#KariLake #DollarGeneralBestSeller #Unemployed @Repeat1968, John Buss
Every day I read something new about some Maga Republican–elected officials or their enablers. My first question is, what fucking century do they think they’re living in or want to live in? The second is pretty brutal. Have they lost all sense of what it means to be part of a community of human beings?
Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz. referred to Black people as “colored people” Thursday in floor debate over his proposed amendment to an annual defense policy bill, prompting a stern rebuke from the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
“My amendment has nothing to do with whether or not colored people or Black people or anybody can serve,” said Crane, who is in his first term. “It has nothing to do with any of that stuff.”
Lawmakers were debating a series of GOP-backed amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, which the House aims to pass by the end of the week.
Crane said his amendment would prohibit the Defense Department from considering race, gender, religion, political affiliations or “any other ideological concepts” as the sole basis for recruitment training, education, promotion or retention decisions.
“The military was never intended to be, you know, inclusive. Its strength is not its diversity. Its strength is its standards,” said Crane, 43, a combat veteran.
“I’m going to tell you guys this right now you can: You can keep playing around these games with diversity, equity and inclusion. But there are some real threats out there. And if we keep messing around and we keep lowering our standards, it’s not going to be good,” he said.
If this Republican official had a better curriculum with real American history, he might’ve learned about the Buffalo Soldiers or the Tuskegee Airmen. For that matter, he could’ve watched a movie called “Glory,” showing the acts of bravery by the United States’ first African American Regiment, The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Actually, all three of these units were portrayed in movies. He didn’t even have to go to a good school to know about them. I wonder how he could manage to degrade the Navaho codetalkers who were an important part of the Asian theatre in World War 2. Who the hell does he think he is? With his time as a Navy Seal, I’m sure he most certainly served with a diverse military since he was born in 1980.
What does he think of the lack of a Marine Commandant whose assignment is being held up by the dumbest man we’ve seen in a long time, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama? He’s now holding up 250 military promotions. The Republican Party hates children and the military. What’s up with that? Their energy policy, education policy, and love of Putin are simply not in line with America’s future.
Congress’s decades-long streak of bipartisan support for itsannual defense policy and spending plan collapsed Friday, after House Republicans rammed through the most conservative National Defense Authorization Act in decades — restricting military personnel’s access to reproductive care and diversity protections, and imperiling lawmakers’ broader effort to set major national security priorities.
The House’s version of the bill, totaling $886 billion, passed on a vote of 219-210, carrying a razor-thin Republican majority. Four Democrats voted in favor of the legislation. The outcome sets up a showdown with the Senate, where lawmakers are expected to vote next week on its version of the legislation which lacks the divisive components pushed by House GOP’s hard-right wing.
Democrats and moderate Republicans predict that the defense bill, in its current form, will die in the Senate, raising uncertainty for the fate of major items that leaders from both political parties had identified as national defense imperatives.
The NDAA, which sets Pentagon policy and spending limits for the year ahead, includes increased investment in precision missiles, warships and newer technologies like artificial intelligence and hypersonics — necessities, leading lawmakers and the Biden administration say, as the United States directs greater attention toward China. It also authorizes a 5.2 percent base pay increase for military personnel and expanded support for their families through housing improvements, and broader access to child care, health care and education benefits.
“To have [House Speaker, Republican Kevin] McCarthy allow extremists to load up this bill with their wish list of extremist agenda items — so that we can’t in good faith pass this because we know it would harm the lives of servicewomen and service members’ families — is just a horrible place to be in,” Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) told reporters on a conference call Friday alongside Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), both U.S. military veterans.
“I don’t think, in good conscience, either one of us feel … that we could vote this through because of the damage it does to those who serve,” Sherrill added.
Iowa’s state legislature voted on Tuesday night to ban most abortions after around six weeks of pregnancy, a time before most people know they are pregnant.
Republican lawmakers, which hold a majority in both the Iowa house and senate, passed the anti-abortion bill after the governor, Kim Reynolds, called a special session to seek a vote on the ban.
The legislation will take immediate effect after the governor signs it on Friday and will prohibit abortions after the first sign of cardiac activity – usually around six weeks, with some exceptions for cases of rape or incest. It will allow for abortions up until 20 weeks of pregnancy only under certain conditions of medical emergency. Abortions in the state were previously allowed up to 20 weeks.
The bill passed with exclusively Republican support in a rare, one-day legislative burst lasting more than 14 hours.
“The Iowa supreme court questioned whether this legislature would pass the same law they did in 2018, and today they have a clear answer,” Reynolds said in a statement. “The voices of Iowans and their democratically elected representatives cannot be ignored any longer, and justice for the unborn should not be delayed.”
The legislation is the latest in a raft of anti-abortion laws passed in states across the country since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year, ending the nationwide constitutional right to abortion. A number of states, including a swath of the southern US, have passed full bans on abortion without exceptions for cases of rape or incest.
Preparations were already under way to quickly file legal challenges in court and get the measure blocked, once Reynolds signs it into law.
The salon, Studio 8 Hair Lab in Traverse City in the northwestern part of the state, announced on social media it will no longer serve clients who identify “as anything other than a man/woman,” and made derogatory comments about transgender people.
The salon’s Instagram page, now set to private, says it is “A private CONSERVATIVE business that does not cater to woke ideologies.”
“You are not welcome at this salon. Period,” the salon wrote in a now deleted Facebook post. “Should you request to have a particular pronoun used please note we may simply refer to you as ‘hey you.'”
The salon’s owner did not respond to requests for comment from USA TODAY or the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network. Christine Geiger, identified as a co-owner of the salon on LinkedIn, said in a Facebook comment reviewed by USA TODAY that she has “no issues” with lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
“It’s the TQ+ that I’m not going to support,” she said, referring to transgender and queer or questioning people. The comment, posted in a local Facebook group, used language often repeated by far-right conspiracy theorists to paint LGBTQ people as “groomers” dangerous to young people.
In March, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed an amendment to the state’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, extending protections to people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is a lesbian, has received several complaints about Geiger’s explicit statements, a spokesperson for the department said.
“The Department and the Attorney General herself are aware of the Traverse City salon proprietor’s professed intent to discriminate against Michigan residents,” the AG’s press secretary Danny Wimmer told The Advocate.
“At the Department, we have received several complaints pertaining to the bigotry exhibited by the salon proprietor in Traverse City, and the Attorney General finds the comments to be hateful, reprehensible remarks that seek only to marginalize a community already suffering from discriminatory animus in Michigan and elsewhere,” he added.
After the Supreme Court’s ruling in June, Nessel reiterated that the 303 Creative case did not affect LGBTQ+ MIchiganders’ access to most services in the state.
“This holding has no impact on Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act (ELCRA) when it is applied to protect against discrimination in the provision of public accommodations that do not constitute speech,” Nessel said in a press release. “My office will continue to fight to enforce Michigan’s ELCRA consistent with the First Amendment to protect the equal rights of all Michiganders.”
A New Jersey family has filed a racial harassment complaint against a school district after the parents said their son’s teacher sent him an unsolicited package that included an afro wig and white face paint in an “act of intimidation.”
According to the July 6 complaint, Denise and Kevin Anderson say the package was sent to their seven-year-old son—only referred to as “J.A.”—by Amazon on July 9, 2021, but there was no sender information. During the 2021-22 school year, administrators of Woodland School in Warren had access to students’ addresses for remote learning, the complaint says. Denise determined that the package was ordered by her son’s second-grade teacher, Christine Rzasa, after speaking with Amazon’s customer service, the suit says.
The complaint says J.A.’s “appearance easily identifies him as a member of the mixed-race community.” His mother is Afro-Latina, and his father is white.
Following the delivery, the Andersons contacted Woodland School Principal Jeff Heaney, the Warren Township School District, and the district board. But the family claimed in their lawsuit that nothing was done regarding the alleged violation of the state’s harassment, intimidation, and bullying laws. Instead, according to the complaint, J.A. was retaliated against in a “hostile education environment.”
“As a result, [J.A.] was so fearful, humiliated and intimidated that he suffered emotional and mental damages for which he had to receive therapy, change of schools and suffer other damages,” the complaint says. “Rzasa’s conduct can be described as nothing short of outrageous.”
DeSantis plans to meet with a group of about 30 pastors and their wives in Indianola, Iowa this weekend during his visit to the state. His campaign wants to have a pastor-surrogate in each of the state’s 99 counties as well as a campaign chair in each. He plans to visit all 99 counties as part of what’s known as “the full Grassley,” named in honor of the state’s senior Republican senator, Chuck Grassley.
The DeSantis team acknowledges Trump is ahead in Iowa and the early states, even in its own internal surveys conducted by DeSantis’s chief pollster and adviser, Ryan Tyson.
In a survey of 500 likely Republican primary voters in Iowa completed this week, Trump leads DeSantis 37%-21%, with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott in third at 11%; all other candidates running well behind in Iowa. Trump’s internal polling showed him with a bigger lead last month.
In a head-to-head matchup, Trump and DeSantis are virtually tied at 43%-42% in the DeSantis campaign poll. His campaign says this shows that the numerous other candidates in the race have little shot of winning but a big role in sapping votes from DeSantis to help Trump win.
Polls of Iowa are scarce, despite the fact that it plays a crucial role in primary season. Most polling in the race is of national Republicans, even though there isn’t a national primary, and sample sizes are usually smaller than 500 people.
The only independent public pollster to survey the race in Iowa recently, Adam Geller, found DeSantis receiving the same number as Tyson’s poll earlier this month: 21%. But Geller found Trump increasing his ballot share in a month to 44%. So Trump had a 23 percentage point lead instead of 16 points in the DeSantis poll by Tyson.
“The difference between 16 and 23 is close enough, depending on sample sizes, questions, dates, everything. I mean, that’s polling,” Geller said. “Sure, it’s early. But for DeSantis, he’s running out of time because in my polling, he’s losing to Trump among voters who like him. How do you win if the people who like you are voting for the other guy?”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung mocked the DeSantis campaign’s internal polling by issuing a written statement that also intentionally misspelled the Florida governor’s name, which Trump insists on doing.
“So the DeSanctus campaign is pushing internal polling from unbelievable pollsters— the most favorable and most biased polling they have— showing them DOWN 16 points,” he said. “How moronic can this campaign be? At this point, anything their campaign does should be considered an in-kind contribution to us.”
Donald Trump is ever the patriot. SIGH. This is from ABC News. Of course, it’s all about him. “Trump’s unprecedented campaign pitch: Elect me to get revenge on the government. “He’s declared war on them,” one GOP pollster said.”
In his comeback bid for the White House, the former president — twice impeached but twice acquitted and now twice indicted — has vowed that if reelected, he will wield his power to personally remake parts of the federal government to a degree that historian Mark Updegrove said was unprecedented. Trump has promised to hamstring perceived enemies, including in the Department of Justice, which is currently investigating him, and target Republican bogeymen like President Joe Biden.
He swore in June to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” the Bidens and that he would “totally obliterate the deep state,” referring to a conspiratorial view of how the government operates.
“This is the final battle. … Either they win or we win,” he said in March.
Among Trump’s policy proposals is reviving an executive order from the final months of his presidency, revoked by Biden, that observers say would let him essentially turn broad swaths of federal workers into at-will employees whom he could fire and replace — rather than terminating them only for cause, such as bad performance, and after satisfying certain employment protections.
The debt relief announced Friday affects borrowers enrolled in income-driven repayment plans, whichallow forgiveness after making a certain number of monthly payments.
But the plans have drawn criticism over the years because of poor communication between the Education Department, loan servicers and borrowers. A NPR investigation in 2022 detailed failures in the program.
According to the Education Department, Friday’s action “also addresses concerns about practices by loan servicers that put borrowers into forbearance in violation of Department rules.”
In April 2022, the Education Department said it would offer a one-time adjustment to address any inaccurate payment counts.
“At the start of this Administration, millions of borrowers had earned loan forgiveness but never received it. That’s unacceptable,” Education Undersecretary James Kvaal said in a statement. “Today we are holding up the bargain we offered borrowers who have completed decades of repayment.”
In coming days, qualifying borrowers who have met the necessary threshold for forgiveness will be notified. Types of loans covered include Direct Loans or Federal Family Education Loans held by the Education Department, including Parent PLUS loans.
A lot of us will be under a severe heat dome next week. Please try to stay safe, near air conditioning, and drink lots of water! I look back on so many things that would be better if we had a President Gore and if Hillary hadn’t been drug through the mud and had, instead, become our President. The sins of the Republicans are against humanity and its most vulnerable.
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Today will be another boiling hot day for millions of people in the U.S. and Europe. There has also been record flooding in many places in recent days.
We’ve had a relatively cool summer here in New England, until recently. Now we are also experiencing an extended period 90+ degree heat, pouring rain, and floods.
Is this extreme weather the new normal, as Dakinikat has suggested? I’ve been looking around this morning to see what experts are saying about this situation.
It’s hardly revelatory that summer is hot, but the summer of 2023 is standing out as records fall and thermometers push their breaking points. If you’re hoping for some sort of relief, it’s not coming anytime soon.
The South and Southwest will continue to face record temperatures for as much as the coming two weeks, forecasters have warned. A heat dome (another term for a ridge of high pressure) over Arizona, Nevada and parts of California could trap the hot air in place. Heat.gov, the government’s heat portal, says over 113 million Americans are under heat alerts. Given that the 2020 census put America’s population at about 331.5 million people, this heat alert means that you have a one in three chance of being under heat alert as an American this July.
It’s oppressive everywhere, but some areas are especially noteworthy. Phoenix has reported temperatures of over 110 degrees for 12 consecutive days. In the coming days, forecasters say that could climb to 118—and there’s no end in sight. Death Valley, Calif., meanwhile, is forecast to hit 123 degrees later this week.
Another heat dome over the South is keeping temperatures close to the 100-degree mark, with high humidity making it feel hotter. Heat indexes in the Lower Mississippi valley, for instance, are expected in the 110-115 range Thursday. That hazardous heat, in some regions, could last through July 20, forecasters say.
Coastal waters around Florida have reached alarming temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) with no sign of cooling off anytime soon, experts say.
The Sunshine State is in the midst of its hottest year in modern history, with temperatures over land averaging in the mid 90s F (35 C) — 3 to 5 F (1.7 to 2.8 C) above normal for this time of year. Ocean waters have absorbed much of this heat, causing sea temperatures to soar to record highs, which could spell trouble for marine ecosystems and strengthen storms and hurricanes.
Józef Chełmoński, Indian Summer, 1875
“It’s an astounding, prolonged heat wave even for a place that’s no stranger to sultry weather,” Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, told the Washington Post. “It’s not something we like to see near land simply because it would allow a storm to maintain a high intensity right up to landfall or rapidly intensify as it approaches landfall.” [….]
The current bath-like conditions are consistent with a “severe” marine heat wave, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The agency defines marine heat waves as “prolonged periods of anomalously high sea surface temperature” that can impact “a broad range of marine life.”
This includes coral bleaching, as reefs are “extremely sensitive to slight changes (just a few degrees) in water [temperature],” Berardelli wrote. NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch has designted an “Alert Level 1” area off the coast of Florida — the second-highest warning on the scale — with “significant bleaching likely.”
Across a wide swath of the U.S. from Texas to Nevada, a major heat wave that is threatening to break temperature records continued to bake parts of the South and Southwest on Wednesday, sending people scrambling for relief and adding to what has become a series of weather extremes that researchers say fit the pattern of a warming environment.
Temperatures well into the triple digits are expected this weekend from California to Texas to Florida, with parts of Nevada forecast to reach 116 degrees Fahrenheit and cities in Arizona expected to hit a staggering 118 F.
“Today is Day 12 of 110-plus, and the exclamation on this event is yet to come,” said David Hondula, who directs the Phoenix Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, which was gearing up for a weekend spike in temperatures.
Last month was the warmest June globally since at least 1850, when record-keeping began, according to a new report by Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research organization that focuses on climate data analysis. The report found that June 2023 broke the previous record, set last year, by a “large margin,” putting the planet on track for one of the warmest years on record — if not the warmest….
Hondula said his primary concern was the city’s population of people experiencing homelessness.
“We know there will be hundreds of people living on the street during this heat event and at much, much higher risk than everybody else,” Hondula said.
Last year, heat played a role in 425 deaths in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is, according to a report released this June. About 56% of the heat deaths involved people experiencing homelessness.
My god. Imagine being homeless and spending day after day outdoors in this heat!
The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing.
The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding.
They’re burbling up from the oceans, where temperatures have surged to levels considered “beyond extreme.”
And they’re showing up in unprecedented, still-burning wildfires in Canada that have sent plumes of dangerous smoke into the United States.
Scientists say there is no question that this cacophony was caused by climate change — or that it will continue to intensify as the planet warms. Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from burning fossil fuels, have raised Earth’s temperature by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Unless humanity radically transforms the way people travel, generate energy and produce food, the global average temperature is on track to increase by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — unleashing catastrophes that will make this year’s disasters seem mild.
The only question, scientists say, is when the alarms will finally be loud enough to make people wake up.
“This is not the new normal,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College London. “We don’t know what the new normal is. The new normal will be what it is once we do stop burning fossil fuels … and we’re nowhere near doing that.”
The arrival of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the return of the El Niño weather pattern, which tends to raise global temperatures, are contributing to this season of simultaneous extremes, Otto said. But the fact that these phenomena are unfolding against a backdrop of human-caused climate change is making these disasters worse than ever before.
What might have been a balmy day without climate change is now a deadly heat wave, she said. What was once a typical summer thunderstorm is now the cause of a catastrophic flood.
And a day that is usually warm for the planet — July 4 — was this year the hottest ever recorded. Earth’s global average temperature of more than 17 degrees Celsius (62.6 Fahrenheit) may well have been the hottest it has gotten in the last 125,000 years.
When will governments and corporations begin to take climate change seriously?
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a birth control pill to be sold without a prescription for the first time in the United States, a milestone that could significantly expand access to contraception.
Summertime, by Mary Cassatt, 1804
The medication, called Opill, will become the most effective birth control method available over the counter — more effective at preventing pregnancy than condoms, spermicides and other nonprescription methods. Experts in reproductive health said its availability could be especially useful for young women, teenagers and those who have difficulty dealing with the time, costs or logistical hurdles involved in visiting a doctor to obtain a prescription.
The pill’s manufacturer, Perrigo Company, based in Dublin, said Opill would most likely become available from stores and online retailers in the United States in early 2024.
The company did not say how much the medication would cost — a key question that will help determine how many people will use the pill — but Frédérique Welgryn, Perrigo’s global vice president for women’s health, said in a statement that the company was committed to making the pill “accessible and affordable to women and people of all ages.” Ms. Welgryn has also said the company would have a consumer assistance program to provide the pill at no cost to some women.
“Today’s approval marks the first time a nonprescription daily oral contraceptive will be an available option for millions of people in the United States,” Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. “When used as directed, daily oral contraception is safe and is expected to be more effective than currently available nonprescription contraceptive methods in preventing unintended pregnancy.”
The Secret Service has concluded its investigation into the small bag of cocaine found at the White House and has been unable to identify a suspect, two sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.
Secret Service officials combed through visitor logs and surveillance footage of hundreds of individuals who entered the West Wing in the days preceding the discovery and were unable to identify a suspect, one of the sources said.
Investigators were also unable to identify the particular moment or day when the baggie was left inside the West Wing cubby near the lower level entrance where it was discovered.
The second source said that the leading theory remains that it was left by one of the hundreds of visitors who entered the West Wing that weekend for tours and were asked to leave their phones inside those cubbies.
The cubbies where the small bag of cocaine was found is a blind spot for surveillance cameras, according to a source familiar with the investigation. While there’s surveillance around where the bag was found, cameras are not trained directly on the West Wing cubbies near the lower-level entrance where it was discovered, the source said, making it difficult to identify who left the bag behind.
So Republicans will be able to continue creating insane conspiracy theories about this.
The Justice Department on Wednesday appealed the sentences handed down to seven members of the Oath Keepers — including founder Stewart Rhodes — for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, a signal that prosecutors are not satisfied with the severity of the jail terms delivered by the federal judge overseeing the case.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Rhodes to 18 years in prison — the harshest sentence for any Jan. 6 defendant — reflecting his leadership of what Mehta characterized as a dangerous criminal conspiracy aimed at violently derailing the transfer of presidential power.
Nevertheless, the sentence for the Yale Law School graduate and disbarred attorney was seven years shorter than the 25-year prison term prosecutors recommended and four years below an agreed-upon “guidelines range” based upon Rhodes’ conduct.
In a series of filings, prosecutors also signaled they were appealing the sentences — all delivered by Mehta, an appointee of President Barack Obama — of several other defendants convicted for their own role in Rhodes’ alleged conspiracy.
Many of Rhodes’ coconspirators faced sentences that similarly fell below the guidelines ranges for their conduct — in some cases by several orders of magnitude. Among those who, like Rhodes, were convicted of seditious conspiracy:
Florida Oath Keeper leader Kelly Meggs received a 12-year term; DOJ sought 21 years.
Roberto Minuta of New York was sentenced to 4.5 years; DOJ sought 17 years.
Joseph Hackett of Florida received a 3.5-year sentence; DOJ sought 12 years.
Ed Vallejo of Arizona received a 3-year sentence; DOJ sought 17 years.
David Moerschel of Florida was sentenced to three years: DOJ sought 10 years.
DOJ also appealed the conviction of two Oath Keepers acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of conspiring to obstruct Congress:
Jessica Watkins of Ohio, who was sentenced to 8.5 years in jail; DOJ sought 18 years.
Kenneth Harrelson of Florida, who was sentenced to 4 years; DOJ sought 15.
The sentences reflected the fact that Mehta viewed Rhodes as the key driver of the conspiracies. During sentencing hearings, several of the defendants similarly pointed to Rhodes, claiming they were manipulated and ginned up by him to participate in the attack on the Capitol.
Apparently, it’s unusual for DOJ to appeal the length of sentences. I wonder if they are anticipating asking for long sentences for Trump and his January 6 Conspirators? Read the whole thing at Politico.
Yesterday, the crazies on Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee got their opportunity to attack Trump-appointed FBI Director Chris Wray. Here’s what happened:
Early in a tense hearing Wednesday featuring FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) tried to lighten the mood. Amid growing attacks by Republicans on Wray, he noted that Wray had been nominated to his current post and also a previous post by Republican presidents. “According to Wikipedia, you’re still a registered Republican,” Buck said, “and I hope you don’t change your party affiliation after this hearing is over.”
Wray, too, repeatedly leaned into his Republican bona fides.
“Yes, I think there were only five votes against,” he said of his 2017 confirmation as FBI director, “and they were all from Democrats.”
The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, by Gustave Courbet
Later in the House Judiciary Committee hearing, he told a Republican congresswoman of GOP allegations against him: “The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background.”
The exchanges highlighted the paradox of Wray’s suddenly becoming Public Enemy No. 1 to congressional Republicans, as they press conspiratorial and highly speculative allegations about the purported weaponization of federal law enforcement.
And while the Trump-nominated FBI director was characteristically even-tempered in his testimony, there were times in which his exasperation at his predicament came to the surface — and in which he showed his critics some teeth.
Multiple Republicans peppered Wray with questions about whether FBI agents or sources were present on Jan. 6 during the attack on the Capitol — feeding a still baseless Tucker Carlson-fueled conspiracy theory that the FBI might have played a role in the insurrection.
Wray at one point remarked: “I will say this notion that somehow the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was part of some operation by FBI sources and agents is ludicrous and is a disservice to our brave, hard-working, dedicated men and women.”
For the past few summers, numerous surfers in Santa Cruz, Calif., have been victims of a crime at sea: boardjacking. The culprit is a female sea otter, who accosts the wave riders, seizing and even damaging their surfboards in the process.
After a weekend in which the otter’s behavior seemed to grow more aggressive, wildlife officials in the area said on Monday they have decided to put a stop to these acts of otter larceny.
“Due to the increasing public safety risk, a team from C.D.F.W. and the Monterey Bay Aquarium trained in the capture and handling of sea otters has been deployed to attempt to capture and rehome her,” a spokesperson for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a statement.
Local officials call the animal Otter 841. The 5-year-old female is well known, for both her bold behavior and her ability to hang 10. And she has a tragic back story, with officials now forced to take steps that illustrate the ways human desire to get close to wild animals can cost the animals their freedom, or worse, their lives.
California sea otters, also known as southern sea otters, are an endangered species found only along California’s central coast. Hundreds of thousands of these otters once roamed the state’s coastal waters, helping to keep the kelp forests healthy as they consumed sea urchins. But when colonists moved in on the West Coast, the species was hunted to near-extinction until a ban was put in place in 1911.
Today, around 3,000 remain, many in areas frequented by kayakers, surfers and paddle boarders.
More, including photos at the NYT link.
Wildlife officials are working to capture an aggressive sea otter that has been menacing surfers and stealing surfboards off the California coast for several weeks. pic.twitter.com/3LeEkR55V4
Remember that so-called “whistleblower” that House Republicans were so excited about? They claimed to have a witness who would blow their “Biden family corruption” case wide open. Then the witness supposedly disappeared and they had no idea where he was. Well, yesterday the DOJ indicted the guy. It turns out he’s an agent for China.
The “missing” witness long-touted by Republicans in Congress as the missing link to their probe into alleged Biden family corruption was accused Monday of being an unregistered foreign agent for China and an international arms trafficker while violating U.S. sanctions on Iran and lying to investigators, among a laundry list of other federal charges.
Dual U.S.-Israeli citizen Gal Luft had already skipped out on his bail while in Cyprus awaiting extradition to the U.S. for a separate case in March—though he alleges that the sprawling case against him represents political persecution and retaliation by the Biden administration against a potential witness.
The House Oversight Committee has for months touted a secret “informant” who could provide evidence of an alleged “quid pro quo” deal for foreign aid between an Obama-era Biden and an unnamed country—though details of the arrangement remain murky and unverified at best.
Those claims partially unraveled when Rep. James Comer (R-KY) in May held a much-hyped press conference in which he promised to expose the preliminary findings of four months’ worth of scrutiny into the Biden family’s business dealings—while failing to air any real evidence of corruption. He then offered a partial excuse for the failure: their star witness had up and disappeared….
Luft then came forward days later in an interview with New York Post opinion columnist Miranda Devine, alleging that he was hiding out in an undisclosed location after being arrested on five charges, including arms dealing across the Third World, as well as a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, among other charges.
“The chances of me getting a fair trial in Washington are virtually zero,” he told Devine as the reason he skipped out on his bail. “I had to do what I had to do.”
Comer and other Republican House members continued to tout Luft as a credible witness right up until Friday, the day before charges were announced by the SDNY.
Rolf Nesch (Germany 1893-1975 Norway), Swans, from Esslingen
A “whistleblower” who has repeatedly accused the Bidens of corruption has been charged by the Justice Department with arms trafficking, acting as a foreign agent for China and violating Iran sanctions.
Gal Luft, who is a citizen of both the United States and Israel, is accused of paying a former adviser to Donald Trump on behalf of principals in China in 2016 without registering as a foreign agent.
Prosecutors say that Mr Luft pushed the former government employee, who is not named, to push policies that were favourable to China.
They also allege that he set up meetings between officials of Iran and a Chinese energy company to discuss oil deals, which would violate US sanctions.
They also alleged that Mr Luft “conspired with others and attempted to broker illicit arms transactions with, among others, certain Chinese individuals and entities” by working as a middleman to find both buyers and sellers for “certain weapons and other materials” in violation of the US Arms Control Act.
Specifically, prosecutors say he attempted to broker a sale of anti-tank weapons, grenade launchers and mortar rounds to Libya by Chinese companies, and also pushed to arrange for the United Arab Emirates to purchase bombs and rockets, and for Kenya to acquire unmanned aerial vehicles capable of striking targets on the ground.
He sounds like a great witness for the Republican “investigations.”
Mr Luft, 57, was arrested in Cyprus in February on US charges but fled after being released on bail while awaiting extradition and is not currently in US custody.
US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said in a statement that Mr Luft “engaged in multiple, serious criminal schemes”.
“He subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. Government official; he acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement,” Mr Williams said.
“As the charges unsealed today reflect, our Office will continue to work vigorously with our law enforcement partners to detect and hold accountable those who surreptitiously attempt to perpetrate malign foreign influence campaigns here in the United States”.
Comer was still defending this guy as a credible witness last night on NewsMax.
Frits Thaulow, Norwegian, Summer Day in the Garden, 1880
Yesterday Judge Cannon granted a short delay in for Walt Nauta to appear in the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case.
Controversial U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon granted a delay for Donald Trump’s aide and co-defendant Walt Nauta in a classified documents case. Prosecutors have called the delay “unnecessary.”
In a filing on Monday, Nauta’s team asked to delay Friday’s hearing, which was set to determine how some materials would be handled in the trial. The attorneys did not propose a date for the new hearing.
“An indefinite continuance is unnecessary, will inject additional delay in this case, and is contrary to the public interest,” special counsel Jack Smith said in a subsequent filing on Monday.
On Tuesday, Cannon granted a 4-day delay, setting the new hearing for July 18 at 2:00 P.M. A court filing said Trump and Smith had agreed to the new date.
This is obviously part of Trump’s usual strategy of delaying court cases as long as possible. Now the Trump lawyers are trying to get Cannon to delay the case until after the 2024 election!
Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a federal judge on Monday night to indefinitely postpone his trial on charges of illegally retaining classified documents after he left office, saying that the proceeding should not begin until all “substantive motions” in the case had been presented and decided.
The written filing — submitted 30 minutes before its deadline of midnight on Tuesday — presents a significant early test for Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist who is overseeing the case. If granted, it could have the effect of pushing Mr. Trump’s trial into the final stages of the presidential campaign in which he is now the Republican front-runner or even past the 2024 election.
While timing is important in any criminal matter, it could be hugely consequential in Mr. Trump’s case, in which he stands accused of illegally holding on to 31 classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim them.
There could be complications of a sort never before presented to a court if Mr. Trump is a candidate in the last legs of a presidential campaign and a federal criminal defendant on trial at the same time. If the trial is pushed back until after the election and Mr. Trump wins, he could try to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the matter entirely….
Judges have wide latitude to set schedules for trials, and scheduling orders are typically not subject to appeal to higher courts. That said, given the extraordinary nature of Mr. Trump’s case and the potential implications of a delay, prosecutors under Mr. Smith could in theory try to come up with a rationale to challenge a scheduling decision made by Judge Cannon to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
This really is a test for Cannon. If she grants such a delay, she should be replaced.
Albert Marquet (1875-1947), Baigneurs à Carqueiranne (1938)
Here are some details on the Trump filing, from the TPM Morning Memo, by David Kurtz.
Some of the filing is the usual defense counsel performative moaning and groaning and sighing heavily about all the work involved and the inherent advantages prosecutors have over them because they’ve long had access to the evidence, blah blah blah. To that end, Trump wants U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to:
withdraw her order for an August 2023 trial;
reject DOJ’s proposal for a December 2023 trial; and
postpone indefinitely even setting a trial date.
But there’s more than the usual slow-rolling going on here. And it matters to the big question of whether Cannon can and will keep the Mar-a-Lago case on track for a trial before the 2024 presidential election.
Trump’s claims in this regard are remarkable:
He’s too busy running for president to be put on trial.
He’s too busy with other criminal and civil trials to add this one to the calendar.
He’s still trying to make the case about the Presidential Records Act (it’s not).
“There is no ongoing threat to national security interests nor any concern regarding continued criminal activity.”
You can’t find an impartial jury in the midst of a presidential election.
The overall thrust of the filing by Trump is that a trial before the election is not advisable, though it stops short of saying so explicitly.
The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents trial is taking steps that could stock the jury box with the former president’s supporters.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon has set the upcoming trial to open on Aug. 14 at her tiny satellite courthouse in the northern reaches of her district, which stretches from the tropical Florida Keys to the citrus groves halfway up the state.
That decision means Trump’s jurors are set to be drawn from the most brightly red corner of a vast court district, plucked from a community that leans heavily Republican—instead of the highly populous and more Democratic urban areas further south….
Park View, Aksel Jørgensen, Danish, 1909
Several Miami lawyers, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because they have active cases before Cannon, noted that Trump’s chances to win what otherwise appears to be an insurmountable criminal case increase the further north he goes.
“You drive around, and you’ll see ‘Trump’ flags and ‘Make America Great Again’ flying in front of houses,” said Paul Bernard, a criminal defense lawyer in Fort Pierce. “With Trump’s trial down this way, he’s going to have a bunch of supporters—and they’re going to make their way onto the jury panel.”
According to local court rules, federal trials in the Fort Pierce division draw jurors from five counties: Highlands, Indian River, Martin, Okeechobee, and St. Lucie.
It’s solidly MAGA country: all five counties voted heavily in favor of Trump in the 2020 election he ultimately lost, with Okeechobee topping out at 72 percent. Across the board, the former president nabbed 62 percent of the vote on average.
Read the whole thing at The Daily Beast link.
There is also news in the Georgia election interference case.
The selection of two Fulton County grand juries will be made Tuesday, with one of the panels expected to decide whether to hand up an indictment for alleged criminal interference in the 2020 presidential election.
One set of jurors is likely to be asked to bring formal charges against former President Donald Trump and other well-known political and legal figures. In a letter to county officials almost two months ago, District Attorney Fani Willis indicated the indictment could be obtained at some point between July 31 and Aug. 18.
Willis began her investigation shortly after hearing the leaked Jan. 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump asked Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to defeat Joe Biden in Georgia. She later convened a special purpose grand jury which examined evidence and heard testimony over an almost eight-month period. Its final report, only part of which has been made public, recommended multiple people be indicted for alleged crimes.
Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special purpose grand jury, will preside over Tuesday’s selection of the two grand juries for this term of court.
Each panel will have 23 grand jurors, plus three alternates. One panel will meet Mondays and Tuesdays, the other Thursdays and Fridays. Both will work in secret and are expected to decide whether to hand up indictments in hundreds of cases. It is unclear which one will consider the much-anticipated election-meddling case.
When a grand jury meets, at least 16 members must be present to conduct business. At least 12 grand jurors must vote to bring an indictment. The burden of proof is much lower for a grand jury to indict someone than it is for a jury to convict or acquit someone and grand jurors typically hear only from the prosecution.
Rudy Giuliani is negotiating a possible resolution in his ongoing court dispute with former Georgia election workers Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and Ruby Freeman, after they accused him of defaming them following the 2020 election and already won nearly $90,000 from him for attorneys’ fees.
The lawsuit from Moss and her mother, Freeman, presents a significant risk to Giuliani financially. It also comes at a time when the former New York mayor and Manhattan prosecutor is attempting to fend off two disbarment proceedings, as well as interest from special counsel Jack Smith’s office, which is criminally investigating Donald Trump’s response to the 2020 vote, of which Giuliani was a central player.
In a court filing late Friday, Moss and Freeman’s legal team disclosed that Giuliani’s lawyer approached them on Thursday “to discuss a potential negotiated resolution of issues that would resolve large portions of this litigation and otherwise give rise to Plaintiffs’ anticipated request for sanctions.”
“Counsel for both parties have worked diligently to negotiate a resolution and believe they are close,” Moss and Freeman’s lawyer wrote.
The negotiation is over “certain factual issues regarding Defendant Giuliani’s liability,” the court filing also said.
Another update on the negotiations is expected in court on Tuesday….
Moss and Freeman accuse Giuliani of scapegoating them in a fabricated effort to undermine how votes were counted in Georgia in 2020.
That’s all I have for you today–lots of legal news involving corrupt Republicans. What else is new?
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Sunrise over the Fields at Eragny, Camille Pissaro, 1891
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Yes. That headline associates what’s going on today with Republican government officials and Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
It’s still hot here, although we’re not topping out at 99. It was 86 at 9 am, and I’m still not used to waking up to that kind of heat. I believe this is the new normal, even though I seriously don’t want to believe it. This is extreme heat.
Last week, seven Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to Target CEO Brian Cornell warning that selling LGBTQ-themed merchandise “to families and young children” may be illegal. The letter, written by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) — and co-signed by the attorneys general of Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, and South Carolina — alleges that selling “LGBT-themed onesies, bibs, and overalls, t-shirts” could violate “[s]tate child-protection laws” prohibiting the “sale or distribution… of obscene matter.” An item is obscene, the letter notes, if its “dominant theme… appeals to the prurient interest in sex.”
The actual LGBTQ-themed merchandise sold by Target in kids sizes, however, is patently not obscene.
The letter cites a number of other state laws “to protect children,” including new laws requiring material “harmful to minors” to be removed from school libraries, prohibiting “gender transition procedures on minors,” and banning the use of a minor’s preferred pronoun. The attorneys general admit that “these laws may not be implicated” by the merchandise for sale at Target but “they nevertheless demonstrate that our States have a strong interest in protecting children.”
Unable to marshall a real legal argument, much of the letter involves parroting misinformation about the items offered for sale in Target during Pride Month. For example, the letter claims that Target sold “girls’ swimsuits with ‘tuck-friendly construction’ and ‘extra crotch coverage’ for male genitalia.” This is false. Those swimsuits were “only offered in adult sizes.”
The attorneys general also object to Target selling a t-shirt called “Pride Adult Drag Queen Katya.” As the name suggests, this is a t-shirt that is offered only in adult sizes.
A federal judge in Louisiana ruled last week that a wide range of Biden administration officials could not communicate with social media companies about content moderation issues, and in a lengthy opinion described the White House’s outreach to platforms as “almost dystopian” and reminiscent of “an Orwellian ministry of truth”.
The ruling, which was delivered by the Trump-appointed judge Terry Doughty, was a significant milestone in a case that Republicans have pushed as proof that the Biden administration is attempting to silence conservative voices. It is also the latest in a wider rightwing campaign to weaken attempts at stopping false information and conspiracy theories from proliferating online, one that has included framing disinformation researchers and their efforts as part of a wide-reaching censorship regime.
Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana have sued Biden administration officials, the GOP-controlled House judiciary committee has demanded extensive documents from researchers studying disinformation, and rightwing media has attacked academics and officials who monitor social media platforms. Many of the researchers involved have faced significant harassment, leading to fears of a chilling effect on speaking out against disinformation ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The Republican pushback against anti-disinformation campaigns has existed for years, alleging that content moderation on major platforms has unfairly targeted conservative voices. Many tech platforms have instituted policies against misinformation or hateful speech that have resulted in content such as election denial, anti-vaccine falsehoods and far-right conspiracy theories being removed – all which tend to skew Republican. But research has found that allegations of anti-conservative bias at social media companies have little empirical evidence, with a 2021 New York University study showing that these platforms’ algorithms instead often work to amplify rightwing content.
The rightwing narrative of tech platform censorship persisted, however, intensifying as companies prohibited medical misinformation about Covid-19. It gained additional momentum last year after the Department of Homeland Security rolled out a disinformation governance board aimed at researching ways to stop malicious online influence campaigns and harmful misinformation. Republican politicians and rightwing media immediately seized on the board as proof of a leftist authoritarian plot.
When 45-year-old Victoria realized she was five weeks late and the lines showed as positive on two pregnancy tests, the New Orleans resident dreamed up a plan to get an abortion.
Traveling out of state was the only abortion option for Victoria, who asked CNN to withhold her last name out of fear of backlash against her and her family. Louisiana is one of several states that have essentially banned all abortions.
“It was probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to go through, from the moment of discovering that I was pregnant at age 45 to actually having to have to take time off work, travel across the country, do a meeting with a doctor, and then take the pills and then skedaddle back home and then go to work like nothing had happened,” Victoria told CNN of her experience earlier this year.
Victoria’s story about the distance she traveled and the hardships she endured to get an abortion reflects a wider American reality, where women seeking the procedure must navigate through a patchwork of states with varying levels of access.
The average travel time to an abortion facility more than tripled, from less than 30 minutes to more than an hour and a half, after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, according to a November study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And for women in Texas and Louisiana, average travel times to the nearest abortion facility were seven hours longer – almost a full workday in travel time to get an abortion.
Victoria says she was grateful she could drop everything and afford to spend $1,000 for the procedure, including same-week airfare with connections both ways and appointment and medication fees.
Sunset, Claude Monet, 1880
You can imagine what it would take if this woman didn’t have a supportive boss as well as money. Read more about her journey at the link.
The photo caught her midsentence, her left hand jabbing at the camera.
“They are twisting everything,” the TV icon was quoted as saying, under a red “BREAKING NEWS” banner.
The ad featuring the Winfrey image and quote ran on the conservative website DC Swamp Tales. It directed readers to a webpage that resembled a news article. The text spun a narrative about a television interviewer who unfairly berated Winfrey for promoting a revolutionary product that could “reverse Dementia instantly & for good.”
But there was no such dispute. Winfrey’s quote was fake, and her name and likeness were used without permission. The product, a low-dose, cannabis-derived gummy supplement, does not treat dementia, let alone reverse it.
“These ads are false. Oprah Winfrey does not have anything to do with these products,” Nicole Nichols, a spokesperson for Winfrey’s company Harpo Inc., told ProPublica.
Such scam ads have proliferated on right-wing websites worldwide in the past eight months. They use fake endorsements from celebrities including Winfrey, country music singers Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire, Twitter and Tesla owner Elon Musk, actor Ryan Reynolds, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder to promote dubious medicines and cryptocurrency frauds. Conservative publishers make money from each click on a deceptive ad, exploiting their like-minded readers.
The ads were placed by AdStyle, an ad network whose corporate website lists it as being registered in Delaware with an office in Boca Raton, Florida. Its website said it is “trusted by” major brands including Toyota, Ikea, EA Games and L’Oréal. But Florida and Delaware corporate registries have no record of AdStyle, which appears to be operated by a Latvian couple living in Italy. Spokespeople for Toyota and Ikea said they could not find any records of those companies working with AdStyle. EA Games and L’Oréal did not respond to queries.
“These ads are certainly terrible,” said Kirsten Grenier Burnett, a spokesperson for McEntire. Spokespeople for Trudeau, Musk, Reynolds, Shröder and Parton either did not respond or declined to comment.
This month, after reporters contacted AdStyle, the “trusted by” assertion and the brand logos were removed from the company’s website.
So, I’m about to go to lunch with a pal I’ve known from grade school to high school. We were folk-singing girls with guitars! Anyway, continue the conversation or post what you’re reading!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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I’m in a surreal frame of mind this morning. I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. I have a sore throat and I feel kind of lightheaded. I hope I’m not getting sick. Maybe it’s just because I’m reading a surreal book, The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. I know I should have read it years ago, but somehow I never got around to it. It’s very different from what I expected. I knew it was about a murder involving upper middle class classics students at a college in Vermont. I didn’t expect it to be full of slapstick humor. It’s somewhat disconcerting, but very well written. It has definitely taken my mind off the horror of U.S. politics.
Leslie Van Houten, a follower of Charles Manson who was convicted in two killings, will be paroled in weeks, her attorney said Friday after California’s governor said he would not challenge it at the State Supreme Court.
“She’s thrilled,” Van Houten’s attorney Nancy Tetreault said.\Van Houten, now 73, will be paroled in the next several weeks after spending more than five decades in prison, Tetreault said.
An appeals court ruled in May that Van Houten is eligible for parole, reversing a decision by Gov. Gavin Newsom to reject parole.
Newsom, who has repeatedly blocked efforts for Van Houten to be paroled, had until Monday to file a challenge with the state Supreme Court.
Newsom, a Democrat, said Friday he would not do so….
Van Houten is serving a life sentence after being convicted along with other cult members of the 1969 killings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in Los Angeles.
A jury convicted Van Houten in 1971 of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. She was initially sentenced to death, but that was overturned and she has spent 52 years in state prison.
Van Houten has been before the state Board of Parole Hearings more than 20 times. The board has recommended Van Houten be paroled five times since 2016, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
She threw her life away back in 1969 when she chose to follow instructions from Manson and his bloodthirsty cult member Susan Atkins. I doubt if she’s a danger to society at this point.
John F. Kelly, who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s second White House chief of staff, said in a sworn statement that Mr. Trump had discussed having the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies investigate two F.B.I. officials involved in the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.
Mr. Kelly said that his recollection of Mr. Trump’s comments to him was based on notes that he had taken at the time in 2018. Mr. Kelly provided copies of his notes to lawyers for one of the F.B.I. officials, who made the sworn statement public in a court filing.
“President Trump questioned whether investigations by the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agencies should be undertaken into Mr. Strzok and/or Ms. Page,” Mr. Kelly said in the statement. “I do not know of President Trump ordering such an investigation. It appeared, however, that he wanted to see Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page investigated.”
Mr. Kelly’s assertions were disclosed on Thursday in a statement that was filed in connection with lawsuits brought by Peter Strzok, who was the lead agent in the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation, and Lisa Page, a former lawyer in the bureau, against the Justice Department for violating their privacy rights when the Trump administration made public text messages between them.
I hope Page and Strzok finally get their revenge on Trump.
The disclosures from Mr. Kelly, made under penalty of perjury, demonstrate the extent of Mr. Trump’s interest in harnessing the law enforcement and investigative powers of the federal government to target his perceived enemies. In the aftermath of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, Congress made it illegal for a president to “directly or indirectly” order an I.R.S. investigation or audit.
The New York Times reported last July that two of Mr. Trump’s greatest perceived enemies — James B. Comey, whom he fired as F.B.I. director, and Mr. Comey’s deputy, Andrew G. McCabe — were the subject of the same type of highly unusual and invasive I.R.S. audit.
It is not known whether the I.R.S. investigated Mr. Strzok or Ms. Page. But Mr. Strzok became a subject in the investigation conducted by the special counsel John Durham into how the F.B.I. investigated Mr. Trump’s campaign. Neither Mr. Strzok nor Ms. Page was charged in connection with that investigation, which former law enforcement officials and Democrats have criticized as an effort to carry out Mr. Trump’s vendetta against the bureau. Mr. Strzok is also suing the department for wrongful termination.
Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page exchanged text messages that were critical of Mr. Trump and were later made public by Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general under Mr. Trump, as he faced heavy criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill who were trying to find ways to undermine him.
A forthcoming book by an ex-Trump administration aide describes an episode in which officials worried that then-President Donald Trump was cavalier in his handling of classified information while talking to reporters, according to a copy obtained by NBC News.
Miles Taylor, who was a top aide to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, writes about the 2018 episode in a book set to be published this month. As a sitting president at the time, Trump had broad powers to declassify information. Yet the incident Taylor describes suggests that his aides still believed he needed to show more care toward state secrets — an issue that landed him in legal peril after he left office and took sensitive records with him….
Trump was still president when the episode Taylor described unfolded Oct. 18, 2018. Taylor writes that he was in a private meeting in the West Wing with John Bolton, who was then Trump’s national security adviser.
Then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders came into Bolton’s office and described an interview that Trump had given in the Oval Office, according to Taylor’s book, “Blowback.” (It’s common for White House press aides to sit in when the president gives interviews.)
Trump had been talking to the reporters about Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and journalist who was killed that month by Saudi assassins in Turkey.
Sanders told Bolton that the president had picked up classified documents relating to intelligence on Khashoggi’s death and displayed them, Taylor writes, but that the reporters were unlikely to have been able to read the text.
Bolton gasped at first, but “breathed a sigh of relief” when Sanders told him there had been no cameras in the room, according to the book.
Still, “We were all disturbed by the lapse in protocol and poor protection of classified information,” Taylor writes.
A Washington, D.C., Bar Association review panel is recommending former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani be disbarred in Washington for his handling of litigation challenging the 2020 election on behalf of then-President Trump.
By Daniel Ryan
Giuliani “claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence,” wrote the three-lawyer panel in a report released Friday, regarding the errors and unsupported claims in a Pennsylvania lawsuit he argued seeking to overturn the Republican president’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
Between Election Day and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Giuliani and other Trump lawyers repeatedly pressed claims of election fraud that were almost uniformly rejected by federal and state courts. He’s the third lawyer who could lose his ability to practice law over what he did for Trump: John Eastman faces disbarment in California, and Lin Wood this week surrendered his license in Georgia.
“Mr. Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy,” wrote the three lawyers on the panel, Robert C. Bernius, Carolyn Haynesworth-Murrell and Jay A. Brozost.
The panel’s report will now go to the D.C. Court of Appeals for a final decision.
How much lower can this man sink. It’s difficult to believe that he was once a DOJ official and then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, not to mention mayor of NYC.
The Zuckerberg-Musk fight over the new Threads social media app is pretty entertaining. Here’s the latest:
Mark Zuckerberg’s “Twitter-killer” Threads has reached 70m sign-ups in less than 48 hours, as it more than doubled its growth from its first day on app stores.
The new microblogging platform was launched in 100 countries this week . It immediately accumulated significant numbers of users, hitting more than 30 million within its first 24 hours, apparently making it the fastest downloaded app ever. On Friday, however, Zuckerberg announced on his Threads account that the user total had more than doubled that figure.
Marc Chagall, Le Poète
“70 million sign ups on Threads as of this morning. Way beyond our expectations,” he wrote. Threads launched around the world at 7pm EST in the US on Wednesday.
Elon Musk’s Twitter has reacted to the new rival with a formal threat to sue the “copycat” app over alleged violation of its “intellectual property rights”….
Zuckerberg, chief executive of Threads and Instagram owner Meta, has said he wants to make “kindness” a focus of the app’s appeal, in a reference to concerns that the rival platform, which has more than 250 million users, has become too hostile for some.
“The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success,” he wrote on his Threads account. “That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”
That seems unlikely, knowing human nature, but we can hope.
If you regularly spread “false information” online, Threads already knows. The platform apparently flagged those accounts on launch, warning users that considered following them, before backtracking.
When Threads launched on Wednesday, numerous right-wing users shared(opens in a new tab) their dissatisfaction(opens in a new tab) with Twitter’s biggest competitor — on Twitter of course — over having their accounts flagged for disinformation.
As of Friday, however, it seems the warning label on accounts that reported the issue has since disappeared….
“This account has repeatedly posted false information that was reviewed by independent fact-checkers or went against our Community Guidelines,” read the label that would pop up when another user attempted follow these accounts.
The wording on the label is similar to a warning prompt that appears on Meta services like Facebook and Instagram. As Threads is so new and still so tightly connected to Instagram, it appears Meta used an account’s existing reputation to inform Threads users of their history.
Later on, Andy Stone of Meta, said the warning labels had been posted by mistake and they were removed from right wing accounts.
Alex Pearlman, a stand-up comedian in Philadelphia, woke up one morning in June and turned on the local news. A portion of Interstate 95 had collapsed. Pearlman thought it was the type of thing people should know about.
Five years ago, he would have turned to Twitter to spread the news. But on that Sunday morning, he picked up his phone and made a TikTok — which quickly amassed more than 2 million views.
By Michael Bridges
A decade ago, Twitter rose to prominence by casting itself as a “global town square,” a space where anyone could reach millions of people overnight. The platform was pivotal in facilitating large social movements, such as the Arab Spring protests in the Middle East and the Black Lives Matter protests over police violence. In a recent email to staff, Twitter’s new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, repeated this characterization, calling the site “a global town square for communication.”
But Twitter no longer serves this function. Thanks to a string of disastrous missteps over the past year by new owner Elon Musk — punctuated by the decision last week to cap the number of posts users can view — Twitter is hemorrhaging users and relevance. While Meta’s new Threads app is making an impressive debut, most social media experts say TikTok reigns as the new global town square and has held that role for quite a while.
“Twitter is definitely not anyone’s public square. Not anymore,” said Chris Messina, who on Thursday posted the hashtag #DeadTwitter on Threads. Twitter is “Elon Musk’s private playground where he’s about to charge everyone … for entry and access #DeadTwitter.”
On Musk’s failed “leadership”:
Since taking the helm last fall promising to champion “free speech,” Musk has alienated users with a relentless stream of updates that are hostile to the app’s heaviest users. He removed all legacy check marks — Twitter’s years-old way to assure users that posters are really who they say they are — sowing distrust and leading to significant financial consequences for major brands that were easily impersonated under the new system. He then sold blue check marks, which ensured amplification to anyone willing to pay $8 a month, allowing scammers and grifters to crowd out the replies to popular tweets. Interesting content has been down-ranked in favor of pay-to-play blue check mark replies, some of which push crypto scams and pornography.
“Before, if I saw someone was verified, they’d have to have done something of note to get it,” said Ryan Fay, a theater director in Atlanta. “Now, I can’t trust anyone who claims to be a journalist and has a check mark because they paid for it, and I don’t know if they have any credentials or knowledge. Seeing a blue check now means this person is using Twitter to try to sell me something or some sort of scamming.”
Musk also fired Twitter’s trust and safety team, allowing harassment and abuse to explode across the platform unchecked. He’s banned prominent journalists and liberal activists. He’s railed against LGTBQ people and declared the word “cisgender” a slur. If that wasn’t enough to drive the most dedicated Twitter users to greener pastures, last week he began limiting the number of tweets users could read, blocking nonpaying users from being served more than 600 tweets per day.
There’s much more on Musk’s failures at the WaPo link. For now, it feels so satisfying to have an alternative to the mess Musk made at Twitter. We’ll have to wait and see how Zuckerberg does with Threads.
Have a great Caturday everyone!!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
This is from the Washington Post.
America’s children continue to be targeted by the Far Right in a misguided effort to supposedly protect them from all kinds of things which are none of their damned business. Not all teachers appear to be on the side of all students. This story from New Jersey is horrifying. This is from 
Where do these folks get these ideas? Well, the fish rots from the head to the anus. This is from Marc Caputo. 
Donald Trump is ever the patriot. SIGH. This is from ABC News. Of course, it’s all about him. “Trump’s unprecedented campaign pitch: Elect me to get revenge on the government. “He’s declared war on them,” one GOP pollster said.”
I’ll end with some good news from Bloomberg. Well, it’s kinda good news. “
Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special purpose grand jury, will preside over Tuesday’s selection of the two grand juries for this term of court.
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