bit on the verbosity of the Daily Data, and in place of all of the descriptions, I added links so you can do your own investigations on stuff I list if you're interested. Let me know what you think about that. I think it strikes a better balance for those who tend to merely skim the Daily Data.
If today happens to be your birthday, too, happy birthday — you're in good company with a Nobel laureate, a Supreme Court justice, and at least one actress who's played a doll.
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During the Biden Administration — arguably the most lamentable in American history — our press corps decided "cheap fakes" deserved load-bearing status in the English language. The Washington Post ran a fact-check using that very term to shield Biden from scrutiny as early as July 2022, waving off a viral clip as misleadingly edited. Wonder of wonders, when we fast-forwarded to 2024, CNN's own reporters quietly admitted to CNN — to CNN! — that maybe, possibly, they'd underplayed the story. One told the network the failure was in not pushing harder after the Robert Hur report described Biden as an elderly man with a poor memory. Karine Jean-Pierre, for her part, handled fitness questions the way a bouncer handles a fake ID: Reporters say she shut them down every time they asked about Biden's fitness for office.
Then came the genre of post-hoc contrition. Jake Tapper — who spent 2020 waving away decline concerns as attacks on a childhood stutter — turned around and co-wrote a whole book about the cover-up, a stunt critics gleefully pointed out was rich coming from a guy whose own network had downplayed or outright dismissed the idea that Biden was losing his grip, before the debate exposed it for everyone to see. Even a former New York Times executive editor piled on, accusing the press corps of enabling a "massive cover-up" and telling them, essentially, for shame.
Now, in fairness to the reporters — because I promised myself when I opened the word processor to be annoyingly balanced about this — several journalists have pushed back that this wasn't quite the malicious conspiracy the retrospectives make it sound like. Their defense, roughly: White House reporters had only limited, orchestrated access to the president, which made it hard to independently assess his day-to-day acuity. Distinguishing normal aging from genuine impairment at a handful of stage-managed appearances is a real reporting problem, they insist, not merely cowardice dressed up as caution. There's also the well-worn counterpoint that scrutiny never happens in a vacuum — media critics on the left have argued the industry's newfound zeal for covering presidential fitness has landed far harder on Trump's age and health than it ever did on Biden's, which either proves the media gained standards or proves it never had any, depending on who's writing the op-ed that week.
So: incompetence, access problems, institutional self-protection, or all three stacked on top of each other — take your pick. Nobody's arguing it was journalism's finest hour. Well, except the journalists themselves, apparently. Honestly, if they leveled with us, they'd have to admit their left-leaning politics drove the whole charade.
And yes, before you start with me, I have right-leaning politics. The difference here is I'm not claiming objectivity.
But with that as background, I can't help turning my attention — and frankly, my annoyance — to the coverage Sen. Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) recent health issues have gotten. If you haven't heard about it, I'm not surprised. McConnell, 84, collapsed unconscious at his Capitol Hill home on June 14, and EMS transported him to the hospital. Dispatch audio (probably from a Broadcastify feed) caught a dispatcher alerting crews to someone "found unconscious" at his D.C. residence that morning — though some outlets note they couldn't independently verify that the leaked audio actually matched McConnell's situation.
Be that as it may, the details since that original event have stayed sparse, to put it mildly. The senator's office confirmed he was admitted to an undisclosed hospital on June 14, and while staff insisted he was receiving "excellent care," they never disclosed the exact nature of his condition. A week after admission, a representative claimed he was "working closely with staff on Senate business." Sen. John Thune has echoed similarly vague reassurances since. This marks McConnell's second hospitalization this year. He was rather closed-mouthed about the first one, as well.
So here's my question: How do I argue that the press covered up Biden's decline while shrugging off the exact same silence around McConnell? The answer, of course, is, "I can't."
Sure, there's a difference in stakes — POTUS versus a senator who's clearly overdue and waiting for his retirement. But something about this whole pattern rhymes a little too well for comfort, and for reasons I can’t quite get my arms around, particularly when one considers the way similar issues were handled with other people.
The press corps, which was all too willing to dig fast and hard to get health data about President Trump, was unable or unwilling to dig into the stories involving Biden and McConnell. I really must wonder why.
I also wonder how Congressman Tom Kean (R-N.J.) and his situation play into this. I mean, give the man credit, he had some serious courage and spoke directly to Congress about his depression diagnosis. Then again, the Democrat Party House organ, otherwise known as The New York Times, ran a piece, “It's Been 100 Days. Do You Know Where Rep. Tom Kean Is?", all of which cranks up my curiosity on the McConnell case.
When we vote for someone to represent us, we usually like to know that they are capable of doing the job for the duration of their term. In light of that presumptive desire, are such questions out of line? I don’t think so.
There’s this, also: McConnell has long been a roadblock to MAGA. Which, like John McCain before him, made him one of the more popular Republicans among the press corps. I can’t help but think that may account for the different handling by the press. Kind of unusual for them to be so unwilling to dig up dirt to throw on a Republican, wouldn’t you say?
I don’t have much in the way of answers that aren’t conjecture. But then again, isn’t that the point? None of us does.
Thought of the day: Consistency is the last refuge of people who haven't checked the news lately.
VIP members: What do you think? I’d like to hear about it.
By the way, I’ll be posting to VIP members shortly about Big Boy again, since he’s on the move toward the July 4 festivities at Philly. You’ll want to catch that. (I’d have had it up last night, but with the heat and all the AC blowing at max around here, we had a power failure for several hours.)
Related: Summertime, Summertime, Sum Sum Summertime
Take care, gang. See you here tomorrow.
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