Next, how about those San Francisco Giants!
In the 8th inning, they were down by a score of 9 to 1 against the Washington Nationals. Then they won the game 11-10!

Next, the World Cup is starting this week.
I wish I could get more excited about it but Trump and his CBP Gestapo have sucked the joy out of it for millions of people. 

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Meanwhile, in the “home of the brave”…

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The US isn’t going to get any respect:

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Some of the team photos are amazing:

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And in Somalia

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This is just shameful – Infantino whines “…we try to do our best…”

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Finally, I thought this was helpful, for all of us who never played soccer and know little about it:

Feeling left out during #WorldCup or soccer conversations?

While Savannah Ridley can’t turn you a total soccer buff, she just might be able to help you fake it. ⚽

trib.al/gUOMZpT

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— Toronto Star (@thestar.com) June 10, 2026 at 11:01 AM

Epstein-Gate Update
The New York Times dropped a major article today

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Here is a gift link to the New York Times article, by reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files.

Ten days earlier, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. had jointly released a memo that bluntly stated that their review had found no “client list” of powerful men for whom the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein had allegedly procured underage girls and young women. Intended to put to rest years of speculation and end the pressure campaign to release the voluminous material in the department’s possession, the memo instead had the opposite effect, setting off a backlash that was notably loud among the MAGA base.

And it was about to get worse: The Wall Street Journal was preparing a damaging article about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. The president’s desperate attempts to kill the story had failed. His team now had to get everyone onto the same page about how to counter the growing swarm of attention. They needed a gesture of transparency to appease an increasingly angry base, but also a way to convey the message that the president was sympathetic to his supporters’ concerns. Which itself was a problem, because he clearly wasn’t….

Later on, the story explains Trump’s “nipples” scandal:

… In the emails, Ransome claimed that she knew a girl in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring named Jen, who said she had sex with Trump. Ransome also claimed that Jen had told her that Trump had a predilection for nipples and that he had aggressively flicked and sucked hers. Ransome wrote that she had seen evidence when she shared a bathroom with Jen. “They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them,” she wrote.

…Some of Trump’s advisers in the Situation Room had never heard of the nipple claim; those who had seemed to have only a passing familiarity with it. Many in the room thought this was all just discredited nonsense. But it might not matter.
… One official would later describe it as a “surreal” experience to be discussing nipples in the White House Situation Room.

This was, in miniature, the entire problem the White House had with the Epstein files: Piles of accusations were impossible to disprove and equally impossible to make go away. Every door they opened led to another room, and in every room were more claims from more women…

In a sidebar article [gift link], Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan summarize their main points:

… The government’s national-security bunker became an Epstein war room…
The president wanted the whole thing buried…
Vice President JD Vance wanted to release all the files — even the unsubstantiated material about Trump…
Expletive-laden blowups fractured the top of the Justice Department…
Advisers found themselves having a surreal debate over an unverified allegation about Mr. Trump…
More than a year later, the files were still damaging the president…

Trump’s staff meeting in the Situation Room about the Epstein cover-up is like a fire drill where everyone brought gasoline just to be safe.

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— 𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕒𝕖 𝔾𝕦𝕣𝕝 (@sundaedivine.lol) June 11, 2026 at 2:04 AM

Moving on, today’s least surprising news story is that Trump says he doesn’t want to continue CUSMA.
Canada responds …

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Its not all sunshine and lollipops, though. 

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And trying to save CUSMA

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But now maybe he has to manage Canadians better too. 

In the past two weeks, Mark Carney unveiled an AI strategy, held a virtual meeting with premiers, visited Paris and Dublin, retraced his roots in County Mayo, attended the G7 Leaders’ Summit, and gave Canada’s World Cup squad a post-game pep-talk in Vancouver.

It’s been like that for more than a year as the Prime Minister leads a government pouring out plans and strategies and setting new directions.

What Mr. Carney hasn’t done yet is pause to hit the reset button.

… Mr. Carney’s second full year in power will be full of demands for execution and implementation, pressure to deliver on promises to build projects and homes, develop new industry and, eventually, to tend to some of the things that have been lost in the rush…

Annie Koshy writes Keir Starmer Resigned This Morning. The Playbook Used Against Him Is Now Being Deployed Against Prime Minister Carney:

….[A Conservative attack ad]exists alongside CarneyWatch.ca, a website dedicated to tracking what it describes as Prime Minister Carney’s broken promises and flip-flops. The site aggregates every criticism, every policy reversal and every opposition attack into a single searchable database designed to function as a permanent negative reference for anyone who searches the Prime Minister’s name. The Conservatives are simultaneously flooding social media platforms with content built around the Liberal recession narrative, the Brookfield claims and the affordability framing, most of it containing claims that have been fact-checked and found to be materially misleading or outright false, as documented in multiple pieces in this publication.

….This is the playbook. It is not a new one. The same framework that destroyed Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom was not built primarily on his actual failures, though he made genuine mistakes. ….What broke British politics was not Starmer alone. It was the same right-wing populist playbook, the same disinformation ecosystem, the same Reform UK template that Nigel Farage, ally of Trump and central figure in Brexit, has been running for years.

That playbook is now running in Canada. The actors are Pierre Poilievre, the Canada Strong and Free Network, the American political operatives documented in Alberta’s information environment and the Russian disinformation networks CSIS has confirmed are amplifying separatist sentiment. The target is a Prime Minister who has been in office for less than a year, managing a trade war, a technical recession driven by external shocks, an active sovereignty threat from both Washington and domestic separatist movements receiving American government support, and the largest infrastructure and defence investment programme in Canadian history….

Others are also noticing this:

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Evan Scrimshaw wants better communications from Carney about what he is doing and why:

…Carney feels like a Prime Minister.. increasingly constrained by the act of politics than the act of policy. In what is the least surprising thing to ever happen and yet a shock to readers of the Star, Carney is not, in fact, starving child care of needed funding, as the government announced another $5B last week. Everything I hear from people lobbying or interacting with the government is the same – make a solid policy argument to Carney and his team and you can win the argument. Where Carney looks much less secure is walking the political tightrope of the job….

Carney needs to be real with Canadians that this is not a continuity government under a new leader. This isn’t Wynne after McGuinty or Clark after Campbell, this is a genuine revolution in what Canadian Liberalism means. Will a few people be pissed at that? Sure, but a lot more will be pissed at the idea that Carney thinks we’re too stupid to notice the bleeding obvious.

…So long as the machine – in this case, the PMO or the PM himself – will not communicate the thoughts and the strain Carney is under, we will continue to run the risk of the public being misled by being told we are both the change the public wanted and the continuity liberals demand. It’s not good enough, and this nonsense has to end….

Neither Wesley Wark nor Justin Ling are happy with Carney’s support last week for Trump’s Iran MOU. That situation is evolving so rapidly I don’t think it is useful to quote from these critiques now, but in both cases they think Carney made a bad call.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Harper’s former communications director Dimitris Soudas writes How to Convince Canadians You’re Not Ready to Govern:

…An online activist named Mario Zelaya — one of the loudest voices in the echo chamber that now believes it gets to decide what conservatism is allowed to be posted an old photograph of the Prime Minister standing near Ghislaine Maxwell. The caption sneered that this is the man lecturing you on how to raise your kids. 

Then it got shared by a sitting Conservative Member of Parliament. Not a backbencher. Not a rookie blowing off steam. Chris Warkentin — the Chief Opposition Whip. The third-ranking member of the caucus. “That’s Epstein’s accomplice…right?”

Sit with that for a second. The one person in the entire Conservative caucus whose actual job is discipline whose title means keeping the team on message and out of the ditch drove into the ditch himself, and waved everyone over to look.

Let me say plainly what that photo is, because facts still matter even when they’re inconvenient. 

It was taken in 2013, at a festival in England, on an estate that belongs to Carney’s sister-in-law. Maxwell was a friend of the family that hosted it. The picture predates her arrest by years, before any of her crimes were public. Fact-checkers have been over this ground more than once. They’ve also spent the better part of a year knocking down a parade of outright fakes — Carney on a beach with Maxwell, Carney at a dinner with Maxwell — most of them cooked up by AI, several still carrying the watermark of the chatbot that made them. There is no reported evidence of any wrongdoing by Carney connected to Epstein or Maxwell. None.

So this is guilt by association, and it isn’t even good guilt by association. It’s the political equivalent of standing in a crowded photo and being blamed for everyone else in the frame. We’ve seen this trick before. That same Maxwell photo has been used to smear a sitting American chief justice, who turned out not to be the man in the picture at all. It’s an old, lazy move, and it survives for one reason: it doesn’t require evidence. It only requires a caption and an audience that already wants to believe it.

Now here’s the part that should worry every conservative who actually wants to win.

Notice what didn’t happen.

Not a single one of Warkentin’s caucus colleagues shared it. Not one. The rest of the team looked at it and stayed where they belonged — on the other side of the line. That tells you the instinct in the room is healthy, even if the leadership isn’t enforcing it.

And notice the second thing that didn’t happen. The leader didn’t ask him to take it down. Pierre Poilievre said nothing. The man who wants to be Prime Minister watched his own whip launder a conspiracy smear and decided it wasn’t worth a phone call.

That is the story. Not the photo. The silence.

Because a whip who freelances a smear and a leader who won’t correct him are telling Canadians something far more important than anything in a 2013 festival snapshot. They’re telling you who’s actually running the show. When the discipline officer is the one breaking discipline, and the leader won’t touch it, you don’t have a caucus. You have a comment section with parliamentary letterhead [emphasis mine]….

Linda T writes Fine, I Guess We’re Getting Spied On. She is not happy with Bill C-22 Lawful Access Act or Bill C-9 Combatting Hate Act, and she has questions about the plan to buy unused Vancouver condos too. Her analysis continues:

….Long story short, Carney should be in trouble after a week like this.

Cue the Conservatives to the rescue.

The ever-hapless opposition – or “government in waiting,” as they like to call themselves, despite showing every sign of being willing to wait forever – has found a way to make all Liberal mistakes feel politically survivable.

Gerald Butts once said hubris was the Liberals’ kryptonite. Maybe it used to be. Not anymore. These days, Liberal hubris can grow to the size of a weather system and still not cost them an election, because the Conservative Party has become incapable of making itself look like a plausible alternative.

CPC headquarters and a generation of MPs have turned defeat into philosophy. “We don’t win. The Liberals just eventually lose.” That seems to be the whole plan now. …
They shrug off criticism with reminders that “Liberals can’t win forever,” which is both not a plan and not true. There’s no law of physics that forces Canadians to hand power to Conservatives after a certain number of Liberal terms. The Liberals absolutely can keep winning forever if the alternative keeps arriving at the door wearing a sandwich board that says, “You don’t like us, but technically we’re next.”

So Carney marches on.

Normally, a week of surveillance bills, speech-control concerns, and a Vancouver condo bailout would make a prime minister nervous. MPs would worry about their own seats. Cabinet would worry about losing the plot. Backbenchers would get twitchy. The opposition would smell blood.

But the Liberals don’t face a serious threat. They face the Conservative Party of Canada.

The leader of the opposition is currently politically homeless, using a borrowed seat, and facing a very real problem: where exactly does he run next? He can’t go back to Carleton. Battle River-Crowfoot was useful once, but it was never really his seat, and Damien Kurek – the former MP who stepped aside for him – is already lined up to take it back. So where exactly does Poilievre go? No other Conservative MP is going to be excited to hand over a safe seat again. And if Poilievre runs in a competitive seat, there’s a decent chance he loses because, once again, a lot of people just don’t like him.

That’s who Carney has to worry about.

A party spending its energy protecting a leader who may not even be able to win a seat, let alone a country. And when that leader isn’t front and centre, the party drags out the leader who lost two elections ago because voters didn’t like him either….

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Just completely ignoring the relevant facts, because he has a narrative.

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— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 12:21 PM

This is a divisive way to act, too

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So next Canada needs to survive the summer, with the wildfires that will be terrible this year, and then the fall with the American mid-terms and likely some Canadian by-elections too, then we’re into next winter… 

A mind is a terrible thing to lose
Moving on, Washington is convinced that Trump has lost his mind over the Reflecting Pool debacle.

Trump is so wound up about his reflecting pool and his ballroom and all his other interior decorating obsessions that I honestly think a simple online ad campaign mocking his shoddy work might seriously cause him to have a stroke.

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 5:29 PM

Reflection Pool As Metaphor has become a meme:

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Over the last week, I haven’t seen many TrumpWatch posts – that’s what I call posts about the world’s most anticipated event. So I wonder if Americans are giving up. They seem to be just in despair now:

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Moving on to something happier – World Cup stories
I switched on this game just in time to see the Messi goal:

The overhead angle of Lionel Messi’s historic 18th #FIFAWorldCup goal are breathtaking 😮

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— TSN (@tsnofficial.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 5:53 PM

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Today’s France-Iraq match also happens to feature the FIRST EVER all-Canadian officiating team at a #FIFAWorldCup! 🇨🇦

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— TSN (@tsnofficial.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 4:25 PM

youtube.com/watch?v=u57E… @drjaydrno.bsky.social 🤣🤣🤣 #FIFA #CanadaGeese

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— GhostWarrior ⚔️🏳️‍🌈 🇨🇦🇺🇦 (@ghostwarrior.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 11:27 PM

This is at an international teams training site in Toronto.