Great Films. Cinema. Shorts. Life.

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls080491643/

Other (2015) [Short Film; Rodrick Pocowatchit] 10/10

Other (2015) [Short Film; Rodrick Pocowatchit]
https://vimeo.com/165069872
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5128742/

Light News Mon/Tues/Wed/Thurs/Fri/Sat/Sun

Supreme Court strikes down Louisiana law regulating abortion clinics. Chief Justice John Roberts joined with his four more liberal colleagues in ruling that the law requiring doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals violates the abortion right the court first announced in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emaoconnor/supreme-court-upholds-abortion-rights-strikes-louisiana-law
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/us/supreme-court-abortion-louisiana.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/29/supreme-court-abortion-decision-louisiana-law-struck-down.html

Pelosi Requests All-House Briefing from the Director of National Intelligence and Central Intelligence Agency on Press Reports of Russian Bounties on U.S. Troops in Afghanistan
https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/62920-0

NATO officials say they were briefed on Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan — even though Trump claims he wasn't
https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-bounty-us-soldiers-afghanistan-nato-officials-briefed-trump-denies-2020-6

Wisconsin Republicans oppose expanding voting by mail, but 80% of state Republican legislators used absentee ballots in April
https://www.chicagotribune.com/midwest/ct-nw-wisconsin-voting-by-mail-republicans-20200629-e2oqmwo5cjbk7anvlzcw6nyevm-story.html

Problem is with the way this administration works is we can't know the scope of the issues without fired trash like Bolton coming forward. These guys hide everything. We will still be finding out new things years after this administration is out of power.

Reddit bans r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse to make Black people happy. Antisemitism still allowed. And Democrats wonder why Trump has already won.
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/6/29/21304947/reddit-ban-subreddits-the-donald-chapo-trap-house-new-content-policy-rules

WH Says Trump Retweeted White Power Video That He Did Not Know Was A White Power Video To Stand With Demonized Supporters
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/white-house-mcenany-defends-trump-white-power-retweet

We used to run from people wearing masks, now we run from people not wearing them. Total insanity. The mask will not save you from covid. This mask thing is total nonsense. Have any of you spent even a second researching the efficacy and danger or otherwise of those masks, or even the so called virus? ..Do you know there are doctors who say those masks are dangerous for your health?... .Damn sheep. Many of you folks need to go online and research these things instead of just swallowing the official line on everything like damn sheeple.

The House has passed the first significant expansion of the Affordable Care Act since its birth a decade ago, providing Democrats a platform to castigate Trump for his efforts to overturn the landmark law during a pandemic and an election year.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/house-democrats-push-through-first-bill-in-a-decade-expanding-affordable-care-act/2020/06/29/350d3046-ba0f-11ea-8cf5-9c1b8d7f84c6_story.html

He's not wrong: In Joe Biden’s America your job is illegal, you are locked in your home, borders don’t exist, MS-13 lives next door and the police aren’t coming when the mob arrives. This is all of us.
https://twitter.com/mattgaetz/status/1277628850130780160

Daniel Pearl's killer may walk free this week. A British-born man convicted over the gruesome 2002 murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl could walk free later this week after a ruling by Pakistan’s supreme court. The court refused on Monday a government request to suspend a lower court’s ruling exonerating Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh of Pearl’s murder before a 90-day detention order expires on Thursday.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/29/man-jailed-for-killing-daniel-pearl-may-walk-free-this-week

Biden, per pooler @KThomasDC: "I certainly wouldn’t invite Putin to the United States. I would take the issue to the (UN) security council, reveal what Russia had done and I’d work like hell with our allies to impose new sanctions on Russia."
https://twitter.com/mikememoli/status/1277713211748487170

Biden told this group of Wall St. execs that he plans to blow out large parts of Trump's tax cut. “I’m going to get rid of the bulk of Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut and a lot of you may not like that but I’m going to close loopholes like capital gains and stepped up basis."
https://twitter.com/schwartzbCNBC/status/1277711899799498752

The spike in Texas cases hit Artemio Muñiz, chair of the Federation of Hispanic Republicans, who got coronavirus along with his brother and father. Muñiz said the surge is a problem for Trump and Republicans and that Democrats can “absolutely” win Texas.
https://newsweek.com/coronavirus-surges-florida-arizona-texas-imperil-trump-campaign-reboot-1514167

WarnerMedia is selling the iconic CNN Center in Atlanta. "During the pandemic, we have learned a lot about working remotely and we will be looking at space solutions that are more agile for the appropriate teams," execs told employees. Countless people permanently unemployed as rich upper-income employees work from home.

He's right: 'Incredible stupidity': Trump blasts Princeton's decision to strip Woodrow Wilson's name from school
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/29/trump-blasts-princeton-woodrow-wilson-name-344209

"A new strain of flu that has the potential to become pandemic has been identified in China by scientists. It emerged recently and is carried by pigs, but can infect humans, they say."
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53218704

"In Texas, Greg Abbott followed Trump's philosophy of 'see no evil, hear no evil' and do as little testing as possible so it looks like you don't have a problem, and that has come back to hurt Texans in a bad way," @JoaquinCastrotx told me.
ttps://newsweek.com/coronavirus-surges-florida-arizona-texas-imperil-trump-campaign-reboot-1514167

Big indication things with China’s takeover of Hong Kong are getting worse: Today, we are ending exports of U.S. defense and dual-use tech to Hong Kong. We can’t risk these items falling into the hands of the People’s Liberation Army, whose purpose is to uphold the dictatorship of the CCP by any means necessary.
https://www.state.gov/u-s-government-ending-controlled-defense-exports-to-hong-kong/

Twitch has suspended Donald Trump's account
https://www.engadget.com/twitch-suspends-donald-trump-account-174145621.html

Trump’s campaign is suing Pennsylvania election officials over the state’s vote-by-mail rules, just weeks after Democrats overwhelmingly cast ballots that way in a primary.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-29/campaign-update

Cirque du Soleil cuts 3,500 jobs to avoid bankruptcy | The company will now try to restructure while shedding about 95% of its staff.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53221516

Arizona governor orders bars, nightclubs, gyms, movie theaters and water parks to close for at least 30 days over virus.
https://twitter.com/NickRiccardi/status/1277731432098488320

I was White House Staff Sec’y. Every document that goes to POTUS is literally stamped “The President Has Seen” and a record is kept. So, let the briefing docs testify.
https://twitter.com/RepSeanMaloney/status/1277563910787399682

NBA and MLB players are opting out all over the place, cancel the seasons already

If Yemen was 100 people:
- 80 need aid to survive.
- 66 have almost nothing to eat.
- 64 have no access to health care.
- 58 are without clean water.
- 11 are severely malnourished.
But Yemen is not 100 people.
It’s 30.5 million people.
https://twitter.com/Carrasquillo/status/1277731829966090246

GOOD: Approximately 13,400 employees of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services woke to find out they will be furloughed beginning in August, a move that will effectively bring the U.S. immigration system grinding to a halt.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ep4pkw/the-trump-administration-just-furloughed-13400-immigration-workers

- “Arizona has lost control of the epidemic” eclipsing NYC boroughs even on their worst days.
- Texas shuttered bars again after a 79% spike in weekly average infections.
- Florida hit a record 9,585 daily cases topping Italy's peak of 6,153, w/ 3x the population.
https://newsweek.com/coronavirus-surges-florida-arizona-texas-imperil-trump-campaign-reboot-1514167
https://twitter.com/Carrasquillo/status/1277738572150431746

Trump claims he wasn't briefed on Russia bounties as US intel links them to killing of three Marines | Reports say Trump was briefed — as were congressional leaders and American allies overseas
https://www.salon.com/2020/06/29/trump-claims-he-wasnt-briefed-on-russia-bounties-as-us-intel-links-them-to-killing-of-three-marines/

—@TuckerCarlson is still airing weeks-old footage on his show. Note this is from May 28, more than a month ago.
https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1277754203008622595

Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie (@SDinwiddie_25) tells @TheAthleticNBA he has tested positive for coronavirus and has symptoms, creating doubt over his status for NBA restart.
https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/1277724324040974336

I agree with this, this is the proper venue for this: The NBA is planning to paint Black Lives Matter on the court inside both sidelines in all three arenas it will use at Disney in Orlando when it resumes the 2019-20 season late next month.
https://twitter.com/wojespn/status/1277743489657253890

Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders are so unhinged that US officials think the president is 'delusional' and a national security threat
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-delusional-calls-with-foreign-leaders-national-security-threat-cnn-2020-6
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-jaw-dropping-calls-with-foreign-leaders-threaten-national-security-cnn-report-claims-2020-06-29

Biden to industry donors "I'm going to get rid of most of Trump's tax cuts and a lot of you may not like that"
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/29/biden-tells-donors-he-will-end-most-of-trumps-tax-cuts.html

[DeAndre Jordan] Found out last night and confirmed again today that I’ve tested positive for Covid while being back in market. As a result of this, I will not be in Orlando for the resumption of the season.
https://twitter.com/DeAndre/status/1277777538312478720

Ian Desmond (MLB, Colorado Rockies, not well known) is opting out of playing in MLB this season. In addition to Covid-19 he cites the MLB’s rampant racism, sexism, homophobia, cheating scandals, and labor wars.
https://www.instagram.com/i_dez20/?hl=en

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey announces there will be limits on gatherings of 50 or more people beginning at 8 p.m. tonight for the next month. The Arizona #Dbacks open the 2020 season in 25 days. Arizona has had more than 3,000 new COVID-19 cases in five of the past seven days.
https://twitter.com/BNightengale/status/1277745564310855682

Trump Received Written Briefing in February - Earlier Than Thought - On  Russian Bounties That Resulted In The Killings Of Three US Marines In A Truck Bombing In 2019, Before Trump's G7 Invite To Putin
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/us/politics/trump-russia-plot-afghanistan.html
https://apnews.com/425e43fa0ffdd6e126c5171653ec47d1
https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-knew-russia-bounties-2019-before-trumps-g7-invite-putin-1514259

Republicans have been skipping House Intelligence meetings for months
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/29/republicans-house-intelligence-345212

Trump attacks Republicans who don't support him as 'stupid people' as president plummets in polls
https://www.independent.co.uk/us-election-2020/trump-polls-latest-approval-rating-republicans-2020-election-second-term-a9591886.html

Suggest that a small percentage of the people who support an avowed racist who pursues openly racist policies might be racists themselves and you're labelled a member of an out of touch coastal elite that despises ordinary Americans. Call members of your own party stupid and you're a strong leader.

Goldman Sachs says a national mask mandate could slash infections and save economy from a 5% hit
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/goldman-sachs-says-a-national-mask-mandate-could-slash-infections-and-save-economy-from-a-5percent-hit.html

I need to just point this out. To say that they worship satan is not exactly correct. They worship the idea of the “adversary”. Not any sort of metaphorical lord of the underworld. The worship the idea of essentially an adversary standing in your way, which must be overcome through logical thought.

Amy McGrath has narrowly won the Democratic nomination in Kentucky to take on Senator Mitch McConnell, fending off a challenge from a progressive rival, Charles Booker. I really don't see any Democrat beating McConnell, but McGrath, a centre-right Democrat has a greater chance of making it a close race then the deranged antisemitic nutjob who was also an African-Americans which cancelled him out in a mostly white conservative alt-right right-wing state like Kentucy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/us/politics/kentucky-senate-mcgrath-booker.html

Mary Trump’s Tell-All Book Temporarily Blocked in Court
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mary-trumps-tell-all-book-temporarily-blocked-in-court/

A Massive Star Has Seemingly Vanished from Space With No Explanation: Astronomers are trying to figure out whether the star collapsed into a black hole without going supernova, or if it disappeared in a cloud of dust.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dyzyez/a-massive-star-has-seemingly-vanished-from-space-with-no-explanation

Senate strips provision from intelligence bill requiring campaigns to report foreign election help
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/30/politics/senate-removes-ban-foreign-election-help/index.html

Trump cancels Alabama rally over coronavirus fears
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-alabama-rally-cancel-coronavirus-jeff-sessions-a9594366.html

Joe Biden invokes his late son's military service as he suggests Trump 'unfit to be president' over Russia claims
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/biden-son-beau-trump-russia-bounty-2020-election-a9594381.html

Good time for a reminder of what the then-Republican-controlled House tried to do after Trump was elected: With No Warning, House Republicans Vote to Gut Independent Ethics Office | House Republicans, overriding their top leaders, voted on Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail. The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/us/politics/with-no-warning-house-republicans-vote-to-hobble-independent-ethics-office.html

In the United States: Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".[9]-Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization | Peer review on Foundations of Geopolitics©1997. Supposedly the book that Putin is using as a loose guide for USSR reunification
https://web.archive.org/web/20160607175004/https://www2.gwu.edu/%7Eieresgwu/assets/docs/demokratizatsiya%20archive/GWASHU_DEMO_12_1/John%20Dunlop%20Aleksandr%20Dugin's%20Foundations%20of%20Geopolitics.pdf

And people think the Cold War just ended? no. The Russians are winning the long game hard right now. All that celebrating over Reagan bankrupting the USSR with the race to build as many missiles as possible. The US thought that was the end of it. The Cold War never ended for Russia. It never ended for Putin. He's been plotting revenge since the fall of the USSR, and has risen to power with one driving thought: destroy the USA.

Also, a reminder for everyone: We had a spy in Russia that could literally take pictures of documents on Putin's desk, and the CIA had to pull him out because they were so worried Trump would inadvertently (or maybe not inadvertently..) give him up after he just blurted out intelligence Israel gave to us about Syria when he had Kislyak and Lavrov, Russian ambassador to the United States and Russia's foreign minister, in the Oval Office the day after he had Comey fired. That spy was how we knew for a fact Russia was interfering in our election.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-kremlin-spy-trump-1458461

Germany still has massive influence over Europe, Taliban currently controls more of Afghanistan than any time since 2002 and are really the de facto leaders of Afghanistan, Vietnam is 'communist'...

Major League Baseball has informed Minor League Baseball that it will not be having its affiliated Minor League teams with players for the 2020 season. As a result, there will not be a Minor League Baseball season in 2020.
https://twitter.com/MiLB/status/1278070823203504130

Update: The Indians will continue to pay their minor leaguers $400 per week through the end of July. That's now 27 of 30 teams paying their minor leaguers past the end of June.
https://twitter.com/kyleaglaser/status/1278066874140356609?s=21

Beyond Meat founder: Our plant-based meat is on its way to being cheaper than animal protein
https://finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/beyond-meat-founder-plantbased-meat-is-on-its-way-to-being-cheaper-than-animal-protein-140141254.html

Good, we should leave Syria, and Afghanistan: Russian forces are encroaching on U.S. troop-controlled territory in eastern Syria — part of what officials say is a deliberate campaign to squeeze the U.S. military out of the region, according to two current U.S. officials and one former U.S. official. Remember Trump announced pre-covid19 that the US was withdrawing from Syria.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/30/russians-us-troops-syria-uproar-trump-345584

I am not protein deficient.
https://i.redd.it/jj6nkmcvt2851.jpg

Here's a 2007 CDC pandemic plan warning that erratic social distancing rules would cause economic and social damage without containing the disease
https://cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mitigation-sm.pdf

Democrats Fear Pandemic's Effect on Biden's Coalition of Black, Latino Voters. Falling voter registration in key states.
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-fear-pandemics-effect-bidens-coalition-black-latino-voters-1514509

Tencent (China!) is launching a competing service with Twitch and the now-defunct Mixer called Trovo. Naturally, everyone thinks it's a great idea to endorse Tencent because everyone loves Chinese money even if it means selling out. How hopeless.

Far too little far too late: Facebook is “designating a violent U.S.-based anti-government network (the Boogaloo movement) as a dangerous organization and banning it from our apps.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-remove-anti-government-boogaloo-groups-n1232579

The Trump campaign has spent more than $325,000 on ads featuring Brad Parscale's Facebook and Instagram pages, most of it in last month. Parscale profiteering.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/us/politics/brad-parscale-trump.html

If a president's advisers only brought him intelligence that reflected a consensus of the intelligence agencies, or that had been fully "verified," to borrow from a word administration officials are using today, they would bring him very little intelligence.

This rejection from Boris Johnson re Trump’s push for Russia’s G8 reentry reads entirely different given he surely was briefed on the intel. “Until it ceases aggressive & destabilizing activity that threatens the safety of U.K. citizens and the collective security of our allies,"
https://twitter.com/biannagolodryga/status/1278074078788804613

Ideological diversity is well and good, but in my experience, hyper-engaged political junkies understand "the other side" way better than they understand the low-interest voters who hate talking politics but actually swing elections.

Alcohol has killed more people than any virus ever could: “On Tuesday, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed into legislation HF 2540, which makes cocktails-to-go permanently legal for both takeout and delivery.” Same legislature rejected mail-in ballots for all registered voters for Nov 2020 election.
https://fortune.com/2020/06/30/to-go-cocktails-takeout-drinks-alcohol-coronvirus/

The Treasury Department had tremendous success developing an understanding of the “hawala” system of money transfers following 9/11. If they've got the goods here this intelligence would appear to be much more solid than we've been led to believe: Analysts have used other evidence to conclude that the transfers were likely part of an effort to offer payments to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan.
https://nytimes.com/2020/06/30/us/politics/russian-bounties-afghanistan-intelligence.html

The good news: no more Steve King!!! The bad news: our new opponent's most coveted endorsement compares homosexuality to pedophilia and supports conversion therapy. Chip in to our campaign that Stands Tall for All in #IA04 and stand up to this hate: http://secure.actblue.com/donate/jdslaunch
https://twitter.com/PreetBharara/status/1278072769889140736?s=20

Was just talking to an epidemiologist about return to schools. And like most every aspect of this pandemic, those severely impacted/left behind will be lower income and communities of color.
https://twitter.com/lbarronlopez/status/1278071314624974851?s=20

Everyone wore masks on their way to the podium & VP Pence continued to encourage Americans to wear face coverings when social distancing isn't possible. This is a change from Friday's briefing. Pence made the new plea more emphatically Sunday in Dallas and is now repeating it.

Of Cubans who migrated to Miami before 1980, 72% say they’re Republican and only 35% of those younger than 40 say they are. Only 23% of those younger Cuban-Americans identify as Democrats, and 40% are independents.
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-30/trump-woos-cuba-hardliners-despite-their-waning-clout-in-florida

Demand for virus tests is again outpacing supply. If it persists and shortages are not resolved, turnaround times for test results will rise, tests will be rationed, and the number of infections that are never counted in official stats will grow
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/06/us-coronavirus-testing-could-fail-again/613675/

The White House is working to set up a Gang of 8 briefing for TOMORROW on the Russia/Afghanistan bounty situation, Hill sources tell me. They have not been briefed yet. Gang of 8: Pelosi, McCarthy, Schumer, McConnell, Schiff, Rubio, Nunes and Warner.
https://twitter.com/JakeSherman/status/1278068364632621057

All major global military powers are going to be jocking for increased global influence and power all the time. Its not just the US and Russia either, China in particular is out in a big way right now as well as are others.

How the fuck weren't intelligence officials sounding the alarm when they were watching Russian intelligence and military entities aid Taliban and other Islamic militants in conducting attacks against US and coalition forces??? And when three US soldiers were killed as a direct result of the bounty agreement?

Another virus with pandemic potential linked to livestock. I wonder how long will it take for people to start seeing the pattern.
https://khn.org/morning-breakout/china-researchers-discover-new-swine-flu-with-pandemic-potential-india-approves-vaccine-for-human-trials/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/30/asia/china-swine-flu-pandemic-intl-hnk-scli-scn/index.html
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/swine-flu-strain-human-pandemic-potential-increasingly-found-pigs-china
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/world/asia/h1n1-swine-flu-virus-china-pig.html

The Other Side of the Mountain Story: A Native Perspective on Mt. Rushmore
https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/the-other-side-of-the-mountain-story-a-native-perspective-on-mt-rushmore/

Democrats Just Flipped A Kentucky State Senate Seat Republicans Held For 25 Years
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kentucky-democrats-flip-state-senate-suburbs_n_5efb5bf0c5b612083c5366a5?ncid=APPLENEWS00001

A handful of major donors footed the bill for nearly $500,000 worth of Vice President Mike Pence’s legal fees related to the special counsel’s investigation, according to a financial filing released Tuesday. | The majority of the trust’s cash came from three donors who each gave $100,000 — Michael K. Hayde and Laura Khouri, real estate executives from Southern California who have donated nearly $3 million to national Republican candidates and groups since the beginning of the 2016 election, and Herbert Simon, a mall developer from Indiana and the owner of a professional basketball team who has donated more than $560,000 in that time, primarily to Democrats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/us/politics/pence-mueller.html

Colorado is a top Senate target for Democrats. But after some stumbles, former Gov. John Hickenlooper is facing a tougher-than-expected primary contest against Andrew Romanoff.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/30/us/elections/results-colorado-primary-elections.html

Meanwhile, in New York City, elections officials said they won’t begin counting all the absentee ballots from last week’s primaries until next week.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/23/us/elections/results-new-york-primary-elections.html

In Utah's Republican gubernatorial primary, former Governor and presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is seeking the gubernatorial nomination in a tight contest with Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox in a race that polls show as a virtual dead heat.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/30/us/elections/results-utah-primary-elections.html

In Oklahoma, there is a mildly competitive Republican primary in Oklahoma's 5th Congressional District to take on incumbent Democratic Representative Kendra Horn, with a runoff in August if no candidate secures a majority of the vote tonight, but the major vote is State Question 802, which is a proposition on the ballot asking whether the state should accept the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/30/us/elections/results-oklahoma-primary-elections.html

Russians grant Putin right to extend his rule until 2036 in landslide vote, initial results show
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-putin-vote-idUSKBN24254A

Trump was reportedly briefed on possible Russian bounties on US troops on February 27 — the same day he had a 45-minute meeting with producers behind a dramatized play about ex-FBI members Peter Strzok and Lisa Page
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-briefing-possible-russian-bounties-cpac-play-fbi-lovebirds-2020-6

100.4 degree Arctic temperature record confirmed as study suggests Earth is warmest in at least 12,000 years
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arctic-temperature-record-100-4-degrees-earth-warmest-12000-years/

Oklahoma voters approve Medicaid expansion at the ballot
https://oklahoman.com/article/5665790/oklahoma-voters-approve-medicaid-expansion-at-the-ballot

Michael Glassner -- the Trump campaign's chief operating officer, who previously handled Trump's rallies -- has been reassigned to deal with legal affairs during the homestretch of the campaign. Aides began making plans to put Glassner in this new role following the rally on June 20 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Trump spoke to an unfilled arena -- a scene about which he has continued to fume. Though there were questions about campaign manager Brad Parscale's future, Glassner was seen as a potential target as well, given the prominent role he played in orchestrating these events.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/30/politics/michael-glassner-trump-campaign-tulsa-rally/index.html

'Where are you Roger Ailes?' Trump Aksks Where Roger Ailes Is. He Died Three Years Ago.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-wonders-where-is-roger-ailes-who-has-been-dead-three-years

Hickenlooper to take on Gardner in Colorado Senate race
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/30/us/elections/results-colorado-primary-elections.html

46 million girls went missing in India, says UNFPA report. The highest figure in the world
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/46-million-girls-went-missing-in-india/article31957348.ece

Alabama Republicans have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block a federal judge’s order that the state cannot prohibit counties from offering curbside voting during the July 14 runoff.
https://www.al.com/news/2020/06/alabama-asks-us-supreme-court-to-block-curbside-voting-ruling.html

Bird found feeding chick cigarette butt in 'devastating' image: 'Cigarette butts were one of the most typical item of all types of rubbish gathered from beaches around the world, according to a report by Sea Conservancy in 2015.'
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/bird-cigarette-butt-chick-picture-florida-beach-photograph-rubbish-a8980676.html

Italy Seizes World Record 14-Tonne Of ISIS-Made Amphetamines From Syria Worth A Billion Dollars. Democrats Are The People Who Support Drug Legalization. Drug Money Funds Crime And Terrorism.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/italy-seizes-world-record-14-tonne-of-isis-made-amphetamines-from-syria-2255225

New strain of swine flu virus is rapidly spreading to people eating pigs.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-nyt-new-swine-flu-spread-china-20200630-ucf67avdhffnzkqxfxndtsczou-story.html

GO VEGAN. STOP EATING ANIMALS. STOP SMOKING EVERYTHING. STOP DRINKING. STOP DRUGGING. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN HEALTH.

50 killed in Ethiopia protests over singer's death
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-protests/50-killed-in-ethiopia-protests-over-singers-death-idUSKBN2411DO

Mississippi Governor Signs Bill Abandoning State Flag With Confederate Emblem
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mississippi-governor-confederate-flag_n_5efbbffec5b6acab28485a17

Judge Throws Out Trump Rule That Blocked Central American Asylum Seekers at Southern Border
https://www.thedailybeast.com/judge-throws-out-trump-immigration-rule-that-blocked-central-american-asylum-seekers-at-southern-border

The Trump administration just lent a troubled trucking company $700 million. The company was worth only $70 million
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/01/business/yrc-federal-loan/index.html

Russian Bounties Strain Veterans’ Support for Trump. It should've been broken when he mocked a POW, or when he disparaged a Gold-star family, or when he abdicated his responsibility to "Obama and the generals" when the Yemen raid he green-lit was disasterous, or when he couldn't remember Sgt. Johnson's name to his widow that was sitting right in front of him, or when...
https://www.courthousenews.com/russian-bounties-strain-veterans-support-for-trump/

Trump dismisses Russian bounty allegations as a 'hoax'
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/505379-trump-dismisses-russian-bounty-allegations-as-a-hoax

Do not believe: US Intelligence Services, US Military, Congressional Republicans and Democrats, Staff from the White House. Do believe: This orange sack of shit, known for lying with each breath he’s ever taken and for slobbering Putin’s knob at every opportunity. Don’t forget the Taliban. They’re saying it’s a hoax too. So for those counting that makes Trump, Putin, and the Taliban vs. the field. Who you got? And the virus is a hoax. 100,000 Americans didn’t die from it. But it’s also China’s fault for spreading the virus. Also the Democrats and Bill Gates created the virus in a lab and all the governments of the world destroyed their economies just to make Trump look bad.

Today, the Crazy Horse Memorial has been under construction since 1948. It is located on private land some 17 miles from Mount Rushmore in Custer County, South Dakota. The enormous monument is being carved from Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills, in an area with sacred significance for some Oglala Lakota. And if it is ever completed, it will tower above the presidents at Mount Rushmore. Meanwhile, though, not all Lakota people are on board with the project. Some are angered by what they see as profiteering from the name of the legendary ancestor. Others believe the monument represents a desecration of land and culture – and something Crazy Horse himself would not have accepted. “[The makers of the memorial] don’t respect our culture, because we didn’t give permission for someone to carve the sacred Black Hills where our burial grounds are,” Elaine Quiver, a descendant of Crazy Horse’s family, told Voice of America in 2003. “They were there for us to enjoy, and they were there for us to pray. But it wasn’t meant to be carved into images, which is very wrong for all of us…” But despite the controversy surrounding the memorial, it should provide benefit to local communities in the form of associated cultural and educational facilities. These include the University and Medical Training Center for the North American Indian – a satellite campus of the University of South Dakota – and the Indian Museum of North America. The memorial foundation has also donated $1.2 million in scholarships, mostly to Native American students.
https://historicalpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/10.-Thunderhead-Mountain-the-Crazy-Horse-Memorial.jpg
https://historicalpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/12.-mountain_monument_crazy-horse-memorial.jpg
https://historicalpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/14.-Face-of-Crazy-Horse.jpg
https://historicalpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/18.-Crazy-Horse-face.jpg
https://historicalpost.com/anthropology-and-history/huge-crazy-horse-monument-years-to-complete/20/

Sigh....J.R. Smith signed with the Lakers....

Taliban commanders have confirmed that Russia has offered financial and material support to its members in exchange for attacking US forces in Afghanistan. Not even the Taliban are denying it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-did-pay-extremists-attack-american-soldiers-taliban-sources-say-2020-7
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html

Hundreds of elephants dead in mysterious mass die-off - Botswana’s government is yet to test the remains of the dead animals in what has been described as a ‘conservation disaster’.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/01/more-than-350-elephants-dead-in-mysterious-mass-die-off-botswana-aoe

McEnany says Trump's message to military families worried about reports about Russia offering bounties for US troops is that it's "unverified." Imagine the reaction from Republicans if Obama administration had been this callous during Benghazi.

By a 1 percent margin, Oklahoma voters expand Medicaid to low-income residents
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/1-percent-margin-oklahoma-voters-expand-medicaid-low-income-residents-n1232645

Trump claims he's 'all for masks' after repeately refusing to publicly wear one himself for months
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-claims-hes-all-for-masks-after-refusing-to-wear-one-himself-2020-7

Trump says coronavirus-19 will "just disappear" at some point
https://www.axios.com/trump-coronavirus-disappear-cac3b50f-14f5-435a-932b-32e61f448554.html

DeSantis signed into law a measure that permanently reverses a ban on sunscreen imposed by Key West to help protect reefs and the fragile ecosystem
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/florida-governor-chooses-side-in-sunscreen-debate-slather-away/2255996/

Trump's resistance to intel warnings about Russia led his national security team to verbally brief him less often on Russia-related threats to the US
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/01/politics/trump-intel-briefings-russia/index.html

The number of active duty military personnel who have tested positive for coronavirus has more than doubled since June 10, per DOD.
https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1278436497058914311?s=20

Pennsylvania's high court turns down Republican lawmakers' effort to end governor's shutdown order.
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1278435931373088769?s=20

My shouted question at the end of this putrid display: “With 130 thousand dead how can you call it a succcess? ⁦” @PressSec ⁩ walked off.
https://twitter.com/BrianKarem/status/1278435871109394432?s=20

While Trump’s rally ended up having far fewer than 19,000 attendees, the documents make it clear that the Trump campaign went ahead with the event even as health officials were projecting that it could literally lead to deaths.
https://twitter.com/weareoversight/status/1278435363653136385?s=20
https://www.americanoversight.org/document/tulsa-oklahoma-covid-19-transmission-and-death-estimates-related-to-trump-campaign-rally

Another problem w this colossally spectacular fail in leadership is that Dorian actually did make landfall in the US. In North Carolina. We don't get to hear about how Dorian was eastern NC's 3rd hurricane in 4 yrs; NC is still deep in recovery mode. This takes up all the oxygen
https://twitter.com/JasonLeopold/status/1278400564733198336?s=20
https://www.noaa.gov/foia/reading-room/hurricane-dorian-related-records/eighth

Ex-felons’ voting rights on hold in Florida after federal court agrees to hear DeSantis’ Amendment 4 appeal
https://orlandosentinel.com/politics/2020-election/os-ne-amendment-4-stay-20200701-r5gjfmv27jfe5fm5xuvjtgfeua-story.html

Why are the Republicans lawmakers silent on all the evil/corruption/destruction/etc? They both agree with it and don't care.

U.S. House passes legislation that would penalize banks doing business with Chinese officials involved in the national security law the country recently imposed on Hong Kong
https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1278440478061592577

Reminder: Mount Rushmore was built on land that belonged to the Lakota tribe and sculpted by a man who had strong bonds with the Ku Klux Klan. It features the faces of 2 U.S. presidents who were slaveholders.

The U.S. House passed, by unanimous consent, the extension of the Paycheck Protection Program to Aug. 8.
It now heads to Trump's desk for his signature.

The NFL is shortening the 2020 preseason from four games down to two games, per @ProFootballTalk. Weeks 1 and 4 will be eliminated.
https://twitter.com/MySportsUpdate/status/1278423125848399874?s=20

GRASSLEY: "When this president starts talking about the future, instead of the past, start talking about the 329 million Americans and not just about himself, I think that you're going to see this very dramatically turn around."
https://twitter.com/ryanstruyk/status/1278439164569161729?s=20

Dr. Fauci says drinking inside bars is one of the most dangerous things you can do right now. Silent on the fact that alcohol has destroyed more people than covid19 could ever dream of and is a major root cause of violence and death and rape and wrecked health etc across the entire fucking globe. Which is why intelligent people dismiss public health officials as liars.

HUD defies Supreme Court decision in Bostock case with rule allowing anti-trans discrimination in homeless shelters
https://www.washingtonblade.com/2020/07/01/hud-appears-to-defy-bostock-ruling-with-anti-trans-rule-for-homeless-shelters/

YEP: RJC Calls on Biden to Condemn Antisemitic BLM Chants
https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status/1278495686581989376?s=20

At what point will the White House stop misleadingly referring to these outbreaks as “embers”? Hospitals are surpassing ICU capacity in Houston. The Sunbelt is burning. This is like a fire department telling you your house is not on fire when you call for help — just “embers.” (press secretary spewing lies)

Mark Zuckerberg recently told Facebook employees he expects boycotting advertisers to “be back on the platform soon enough," and that he won't change policies “because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue.”

Tonight a New York appellate court vacated the restraining order against Simon & Schuster, publisher of the forthcoming book written by the president's niece.
https://twitter.com/rcfp/status/1278480161034436610?s=20

"The Trump campaign isn’t trying to grow his support among Black and Latino voters—even they understand that is a fool’s errand. ... [T]hey want to diminish overall Black and Latino turnout to make it easier to win the election with only white voters."
https://crooked.com/articles/donald-trump-secret-plan-to-win/

Afghan Contractor Handed Out Russian Cash to Kill Americans | A small-time businessman became a key middleman for bounties on coalition troops in Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence reports say. Friends saw him grow rich, but didn’t know how. An Afghan contractor is named in American intel reports and confirmed by Afghan officials as a key middleman who for years handed out money from a Russian military intel unit to reward Taliban-linked fighters for targeting American troops in Afghanistan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/asia/afghan-russia-bounty-middleman.html

“Part of the revolutionary work of Hamilton is that it provides a sense of joyful, celebratory ownership of a country in which citizenship has been, officially and unofficially, so often conflated with whiteness.”
https://theundefeated.com/features/five-years-ago-hamilton-turned-a-revolution-into-a-revelation-what-now/

"Some doctors believe the culprit is a neurological condition that may affect up to 15% of all Covid-19 patients" | Meet the "long-haulers," the young and healthy Covid-19 patients who never got better.  I interviewed 24 of them. A Mount Sinai doctor says many may have developed post-viral dysautonomia, a neurological condition.
https://wsj.com/articles/three-months-in-these-patients-are-still-ravaged-by-covids-fallout-11593612004

The Supreme Court will keep secret grand jury testimony collected by former special counsel Robert Mueller out of House Democrats' hands until after the November presidential election to protect Republicans. If voters learn from the mouth of Republicans that Trump and Republicans conspired with Russia to rig the elections, voters might now want tovote for Trump and Republicans, and the Republican-controlled Supreme Court can't have that.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/mueller-investigation-russia-probe-trump-supreme-court-testimony-congress-a9597911.html

Trump Campaign T-Shirts Display Nazi-Inspired Symbol
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-campaign-election-t-shirt-nazi-1514950

Every damn time. It really is unbelievable. You'd think that at least once they could do something without it being some subtle (or not so subtle) nod to white supremacy. Obviously, this is no coincidence.

Herman Cain Hospitalized With COVID-19 Days After Attending Trump’s Tulsa Rally
https://www.thedailybeast.com/herman-cain-hospitalized-with-covid-19-days-after-attending-trumps-tulsa-rally

Ghislaine Maxwell, Associate of Jeffrey Epstein, Is Arrested | Ms. Maxwell was accused of helping Mr. Epstein to recruit, groom and then sexually abuse girls, one as young as 14.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/nyregion/ghislaine-maxwell-arrest-jeffrey-epstein.html

Twenty-five positive tests out of 351 players tested since June 23. Out of 884 team staff tested from June 23-29, 10 have tested positive.
https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/1278728595050049536

YEP: Speaker Pelosi: The president himself is a hoax
https://www.msnbc.com/stephanie-ruhle/watch/speaker-pelosi-the-president-himself-is-a-hoax-86810181720

Republican-controlled Veterans' Administgration refuses to suspend scam colleges that do not provide legitimate degrees from accessing GI Bill benefits
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/07/02/va-backs-down-plan-suspend-university-phoenix-other-colleges-accessing-gi-bill-benefits/

In Whiplash-Inducing Reversal, Abbott Requires Masks In COVID-Ravaged Texas
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/in-whiplash-inducing-reversal-abbott-requires-masks-in-covid-ravaged-texas

Lest we forget, Abbott had previously *overruled* mayors who wanted to require masks locally, and explicitly forbidden cities to do so.
https://cnn.com/2020/06/18/health/texas-coronavirus-face-masks-abbott-mayors/index.html

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has confirmed an AP report that some service members mobilized to D.C. in response to the unrest over the killing of George Floyd were issued bayonets to kill Americans. Defense documents show some were not trained in riot response.
https://apnews.com/62e1aa26fe5043a63441dcacea70703e

Manhattan prosecutors are attempting to revive their criminal case against Paul Manafort, arguing in a filing made that they have legal standing to bring the indictment even though a state court judge dismissed it six months ago on double jeopardy grounds.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/paul-manafort-new-york-trump-pardon/2020/07/02/97f2197c-bca0-11ea-80b9-40ece9a701dc_story.html

America Spends Billions To Get The Best Intel In The World But Can’t Make Trump Read It | Trump had only 41 “daily” intelligence briefings on his schedule during the first half of 2020 — an average of just one and a half per week
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-intel-briefings_n_5efe4bd8c5b6acab284d73bf

The NBA is closing in on signing off on a second “bubble” in Chicago for the eight teams that were not invited to play in Orlando, enabling mini-training camps and subsequent games against other clubs with a target date of September, sources tell ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan.
https://twitter.com/wojespn/status/1278790366624452608

Supreme Court, on 5-4 Vote, Blocks Federal District Courts Rules Easing Voting in Alabama Primary in Light of COVID-19
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=112775

If the court can't fucking hold in person oral arguments (the shitstain supreme court is currently working remotely) then none of the supreme court decisions are valid. All their recent decisions were made AT HOME. IF THE SUPREME COURT REFUSES TO GO TO THE ACTUAL SUPREME COURT AND WORK, THEN NONE OF THEIR RULINGS ARE VALID. SOMEBODY PLEASE PUT A BULLET IN THEIR BRAINS ALREADY. THE. JUSTICES. REFUSE. TO. WORK. IN. PERSON. BECAUSE. OF. COVID19. YET. THEY. JUST. RULED. THAT. REPUBLICANS. ARE. ALLOWED. TO. BAN. MAIL-IN. BALLOTS. I got so mad when I saw so many idiots praising Roberts on the DACA and LA abortion. He's continually been an enemy to voting rights, this plus the Wisconsin decision.

This post puts the ruling in a broader context. It's in line with 5-4 SCOTUS decision in RNC v. DNC about the Wisconsin primary. Supreme Court majority is not siding with voters, even during (especially during) a pandemic. This is a big deal. More here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3604668

Mike Pence's trip to Arizona this week had to be postponed by a day after several Secret Service agents who helped organize the visit either tested positive for coronavirus or were showing symptoms of being infected.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret-service-agents-preparing-for-pence-arizona-trip-contracted-coronavirus/2020/07/02/8029280c-bc97-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html

Florida's Miami-Dade County imposes nightly curfew to try and slow the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the region. The announcement comes the same day that health officials reported more than 10,000 new cases statewide.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-s-miami-dade-county-use-nightly-curfew-fight-growing-n1232856?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_np

Trump's campaign ready to cancel his convention rally to avoid a 'Tulsa-like humiliation'
https://theweek.com/speedreads/923605/trumps-campaign-reportedly-ready-cancel-convention-rally-avoid-tulsalike-humiliation

Dallas Choir Members Tested Positive for COVID-19 Ahead of Performance for Mike Pence
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/7/2/headlines/dallas_choir_members_tested_positive_for_covid_19_ahead_of_performance_for_mike_pence

Leftists aren’t giving Joe Biden credit for a radical tax plan that goes after the indolent rich — Biden’s unapologetic liberalism and progressivism would nearly double the average tax rate paid by nonworking millionaires and aid the most vulnerable
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/liberals-arent-giving-joe-biden-credit-for-a-radical-tax-plan-that-goes-after-the-indolent-rich-2020-07-02

Puerto Rico - whose citizens are American citizens - declares state of emergency as drought leaves 140,000 without running water
https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/infrastructure/505082-puerto-rico-declares-state-of-emergency-cuts

Pence: Florida can thank Trump for being prepared to handle COVID cases
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article243970892.html

Every year during December 31st and the 4th of July several dogs are lost trying to escape from firework noise, only some of them are lucky to be found by shelters. Please choose soundless fireworks when possible to prevent this.
https://abcnews4.com/news/local/animal-shelters-taking-in-pets-spooked-by-fireworks-thunder

What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July? By Frederick Douglass
https://npr.org/2020/07/03/884832594/video-frederick-douglass-descendants-read-his-fourth-of-july-speech

Stacey Abrams on long lines to vote: "It’s a Poll Tax when someone has to risk an entire day’s wage"
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/stacey-abrams-on-long-lines-to-vote-it-s-a-poll-tax-when-someone-has-to-risk-an-entire-day-s-wage-86941253741

After months of inquiry, Trump campaign refuses to return illegal foreign donation | Following two published reports and months of follow-up conversations via phone and email, the Trump campaign has consistently refused to answer the question of what happened to an unlawful $2,800 donation which ended up on its balance sheets in 2019. The most recent Federal Election Commission (FEC) records indicate that the Trump campaign has still not disgorged Turkish national Rabia Kazan's 2019 donation.
https://www.salon.com/2020/07/03/after-months-of-inquiry-trump-campaign-still-appears-to-have-not-returned-illegal-foreign-donation/
https://www.salon.com/2020/05/04/trump-campaign-has-not-returned-illegal-donation-from-foreign-national-fec-records-show/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rogersollenberger/she-shunned-islam-and-was-embraced-by-trump-world-now-shes
http://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?cycle=2020&data_type=processed&committee_id=C00580100&recipient_name=kazan&two_year_transaction_period=2020&line_number=F3P-28A
http://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?cycle=2020&data_type=processed&committee_id=C00580100&recipient_name=kazan&two_year_transaction_period=2020&line_number=F3P-28A

The White House repeatedly denied the CDC permission to brief the public on the coronavirus, report says
https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-denied-permission-to-brief-public-about-coronavirus-yahoo-2020-7

I hate sore losers. Amy McGrath didn't cheat to win. Democratic establishment didn't cheat Charles Booker out of winning. Both candidates presented a platform to the people of Kentucky and they picked. The fact Amy McGrath wasn't congratulated is a terrible look for Booker, idc!
https://twitter.com/WonderKing82/status/1278719364594835456?s=09

A number of supermarkets in the UK have removed some coconut water and oil from their shelves after it emerged the products were made with fruit picked by monkeys.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53276071

China's Second Wave of Coronavirus Declining
https://time.com/5862482/china-beijing-coronavirus-second-wave-covid19-xinfadi/

Oglala Sioux Tribe Votes to Ban Trump, South Dakota Gov. from Mount Rushmore
https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/oglala-sioux-tribe-votes-to-ban-president-trump-south-dakota-gov-from-mount-rushmore/

MLB and the MLBPA have announced the results from the first round of COVID-19 testing. There were 38 positive tests (31 players, 7 staff members) out of 3,185 samples collected, a rate of 1.2%. 19 different clubs had one or more positive tests.
https://twitter.com/Feinsand/status/1279154926942388225?s=19

Joaquin Phoenix is a living legend. He uses his large platform for the greater good, and to speak up on not only humanitarian issues, but issues regarding all species. He’s a true vegan king, and we should all strive to be like him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ptPnrROTpk

MLB has 38 positive COVID-19 tests as training resumes; 31 players and 7 staff among 19 teams.

Aurora's interim police chief has fired two of the three officers who posed for a photo reenacting a chokehold at the site of Elijah McClain's violent arrest — the third already had resigned — and terminated another who received the photo.
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/07/03/elijah-mcclain-aurora-police-photos-officers/

Biden becomes emotional speaking to NEAToday, largest labor union in the nation: Everything Changed When the World Saw George Floyd Say 'Mama, I Can't Breathe' https://newsweek.com/biden-everything-changed-when-world-saw-george-floyd-say-mama-i-cant-breathe-1515376

Many of the seats at Trump’s speech tonight at Mount Rushmore are being ziptied together, guaranteeing no social distancing for scores of people attending the event.
https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/1279168956339798018?s=20

What was it about George Floyd’s killing that struck a nerve with so many people, especially white people? That’s the question being raised by a Pennsylvania mother whose daughter was killed three years ago by a white man. There were no protests and no vows to confront the systemic racism that she says her neighbors only whisper about in the predominantly white suburban community to which she moved to escape big-city life. Our colleague Jenna Johnson explores the question of how committed Americans are to change in this moment of reckoning and how long it will last. | “Where was this crowd June 28, 2017?” she said, uttering words she hadn’t planned to say until just then. “I will ask it again: Where was this crowd on June 28, 2017?”
https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?trackId=596b71ccade4e24119b3a559&s=5eff101ffe1ff6482db32ee8

At least eight Secret Service agents are currently holed up in a hotel in Phoenix, some suffering the flu-like coronavirus symptoms after coming down with Covid-19 while preparing for a visit by Vice President Mike Pence, sources say
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/03/politics/secret-service-coronavirus-trump/index.html

New Trump Administration Memo Fosters Doubts About Russian Bounties
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/politics/memo-russian-bounties.html

U.S. Coronavirus Cases Are Rising Sharply, but Deaths Are Still Down https://nytimes.com/2020/07/03/health/coronavirus-mortality-testing.html

The head of the NIH and a close Fauci friend/ally: "It’s one of the great tragedies of this current moment that scientifically based public-health measures have somehow been captured as cultural or political phenomena."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/anthony-faucis-boss-on-why-things-could-be-much-better-soon.html

Rapid Arctic meltdown in Siberia alarms scientists
https://washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/rapid-arctic-meltdown-in-siberia-alarms-scientists/2020/07/03/4c1bd6a6-bbaa-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html

Just hours before Trump is set to speak,  protesters are blocking the main road leading up to Mount Rushmore. They used vans to block the entrance.  Multiple people have been illegally detained.

Donald Trump Jr's girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle tests positive for coronavirus. She is the top fund-raising official for Trump's campaign.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/kimberly-guilfoyle-coronavirus-positive-donald-trump-jr-covid-19-a9601116.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/politics/kimberly-guilfoyle-trump-campaign-coronavirus.html

Under pressure, Florida will start reporting how many people hospitalized with COVID
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article243899367.html

On July 4, America will celebrate 244 years since the continental congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. NPR marks the celebration with what has become a Morning Edition tradition: the annual reading of that document
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/03/883024992/npr-reads-the-declaration-of-independence

What to the Slave Is the 4th of July? James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass’s Historic Speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbOya3Ao09g

Landslide at a Jade mine in Myanmar kills over 100 workers
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/02/886963705/landslide-at-myanmar-jade-mine-kills-at-least-162

SARS-CoV-2 circulating in Brazil back in November 2019
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200701/SARS-CoV-2-circulating-in-Brazil-back-in-November-2019.aspx

Pro-Trump Twitter is running wild with rumors about an antifa flag-burning at Gettysburg on July 4th, complete with "antifa face painting" for the kids. Now Gettysburg cops are begging people to stop calling them about it.
https://thedailybeast.com/cops-want-right-wingers-to-stop-hassling-them-about-an-imaginary-antifa-attack-on-gettysburg

Florida breaks coronavirus record with over 11K new cases reported in one day
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/coronavirus/os-ne-florida-coronavirus-saturday-july-4-20200704-e5lqdwvuhrcb5f2ynyplzprtrq-story.html

‘Zombie Fires’ in the Arctic Pump Out Carbon at Record Pace | Arctic fires emitted 16.3 million metric tons of carbon — or about 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — in June. That’s the highest since at least 2003 and almost nine times more than the same month in 2018
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-02/arctic-fires-cause-record-jump-in-emissions-as-temperatures-soar

Trump signs Paycheck Protection Program extension
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/04/politics/trump-ppp-extension/index.html

It’s wild to read about the Bubonic Plague and how Europe’s corrupt leaders and institutions didn’t follow basic hygiene or science, causing mass death. 700 years later, America is following this backwards model while other nations follow science and reduce the spread of Covid.

Say a teacher gets sick at school, and they are out an extended time, or have to go to the hospital, is that on them? Do they foot the bills, lose all their PTO, go into the hole, or do districts who once again are knowingly sending them into harm's way pick up the costs? What happens to teachers if they are required to go back to school and get sick or worse? This is the question nobody seems to want to answer.

Yes, our founding ideals were in tension with the founding reality. But for 244 years, as reality collided with our ideals, the ideals have slowly (though often painfully) prevailed. The ideals are proving more powerful than the injustice. This is a great nation.

Republican internal polling signals a Democratic rout. The GOP has released 0 district polls conducted since April. Dems have released 17. Historically, the difference between number of polls put out by each party is HIGHLY correlated with November's result. https://cnn.com/2020/07/04/politics/partisan-polls-analysis/index.html

Nearly 3M cases and 133K deaths due to the pandemic. Domestic unrest. Record unemployment. The world’s pariah. THIS is a disaster.

The way many think of custodial staff does not reflect the value that they provide to hospitals. They are critical to infection control; we need to see these employees as skilled workers. Veterans' Hospitals Have a Cleanliness Crisis
https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/va-veterans-pandemic-housekeepers/613735/

"This election will decide whether we want to shrink or grow our democratic values—whether we'll leave the house of democracy built by generations of architects and activists to decay, or whether we will come together as one nation to build it up."
https://nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-erodes-america-s-foundation-fourth-july-i-pledge-rebuild-ncna1232887

Clint Lorance had been in charge of his platoon for only three days when he ordered his men to kill three Afghans stopped on a dirt road. A second-degree murder conviction and pardon followed. Today, Lorance is hailed as a hero by Trump. His troops have suffered a very different fate. Only a few hours had passed since President Trump pardoned 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and the men of 1st Platoon were still trying to make sense of how it was even possible. How could a man they blamed for ruining their lives, an officer the Army convicted of second-degree murder and other charges, be forgiven so easily? How could their president allow him to just walk free? “I feel like I’m in a nightmare,” Lucas Gray, a former specialist from the unit, texted his old squad leader, who was out of the Army and living in Fayetteville, N.C. “I haven’t been handling it well either,” replied Mike McGuinness on Nov. 15, the day Lorance was pardoned. “There’s literally no point in anything we did or said,” Gray continued. “Now he gets to be the hero . . .” “And we’re left to deal with it,” McGuinness concluded.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/clint-lorance-platoon-afghanistan/

DANA BASH: You criticized Obama for 'failed leadership' when 2 people in the US died from Ebola. Nearly 130,000 are dead from coronavirus. So is Trump showing failed leadership? @SenJoniErnst : "No. I think that the president is stepping forward."
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1279773674149740544?s=20

"We enjoy personal freedom, but we can also choose to do something better for the common good but fuck off with banning drugs and alcohol and smoking and automobile pollution and industrial pollution and banning the industrial agriculture industry which is destroying 98% of the planet and everything on it....."

The Democrats destroying America voted for Sanders and lost. They are the alt-left mentally ill deranged criminals who voted for all the "leftist" candidates (and 99% of them lost as well). If the Democrats destroying America represented the actual Democratic base (they don't), Biden would not have won the nomination, Sanders would have, and Sanders was blown the fuck out. "Anarchists" are typically Democrats but they have zero impact on the Democratic party and the Democratic candidates. The Democrats burning down the country reject the Democratic party and will either vote Green or stay home. Their candidate was Sanders and Sanders was blown out in both 2016 and 2020. If "leftists" and "anarchists" were the Democratic base, Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich would have won the nomination in 2008 and McCain would have went on to win the election.

Donald Trump wants to continue honoring traitors who took up arms against us in the Civil War to protect their ability to enslave, sell & kill Black Americans. This has never been a debate about honoring the complex legacy of those who actually helped *build* our great nation. twitter.com/ILGOP/status/1…
https://twitter.com/TammyforIL/status/1279792676901175297?s=20

Predominantly Black armed protesters march through Confederate memorial park in Georgia
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-race-usa-stone-mountain/predominantly-black-armed-protesters-march-through-confederate-memorial-park-in-georgia-idUSKBN24605G

Mississippi Election Commissioner Complains That "Blacks" Are Registering to Vote
https://www.theroot.com/mississippi-election-commissioner-complains-that-black-1844271802

Florida breaks coronavirus record with 59,036 new cases reported in one week
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/coronavirus/os-ne-florida-coronavirus-sunday-july-5-20200705-zfezsjwvdfhj3jaopyw45473fe-story.html

4 Hospitals in Fla. County Run Out of ICU Beds as State Sets Another Record in New Daily COVID Cases | All intensive care unit (ICU) beds are currently occupied at four hospitals in Pinellas County, Florida, as the state continues to see a record spike in new cases and hospitalizations related to the novel coronavirus.
https://www.newsweek.com/4-hospitals-fla-county-run-out-icu-beds-state-sets-another-record-new-daily-covid-cases-1515485

Former Trump aide Flynn appears to make pledge to QAnon in July 4 video
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-flynn-qanon-conspiracy-theory-independence-day-speech-slogan-a9602596.html

Gianforte halts in-person campaigning after wife, running mate attend event with Guilfoyle
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/505898-gianforte-halts-in-person-campaigning-after-wife-running-mate-attend

Federal authorities in New York on Wednesday seized a shipment of weaves and other beauty accessories suspected to be made out of human hair taken from people locked inside a Chinese internment camp
https://apnews.com/fff5fc7925f09916bf6b9d5f79bb4132

41 shot overnight in NYC with at least 4 dead in citywide explosion of gun violence
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-man-fatally-shot-brooklyn-20200705-uu2vl6rmsvgt5hr6afpoye3j7i-story.html

EPA Tests Chemicals on at Least 23,000 Animals Per Year, Plans Phase Out by 2035
https://veganauthority.com/usa-epa-tests-chemicals-on-at-least-23-000-animals-per-year-plans-phase-out-by-2035/gv9776.html

Is this Cancel Culture?......@FoxNews weekend afternoons is the worst! Getting into @CNN and MSDNC territory. Watch @OANN & @newsmax instead. Much better!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1279884213055926272?s=20

The disclaimer when registering for Trump's Portsmouth rally: "In attending the event, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19, and waive, release, and discharge Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. ... from any and all liability."
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1279882926994321408?s=20

We are happy to announce our free summer classes. Facilitated by our experienced educators and experts, these hour-long virtual programs are designed to address contemporary First Amendment issues, including media literacy, that impact us all.
https://newseumed.org/classes-training/free-summer-classes

Iran has confirmed that a building damaged by a fire at the underground Natanz nuclear site was a new centrifuge assembly center. A spokesman said the damage would “possibly cause a delay in development and production.”
https://apnews.com/6738eb091a5a26500f45c01d019c0fc9

Militias flocked to Gettysburg to foil a supposed antifa flag burning, an apparent hoax created on social media
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/hundreds-of-armed-men-went-to-gettysburg-to-defend-it-from-a-phantom-antifa-flag-burner-created-on-social-media/2020/07/04/206ee4da-bb05-11ea-86d5-3b9b3863273b_story.html

It took three months for Florida to cross 100,000 new confirmed COVID-19 cases. It took less than two weeks for the state to go from 100,000 to 200,000 cases — and the positive test rate keeps rising.
https://miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article244011507.html

Guillén felt she could not approach her chain of command with allegations, her relatives said. “She felt if she spoke, something would happen,” sister Mayra Guillén told The Post. “I now realize everything leads back to them harassing her at work.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/07/05/vanessa-guillen-remains-identified-ft-hood/

A federal judge has ruled ICE unlawfully transferred thousands of unaccompanied children who turned 18 to adult detention facilities without considering alternatives, in violation of a 2013 law.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/us-judge-rules-ice-unlawfully-jails-unaccompanied-migrant-children-once-they-turn-18/2020/07/02/6a8d6cd4-bc91-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html

Hope (2005) [Short Film; Fernando Carmo, Catherine Margerin, Willy Whitefeather]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458393/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVSmLpNK45Q


Willy Whitefeather On Hope
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH3kvigXIQs

"I cOuLd neVEr be vEgaN beCauSe aLL tHe ResTrICtiOns aNd nO cHeESe aNd eAtInG SalAdS aLL tHe tiME" | Vegan Sour Cherry Pancakes | Vegan Broccoli Spinach And Chickpea Soup | Vegan Jackfruit BBQ Burger With Coleslaw | Vegan Chocolate Cherry Cake | Vegan Cauliflower Gyros | Vegan Funfetti Cake | Vegan Coconut Maqui Berry Cheesecake | Vegan Toasted Almond Cake With A White Chocolate & Tahini Ganache | Vegan Chickpea Flour Chocolate Pancakes

Vegan Peanut Butter And Chocolate Cake | Vegan Mango, Pineapple, Banana, Coconut Milk Sorbetto, With Raspberry Garnish | Vegan Baked General Tao Cauliflower | Vegan Chickpea Pancake, Portobello Mushroom, Avocado | Vegan Black & Wild Rice, Nopales, Cilantro, Onion, Lime, Salsa | Happy Vegan Cake Day | Vegan Thai Red Coconut Curry | Vegan Quinoa Bowl With Nooch Kale, Roasted Fingerling, Sweet Potatoes, Sautéed Mushrooms In Coconut Aminos And Savoury Cashew Cream Sauce | Vegan Stuffed Eggplant

A Profoundly Unserious Way of Dealing With the Past | As statues topple across the country, Americans need to distinguish between the problematic or objectionable and the irredeemably wrong. [theatlantic]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/statues-and-limitations/613444/

A Profoundly Unserious Way of Dealing With the Past

As statues topple across the country, Americans need to distinguish between the problematic or objectionable and the irredeemably wrong.

12:07 PM ET

Eliot A. Cohen

Contributing writer at The Atlantic and Dean of SAIS at Johns Hopkins University

There is, near a state capitol, statuary of a dominant white man on horseback, surrounded by African Americans. He is clearly in charge, and they are held together by an externally imposed discipline of a particularly tough kind. A white woman hovers over all. Dedicated in 1897, it is about as racialized a piece of bronze as the era of the Lost Cause could produce. Should it be taken down?

Of course not. The statuary in question is the Robert Gould Shaw memorial, opposite the statehouse in Boston, which commemorates Colonel Shaw and the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, only the second black regiment raised in the North. Shaw famously led the 54th in the desperate but failed assault on Fort Wagner in July 1863, where it sustained 40 percent casualties. The victorious rebels threw Shaw's body into a pit with his fallen soldiers. Shaw's family later refused to let him be exhumed for separate burial, preferring that his bones be forever mingled with theirs.

However, at the end of May 2020, the memorial was vandalized with some of the slogans of this moment.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/01/metro/monuments-boston-common-public-garden-defaced-with-graffiti-following-protests/

Statues are toppling—even that of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the Museum of Natural History in New York; even that of Ulysses S. Grant, the general most responsible for the crushing of the Confederacy. In Britain, the statue of Winston Churchill outside the Houses of Parliament has been defaced by graffiti. As the daughter of a friend sourly remarked, "They seem not to have heard about the other guy."

Yet surely some statues, some memorials, some place names and portraits should come down. As David Petraeus has pointed out in The Atlantic, it has long been absurd to have American military installations named for Confederate generals; and one cannot defend keeping a statue of Jefferson Davis or Alexander Stephens in a public building other than a museum. So where should we draw the line?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/take-confederate-names-off-our-army-bases/612832/

A good place to begin is by asking whether the evil a man or woman did is the most important fact of his or her life. With regard to the Confederate generals, that is unquestionably the case. Robert E. Lee would have been a footnote in the history books had he not foresworn his allegiance to the Constitution and done his formidable best not only to rend the Union asunder, but to defend the system of chattel slavery. As Lincoln once wrote, "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." The sheer, murderous wickedness of the Confederate cause, long lost in mythologizing and willful ignorance, is unambiguous.

But of other radically flawed individuals, a different judgment should be made. John F. Kennedy was a sexual predator, as we now know. We should not, however, take his name off the Kennedy Center, and we should not fail to be moved by the clarion call of his inaugural address. Thomas Jefferson was not merely a slaveholder, but a particularly callous one. He was willing to inflict suffering, preying on vulnerable enslaved women and breaking up families. But he also gave America the Declaration of Independence and its principles, which transcend the deeply flawed mortal who wrote them down. We can similarly recognize and wrestle with the flaws—some of them considerable—of the likes of Roosevelt, Grant, and Churchill without losing sight of their accomplishments.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/jackie-and-the-girls/309000/

And there are difficult judgments to be made. What of Andrew Jackson, the victor of the Battle of New Orleans, a democrat rebelling against the rule of established, moneyed elites—but also the political leader principally responsible for the genocidal Trail of Tears?

There are two other principles here. One is that there is one kind of conversation when a person is about to be memorialized; quite another when the monument already exists and its obliteration is intended to remove painful memories of a past that was real. For that reason, there is a higher bar for the removal of Confederate statues than for putting new ones up—yet even so, that higher bar is easily met. But if it's perfectly reasonable to say that we should not be naming something new after Woodrow Wilson, a bigot throughout his career, whether we should strip his name off a school and a research center that already exist is much less clear.

The other principle is that the decision needs to be made carefully, and with thought, discussion, and justification; dissenting views must be treated with respect, no matter where the outcome lies. The model here is Mayor Mitch Landrieu's speech of May 19, 2017, explaining his decision to remove Confederate statuary from New Orleans. The thoughtfulness and consideration he showed in no way diminished the force of his remarks, unflinching in what he said not only about slavery but about the lynchings and brutality of the years after 1865. Nor did his candor diminish the high-minded, optimistic patriotism of his rhetoric and his celebration of the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's second inaugural, two of the sacred texts of America's civic religion.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/we-cant-walk-away-from-this-truth/527721/

Americans are living, as they so often have, through a moment fraught with violence and hope, in which they see both their aspirations and their fears in the news and in their hearts. One of those fears is of having to confront the complex history of their country and of their heroes. In that respect, some of the decisions of the moment are about not confronting difficulty but wishing it away, which is a malady of the spirit. It is much harder, braver, and better to wrestle with the conundrum of Jefferson's anguished declaration that "I tremble for my country when I reflect that G-d is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever" than to remove him from sight in a spasm of preening righteousness.

The issue here is not merely physical assaults on statues, but a failure to distinguish between the problematic or objectionable and the irredeemably wrong, an attempt either to airbrush into anodyne gauziness the history represented by our monuments and named buildings, or to distort it into a long tale of oppression unrelieved by decency or even human complexity. Our current conversation is not taking seriously the problem of context, of how to judge the failures of previous generations, and it reflects a curious assumption that we may not seem equally retrograde and morally obtuse to future generations. This is, in short, a profoundly unserious way of dealing with the past.

Moral judgment can coexist with humility and perspective. In his remarks, Landrieu, a Democrat, approvingly quoted George W. Bush, a Republican, at the dedication of the National Museum of African American History and Culture: "A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them." That sounds strangely out of mode just now. But its truth illuminates a path forward for an agonized country.

Light News Mon/Tues/Wed/Thurs/Fri/Sat/Sun

Sir Iam Holm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Holm
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000453/

Joel Schumacher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Schumacher
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001708/

Trump and several staff members stood backstage and gazed at the empty BOK Center in horror. Trump, who had been warned that crowds were smaller than expected, was stunned and he yelled at aides backstage while looking at endless rows of empty blue seats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/us/politics/trump-tulsa-rally.html

The Department of Justice announced today the unsealing of an indictment charging Ethan Melzer, 22, of Louisville, Kentucky, for allegedly planning an attack on his U.S. Army unit by sending sensitive details about the unit – including information about its location, movements, and security – to members of an extremist organization named Order of the Nine Angles (O9A), an occult-based neo-Nazi and white supremacist group.   Melzer is charged with conspiring and attempting to murder U.S. nationals, conspiring and attempting to murder military service members, providing and attempting to provide material support to terrorists, and conspiring to murder and maim in a foreign country.  The FBI and the U.S. Army thwarted Melzer’s plot in late-May 2020, and the FBI arrested Melzer on June 10, 2020.  The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Gregory Woods.
His indictment charges six counts, including material support for terrorism and plotting to murder U.S. service members.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-army-soldier-charged-terrorism-offenses-planning-deadly-ambush-service-members-his-unit

A half-dozen senior advisers to Trump have repeatedly voted by mail, according to election records obtained by the AP. The aides include Betsy DeVos and Brad Parscale. https://nytimes.com/aponline/2020/06/22/us/politics/ap-us-election-2020-trump-advisers-voting.html?searchResultPosition=8

The Taliban killed at least 291 Afghan security personnel over the past week, a top government official said Monday, accusing the insurgents of unleashing a wave of violence ahead of potential talks. The week was the "deadliest" in the country's 19 years of conflict
https://news.yahoo.com/taliban-killed-291-afghan-security-personnel-past-week-052844020.html

House Judiciary Committee prepares to subpoena Attorney General Bill Barr
https://www.axios.com/house-judiciary-nadler-subpoena-attorney-general-bill-barr-4b3aa4de-a8cd-4bd9-93b2-5c51dd19c60b.html

In his letter, Jordan says Barr "remains willing to testify voluntarily once the pandemic concludes." Barr was in Boston last week; he met with the police chief (and others, and with no mask), why can't he testify in front of House Judiciary?

Secret Service tells press to leave White House grounds in highly unusual and unconstutional move
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/white-house-secret-service-press/index.html

Absentee ballot requests, number of early in-person votes point towards historically high voter turnout for Kentucky's primary
https://www.lex18.com/news/state-of-the-commonwealth/absentee-ballot-requests-number-of-early-in-person-votes-point-towards-historically-high-voter-turnout-for-kentuckys-primary

Arizona Mega-Church Set to Host Trump Rally Falsely Claim Its Air Filter Zaps COVID-19https://www.thedailybeast.com/arizona-mega-church-set-to-host-trump-rally-falsely-claim-its-air-filter-zaps-covid

Today, voters in Kentucky and New York head to the polls to cast votes in Presidential, Congressional and State level primaries. Voters in certain districts in Virginia are also headed to the polls for Congressional races, and voters in certain districts in North Carolina and Mississippi are also headed to the polls again to vote in runoff elections. While both major parties now have presumptive nominees for the 2020 Presidential Election, competitive primaries exist at the Congressional level in Kentucky and New York. In New York, incumbent Congressman and Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee Elliot Engel is facing a stiff competition in his primary against challenger Jamaal Bowman in New York's 16th District, following leaked audio of Engel apparently expressing disdain for a campaign event he was attending. In Kentucky, the Democratic primary to take on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November has become competitive, with former fighter pilot and 2018 KY-06 nominee Amy McGrath trying to fend off a sudden surge in support for State Representative Charles Booker. For voters in Kentucky, please note that the number of polling locations in the state has been dramatically cut as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Please give yourself extra time to wait in line if you intend to cast an in-person ballot, and remember to follow all safety guidelines when doing so. The Kentucky results will be released at the end of the month.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/n-scott-momaday-words-from-a-bearabout-the-film/12052/

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/23/us/elections/results-new-york-primary-elections.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/23/us/elections/results-kentucky-primary-elections.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/23/us/elections/results-virginia-primary-elections.html


14th Congressional District Democratic Primary
This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first re-election campaign, and she drew a well-financed challenger in Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a former CNBC anchor. A.O.C. took the challenge seriously enough that she paid for a late attack ad calling her opponent a former Republican.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/23/us/elections/results-new-york-house-district-14-primary-election.html

16th Congressional District Democratic Primary
Eliot Engel faces one of the stiffest challenges of his decades-long career as Jamaal Bowman rides a wave of progressive support. Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi lined up behind Mr. Engel, while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders backed Mr. Bowman.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/23/us/elections/results-new-york-house-district-16-primary-election.html

U.S. Senate Democratic Primary
Amy McGrath, a powerhouse fund-raiser endorsed by Chuck Schumer, faces a tightening race against Charles Booker, an upstart progressive. The winner takes on Mitch McConnell.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/23/us/elections/results-kentucky-senate-primary-election.html

Reporting with @WindhorstESPN: Nuggets star Nikola Jokic tested positive for the coronavirus in Serbia and his return to the U.S. is temporarily delayed. He’s been asymptomatic since testing positive last week. Jokic is expected to be cleared to travel to Denver within a week.
https://twitter.com/wojespn/status/1275528393640075264

The FBI has just released a statement about the NASCAR noose incident at Talladega, indicating it was a misunderstanding. No crime was committed. The noose was already there as early as last year.
https://twitter.com/jeff_gluck/status/1275537836020690944

Apologies for not knowing who originally created this image, but it has been making the rounds on Twitter and turned out to be correct. You can see in the left photo the rope was in noose form — apparently as a handle — last year and then cut for evidence Sunday.
https://twitter.com/jeff_gluck/status/1275542160868175872

It was used as a garage pull to help pull the rolling door down

John Mark Byers, of West Memphis 3 notoriety, once a suspect, has died in a car crash. John Mark Byers, who was Chris Byers’ adoptive/step father, was a controversial figure. For many people he seemed like a perfect suspect; an abusive alcoholic who abused Chris and behaved erratically in the aftermath of the crime. He was also a suspect in his wife's death. After the 2nd installment of the Paradise Lost series was released, he became a popular suspect in the discourse surrounding the crime. That suspicion has been largely discarded in recent years, after his timelines were thoroughly vetted and it became apparent that it was impossible for him to commit the crime. At first, he was one of the most vocal supporters of the West Memphis Three’s conviction, though he eventually came to believe in their innocence, and was supportive through their release from prison in 2011. JMB was definitely interesting. I go in and out of ‘liking’ him, if that makes sense. Everything I’ve read or seen about him makes him seem like a real asshole. That being said, he’s no dummy, no matter how hard the media tried to portray him as a bumbling redneck. He was capable of the personal growth necessary to advocate on behalf of the men he once was sure had killed his stepson, that’s no small feat. It hurts my heart that he never experienced closure.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2020/06/20/john-mark-byers-west-memphis-three-figure-dies-in-car-crash

RNC won't return illegal donations that they used to illegally set up illegally pay-to-play access to Trump
https://www.newsweek.com/rnc-wont-return-donations-that-bought-chinese-officials-access-trump-1512969

Appeals court orders judge to dismiss Flynn charges. A friendly reminder that any active judge on the D.C. Circuit can ask the full Court of Appeals to vote whether to rehear a panel decision “sua sponte”—that is, even without any party formally petitioning for such an “en banc” rehearing. If none of them do, the Judiciary is extremely compromised. Also one of the judges who ordered the charges dismissed is a conservative pro-Trump Republican who WORKED WITH FLYNN AND HIS FRIENDS WITH HIM. Should also be making judicial ethics complaints for "Judge" Neomi Rao's failure to recuse despite a  2017 work relationship w/Flynn in the WH irrespective of full CoA action. She worked w/Flynn in 2017 as Adm of Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/504273-appeals-court-orders-judge-to-dismiss-flynn-charges

A friendly reminder of on why any decision penned by Neomi Rao should be suspect.
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/11/21173437/trump-judge-neomi-rao-mueller-grand-jury-dc-circuit

Rao penned the widely regarded as a very embarrassing dissent that said Trump can't be investigated for anything citing just "the constitution" and ignoring the supreme court cases that say the opposite. She's 47, on the 2nd most important court in the nation. Trump and the Republicans fucked us for a generation no matter what happens in November.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/trump-subpoena-mazars-neomi-rao.html

Over the last 3 years, we’ve been so weary in these dark times. The lies. The corruption. The hate. Every day. We wondered what happened to our country that people support this?  But if we work our hearts out over the next 4 months, we can end Trump’s reign. And end Trumpism.

A humbling night for the Democratic foreign policy establishment last night who got off the sidelines to endorse a party elder whose foreign policy was largely indistinguishable from a mainstream Republican: rightfully a hawk on Israel-Pal, Syria, Russia, Latin Am, defense spending. If Engel is unseated as polls suggest, leadership may easily pick another hawk w/ similar views as him to chair the Foreign Affairs Committee. Ted Deutch and Brad Sherman, who both defied progressives and voted against the Iran deal, would be top contenders. The more progressive options would be Reps. Gregory Meeks and Gerald Connolly who supported Iran deal and take a more dovish approach in general on issues like U.S.-Saudi policy, Latin America, etc. There's obviously long been a gap between the party's leadership & the grassroots on foreign policy. There aren't many entrenched interests that play in favor of dovish lawmakers whose preferences track more consistently with polling preferences of Dem rank-and-file on war/peace.

A new proposal calls for New York City to build the first new bridge to Manhattan in decades — one just for cyclists and pedestrians
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/nyregion/nyc-bridge-bike-pedestrians.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytmetro

The House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing today involving assistant US Attorney Aaron Zelinsky, who handled the Roger Stone case, but withdrew after the Justice Department recommended a lighter prison sentence. Republicans have two strategies: Deflect and make shit up. They love yelling that there are no eye witnesses. Here we have two and they refuse to allow them to talk. Today we received notes that prove both the president and vice president were personally interfering in criminal cases for political purposes. We have the president's words on transcript giving the order to his officials to interfere, and after he gave the order, they went out and committed acts of corrupt investigative and prosecutorial misconduct, all with a proven political agenda.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?473163-1/house-judiciary-hearing-justice-department-oversight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8P2EMIh7rk [pbs on youtube]

I just want one, only one, "shut your fucking mouth" from Nadler.

Best moment so far was when Gohmert was banging on the table as Ayer obliterated Barr and someone said "Can the sergeant at arms please remove Gene Krupa?" Rep. Louie Gohmert, TX 1st District, is an insufferable child. He banged on his desk to disrupt proceedings, and then when given his 5 minutes he just slandered and character assassinated every witness and didn't even ask a question. What a complete disgrace.

Video of Gohmert throwing a hissy fit and tapping during witness testimony: https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/1275835459667521537

In Scathing Letter, More Than 80-Percent of Faculty at Bill Barr’s Law School Call for His Censure and Resignation
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/in-scathing-letter-more-than-80-percent-of-active-faculty-at-bill-barrs-law-school-call-for-his-censure-and-resignation/

Middle school principal Jamaal Bowman unseats Eliot Engel in New York
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/24/21299037/jamaal-bowman-defeats-eliot-engel-new-york-bronx-congress-election

Malcolm Brogdon tests positive for coronavirus.
https://twitter.com/fantasylabsnba/status/1275831999677243398?s=21

Epidemiologist at Emory University: "Extremely concerning" on NBA attempting to finish its season in Orlando. Florida reported 11,365 new coronavirus cases over three days, its three worst days on record.
https://sports.yahoo.com/nba-florida-coronavirus-disney-orlando-orange-county-cases-162243057.html

The Arctic is on fire: Siberian heat wave alarms scientists | Last August, more than 4 million hectares of forests in Siberia were on fire, according to Greenpeace. This year the fires have already started raging much earlier than the usual start in July
https://phys.org/news/2020-06-arctic-siberian-alarms-scientists.html

Canada Drops Charges Against Indigenous Chief Assaulted in Video
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/world/canada/canada-allan-adam-indigenous.html

A cruel training method for baby elephants known as “the crush” has been revealed in rarely-seen footage. The practice sees calves bound with chains and confined in narrow enclosures for days at a time to make them submissive enough to interact with tourists.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/elephant-baby-training-video-thailand-tourism-the-crush-a9582081.html

Walmart Canada Faces Backlash For Selling ‘All Lives Matter’ T-Shirts: The company is also selling T-shirts with “Blue Lives Matter” and “Irish Lives Matter” printed across them
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/walmart-all-lives-matter-tshirts_ca_5ef34593c5b663ecc8559560

They also still sell products with confederate insignia despite claiming they removed those products.

Germany is banning the sale of single-use plastic straws, cotton buds and food containers, bringing it in line with a EU directive intended to reduce the amount of plastic garbage that pollutes the environment.
https://news.yahoo.com/germany-bans-single-plastic-straws-102034468.html

Locusts are devastating East Africa: A fourth generation of locust eggs is now hatching, which experts predict will create a locust population 8,000 times larger than the current infestation.
https://www.rescue.org/article/other-plague-locusts-are-devastating-east-africa

Fifty-nine baby crocs went missing from a Darwin reptile park last month. "I’d like to know who’s doing it," says the park owner. "What are you going to do with 59 crocs?"
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/n7weyz/someone-in-australia-is-stealing-baby-crocodiles-authorities-dont-know-why

Ontario new math curriculum to introduce coding, personal finance starting in Grade 1
https://www.cp24.com/mobile/news/ontario-s-new-math-curriculum-to-introduce-coding-personal-finance-starting-in-grade-1-1.4995865

Bayer to pay $10 billion to settle Roundup cancer lawsuit
https://m.dw.com/en/bayer-to-pay-10-billion-to-settle-roundup-cancer-lawsuit/a-53931554

136 earthquakes in 24 hrs, Philippines Volcano Enters Period of Unrest.
https://weather.com/en-IN/india/news/news/2020-06-23-136-earthquakes-24-hours-philippines-volcano-enters-period-of-unrest

European Union considering recommendation to block entry to Americans due to coronavirus surge
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/23/politics/eu-us-coronavirus-travel/index.html

Brazilian judge tells Bolsonaro to behave and wear a face mask - President reminded he is not above the law and risks fine if he continues to break rules
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/23/brazilian-judge-tells-bolsonaro-to-behave-and-wear-a-face-mask

GOOD. RELOCATE THESE INNOCENT CREATURES OF EARTH TO SANCTUARIES. All Mink Fur Farms To Shut In The Netherlands Due To COVID-19 Outbreaks
https://raisevegan.com/all-mink-fur-farms-to-shut-in-the-netherlands-due-to-covid-19-outbreaks/

The president of the international criminal court has accused the US of acting unlawfully by threatening an economic and legal offensive against the institution following a decision by judges to open an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan.

'Black neutron star' discovery changes astronomy
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53151106

STOP MURDERING THESE INNOCENT CREATURES OF EARTH. RELEASE THEM TO SANCTURIES. END THE ANIMAL EXPLOITATION INDUSTRY ALREADY. Horrifying undercover footage from the UK shows pig farm worker slamming piglets into concrete floor while others are thrown into metal troughs as food regulators launch investigation
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8446663/Horrifying-undercover-footage-shows-pig-farm-worker-slamming-piglets-concrete-floor.html

Islamic Terrorists Murder 251 Afghan Security Forces (all Muslims), 550 wounded
https://www.voanews.com/usa/afghan-security-forces-suffer-bloodiest-week-19-years

U.S. sanctions five Iranian ship captains for bringing oil to Venezuela: Pompeo
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-iran-gasoline/u-s-sanctions-five-iranian-ship-captains-for-bringing-oil-to-venezuela-pompeo-idUSKBN23V25I?il=0

China dog meat festival goes ahead despite coronavirus visitor decline
https://hongkongfp.com/2020/06/23/china-dog-meat-festival-goes-ahead-despite-coronavirus-visitor-decline/
http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=291665

Israel should postpone annexation until after US elections. If Republicans win, then do it. If Democrats win, don't do so as not to lose US support. If Democrats win, they will have the power to inflict serious damage in already derailed US-Israeli relations.

Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and nine other former separatist fighters were indicted Wednesday on a range of crimes against humanity and war crimes charges, including murder, by an international prosecutor probing their actions against ethnic Serbs and others during and after Kosovo’s 1998-99 independence war with Serbia. Because of the indictment, Thaci has postponed his trip to Washington, where he was to meet Saturday for talks at the White House with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.
https://apnews.com/e3024e62476315436534d8a896d10ff4

Biden is running a great campaign because he's doing little while clobbering Trump Human Wise and in the polls. Joe Biden spent months stumbling through the Democratic primary, only to prevail in the end through a fantastical combination of circumstances. Now he is stumbling through the basement-confined general election to a double-digit lead.  Biden has done an effective job of using the most popular parts of the "Black Lives Matters" protesters' message while distancing himself from its unpopular elements. Biden speaks for the transracial majority that supports systematic police reform and opposes defunding the cops. Trump is left to represent the racist minority that sees Floyd’s death as an outlier requiring no serious changes. He has appealed to leftists (dangerously rebranded as "progressives" by the Sanders movement when labels such as "leftist" and "socialist" and "democratic socialist" sunk Sanders) by adopting some of the most popular pieces of their program, while steering clear of its controversial aspects. And he is winning in the very conventional way: by stealing Republican voters in the Republican middle who are conflicted. Those conflicted voters tend to give Trump high marks for his handling of the economy and illegal immigration, but recoil at his ugly persona. A Democratic campaign premised on transformational economic change would have given Trump the chance to make those voters choose between style and (what they perceive as) substance. Biden from the beginning has tailored his message precisely for what they want: a president who will act like a president without scaring people about the pace and extent of social and economic change. Biden is running on a progressive platform - more progressive than most people think, and almost certainly more progressive than even a fully Democratic Congress would pass into law. But his choice to avoid unpopular issues (Medicare for All, the Green New Deal) - which the left assailed not only on substantive terms but as a bad choice that would deflate his voters - is looking shrewder than ever. Biden probably wouldn’t be yielding rapturous mass rallies even if there was no virus. Nor has he inspired armies of idealistic volunteers. But all the evidence we have suggests Biden and Democrats actually knows what they're doing.

Barr agrees to testify after facing subpoena threat
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/24/william-barr-testify-congress-338113

If he shows up: Three previous attempts to bring him in were aborted. The first, in spring 2019, was canceled after Barr refused to submit to questioning from committee staff, in the weeks after he released the report of special counsel Robert Mueller. The second occurred in March, when the coronavirus crisis led the House to call off most committee proceedings. The hearing was rescheduled for early June, but Barr again canceled after the White House objected, citing a prohibition on congressional testimony during the coronavirus emergency. Regardless, the spineless Senate Republicans will hold nobody accountable. Who's ready for the "I don't recall" marathon?

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced on Wednesday he had filed a consumer protection lawsuit against oil companies that he claims defrauded Minnesotans about climate change. The lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Koch Industries and the American Petroleum Institute includes claims for fraud, failure to warn and separate violations of Minnesota statutes that prohibit consumer fraud, deceptive trade practices and false statements in advertising, according to a statement from the Attorney General's Office. "We're here suing these defendants — API, ExxonMobil and Koch — for hiding the truth, confusing the facts and muddling the water to devastating effect," Ellison said in a news conference.
https://kstp.com/news/live-video-minnesota-attorney-general-ellison-files-lawsuit-against-exxonmobil-koch-industries-american-petroleum-climate-change/5770393/

Ken Burns: 'Confederate monuments have to go'
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/504329-ken-burns-confederate-monuments-have-to-go

Gun Violence Spikes in N.Y.C., Intensifying Debate Over Policing. More than a dozen people have been fatally shot, including a teenager at her college graduation party and a clothing designer who was washing his car.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/nyregion/nyc-shootings-surge.html

Trump Administration to end support for coronavirus testing sites - While state governments scramble to contain the accelerating outbreak, the Trump Administration announced it will cut funding and support for testing sites on June 30.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/trump-administration-to-end-support-for-coronavirus-testing-sites-85916741677

A grand jury has indicted three men on murder charges in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was shot to death by two white men in Georgia in February while he was out running, a prosecutor says.
https://apnews.com/f7090f3db3599c0f14fcb2499d6559a6

How did the phrase "decolonize" get appropriated from Indians facing British batons and gunfire, Algerians waging a rebel war against French military, etc. to let's make our language more like Tumblr

The Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park was funded entirely by freedmen and women. They should have gone with Harriet Hosmer's design - which would have showed Abraham Lincoln flanked by black Civil War soldiers - but the act of commemoration here doesn't deserve to be torched. This is why Trump easily wins re-election:  DC Police are lining up at Lincoln Park. A protest called “Shut Down The Capitol” is scheduled for 7pm. Residents say they want to see changes because it depicts Lincoln standing over a freed slave.
https://nbcwashington.com/news/local/capitol-hill-residents-call-for-changes-to-statue-of-lincoln-standing-over-freed-black-man/2335507/

So Democrat protestors in Madison knocked over the statue of an abolitionist immigrant who died fighting for the union, a statue commemorating women's suffrage and beat up a 60 year old democratic state senator and left him lying on the ground.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/24/madison-police-protest-senator/

Democrats are why Lindsey Graham 1) is alive and 2) an elected official. Without Democrats fighting for decades for gay rights and equality, he would have been lynched decades ago by the KKK

Hard to count the reasons Engel's loss in #NY16 (after 32 years) is so monumental. Just a few:
1) Pelosi loses a top ally & sitting Foreign Affairs chair
2) Desire in majority non-white districts for reflective representation
3) New York Democrats voting for antisemites who ran on a platform of "Jews control everything, kill them and all the wars end and capitalism ends"

Quinnipiac OHIO poll: "A majority (57 percent) oppose cutting some funding for police departments in their community and shifting it to social services, while 39 percent support it."
https://poll.qu.edu/ohio/release-detail?ReleaseID=3665

They're not really arguing about it, they're just whistling tunes from Les Miserables (gay Lindsey Graham) ... Logs onto Twitter. Sees people vehemently arguing about the French Revolution. Logs off of Twitter...

A shift from House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler: After saying Sunday impeaching AG Bill Barr is a “waste of time,” he says his committee “may very well” pursue Barr’s impeachment. Asked why his view had changed, Nadler said: “I think the weight of the evidence and of what’s happens leads to that conclusion.”

If you were born after November 1974, you have never voted in an election where an incumbent President was defeated. So the gal between polling (Trump down 10) and voter expectations (of course he’ll win again) isn’t super surprising.

Twitter has confirmed to @Gizmodo that @DDoSecrets  was "permanently suspended". We @derSpiegel
 portrayed the work of the #DDoSecrets transparency activists @NatSecGeek & @bbhorne
 a while ago:
https://spiegel.de/international/database-exposes-offshore-holdings-of-prominent-germans-a-065050b7-88f9-48b3-83b9-d474599de2ed

It’s nearly impossible to imagine how police reform is revived this year after Wednesday’s spectacle on the Senate floor. Republicans want to bring bill back up and dare Democrats to block again. Democrats want bill in Committee; “waste of my time,” said Chairman Lindsey Graham. Police reform not surprisingly killed by Republicans.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/24/how-police-reform-collapsed-in-the-senate-338332


We can’t have selective laws based upon political leanings. Just because you agree politically with the lawlessness should not make the act lawful. If roving mobs turned and began destroying Abolitionist or Civil Rights Movement statues, we cannot then choose to only prosecute them because we disagree with their agenda. We need a safe and legal process to dismantle racist statues that doesn’t involve burning and decapitating them in the middle of the night.

A federal grand jury returned a second superseding indictment today charging Julian P. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.  
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wikileaks-founder-charged-superseding-indictment

The US must first return to normal - which simply means SETTLING DOWN - and then move forward.

In light of the DC Circuit's order this morning that the judge grant DOJ's motion to dismiss the case, the judge has put the hearing date on hold. He hasn't ordered dismissal yet, however. He’s waiting to see if another member of the DC Court of Appeals will want it to go to the full court
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/michael-flynn-case-dismissal-court-rules-trump

The DNC has outlined its adjusted 2020 convention plans:
- Biden to accept nomination Milwaukee
- State delegations to conduct business remotely
- Venue moved from Fiserv Forum to Wisconsin Center
- Additional health precautions to come
https://www.axios.com/dnc-convention-milwaukee-bc909ff0-0203-449c-969a-020783f36990.html

In this case they ought to move the convention back to mid July (ditto for Republicans) to allow states to start mass producing mail-in ballots and to allow Democrats access his general election money a month sooner.

Yet another senior White House economic official is leaving -- in the middle of an economic crisis. This time it's Tom Philipson, chair of the WH Council of Economic Advisers
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/24/white-house-economist-philipson-departure/

MSNBC is expected to tap political analyst Joy Reid to anchor a 7 p.m. daily news and opinion program, people familiar with the matter said, filling the vacancy created at the cable news channel when Chris Matthews resigned abruptly
https://www.wsj.com/articles/msnbc-expected-to-tap-joy-reid-to-anchor-daily-news-and-opinion-program-11593041370

Joy Reid, an MSNBC host and a prominent liberal figure who blamed hackers for some of the homophobic blog posts found on her decade-old blog in the past several months, apologized again on Friday after more incendiary posts emerged this week. On Wednesday, BuzzFeed News reported that Ms. Reid’s old blog had promoted a Sept. 11 conspiracy by suggesting that readers watch “Loose Change,” which posits that the attack was planned by the United States government. And on Thursday, BuzzFeed News surfaced a post that contained an image of Senator John McCain’s head Photoshopped onto the body of Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech. Meghan McCain, the senator’s daughter, wrote on Twitter that the post was “beyond disgusting and disgraceful.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/business/media/joy-reid-msnbc-apology.html

Dozens of Secret Service officers and agents on site for Trump's Tulsa rally have been ordered to self-quarantine after two of their colleagues tested positive for coronavirus⁠—part of the fallout from Trump's insistence on the event.
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/dozens-of-secret-service-officers-and-agents-told-to-self-quarantine-after-trumps-tulsa-rally/2020/06/24/22c08b36-b55f-11ea-aca5-ebb63d27e1ff_story.html

The state of Texas reported 5,551 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, its highest number of reported cases in one day yet.

Nunes cannot sue Twitter over accounts posing as his mother and a cow, judge rules
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/24/politics/devin-nunes-twitter-lawsuit-cow/index.html
https://fresnobee.com/news/nation-world/national/article243664982.html

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice has forced out the commissioner of his public health bureau hours after he publicly questioned the accuracy of the state’s coronavirus data and detailed growing outbreaks in about a dozen counties.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/west-virginia-gov-jim-justice-forces-out-top-health-official-n1232066?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_np

During tonight's "Community of Pride" event, JoeBiden says that if the U.S. wants to live up to being the beacon of hope in the world, they need to pass the Equality Act, ban conversion therapy & bring back pride celebrations to the White House. He promises to do that if elected

That fake cow had something like 18 followers when all this blew up. It gained hundreds of thousands more very quickly. No idea what the current total is, but this would have never been noticed if Nunes had just shut his yap. Just checked. 724,000 followers. That's how the show Married with Children became popular. An uptight lady got her panties in a twist and campaigned to have the show dropped, but the publicity around the conflict improved the popularity of the show. Every year the show was on air, the showrunners sent flowers to the woman for her birthday.

White House ordered NIH to cancel coronavirus research funding
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/white-house-ordered-nih-to-cancel-coronavirus-research-funding-fauci-says/

Kings guard Buddy Hield has tested positive for coronavirus
https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/1275956022499258377

90-percent of the worlds Elephant population has been killed off in the last 70 years as habitat loss and https://dailycolumn.com.au/90-percent-the-worlds-elephant-population-has-been-killed-off-in-the-last-70-years-as-habitat-loss-and-wildlife-trade-on-the-rise/

400 DC National Guard Members Activated, on Standby to Protect Monuments
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/400-dc-national-guard-members-activated-on-standby-to-protect-monuments/2342789/

This is Elijah McClain. He helped at animal shelters by playing the violin to the animals and doesn't eat meat. Elijah was killed after the police put him in a carotid hold and the paramedics injected him with ketamine.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/2-million-people-signed-petition-203000562.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/justice-for-elijah-mcclain-petition-gets-over-2-million-signatures-one-year-after-death/
https://www.change.org/p/adams-county-district-attorney-justice-for-elijah-mcclain-48a81830-f891-4b04-ba28-c2625b916b96

Over the last 2 weeks, cases have risen by 84% in states that don't require wearing masks in public. In states where mask wearing is mandatory, cases have fallen by 25%.
https://inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/covid-19-coronavirus-face-masks-infection-rates-20200624.html

Moot, I'm still not wearing a mask and don't have any reason to, I actually healthy for real, never smoked anything, never drank, no drugs, organic+vegan for almost 20 years, etc. Nobody FACTUALLY healthy has been hospitalized, let alone died. Covid19 attacks people who destroyed their own health with smoking, drugs, alcohol, shit food, etc

Ah yes, that famous reactionary icon commissioned by Wisconsin women, sculpted by one, and designed explicitly as a symbol of progressivism in the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment: Lady Forward statute has been removed by mentally ill deranged Democrats at the Wisconsin State Capitol. Statue is now in the middle of the street.
https://twitter.com/lachlan/status/1275751415038820353?s=20

For the first time, Miami-Dade County will send teams to  neighborhoods with the highest number of coronavirus cases to educate people about social distancing and masking and distribute hand sanitizer and mask. The county is also providing hotel rooms for people to self-isolate.
https://twitter.com/PatriciaMazzei/status/1275894479212462080?s=20

In Miami-Dade County, the number coronavirus cases among 18 to 34 year olds has increased fivefold in a month to more than 1,000 as of June 18, Mayor Carlos Gimenez says.
https://twitter.com/PatriciaMazzei/status/1275895499783094273?s=20

18 to 34 year olds in South Florida = 100% of whom smoke cigarettes/marijuana and/or vape, take other drugs, drink alcohol like crazy, and eat shit

"It's on the table" to start enforcing penalties against people failing to wear masks, Gimenez says. The penalties are on the books as a criminal citation. The mayor says the county is considering if a civil citation is also a possibility.
https://twitter.com/PatriciaMazzei/status/1275896045009080321?s=20

A massive plume of dust from the Sahara desert in northern Africa has been traversing the atmosphere, thousands of feet above the tropical Atlantic Ocean, and is now cloaking the Caribbean and closing in on the southeastern United States. While summer dust plumes are a common occurrence, this appears to be one of the most extreme in recent memory. It's so large it has been nicknamed the Gorilla Dust Cloud.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saharan-dust-plume-gorilla-dust-cloud-drifting-united-states/

About 1.3M more workers filed jobless claims, signaling slow recovery
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/06/24/layoffs-least-1-3-m-workers-expected-have-filed-jobless-claims/3241700001/

Heat forward Derrick Jones Jr. tests positive for coronavirus.
https://twitter.com/IraHeatBeat/status/1276141013577412614

Vince Carter announced his retirement today after 22 seasons in the NBA. He was drafted on June 24, 1998, when 4 of his Hawks teammates from this season weren’t even born yet.

Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Sues Trump and Team Over Forcing them to Dismantle their Covid-19 Checkpoints by Pulling Law Enforcement Funding
https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/cheyenne-river-sioux-river-sues-trump-and-team-over-checkpoint/

Colorado governor directs officials to reexamine death of Elijah McClain in police custody
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/504508-colorado-governor-directs-office-to-reexamine-death-of-elijah-mcclain-in

Native American activists planning protests for Trump's Mount Rushmore visit
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/504513-native-american-activists-planning-protests-for-trumps-mount-rushmore

Supreme Court bolsters Trump administration's ability to quickly deport people who enter country illegally, refuses to give asylum seekers broad right to make case to federal judge. That's the only Scotus opinion today. 7-2, with only Sotomayor and Kagan dissenting -- definitely not a party-line decision here.
https://twitter.com/gregstohr/status/1276154418661113857?s=21

Trump's Fireworks Show at Mt. Rushmore Is a Dangerous Idea (And Sacrilegious)
https://www.ecowatch.com/mt-rushmore-fireworks-trump-public-health-2646260174.html

California Set to Require Zero-Emissions Trucks; The new rule, expected Thursday, would mean more than half of trucks sold in the state must be zero-emissions by 2035, and all of them by 2045
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/climate/zero-emissions-trucks-california.html

World Health Organization announces end to Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo that killed 2,280 people
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/25/world-health-organization-announces-end-to-ebola-o/

The entire planet is going to have to live with covid19, get fucking over it already

Trump keeps losing in the courts. You love to see it: Judge rejects Trump family attempt to block publication of niece's tell-all
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/25/judge-rejects-trump-family-attempt-to-block-publication-of-nieces-tell-all-lawyer-says.html

Hey Joe Bye Don

4.7 Million Uninsured Adults Could Become Eligible for Medicaid by 2021 if All Remaining States Expanded the Program under the ACA
https://www.kff.org/uninsured/press-release/4-7-million-uninsured-adults-could-become-eligible-for-medicaid-by-2021-if-all-remaining-states-expanded-the-program-under-the-aca/

Pres uses shipyard speech to trumpet Government contract to build ten next generation guided missile frigates worth $5.5-billiion. Says it will create 1,000 new jobs at the shipyard, and 15,000 more in the supply chain in WI and MI, both must-win states for his reelection.
https://twitter.com/markknoller/status/1276265680342564864?s=20

Today I signed an Executive Order designating Attorney General Phil Weiser to investigate and, if the facts support prosecution, criminally prosecute any individuals whose actions caused the death of Elijah McClain.
https://twitter.com/GovofCO/status/1276251394412961792?s=20

This is innumeracy masquerading as accountability. $1.4 billion out of $269 billion—a 0.5% error rate—going to people it shouldn’t have really isn’t that big a deal for money that had to get out the door immediately.
https://washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/06/25/irs-stimulus-checks-dead-people-gao/

Because people on this website love travel problems: Hertz now calls several times a day, claiming (incorrectly) that I never returned my New Mexico car. And instead of being connected to a rep I have to call and wait on hold. So, totally mystery why they went bankrupt

DC statehood vote to make history in the House — and that's about all. Senate Republicans Not Interested. Republican arguments against DC statehood are so empty it’s like they aren’t even trying. They are saying that there aren’t enough miners and loggers in DC. Plus, I kid you not, something about Marion Barry, and DC residents not being well rounded enough.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/d-c-statehood-vote-make-history-house-s-about-all-n1232099?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_np

Dozens Arrested In NYC For Illegal Fireworks, Guns, Alligator Carcasses
https://gothamist.com/news/nearly-two-dozen-arrested-nyc-illegal-fireworks-guns-alligator-carcasses

Previously Convicted Felon Lobbyist Jack Abramoff and CEO Roland Marcus Andrade charged in SF with fraud in connection with $5 mill cryptocurrancy deal
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-25/lobbyist-abramoff-charged-in-crypto-currency-case-u-s-says
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff

DeVos issues illegal rule illegally steering more virus aid to Christian schools
https://apnews.com/7b035436a7abf06588dcf5cb65a3a9a9

"What had happened was wrong, and I did not want to be a part of what had happened," Zelinsky, who quit the case with three other prosecutors after the intervention, said. ". . . Roger Stone was treated differently because of politics. He received breaks that are, in my experience, unheard of, and all the more so for a defendant in his circumstances: a defendant who lied to Congress, who remained unrepentant and who made threats against a judge in his case. And what I heard repeatedly was that this leniency was happening because of Stone's relationship to the president."
https://www.salon.com/2020/06/25/house-democrats--we-may-very-well-impeach-william-barr-for-reigning-terror-on-the-rule-of-law/

One of those great coincidences that one Trump scandal involves someone named Zelensky who didn't want to be a part of something shady, while another one involves someone named Zelinsky who didn't want to be a part of something shady. There was also a Zelenko (malaria drug) who was very eager to get involved with something shady, but the email accidentally went to one of the other Zel names (Aaron Zelinsky, Baltimore prosecutor) that wasn't interested in shady business.

Vandals Cause Estimated $100K of Damage to Indian Restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico | Restaurant vandalised with racist slurs, White supremacist and Trump 2020 messages

Siberia Heatwave Sees Buildings Split in Two As Permafrost Thaws | A two-story residential building broke apart as layers of permafrost thawed during a summer heatwave in Yakutsk, Russia — often referred to as the "world's coldest city"
https://www.newsweek.com/siberia-heatwave-buildings-split-permafrost-thaws-1513455

Earlier this year, the narrative being projected by some around Trump was that the pandemic was a blue state problem, and, in the way some view the world, that it wasn’t “our people” dying. Then there’s this: Oklahoma, Texas, South Carolina and Florida are now all reporting their highest single-day totals of the coronavirus ever
https://twitter.com/TheBeatWithAri/status/1276281917403541504?s=20

Barr spent weeks in 2019 questioning SDNY prosecutors over their decision to charge Michael Cohen with violating campaign finance laws. At one point, Barr told DOJ officials to draft a memo that could have undermined that part of Cohen's conviction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/nyregion/geoffrey-berman-william-barr-michael-cohen.html

So Barr tried to interfere in a case that *directly* implicated Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator. How much more of this are we going to take?? IMPEACH BARR

Three wildfires burning in Arizona rank in the top 10 largest in the state’s history. The Bush Fire, Bighorn Fire and Mangum Fire have burned more than 323,000 acres combined as of Wednesday morning, according to InciWeb.
https://ktar.com/story/3333221/3-wildfires-burning-in-arizona-rank-in-top-10-largest-in-state-history/
https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/

There's a tendency to dismiss TX and its latent competitiveness at the Presidential level by dismissing 2018 as a function of Ted Cruz being, well, Ted Cruz. But remember, by the time Beto got 48% and came within 3 points, Cruz JA was net positive and Trump was at 49% in exits.

Dr. Rick Bright, who was removed from a key pandemic response job, updates whistleblower complaint with additional allegations of retribution and says the Trump admin. is "on the warpath" against him.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/ousted-coronavirus-whistleblower-says-trump-administration-warpath-against-him-n1232177?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_np

Arizona is getting hit worse over coronavirus than Florida. And the tone of both politicians reflect it. But the warning and details from AZ’s governor are orders of magnitude greater than FL’s. If FL’s trajectory continues, will this rhetorical disparity still exist? We’ll see

NASA will name its headquarters after Mary W. Jackson, the agency's first African American female engineer! Her story inspired the book and film "Hidden Figures." She is hidden no more.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/us/mary-w-jackson-hidden-figures-nasa-building-trnd/index.html

For people who want to help realize this moment and turn Texas blue, please consider supporting today:
https://poweredxpeople.org/

School districts around our nation should consider how to improve, rather than eliminate, school resource officers. Defunding school safety isn’t the answer. Communities should let data guide their decision.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/opinions/removing-law-enforcement-from-schools-mistake-petty/index.html

YEP: Oglala Sioux President says Mount Rushmore should be 'removed': What's behind the site's controversial history (at least file down the faces)
https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/25/mount-rushmore-oglala-sioux-president-removal-president-trump/3198922001/

Trump cancels golf trip to New Jersey after new coronavirus quarantine rule
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/26/covid-19-trump-cancels-new-jersey-trip-after-coronavirus-quarantine-rule.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-bedminster-new-jersey-coronavirus-quarantine-golf-club-white-house-a9588161.html

A 14-year-old girl fought off two rapists in India but was burned to death when her attackers became enraged at her resistance. Indians shrug.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8458767/Girl-14-fights-gang-rapists-burnt-death-enraged-attackers-India.html

Trump Administration Files Supreme Court Brief To End Obamacare Amid COVID-19 Crisis
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obamacare-supreme-court-brief-trump-coronavirus_n_5ef57235c5b612083c4b567a

Trump administration illegally wants drilling on more than two-thirds of the largest swath of U.S. public land | The nearly 23-million acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska provides a critical refuge to migrating caribou, waterfowl and other wildlife
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/06/25/national-petroleum-reserve-alaska-trump

Sen. Tom Cotton praises Wyoming as a white pro- state in arguing against D.C. statehood
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gop-senator-says-dc-residents-dont-measure-up-to-wyomings-working-middle-class/2020/06/25/39e66312-b721-11ea-a510-55bf26485c93_story.html

His supporters only want one thing: to hurt the people that they don't like. That's it. He doesn't need to help a single person, fix a single problem, nothing. As long as him being president makes life worse for everyone that doesn't look or think like them, he will be their only choice.

Ninth Circuit Hands Trump Admin a Big Loss: the Transfer of Military Funds to Build the Wall Was ‘Unlawful’
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/ninth-circuit-hands-trump-admin-a-big-loss-the-transfer-of-military-funds-to-build-the-wall-was-unlawful/

DOJ Refusing to Release Secret Memo Detailing Rationale for Not Charging Trump with Obstruction in Mueller Probe
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/doj-refusing-to-release-secret-memo-detailing-rationale-for-not-charging-trump-with-obstruction-in-mueller-probe/

Witness in the Mueller investigation and informal Trump adviser gets 10 years in prison in child sex case
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/26/politics/george-nader-prison-sentence-mueller/index.html

House Passes DC Statehood Bill Friday in Historic Vote. With more than 220 co-sponsors, the bill has enough support to pass but is not expected to go anywhere in the Senate. Sen. Mitch McConnell already said he wouldn't bring the bill to the Senate floor for a vote.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/house-passes-dc-statehood-bill/2344609/

COVID-19 Cases in FL are up 205% from 2-weeks ago now a particularly dangerous hotspot. Disney World is under pressure to push back its reopening.
https://www.si.com/nba/2020/06/26/nba-bubble-coronavirus-breaking-point

Disney World re-opening will make covid cases sky rocket. They need to shut down the entire state. All the states that got hit hard back in April-March shut down for much less than what Florida is seeing right now, and NYC still suffered greatly for it. Florida fucked Disney by opening too early. Disney made the correct decision to wait until after July 4th to open. If the whole state had done the same thing I’m confident that we wouldn’t be seeing the issues we are seeing now.

Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill Troops | The intelligence finding was briefed to Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said. He wanted Russia back into the G7 late in April. A month after he learned about this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html
https://nypost.com/2019/08/20/trump-wants-russia-back-in-the-g7-says-putin-outsmarted-obama/

People think he accidentally bungled the pandemic response. He's successfully tricked everyone into thinking it's incompetence instead of evil.

"Putin said he didn't do it, and I believe him."

Supreme Court of Canada rules against Uber, allowing $400M class-action lawsuit to move ahead
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/stefanovich-supreme-court-uber-class-action-decision-1.5626853

Jaguar poaching has increased more than 200-fold in the last five years, driven by demand from Chinese consumers for claws, teeth and bone powder used in medicinal paste
https://focusingonwildlife.com/news/jaguar-poaching-has-increased-more-than-200-fold-in-the-last-five-years-driven-by-demand-from-chinese-consumers-for-claws-teeth-and-bone-powder-used-in-medicinal-paste

Major Fuel Spill in Russia’s North Spreads Toward Arctic Ocean: A diesel spill has released about half as much petroleum into the environment as the Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Alaska. The fuel is flowing toward the Arctic Ocean.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/world/europe/russia-arctic-oil-spill.html

Most U.S. travelers will be barred from E.U. when 27-nation bloc reopens. Travelers from China welcomed as long as EU travelers not blocked by Beijing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/world/europe/europe-us-travel-ban.html

The lawsuit seeking to block the tell-all book of the president's niece Mary Trump has been refiled in Dutchess County, N.Y., the day after the same effort failed in Queens.
https://www.courthousenews.com/court-wont-block-tell-all-book-by-presidents-niece-mary-trump/

Mandatory measures for face masks: NC, WA, CA, CT, DE, HI, IL, KY, ME, MD, MA, MI, NJ, NM, NY, PA, RI. District of Columbia introduced measures on face coverings. Palm Beach County has a new mask mandate.

Nothing can make me wear a fask mask, unlike 100% of the people hospitalized and dead, I'm actually healthy. My body my choice. Fuck you and your masks. Covid19 really is a "kung flu". REAL healthy people are asymptomatic and unaffected. Unhealthy people are and that's not my problem. You destroyed your health, you pay the consequences, not me. Quit dictating to me what I can wear and where I can go. Democrats on track to lose.

Blackstone Group Inc. is more than 30 days delinquent on $273.7 million of debt tied to a portfolio of business hotels, a sign that large real estate investors are considering walking away from properties in the pandemic
economy.

“The panel held that the Executive Branch lacked independent constitutional authority to authorize the transfer of funds. The panel noted that the Appropriations Clause of the U.S. Constitution exclusively grants the power of the purse to Congress. The panel held that the transfer of funds violated the Appropriations Clause, and, therefore, was unlawful.”
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/ninth-circuit-hands-trump-admin-a-big-loss-the-transfer-of-military-funds-to-build-the-wall-was-unlawful/

Guess this one will be going to the Supreme Court...Taking this to the Supreme Court would be like asking them to rule whether someone under 35 can be president. But here we are.

The NBA and NBPA have announced the following: 1 out of every 19 NBA players has coronavirus right now. What about the results from staff members?
https://twitter.com/NBA/status/1276540626255917056

CANCEL THE SEASON ALREADY AND POSTPONE NEXT SEASON INDEFINITELY.

"If we didn’t test there would be no cases"

Adam Silver said “there will not a law enforcement presence” on the campus and that players will be free to leave the bubble, as opposed to being prevented.
https://twitter.com/VinceGoodwill/status/1276609508345876482

Native American Leader Challenges Players on Washington’s NFL Team to Sit - The National Congress of American Indians, which represents over 500 tribal nations, calls for athletes to stay home rather than play under the team's racist name
https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/06/26/native-american-leader-challenges-players-on-washingtons-nfl-team-to-sit/

Court Orders DeVos to Cancel Loans for Mass. Students Defrauded by Corinthian Colleges
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/26/huge-win-court-orders-devos-cancel-loans-mass-students-defrauded-corinthian-colleges

Good, Democrats need to stop closing down everything and attacking everybody already: Federal Judge Blocks Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio’s Coronavirus Limits on Religious Gatherings.
https://lawandcrime.com/covid-19-pandemic/federal-judge-blocks-andrew-cuomo-and-bill-de-blasios-coronavirus-limits-on-religious-gatherings/

The simple fact that trump’s tax returns are the first and only set of returns deemed meritorious of a safe speaks volumes

Florida would’ve been better off with the guy who was caught with a possible male prostitute and cocaine at a hotel room.

“He showed some concern when his personal valet, who serves his food, was diagnosed with the coronavirus and Mr. Pence’s press secretary tested positive. But since then, Mr. Trump has maintained a posture of denial and dismissiveness.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/trump-coronavirus.html

Citing COVID-19 concerns, a federal judge has ordered  ICE to release all immigrant children, detained inside its three family detention centers for more than 20 days, by July 17. Yesterday we reported that 11 people inside one of these facilities tested positive for the disease.
https://twitter.com/aflores/status/1276663159927996423

Texas was among the first states to reopen during the pandemic, but now the state is rolling back reopening plans. Houston is locking back down even further. The surrounding county is at “level one,” its highest threat level, as hospitals are filling up.
https://twitter.com/CBSEveningNews/status/1276646831930462208

Jenniffer Gonzalez, the current Resident Commissioner elected by Puerto Rico to be a non voting member of the House, is a shitstain deranged Republican: if DC and Puerto Rico become states, "I will be the last Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee forever because they will pick up four Democratic seats that will never flip over. ... Republicans will never be in the majority in the United States Senate." | The only reason to believe this is if you think the GOP could never, at any point, be competitive in an election where most voters are people of color. And if that’s your view, then man do I have some news for you about the demographic future of this country.
https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status/1276663674183323650?s=20

For everyone claiming that protests caused the #COVID19 surge, here’s the case curve in D.C., site of some of the biggest protests. Meanwhile, Tom Cotton thinks D.C. isn’t responsible enough to be a state. So let’s check in on Arkansas.
https://twitter.com/ChrisLu44/status/1276656993097314306?s=20

US saw a record number of new coronavirus cases in a single day Friday, with 40,173 new cases reported, according to Johns Hopkins University.
https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1276676463996133376?s=20

The previous record was set yesterday, surpassing the record set the day before that.

Barr admits he has no evidence to support his voting by mail conspiracy about counterfeit ballots
https://www.salon.com/2020/06/26/barr-admits-he-has-no-evidence-to-support-his-voting-by-mail-conspiracy-about-counterfeit-ballots/

Judge orders Roger Stone to begin sentence on July 14
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/26/judge-orders-roger-stone-to-begin-sentence-on-july-14/

This is the REAL TikTok: TikTok reportedly waited nearly 3 hours to call police in Brazil after a teen's death was livestreamed on the platform, but the company notified its own PR team almost immediately
https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-suicide-livestream-brazil-teen-waited-3-hours-call-police-2020-2

In India, Father And Son Sodomized In Police Custody (in custody for keeping business open during shutdown) die from injuries.
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/tuticorin-custodial-death-kin-say-father-son-duo-was-sexually-abused-in-police-custody-outrage-in-tamil-nadu-1692411-2020-06-25

Hundreds of dead dolphins washing up on French coast after being trapped in fishing nets
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dolphins-dead-france-fishing-brittany-a9588606.html

Feds Point to Daily Caller Writer as Part of Abramoff Payola Scheme
https://www.thedailybeast.com/feds-point-to-daily-caller-writer-as-part-of-jack-abramoff-payola-scheme

Democrats have zero credibility and are done, I'm a registered Democrat who did not support Clinton or Sanders in 2016 and stayed home, did not vote in the 2018 midterms or any local/state elections (pointless, 100% of the candidates are evil lying mentally ill deranged criminal terrorists), and already see Trump easily winning re-election. I went from voting in all elections at the local/state/federal level for 25 years (never missed a vote) and being an actual Democratic national delegate in 2008 to basically abandoning the party altogether when the Zimmerman/Martin case happened. That is the moment Democrats destroyed their party.

Texas Bar Owners Plan Protest Against New Shutdowns as Coronavirus Cases Spike
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-bar-owners-plan-protest-against-new-shutdowns-coronavirus-cases-spike-1513811

New vegan film They're Trying To Kill Us examines intersection of diet, poverty, and systemic racism.
https://vegnews.com/2020/6/new-vegan-film-they-re-trying-to-kill-us-examines-intersection-of-diet-poverty-and-systemic-racism

Florida is actively suppressing death counts related to covid, abysmal testing, and even trying to under report cases.

They say “g/d will protect them” from coronavirus-19 so they shouldn’t have to wear masks. My favourite argument to that is if g/d is protecting them why do they need to carry a gun?

If g/d meant for you to see, he would’ve given you better vision.  Might as well stop wearing tampons as well, g/d created periods too. You know what, stop putting diapers on babies. G/d clearly wanted your baby to be covered in its own excrement and develop sores. Why even bother having doctors? Our bodies are perfect temples and can magically heal themselves with the power of prayer!

9000 is 1/4 of ALL new cases in the entire U.S. Florida is being completely overrun by this thing. They're about to reach Italy levels of death and exhaustion of hospitals. Ron DeSantis should be in a cell right now.

I hate meat-eaters who let meat/dairy go bad, and throw it out. What the hell?? As if contributing to murder isn’t bad enough. Flat-out throwing the animal products away disgusts me on such a visceral level. It’s unreal, the utter disregard for the animal. These murderers would just chuck one into the bin like nothing’s wrong. If someone is going to justify eating meat with “at least every part gets used” but said person has let an animal product go to waste, they’re a piece of sh*t. It's really depressing how disconnected people are. The whole everyone calling cops "Pigs" bothers me too since it's happening so much right now. Pigs have suffered their entire miserable lives for nothing, and only to be treated as worthless and as a joke by our society. It's so different from how Native Americans treated the animals that died to sustain them with dignity and respect, American Buffalo for example were considered Sacred beings and their lives were honored in many prayer and spiritual/religious rituals.

How would Fox, Lindsey Graham, and Republicans react if any other President knew for months that Russia was paying bounties on our troops, did literally nothing about it, praised Russia, invited Putin back to the G-7, and used our military for campaign photo ops? Vote them all out

Linking the repeal of the individual mandate to repeal of the entire law is exactly what Senate Rrepublicans say they did not do when they wrote the tax bill
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-administrations-move-to-end-obamacare-amid-pandemic-reignites-political-fight/2020/06/26/9c1ddb98-b7bf-11ea-9b0f-c797548c1154_story.html

Florida sets another one-day record with 9,585 new coronavirus cases
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/504847-florida-sets-another-one-day-record-with-9585-new-coronavirus-cases

Mississippi governor says he would sign bill to remove Confederate emblem from state flag
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/27/mississippi-flag-vote/

Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., the last of three one-time Ku Klux Klansmen convicted in a 1963 Alabama church bombing that killed four Black girls and was the deadliest single attack of the civil rights movement, died Friday in prison. He was 82.

Trump was asked by Spectrum News put the phrase "Black Lives Matter" into this own words and what this civil rights moment means now. His answer: "It means a lot to me and the civil rights means a lot to me. And nobody has done more for African-Americans."
https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-interview-jeevan-vittal-spectrum-news-june-22-2020

I’ve been digging into some of the stories of people getting fired for supposed racism. What I found was companies cravenly sacrificing employees—some of them working-class people of color—who did nothing wrong: Those of us who want to build a better society should defend the innocent because movements willing to sacrifice justice in the pursuit of noble goals have, again and again, built societies characterized by pervasive injustice.
https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/

A Toronto police officer who beat a Black teenager so badly he lost an eye has been found guilty of assault, but not aggravated assault.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ep4pbz/toronto-cop-found-guilty-in-assault-on-black-teenager-who-lost-an-eye

A cloud with tiny levels of radioactivity, believed to originate from western Russia, has been detected over Scandinavia and European Arctic.
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/ecology/2020/06/various-reactor-related-isotopes-measured-over-scandinavia-and-svalbard

Radiation level increase in northern Europe may ‘indicate damage’ to nuclear power plant in Russia
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/radiation-scandinavia-nuclear-power-plant-russia-a9589301.html

A slice of the Australian outback almost the size of greater London will be turned into a national park to help protect threatened species. Narriearra Station, 592-square-mile property in northwest New South Wales, is the biggest purchase of private land for national parks ever made
https://www.france24.com/en/20200627-australian-outback-station-turned-into-national-park

A bear in Italy has been sentenced to death after attacking hikers. Activists want a stay of execution
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/27/world/bear-sentenced-to-death-in-italy-scli-intl/index.html

The Environmental Justice Foundation has found Taiwanese fishing crews have been intentional killing or illegal capture of protected marine mammals, including killer whales and dolphins
https://focustaiwan.tw/society/202006240026

Spanish virologists have found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before the COVID-19 disease was identified in China, the University of Barcelona said on Friday. The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought. | Bosch, who is president of the Spanish Society of Virologists, said that an early detection even in January could have improved the response to the pandemic. Instead, patients were probably misdiagnosed with common flu, contributing to community transmission before measures were taken.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/06/26/world/europe/26reuters-health-coronavirus-spain-science.html

Mississippi lawmakers have paved the way for legislation to remove the Confederate symbol from their state flag.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/27/mississippi-flag-vote/

Before the pandemic, the San Antonio food bank was feeding approximately 60,000 people per week. That number is now closer to 120,000, many are families accessing a food bank for the first time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/27/opinion/san-antonio-food-bank-coronavirus.html

What a ridiculous lie. Of course he was briefed. The alternative is dereliction of duty because you don’t read your PDB.  This raises the obvious and very serious question: The US had intelligence that Russia was paying militants to kill US & allied troops, and officials decided NOT to tell the president or VP about it? Team Trump's line s always "anybody who says otherwise is a liar!". Kayleigh and the White House have zero credibility.
https://twitter.com/JoshNBCNews/status/1276981842026082307

Four Heroes Charged in Federal Court for Attempting to Tear Down Statue of Genocider Of Native Americans. Boy. Thank g/d! Such a HUGE priority right now. I know that if anything else were going on—rampant unemployment, racism, police brutality, a pandemic—you guys would be laser focused on those things instead. Trump promised to make America great, but delivered only corruption, mass unemployment, hunger, homelessness, and 125,000 deaths. Fuck your little statue obsession.
https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status/1277043316903890944

Kings' Jabari Parker seen playing tennis after positive coronavirus test
https://sports.yahoo.com/kings-jabari-parker-seen-playing-231843934.html

While coronavirus spread in the U.S., an Indian slum with 1 million residents contained it
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-06-24/dharavi-slum-in-mumbai-india-contained-covid-19

While coronavirus spread in the U.S., an Indian slum with 1 million residents contained it
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-06-24/dharavi-slum-in-mumbai-india-contained-covid-19

Senate Republicans voted to authorize 53 subpoenas in its investigation of Obama. Almost all the subpoenas are for former Obama-era officials. To counter the Republican subpoenas, Democrats sought subpoenas for people in Trump’s inner circle, including former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump personal attorney Rudy Guiliani, his former attorney Michael Cohen, former deputy campaign manager Rich Gates, Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Those votes failed. This is going to be their angle and they will plan on using it from now to November. Expect this on the front page of FauxNews everyday as they rush schedule hearing after hearing, led by the Shrieking Eel Gym Jordan demanding Obama be charged with treason. Apparently, all this shit we're in as a country is the corrupt Dems' fault...and Trump is a true American hero; honest, brilliant, scholarly, and eloquent. Every day is opposite day now.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-committee-approves-over-50-subpoenas-investigation-mueller-probe-n1229986

Hundreds of complaints, zero penalties for bars, restaurants violating Florida reopening rules
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20200622/hundreds-of-complaints-zero-penalties-for-bars-restaurants-violating-florida-reopening-rules

Republicans cancel Pence's campaign tour because the Tulsa rally was a flop and many people tested positive within days, and because the states Republicans were targeting have rapidly increasing covid19 cases.
 
Rep. Steve Cohen, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, plans to file a resolution calling for an investigation into whether Barr has committed impeachable conduct and circulated a letter asking other Democrats to support it.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/26/attorney-general-william-barr-impeachment-probe-341296

Twitter user appearing to be Trump appears to promote electronic images appearing to be a video appearing to show a human appearing to be a supporter appearing to shout words appearing to sound like "white power"
https://nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-promotes-video-appearing-show-supporter-shouting-white-power-n1232356

Donald Trump also just killed the tweet where he amplified the video of The Villages contretemps where a supporter had yelled "white power."

Trump arrives Sunday morning at his Virginia golf club for the second time this weekend, his 272nd time at one of his golf clubs in his presidency. This time, he’s with Lindsey Graham
https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1277246121035943936

Mississippi Senate, House both approve resolution to suspend rules, create committee to change flag
https://www.wdam.com/2020/06/27/live-miss-house-begins-discussion-changing-state-flag/

The Obama Administration did everything they could to investigate and counter Russian election interference. Republicans controlled Congress and blocked many of the investigations being conducted by the entire government. Because Obama appointed Republicans to the government in a sign of bipartisonship, those Republican-appointees were also obstructing the investigations.
His response was a Lose-lose. He thought responding publically (announcing to the world that Trump and his campaign and all the people around him were under investigation) would polarize the electorate even more. I suspect he was right. So he made the decision he thought had the greatest possibility of electing Hillary and helping Democrats win back Congressional seats.

Hawaii Group Sets Record For Largest Haul of Plastic Removed From The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/hawaii-group-sets-record-for-largest-haul-of-plastic-removed-from-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch/

YEP: This year has taught us in the bluntest possible terms how much can change in four months. Between now and November 3rd, we have to work every day with urgency, and hope, to replace this president and elect @JoeBiden.
https://twitter.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1277230830163722241

Joaquin Phoenix Pays Tribute To Regan Russel At Slaughterhouse Vigil
https://raisevegan.com/joaquin-phoenix-pays-tribute-to-regan-russel-at-slaughterhouse-vigil/

Houston hospitals hit 100% base ICU capacity. Then they stopped reporting data.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Houston-hospitals-hit-100-base-ICU-capacity-15372256.php

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which last night said Trump and Pence never got a briefing on Russia bounty intel, is declining this morning to say whether the intel was included in a written President's Daily Brief
https://twitter.com/JoshNBCNews/status/1277266631694188545?s=20

Reported death toll in coronavirus pandemic exceeds 500,000
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

Pence pivots to adhering to CDC guidelines on masks — imagine the difference if the VP and POTUS started encouraging mask wearing and wearing masks themselves on April 3 when the CDC recommended it
https://twitter.com/kathrynw5/status/1277353969258356736?s=20

Whelp, there it is. The Texas Medical Center has deleted its helpful charts showing base and surge ICU capacity. No longer part of the daily updates. Comes 3 days after Gov. Abbott ordered hospitals in Houston to stop doing elective surgeries to preserve ICU beds.
https://twitter.com/Mike_Hixenbaugh/status/1277204625217720320?s=20

In the past 72 hours we've learned:
1. Trump knew Putin was hunting US soldiers
2. Putin successfully killed US soldiers
3. The Republican Administration intentionally and knowingly sold faulty anti-body testing kits
4. Covid19 had its largest ever single day cases
5. Trump tweeted a "white power" video