Ellen and I chatted about the 3 branches of government. In Ellen's words, "oh, that sounds good." 

Sticking with Hamilton, we're exploring Federalist 9 and 15 today. Federalist 9 is his take on Madison's proposition that the Union guards against factions. 15 is full of Hamilton venting about how the confederacy of colonies was a tragic mess and that a strong federal government was the only way to clean it up. In other words, RELEVANT. 

Welcome Alexander Hamilton to the party, and get ready to be both amused and mystified by his belief that the way we elect presidents is close to perfect. 

Continuing our journey, let's discuss Federalist 51 by James Madison -- The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments (or why we have 3 co-equal branches of government). 

Get excited for Federalist Papers week! We're going to dive into a few of the essays that John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton wrote in order to persuade their fellow Americans that the Constitution was worth ratifying. There were 85 Federalist Papers written in total. We're going to deep dive on 6, beginning today with Federalist 10, written by James Madison. 

We're SO excited about our "How to Be a Citizen" series, and we wanted to bring you some started conversations for you to have with the kids in your lives. I'll be talking with Jane and Ellen here on Patreon. Look for Sarah and her boys on Instagram. First up, here's a conversation on what citizenship means. 

Hackers hijacked the Twitter accounts of a number of major figures, including Barack Obama, Kanye West and Bill Gates, and posted messages asking followers to send them Bitcoin. The messages were clearly a scam but the breach reveals the real vulnerabilities in our communication platforms. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/technology/twitter-hack-bill-gates-elon-musk.html

Security officials announced Thursday that hackers linked to Russia's intelligence services were actively trying to steal information from researchers working to produce coronavirus vaccines in the United States, Britain and Canada.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/uk-us-and-canada-report-russian-cyberspies-may-be-trying-to-steal-vaccine-research/2020/07/16/d7c0dbd6-c765-11ea-a825-8722004e4150_story.html

President Trump demoted his campaign manager Brad Parscale and replaced him with Bill Stepien.

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President Trump held a press conference the Rose Garden to announce the end of special status for Hong Kong. He then launched into a rally speech for over an hour while spending six minutes taking questions. 

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-broke-protocol-attack-joe-biden-rally-style-rose-garden-speech-2020-7

Here’s Ivanka’s super weird Goya tweet

https://static.politico.com/d6/ba/7b02ac764bf8b6f5f22df0b513c0/ivanka-tweet.png

Peter Navarro attacking Anthony Fauci 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/todaysdebate/2020/07/14/anthony-fauci-wrong-with-me-peter-navarro-editorials-debates/5439374002/

The Trump administration abandoned its controversial immigration policy that would require foreign students to return to their home country if they were attending no in-person classes in the fall.

MJ Hager won the Democratic nomination for Texas’s US Senate seat. Jeff Sessions lost the Republican primary to former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been hospitalized for an infection. 

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We have a new episode of The Nuanced Life out today where we talk about what to do when all your friends are getting divorced!

We interrupt SCOTUS week and our commitment to grace for a moment of just feeling our feelings about the policy failures around school reopening. 

In the middle of the night, the Supreme Court allowed the federal government to resume lethal injections.