Nebraska Votes in Primary Election Filled With Undercover Plants

This may be one of the most confusing primary elections ever.

The Nebraska Senate Democratic primary Tuesday appears tailor-made to confuse voters.

There wasn’t even supposed to be a contest, thanks to independent populist Dan Osborn running for the Senate. The Nebraska Democratic Party planned to endorse his candidacy this year due to his strong performance in 2024, when he came within seven percentage points of defeating incumbent Republican Senator Deb Fischer and outperformed Kamala Harris’s 21-point loss to Donald Trump in the state.

But then 79-year-old pastor William Forbes entered the race. While Forbes is a registered Democrat, he’s voted for Trump three times and attended a Republican training event earlier this year. Nebraska Democrats were understandably worried, so now retired pharmacy tech Cindy Burbank is running against Forbes.

Burbank said that if she wins the primary, she’ll drop out and endorse Osborn so he has a clear field to take on incumbent Republican Senator Pete Ricketts, whose family is worth billions. Not surprisingly, Republicans are crying foul, calling Burbank’s candidacy a coordinated and unfair means to prop up Osborn.

Republican Secretary of State Bob Evnen tried to kick Burbank off the ballot in March, but she successfully sued to stay on. Burbank also paid the filing fee for a third-party candidate, Mike Marvin, of the Legal Marijuana NOW Party.

Osborn is an Omaha union leader who became popular during a 77-day strike at a Kellogg’s cereal plant in 2021, catapulting him to fame and his strong showing in 2024. A former registered Democrat, he ran as an independent that year in part due to the party’s struggles to convince voters in the Great Plains, and pledges not to caucus with either party if he wins this time around. He’s behind Ricketts by only one percentage point in recent polling.

“The national Democratic brand is toxic among voters in states like Nebraska in the sense that it’s very much identified with the coastal liberal elites on a whole host of issues,” Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, told USA Today. “Nebraska Democrats are adopting this sort of plan B strategy, which is to not run a Democratic candidate at all.”

Will Nebraska voters be able to figure out what’s going on? If Forbes wins the primary, he could siphon away votes from Osborn in November and help Ricketts to victory. If Burbank wins, Nebraska Democrats have to get the word out that she’s supporting Osborn. All of this could easily go wrong.

Trump Admin Sued for Diverting $100 Million in Taxpayer Funds

The Trump administration refuses to answer questions about Freedom 250.

A watchdog group is suing the Trump administration for allegedly using the president’s “Freedom 250” organization as a vehicle to divert funds to his vanity projects without congressional approval.

On Tuesday, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, following unanswered Freedom of Information Act requests filed back in February for records regarding the public funds being used for Freedom 250—the organization overseeing everything from setting up the Grand Prix around the National Mall to Trump’s independence arch. The Department of the Interior never responded to the requests, and now PEER’s lawsuit claims that our money is being used with “with no transparency, no accountability, and no guardrails.”

“America’s 250th anniversary celebration is supposed to be an occasion for strengthening public trust in our democratic institutions, not eroding it,” PEER’s executive director, Tim Whitehouse, said in a statement on Monday. “In contrast, Freedom 250 is a privately managed slush fund.… It epitomizes what is wrong with politics today.”

PEER alleges that the Trump administration is using Freedom 250 to redirect $100 million in taxpayer funds from America 250 without congressional approval, mix private funding and public taxpayer money without oversight, sell “access to President Trump” for up to $2.5 million, solicit foreign donations, and more. PEER also accuses the DOI of pressuring workers to use Freedom 250 branding in their official email sign-offs, which could violate the Hatch Act.

The Trump administration has yet to comment on the lawsuit.

Sotomayor Rips Supreme Court’s “Inappropriate” Decision on Alabama

The Supreme Court is letting another state’s Republican Party steal House seats.

The Supreme Court has cleared the way for Alabama to use a congressional map that disregards one of two majority-Black voting districts in the state—a decision that one justice predicts will cause “chaos” and “confusion.”

All three of the court’s liberal justices dissented against Monday’s order, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned the counterargument. In five concise pages, Sotomayor flamed her conservative colleagues for the ruling, arguing that it was “inappropriate” for the court to alter the state’s voting lines mere days before the primary. She noted that Alabama had already been found to have violated the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of its Black voters.

“The Court today unceremoniously discards District Court’s meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding & careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, noting that the decision will “cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the........

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