I had seen the hanging flower garlands on Pinterest and mentioned them to Kayleigh (my dil). She said, "I could make that with my Cricut!" So I bought paper and she spent many hours creating this stunning hanging background!
Those are all paper flowers that print out flat! She also made a lot of leaves that we added to the food table! It looked so great!
The shower was a drop in, and so for several hours we had ladies coming and going, and then some of our dearest friends stayed for a long time afterwards.
It was a special time and Sarah loved it.
I made my curried chicken salad, and regular chicken salad. I made sandwiches with mini croissants and then also had bowls of chicken salad for those who are gluten free or watching their carbs. I also made gluten free keto brownies and they were very delicious! The grooms' mom brought veggie platters and Rachel did a fruit salad. The rest we bought.
We are now three weeks away from the wedding! It's time to work on the flower order! I'm so excited for Sarah and Dave! It's going to be a great day!
It's a big day here at the Cottage. It's my Sarah's birthday and then tomorrow is her bridal shower! Then just three more weeks until the wedding!
But now onto the Information!
CIA Contradicts Obama Officials’ Sworn Denials About Russiagate Report
By Paul Sperry - RealClearInvestigations
Explosive new evidence suggests that some of the highest-ranking officials in the Obama-era CIA and FBI perjured themselves regarding their claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump secure his victory in 2016.
A newly released CIA review challenges their sworn denials to Congress that the Steele dossier – a discredited set of allegations about Trump funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign – was used as the basis for the years-long Russiagate probe that hamstrung President Trump’s first term.
“We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.” —John Adams (1797)
There was some other news this week pertaining to an another dossier that hardly got any mention — though it further exposed the most egregious deep-state assault on a sitting president in the history of our nation.
As you may recall, last week CIA Director John Ratcliffe released the declassified report on a comprehensive review he ordered of the agency’s analysis on Russia collusion in the 2016 election.
According to Ratcliffe: “[President Trump] has trusted me with helping to end weaponization of US intelligence. [This] report underscores that the 2016 IC Assessment was conducted through an atypical and corrupt process under the politically charged environments of former Dir. Brennan and former FBI Dir. Comey. All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals — all to get Trump. Thank you to the career CIA officers who conducted this review and exposed the facts.”
"I noted that the colluders in this coup attempt were under the direction of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and included a brazen cabal of operatives at the highest levels of the most powerful government agencies. These operatives included former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI Chief of Counterespionage Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. All of whom colluded with then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) in his repeated efforts to impeach President Trump."
Secret Service suspensions: July 13, 2024, will be remembered for the attempt a deranged madman made to assassinate Donald Trump. Almost a year later, reports have emerged that six Secret Service agents were suspended without pay due to failures at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The penalties ranged from 10 to 42 days of unpaid leave, with Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn explaining that the Service could not "fire its way out of this" problem. After the suspensions were lifted, the agents were assigned to restricted roles with reduced responsibility. The second attempted assassination that occurred in September of 2024 has had repercussions as well, with Tina Brown Cooper and Ronnie Jay Oxendine pleading guilty to charges after they conspired to sell a rifle to the would-be assassin despite his 2002 weapons conviction.
Sadly, this is not about what she feels about a case. It is about law. All the court is supposed to do is rule regarding law. Not personal opinion, not feelings.
What a lovely weekend we had here at the cottage! Most of our kids came, the local grands were here and got to swim! They'd been looking forward to this! Kaidence, age 6, said to her mom on the morning of the 4th, "Do you know what today is?" and Kayleigh answered her, "It's the 4th of July!" Kaidence responded, "No, it's fireworks and swimming day!" (grin) She starts formal education this year and she'll be learning all about the real reason why we celebrate!
We had a few friends join us for food and fireworks. We always have a good time.
Kyle bought his first car this week!
Kyle helped me in the garden on Saturday. Just a bit of cutting back, deadheading, and a few weeds. Now it's looking good for Sarah's bridal shower this weekend!
On Sunday, Tim and I and my parents meandered our way down to Havre de Grace and enjoyed a drive through Susquehanna State Park in Maryland.
We ate lunch in Havre de Grace at the Promenade Grille, outdoors in beautiful weather by the water. What more could you ask for?
No photo of mom. Her neck was bothering her and she didn't want her photo taken. The drive home was lovely!
Tim and I ended the evening at a friends' home. Tim was helping him put together a desk and bookcase.
It was a wonderful weekend.
Today, I have an annual check up, and an appointment with my naturopath. I'm working on loosening up these tight muscles still!
Four weeks until Sarah and Dave's wedding! It's coming fast now!
“This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.” —Thomas Jefferson (1825)
"But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations.... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution." — John Adams
Trump Is a Terrible Tyrant
By Douglas Andrews
This isn’t going to sit well with the Nazi King crowd.
Fresh off their failed efforts to convince the American people that Donald Trump is a goose-stepping version of George III, the Democrats have been hit by yet another salvo of unassailable facts. As it turns out, Donald Trump is the opposite of a dictator, and the numbers bear this out.
We find these facts in The Federal Register, a document that might fairly be described as the daily diary of Big Government’s depredations on our Essential Liberty. Indeed, the Register is the official journal of the agency rules, proposed rules, and public notices of the federal government. And its pages are, right now, being churned out at a record low pace.
Facts are stubborn things.
“It’s July 1, mid-year 2025,” begins Wayne Crews at Forbes. “The federal regulatory landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation. After years of relentless compounding of federal rules and regulations and Federal Register pages — capped by Joe Biden’s self-proclaimed ‘whole-of-government’ executive actions on the likes of DEI, ESG, net-zero and the ‘care economy’ — conventioal [sic] federal regulation as we have known it has largely stopped.”
How can this be? you ask. And rightly so. After all, ever since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, you’ve been buried beneath a deluge of mainstream media reporting about his authoritarian despotism, his monarchical tendencies, his rank Third Reichishness.
These are lies. James Freeman at The Wall Street Journal piles on: “At the risk of ruining his media reputation as an authoritarian, Mr. Trump now appears to be setting a modern record in avoiding telling Americans what to do. Specifically his administration appears to be imposing far fewer rules than its recent predecessors. What’s more, even when Mr. Trump does issue a directive, it’s often simply to tell Americans that they no longer have to follow another directive previously issued by someone else.”
Dude is the worst Nazi ever. The worst authoritarian ever. In fact, when it comes to deregulation, Donald Trump is the OG — the Original Gangster. Recall that soon after taking office, after the dust from his initial flurry of executive orders had begun to settle, Trump issued a directive stating that for any agency to put forth a new rule, regulation, or guidance, it must first finger “at least 10 existing rules, regulations, or guidance documents to be repealed.”
June jobs report exceeds expectations: Economists keep warning that Donald Trump's policies are leading to an economic slowdown that fails to materialize month after month. Predictions for the June jobs report included unemployment ticking up from 4.2% to 4.3% and the addition of only 115,000 jobs. Once again, Democrats were disappointed by reality this morning when the numbers showed that unemployment had ticked down to 4.1% and 147,000 jobs had been added. Government employment accounted for most of the growth, adding 73,000 jobs even while DOGE-related projects cut 7,000 jobs in June. Manufacturing and business services experienced a decline of 14,000 jobs, while education, health, hospitality, and construction accounted for most of the remaining growth.
“What light is to the eyes, what air is to the lungs, what love is to the heart — liberty is to the soul of man.” — Robert Green Ingersoll
"Courage, then, my countrymen, our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty." — Samuel Adams
“We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.” — William Faulkner
“How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!” — Thomas Jefferson
“There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free or you are not free.” — Walter Cronkite
“Where liberty dwells, there is my country.” — Benjamin Franklin
“Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts,” the Supreme Court ruled today in a big win for the Trump administration and a rebuke for power-hungry lower-court judges. “The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.”
The 6-3 Trump v. Casa opinion, written by the lately beleaguered Justice Amy Coney Barrett, concluded, “The issuance of a universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such power.” Furthermore, “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
Lower courts must now reconsider numerous cases filed by litigious activists against everything Trump has done.
Say what you will — and there’s plenty to be said — about the constitutional wobbliness of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, but this much must also be said: They’re real Catholics, not fake ones like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.
We got a sense of this three years ago, when the duo stood up for babies and helped strike down the half-century-old abomination known as Roe v. Wade. Further evidence of their support for the unborn came yesterday when the duo joined fellow Catholics Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh — along with Catholic-turned-Episcopalian Neil Gorsuch — in ruling 6-3 that South Carolina can block Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics. (The only Catholic apostate was, predictably, Sonia Sotomayor, who continues to believe that the leftist sacrament of abortion trumps the Church’s 2,000-year-old teaching that abortion is a “moral evil.”)
Specifically, the High Court’s decision in this case, Medina v. Planned Parenthood, makes it easier for states (read: easier for red states) to boot Planned Parenthood clinics out of their Medicaid programs if their citizens don’t like the idea that their tax dollars are funding such a barbaric procedure, and it made it harder for pro-abortion forces to sue those states for honoring the life-affirming will of their citizens. And since more than three-fourths of abortions are undergone by low-income women, the decision is a serious financial throat punch to the entity that can be aptly understood as the Amazon.com of abortions.
Democrats Offer Little but Socialism and Infighting
By Brian Mark Weber
In the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, media outlets brimmed with enthusiasm that Trump’s move was ripping apart the MAGA coalition. They’d been reporting for months that the Republican Party was coming apart at the seams over budget fights, border enforcement disagreements, and the direction of the MAGA movement.
The fact that the Leftmedia is fixated on finding cracks in Republican support for President Trump and within the party itself seems to be a case of projection, as the real civil war is among Democrats. Infighting in the GOP is the result of differing opinions, not a lack of party unity. On the other hand, Democrats are at a crossroads, pitting the young, radical Left against the old guard.
Democrats “are engaged in bitter infighting and struggling to come up with a unified strategy to oppose Trump,” veteran political analyst Byron York observes. “Meanwhile, Trump is pushing forward on all fronts, setting the agenda — just look at the recent bombing of nuclear sites in Iran — and putting together one of the most consequential presidencies in years.” York adds, “It’s more an indicator of the Democratic Party’s impotence in the face of the Trump presidency. And behind the embarrassing stories, Democrats have substantial problems that could render the party ineffective for quite a while.”
One of the main issues is that Democrats are completely out of touch with Americans.
he fallout from New York City’s primary election has Democrats in shock. Veteran strategist James Carville called Zohar Mamdani’s win a “potentially damaging event” for the Democrat Party. While the Left is praising Mamdani’s victory, there are several red flags emerging in the post-election analysis. Turnout in Tuesday’s primary was low. So low, in fact, that one analysis suggests only five to seven percent of New Yorkers actually voted for Mamdani in the primary, hardly a sign of a popular mandate. Working-class voters overwhelmingly voted for Andrew Cuomo. College-aged, white liberals voted for Mamdani. How do you explain that? They’ve been indoctrinated. Mamdani’s voters have gone through the four-year Marxist bootcamps we call “higher education.” They come out hating America, Israel, free markets, and the police. Working-class Americans know the reality of life. They know what works and what doesn’t.
In addition to his own radical views, Mamdani’s radical supporters are coming under scrutiny. Speaking of his views, Mamdani is a follower of the Shia Muslim Twelver sect, the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Twelvers are waiting for the 12th imam, the “hidden imam” known as the Mahdi, to reveal himself and conquer the world in the name of Allah. That would be bad for Christians, Jews, women, and, I hate to break it to them, the LGBTQ community. But Mamdani says he’s a huge supporter of LGBTQ rights. His platform calls for publicly funded transgender surgeries.
Supreme Court upholds Texas age-verification law for adult websites: Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the 6-3 decision for Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which determined that Texas has the right to enforce its age-verification law for pornographic content. The case brought by advocates of the porn industry argued that the law impeded the free speech of adults accessing the content. Thomas's decision explains that this only "incidentally burdens" adults' protected speech, while the main focus is on preventing minors' access to harmful content. This is very similar to the minor burden adults face in accessing alcohol. Tradition has established that sexual content that is harmful to minors but ostensibly not harmful to adults is protected in part and unprotected in part; this decision reinforces that tradition. Writing for the dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wishes for a more perfect law that restricts access to minors without burdening adults.
This is great news!
SCOTUS rules parents have opt-out rights: In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor in favor of parents in Maryland who sued the Montgomery County Board of Education after their petitions to opt their children out of classes that promote LGBTQ ideology was denied. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, "Today, we hold that the parents have shown that they are entitled to a preliminary injunction. A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses 'a very real threat of undermining' the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill." This ruling is a significant victory for both parental rights and religious freedom. It's also a blow to the groomers.
In other news -
Trade deal with China: Donald Trump announced late Thursday night that a trade deal with China had been signed, although he did not provide details. Subsequently, China's Ministry of Commerce announced that it will approve export applications of "controlled items," while the U.S. will ease "restrictive measures" imposed on Beijing. Earlier this month, Trump announced that the U.S. and China were nearing an agreement on rare earth minerals, which are crucial to advanced technologies such as clean energy projects; it is unclear if that is the deal signed this week. For now, details of the agreement are sparse pending more official announcements
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! Next Friday is Independence Day and we'll be celebrating with family and friends! I'm thankful for this nation, thankful to have the privilege to be born and raised here, and thankful for all God is doing in our nation.
