Hey, there. Glad you're here. Today is Friday, Aug. 7, 2026 — beer, pie, and lighthouses all sharing the calendar, which honestly sounds like a pretty solid Friday if you plan it right.
My calendar says it's Beer Day, Lighthouse Day, Braham Pie Day, Cycle to Work Day, Braiders Day, and the start of Twins Day weekend. Crack a beer, grab a slice of pie, and if you happen to have a twin, drag them along. The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally also kicks off today, so if you hear engines this weekend, that's why.
Today in History:
1782: General George Washington creates the Badge of Military Merit, the decoration that eventually becomes the Purple Heart.
1789: Congress establishes the U.S. War Department, the forerunner of today's Department of War.
1882: The Hatfield-McCoy feud turns violent when three McCoy brothers kill a member of the Hatfield clan, touching off one of America's most notorious family blood feuds.
1927: The Peace Bridge between the United States and Canada is dedicated, with Britain's Prince Edward of Wales among the dignitaries in attendance.
1942: American and Allied forces land at Guadalcanal, launching the first major Allied offensive against Japan in the Pacific.
1947: Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft, Kon-Tiki, crashes into a reef in Polynesia, completing a 4,300-mile, 101-day voyage meant to prove ancient South Americans could have settled the Pacific islands.
1959: The United States launches Explorer VI, which sends back the first photograph of Earth taken from space.
1964: Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting President Lyndon Johnson sweeping authority to escalate American involvement in Vietnam.
1974: French high-wire artist Philippe Petit spends 45 minutes walking a cable strung between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, 1,350 feet above the ground.
1990: Operation Desert Shield begins as U.S. troops deploy to Saudi Arabia to deter Saddam Hussein from invading the kingdom the way he'd just invaded Kuwait.
1998: Coordinated truck bombings at U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, kill over 200 people, in an attack claimed by an al-Qaeda affiliate.
2007: Barry Bonds hits his 756th career home run, breaking Hank Aaron's longstanding record under a cloud of steroid allegations that still shadow the achievement today.
2008: Russia and Georgia go to war over the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a conflict Russia wins within days.
Birthdays Today include: Charlize Theron, actor (Mad Max: Fury Road); David Duchovny, actor (The X-Files); Rodney Crowell, singer-songwriter ("Ain't Living Long Like This"); Harold Perrineau, actor (Lost); Garrison Keillor, radio host and author (Lake Wobegon Days); and Abbie Hoffman, political activist (Steal This Book).
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday.
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We'll start with this because sometimes the commentary just writes itself.
Congratulations @AbdulElSayed on a hard-fought victory!
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) August 5, 2026
Trump and the GOP are trying everything to rig the rules and silence voters — but they can’t stop a Democratic Party united around working people and accountability.
On to November! Let’s take our country back.
Gavin Newsom snuggling up to Abdul El-Sayed? Shocking. Truly.
I'm sure you can understand why this caught my eye over coffee this morning, in the same way a train derailment does.
I regard this as nothing less than a measure of raw, undiluted desperation on Newsom's part — the political equivalent of a man drowning and grabbing whatever floats past, terror-financing allegations be damned. He, or more likely some overpaid staffer who apparently skipped the opposition-research memo, posted this the instant the primary got called for El-Sayed.
His team reached out to El-Sayed directly after the race was called, and Newsom is now heading to Michigan for a multi-day campaign swing in support of him — part of what's being described as an increasingly aggressive national political tour, which everyone with a functioning brain reads as a barely-disguised audition for 2028.
I guess it's not much of a surprise, but best I can tell, Newsom just took his own presidential ambitions out behind the barn.
Look, we already know El-Sayed has drawn documented scrutiny over past comments on Israel — reporting specifically frames him as someone who "will not affirm Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state." Yeah. That's gonna play really well in a general election. </sarc>
I can't help but think this single photo-op is going to haunt Newsom clear through any presidential run he manages to cobble together, nomination or not.
Remember who we're talking about here: This is the very same Newsom who, after Hamas slaughtered roughly 1,200 people on October 7, personally flew to Israel, sat with survivors, met grieving families, and stood in front of cameras, talking about the evils of antisemitism. Real moving stuff. It would have helped him if it wasn't perceived as not genuine but purely political positioning.
And yet none of that produced so much as a flicker of hesitation before he threw his full endorsement behind a candidate whose own record on Israel raises real questions about where he actually stands. One columnist put it bluntly, framing El-Sayed as someone who will not affirm Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Fair or not as a characterization, it's the kind of question a candidate should have to answer plainly, and apparently, Newsom didn't think it was worth asking before signing on. Convictions must have an expiration trigger the moment the finger gauge measures a change in the wind.
It gets better. Fox News reports El-Sayed's Senate campaign happily pocketed over $115,000 from CAIR-affiliated donors, including an executive who publicly cheered Hamas on the actual day of the massacre. I don't imagine I need to beat the drum about CAIR much further at this point — you already know the tune. Our own Catherine Salgado dives into this one, just this morning, and she rightly savors the irony of a guy who campaigns on "getting money out of politics" cashing checks from a network with terror-financing baggage. Says Catherine, and correctly:
CAIR's national Board Chair Manal Fakhoury, national Vice Chair Emad Sabbah, national Board Treasurer Eyas Abdeen, and CAIR-Michigan board member Jukaku Tayeb all donated to El-Sayed. And Tayeb also just happens to be El-Sayed's father-in-law. Jihad is all the family, it seems.
Family that donates together apparently stays together. Is Newsom even remotely aware of that little detail, or did his vetting process consist entirely of checking whether El-Sayed had the right letter next to his name? This move is of a kind with the vetting process Democrats ran Graham Platner through, up in Maine.
Tayeb has been one of the largest financial backers of the super PAC supporting El-Sayed's campaign and is also part of the founding committee of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a group linked to Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood funding […]
One donor, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, listed in FEC records under the name Nehad Hammad, drew national condemnation after saying he was "happy" to see Hamas break out of Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, and arguing Israel "does not have the right to self-defense" as an occupying power.
Newsom, naturally, will take support wherever he can scrounge it up these days. I've noted in previous columns those numbers are dwindling. But this isn't the kind of documented paper trail that wins converts — it's the kind that sends the ones you've already got sprinting for the exits. We've already covered, at length, how rank-and-file Democrats are quietly edging away from their own party's offerings. This endorsement isn't going to slow that stampede. If anything, Newsom just handed them a very good reason to run faster.
El-Sayed now heads into November facing Republican Mike Rogers, in a race Democrats consider essential to retaking the Senate — and, per the polling we already dug through a few days back, there's one where El-Sayed currently trails Rogers by several points.
So, snuggling up to someone who is a nearly sure bet to lose his election? It would be easy to chalk Newsom's move up to stupidity. But I suspect he actually recognizes he's going to see his presidential aspirations in better shape than they are at the moment. In other words, this is a move driven by outright desperation. (Chuckle)
Yeah. Good luck with that, Governor. You're going to need it.
Thought for the day: Congress handed President Johnson a blank check in one afternoon with the Tonkin Resolution, and the country spent the next decade paying for it. Argue about the validity of the move if you will, but we can take it as proof that broad grants of power are always cheaper to give than to take back.
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Take care, gang. I'll see you tomorrow.
Recommended: A Mass Exodus of Muslims From France? Maybe.
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