Men's Lifestyle July 24, 2026 0 Comments

Why JD Vance’s 2028 Election Bid Could Be the Biggest Political Trainwreck You’ve Never Seen—and What It Means for America’s Future

Ever get the feeling politics today is less “game of thrones” and more “game of thorns”? Well, buckle up. Vice President J. Divan Vance, who’s as charming as a cactus and twice as prickly, is catching flak left, right, and center. The “Never Vance” crowd is out in full force, slinging accusations like a chaotic video game where no one’s hitting pause. And yet, his team just shrugs it off, convinced these online attacks are anything but organic. It’s a wild political rodeo, tangled in social media dust, backroom whispers, and the ever-present question: can anyone actually survive this circus without losing a limb—or their mind? Plus, in the midst of all this turmoil, our courts are stepping up with a smackdown on DOJ overreach that’s as satisfying as a comeback punch. So, grab your popcorn or your protein shake—this weekend’s roundup is a rollercoaster of drama, justice, and yes, even a dash of dinosaur discoveries. Who says you can’t mix politics with a little paleo intrigue? Dive in and see if you can keep up with the madness. LEARN MORE

9 min read

Out on the Weekend

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

Ruh-roh! Low bridge out there for vice president J. Divan Vance, the most naturally unlikeable American politician of my lifetime. According to The Washington Post, his people are feeling a bustle in their hedgerows, and they are certainly alarmed now.

His detractors have adopted the “Never Vance” slogan and flooded social media, especially over the past week, with attacks including claims that Vance is “unfit” to be vice president due to his efforts to negotiate a peace deal with Iran. They have asserted, without evidence, that Vance is making policy decisions not supported by President Donald Trump. They have likened him to former president Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

Only modern Republicans could think that comparing a candidate to a successful two-term president is a bad thing.

The sustained public hostility from Vance’s own side of the aisle is unlike that faced by other vice presidents in decades, both in intensity and in the early timing—two years before the party will choose its next presidential nominee. The unusual nature is a product of the central role that social media plays in today’s political discourse, as well as the high stakes as Republicans prepare to select a new standard-bearer after Trump, Vance allies and critics say.

(Truth be told, President Eisenhower was under considerable pressure to drop vice-president Richard Nixon in 1956. If Ike had done that, ending Nixon’s political career would have been behind only the invasion of Normandy on his career contributions to the United States.)

Vance’s political team remains dismissive of the social media onslaught and its impact on Republican voters, believing that many of the attacks are not organic, a close ally of the vice president told The Washington Post—a sentiment echoed by two other people with knowledge of Vance’s strategy. The ally and other advisers spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Vance’s allies are keenly aware of and monitoring the online attacks, but his team says the criticism sends a signal to the conservative base that establishment Republicans and opponents they label as neoconservatives hate Vance. That, they say, could ultimately strengthen his standing in a GOP primary.

Vance’s team seems as clueless as its candidate. Yes, political opponents are going to, you know, oppose him. Get used to it, dude.

Vance, whose brand of politics is populist and skeptical of foreign wars, has remained the front-runner in 2028 Republican primary polling. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the favorite of many more traditional, business-minded Republicans, has gained ground in recent months, however, although Rubio has insisted he will support Vance if he runs. The knives have long been out for Vance within the GOP, since before Trump selected him as his running mate. At the time, hawkish donors and conservative media personalities lobbied for Trump to reject Vance in favor of Rubio or Doug Burgum, now secretary of the interior.

Oh, please. Vance is an unprincipled yahoo who will adopt any political position that will get him on television for 20 minutes. If he gets sold out the way everybody who trusts this president gets sold out, nobody will deserve it more. And if the elite political media attempts to make him 2028’s Sensible Republican, it will be proof that none of them have learned anything at all.

If we all survive this political era, and I still make that a 50-50 proposition, we will have many judges to thank. From NPR:

The Justice Department is dropping the subpoenas it filed demanding grand jury testimony and phone records from New York Times journalists after sharp questioning Thursday from a federal judge who challenged almost every facet of the government’s approach.

The government had insisted that it was acting solely in the interest of national security. It filed subpoenas on July 10, just two days after the Times published the first of two stories about concerns that led to the U.S. Secret Service interceding to prevent President Trump from flying home from Turkey on the new Air Force One jet.

Judges have been fed up with the clown show at the DOJ for a while now, and their dicta from the bench has steadily increased in unbridled scorn.

In the court hearing, which lasted well over an hour, [U.S. district court judge Arun] Subramanian laced into [deputy U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York Sean] Buckley’s logic for issuing the subpoenas just two days after the first Times article reported that Trump had left the NATO summit in Turkey on an older plane because of security concerns. A story the next day detailed many of the specific concerns.

The government offered to hold the subpoenas “in abeyance” for 14 days as it pursued other investigative avenues, Buckley told the court. But that held little appeal for Subramanian. Seeking testimony and materials from reporters as the federal government did is supposed to be a last resort, not a first move, the judge noted. He pointed to binding legal precedent as well as the Justice Department’s own current policy. How, Subramanian asked again and again, could it be a last resort if done just two days after publication? Buckley said it was a last resort given what they knew at the time.

The judge didn’t buy that logic.

He later asked why Buckley did not know of the specific legal precedent protecting journalists prior to issuing the subpoenas as part of the investigation. That legal precedent was established in another case. … Buckley later apologized for subpoenaing the mobile telephone records of the mother of one Times journalist and two reporters’ spouses. He called it an honest mistake and said prosecutors had mistakenly relied on publicly available databases that associated those phone numbers with the reporters involved The New York Times in the appeals circuit that includes New York.

The Department of Justice is terrible at being authoritarian. Thank god.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: Last Two Dollars (Johnny Taylor) — Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1917, American officers in sidecars with machine guns, guarding the border. This was a year of delicate diplomacy between the new Carranza government in Mexico and the Wilson administration, highlighted by the February discovery of the Zimmermann telegram, an attempt by the German government to ally itself with Mexico with a promise to return land the U.S. grabbed in the Mexican War. This revelation helped accelerate the United States’ drift toward participation in World War I. History is so cool.

From the sports page: It’s only been a week and I miss the World Cup. I miss all the happy people in the streets—No Scotland, No Party!—and I miss having live sports on my TV during the day, which always feels like playing hooky.

Somehow, with all that going on, the Red Sox won 15 games in a row after spending the first couple of months of the season as such an absolute landfill that they fired the manager, and the only remaining mystery of the season was whether or not they’d decapitate the entire baseball operation. Now, they’re solidly back in the wild-card race and are likely to make some serious pickups prior to the August 3 trade deadline. They have starting pitching that’s more than solid with Aroldis Chapman and his 100 mph fastball for a closer, and both pircher Garrett Crochet and phenom Roman Anthony have been out for most of the year. I remain wary, but intrigued.

And now the big news: Kerry will go after its second straight—and 40th all-time—All-Ireland football title on Sunday. This year’s vict … er … opponent is luckless Mayo, which hasn’t won the Sam Maguire Cup since 1951. The reason for this is shrouded in myths and lore. Supposedly, when the 1951 team was returning home after winning the title, its bus disrespected a country funeral procession. At which point, the local priest—or a local witch, opinions vary—cursed the Mayo side by saying they would not win the All Ireland again until every member of the 1951 team was dead. (The last survivor died five years ago.) Kerry has no need of a witch’s curse. It has David Clifford. Ciarrai abu!

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Popular Mechanics:

Construction on the Varberg Tunnel in Sweden—part of a modern railway project—has resulted in an unexpected bounty of historical underwater finds: six shipwrecks spanning the Middle Ages to the 17th century, all maritime remnants of what was once a bustling harbor. Of the six separate wrecks found in 2025, four are from the Middle Ages (or Late Middle Ages), one is from the 17th century, and one couldn’t be dated, according to a translated report from archaeology consultant group Arkeologerna.

Found in the central part of the city, which was once an original shoreline and location of harbor defenses, Wreck 2 was both the most preserved and the only with a continuous structure. Wrecks 5 and 6 required hasty removal due to time constraints on the tunnel’s construction project, which could have left additional portions of the ships underground.

This being an all-purpose blog, here is your brief tutorial in case 16th century shipbuilding comes up in pub trivia.

Wreck 2 comprises the remains of an oak sailing ship built during the second half of the 1530s. Using timber from West Sweden, the clinker-built style craft—where the edges of the timbers overlap—still included two hull sections from the ship’s starboard side, along with scattered timbers. The ship’s design also featured a berghult, or rock beam—a protective strip on the outside of the hull, which Schager called “exciting.” The piece functions as a reinforcing support strip to protect the hull when docking, and can also serve as a brace for the superstructure. The ship was either fully or partially decked.

I suspect that the crew was partially decked when they finally came ashore, but that’s beside the point.

Hey, Independent. Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

The new fossil discovered in the western Indian state of Gujarat belongs to the group called neosauropods, which eventually evolved into a group of colossal dinosaurs that includes Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus and Argentinosaurus. But unlike these titans, the newly uncovered species, Ceratocaudia antiqua, measured only about 7m (23 feet) long. During excavations at the Kaladongar fossil site of the Kachchh Basin in western India, they found over 180 skeletal fragments of the dinosaur, including vertebrae, ribs, and elements of forelimb and hind-limb – all thought to belong to one individual. The rocks where the dinosaur fossil was found span from the Early Jurassic to the Bajocian stage of the Middle Jurassic, making the dinosaur as much as 190 million years old. This is about 10 million years older than the previous oldest identified neosauropods, meaning these dinosaurs roamed the planet much earlier than thought.

The fossil was of an animal that wandered the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, and I have to wonder, has there ever been a band called Gondwana? Sometimes, I believe that they lived then to make us giddy now.

(Major props to the crew behind this season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for including dinos as an important plot point. It’s always a good day for dinosaur extras!)

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the Epstein victims, whose trauma is back in the news again, and the victims of the Canadian wildfires, and also the ones in Spain, and the victims of the floods in Missouri, and the victims of the heat domes, and those affected around the world by wildfires, and the victims of the Venezuelan earthquake, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of the Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont,, and for all the people and the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornados in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, the explosive diarrhea bug, and the Legionnaire’s disease outbreak in Harlem, and the victims of the heat wave in Europe, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they’re getting.