Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)

Tidbits-July 9 – Reader Comments: World Cup, World Stage, Trump; What the Country Wants and Believes; What’s the Matter With JD Vance?; the Judeo-Bolshevist Target; Take Action – Honduras; Symposium: Forging a Democracy That Works for All;

https://portside.org/2026-07-09/tidbits-july-9-reader-comments-world-cup-world-stage-trump-what-country-wants-and
Portside Date:
Author:
Date of source:
Portside

 

Take Action:

 

Announcements:



 

All he wants is to win. He wanted to be the big hero. Instead, he’s become the laughingstock of the world—once again.

Steve Sack
July 7, 2026
The Art of Sack
 




 

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOA...way!  --  Cartoon by Jack Ohman




Jack Ohman
July 6, 2026
Jack Ohman's You Betcha!
 



 

Re: We Need a Second Founding
 

Interesting in terms of data AND proposals...

Tom Edminster
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
 

     =====

Some would say the Second Founding was Reconstruction. There is plenty in that project still to draw from. But sweeping programs are not as urgent as a strategy that aims to build opposition -- united front, which seeks to take on our weaknesses and build on our strengths. Dialog in diversity can produce the ideas we are lacking when we reach out.

Ethan Young
Posted on Portside's Facebook page



 

Re: Trump Has the Same Huge Obsession That Mussolini Had
 

Why not "Arc de Me"

Dennis Thompkins

     =====

The photo at the top of the article reminds me of Spinal Tap

Cap'n Steve




 

What the Country Wants and Believes  --  Meme

 

 

 



 

Re: Drone Warfare Turns Oil From a Resource Into a Liability
 

An interesting argument for turning to solar power.
You can't stop the flow of sun and wind, and its everywhere.

Dick

 


 

A Deep Thirst for Nothingness  --  Cartoon and Commentary by Ted Rall
 


After Democratic socialists swept the June Democratic primary races, the centrist-controlled Democratic National Committee resorted to its usual tactics. Rather than unifying the party’s progressives and corporate liberals, liberal right-wingers declared the DSA insurgency an emergency that had to be stopped. They claimed—against all the evidence—that voters are in the mood for militant milquetoast moderation.

Ted Rall
July 7, 2026
Ted Rall
 



 

Re: The Judeo-Bolshevist Target
 

Thank you for Portside's reprint (July 5: The Judeo-Bolshevist Target). of Omer Bartov's first part of his planned two-part review of World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews. I look forward to part 2, although I've ordered the book, and wonder if it and his review will acknowledge the notoriously uncited 1988 book by Princeton's Arno Mayer: Why did the heavens not darken? The "final solution" in history. Mayer made a similar argument in depth regarding how the Nazi leadership constantly spoke of Judeo-Bolshevism (see p. 51 and dozens of index items): "When its eastern campaign bogged down in the late fall of 1941, Nazi Germany radicalized the conduct of the war...fixing on the Jews for slaughter as the most hated and accessible member of the 'common enemy'--'"Judeobolshevism'."

Michael A. Dover
Cleveland




 

Re: What’s the Matter With JD Vance?

(posting on Portside Culture)
 

If Thiel and Vance are "Christians," the word has no meaning at all.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Posted on Portside's Facebook page



 

17 Years After the Coup: The Narco-Dictatorship Returns
 

Karen Spring
June 29, 2026
Honduras Now / Honduras Solidarity Network

 

Photo caption and credit: Social movements mobilize in front of the Supreme Court in Tegucigalpa, Honduras on June 17, 2026.   (Photo by: Reporteros de Investigación  //  Honduras Now / Honduras Solidarity Network)

In the weeks leading up to the 17th anniversary of the 2009 Honduran military coup, dozens of social movements and community-based organizations are coordinating press conferences, gathering signatures, blocking roads, and protesting in front of the Supreme Court. These actions are all aimed at denouncing a slew of laws that promote and prioritize large-scale private investments in agro-business, tourism, and energy, pushing Honduras back to the post-coup narco-dictatorship (2009-2022). Their resistance is directly related to heightened US intervention in Honduras. 

Seventeen years since the 2009 coup in Honduras, it is hard to understate the catastrophic impact of US President Donald Trump and the Make American Great Again (MAGA) movement in Honduras. Following Trump's crude intervention in the 2025 elections, Honduran drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández was pardoned and released from prison, and all political forces with progressive positions or sympathies found themselves under political attack. This includes representatives of Honduras' electoral institutions, the Attorney General, and the President of the Supreme Court who have been removed via threat of or direct impeachment. The National Party, with the support of the Liberal Party, has returned to power and to its traditional partnership. They are bringing back not only their conservative, pro-business policies, but also the same characters that were involved in and fundamental to the growth and structure of the corrupt narco-dictatorship from 2009 to 2021. In other words, the new government is reversing the important advances made under Xiomara Castro's administration (2022 to 2026) and deepening the power of the wealthy oligarchs, organized crime, and transnational capital. 

In the meantime, social movements are mobilizing to stop the onslaught of damaging laws approved by Congress. After a massacre of 20 campesinos on May 21, 2026 in Rigores, Colón, the National Congress promoted the Law for the Strengthening and Protection of the Agro-industrial Sector as a manipulated and fake solution to land conflicts. The law prioritizes agro-business over small-scale and subsistence farming. It also favors transnational over Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous and peasant land rights that are protected by agrarian reform laws and international treaties. Other laws and reforms, including a new definition of “terrorist association” in the Criminal Code, and the proposal to privatize the National Electrical Energy Company (ENEE), will promote further state attacks and criminalization of community organizers and social movements, and hand over public goods and infrastructure to corporate interests. 

As Trump's intervention in the elections demonstrated, Honduras remains an important country in the US's imperialist plan to re-exert its dominance in Latin America. In May, 37 audio files were released by Hondurasgate and Diario Red , featuring various Honduran political figures, including convicted drug trafficker and ex-President Juan Orlando Hernández. Among numerous scandalous revelations, the leaks outline an international and national plan to attack progressive forces and prop up right wing powers across Latin America. Hernández, a long-standing US ally during his presidencies (2014 to 2022) is a central figure in the plan despite being a convicted drug trafficker who received a pardon from Trump as the US continues to attack and bomb fishing boats in the Pacific and Atlantic to allegedly “combat narco-terrorism.” 

From FBI participation in police operations in Honduras to visits to Tegucigalpa from Kristi Noem as part of the newly formed US's Shield of the Americas, the US's presence in Honduras is even more conspicuous now than in the years following the 2009 coup. But despite the increasing global reach of the “MAGA” movement and the US's efforts to continue consolidating its power in the region, the social movements that the Honduras Solidarity Network (HSN) has long supported continue to organize and resist: 

While these are just a few examples of how the struggle continues 17 years after the 2009 coup, these struggles of organizing and collaboration are not only sparks of hope, but active ways that Honduran groups are building alternative futures. They show how resistance, although hard, dangerous, and difficult, continues on this anniversary of the 2009 coup. As a network that formed 17 years ago, the HSN continues to denounce US imperialism and call on all to resist in solidarity with social movements in Honduras, and around the world.  

Take Action Against US Interference in Honduras

Show your solidarity by sharing this statement on all your social media and tagging the US State Department. Let them know that we hold them accountable. 

Facebook and Instagram: @statedept

X: @StateDept

Bluesky: @state-department.bsky.social 

Contact: Honduras Solidarity Network, honsolnetwork@gmail.com

For more information




 

3rd Annual Henry A. Wallace Symposium: Forging A Democracy That Works for All - Washington, DC and Virtual - July 23  (Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation, We Build Progress, and Wallace Global Fund)
 



July 23

2:30 pm - 6:30 pm EDT


Eaton DC
1201 K St. NW
Washington, DC 20005


Please join us in person or online for this fantastic event! Please RSVP; the cost is $0!

On July 23rd, the Institute for Policy Studies, alongside The Nation, We Build Progress, and Wallace Global Fund, will host the 3rd Annual Henry A. Wallace Symposium: Forging A Democracy That Works for All.

Throughout the event, we will hear from movement leaders fighting to protect hard-earned rights and frontline communities, policy experts advancing a bold agenda to confront corporate and Pentagon power and create shared prosperity, and elected officials working to renew our democratic institutions from within. Together, we will explore the most urgent of challenges: how might we re-envision democracy at home and abroad to ensure its survival – and with it our thriving?

Confirmed guest speakers include Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD), Sulma Arias (People’s Action), Keya Chatterjee (Free DC), Kate Hess Pace (Hoosier Action), Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation), Aru Shiney-Ajay (Sunrise), Shane Larson (CWA), Lindsay Owens (Groundwork Collaborative), and Erica Smiley (Jobs With Justice), Lindsay Koshgarian (National Priorities Project), Sarah Anderson (IPS), Tope Folarin (IPS), and Khury Petersen-Smith (IPS). Additional speakers and a full schedule will be announced soon.

This year’s Wallace Symposium will be held on Thursday, July 23rd from 2:30 to 6:30 pm EST at The Eaton DC. The event will also be live streamed. For in-person attendees, the Symposium will be followed by an evening reception from 6:30 to 8:30pm. To attend in-person or virtually, please register here.

Please share this invitation with your colleagues and other organizational partners who you think would be interested. Thank you, and we hope to see you there!

https://ips-dc.org/event/3rd-wallace-symposium/

The Institute for Policy Studies, alongside The Nation and We Build Progress, is hosting its third annual Henry A. Wallace Symposium. This symposium is a capstone event of IPS’s Henry A. Wallace Fellowship Program, supported by the Wallace Global Fund.

In 1939, as fascism was overtaking Europe and gaining ground at home, then U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace charged that words alone would not secure democracy’s survival:

“Democracy must apply itself to meeting the material need of people for work, for income, for goods, for health, for security, and to meeting their spiritual need for dignity, for knowledge, for self-expression, for adventure and for reverence…The danger that it will be overthrown in favor of some other system is in direct proportion to its failure to meet these needs. We may talk all we like about the beauties of democracy, the ideals of democracy, the rightness of democracy. In the long run, democracy or any other system will be measured by its deeds, not its words.”

The rise of far-right authoritarianism in the U.S. and across the globe today – fueled by deteriorating economic conditions, militarized borders, and a lack of hope for a better future – demonstrates the urgent need to not only defend democracy as an ideal but to expand its meaning for our everyday lives, as Wallace presciently envisioned over eighty years ago. 

At this year’s Wallace Symposium, we will hear from movement leaders fighting to protect hard-earned rights and frontline communities, policy experts advancing a bold agenda to confront corporate and Pentagon power and create shared prosperity, and elected officials working to renew our democratic institutions from within. Together, we will explore the most urgent of challenges: how might we re-envision democracy at home and abroad to ensure its survival – and with it our thriving?

Join us on July 23 from 2:30 pm to 6:30 p.m. EDT at Eaton DC. This free event will be both in-person and live streamed. For in-person attendees, the Symposium will be followed by an evening reception from 6:30 to 8:30pm. RSVP using the button below!

Confirmed Speakers Include:


RSVP Today - Click here 

Institute for Policy Studies -- https://ips-dc.org/



 

An Art Show Curated by Lalo Alcaraz - Pomona - Opens August 8


One month away! We’re gonna have a hell of an opening at Galeria Yasmin!



Galeria Yasmin
250 W. Second Street
Pomona, CA / San Gabriel Valley, CA

(840) 277-7939

Email: yasmin.glaw@gmail.com
https://galeriayasmin.com/
 

Source URL: https://portside.org/2026-07-09/tidbits-july-9-reader-comments-world-cup-world-stage-trump-what-country-wants-and