Here's a
quick visual summary of what got us here: pic.twitter.com/1laEqsONvb
—
Rishi Desai (@RishiDesaiMD) June
30, 2020
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peter mccarthy (@pmac_612) June
30, 2020
Fixed it pic.twitter.com/6llu391Jr3
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barbara rettemnier (@respbarb) June
30, 2020
"Reiner’s 1958 novel 'Enter Laughing,' loosely based on his own experiences, was optioned for the stage by producer David Merrick. Reiner did a legit adaptation in 1963 and then directed the film version in 1967, marking his motion picture directing debut.The tireless Reiner's work continued into his 80 and 90s in both acting and directing:
For Broadway he wrote and directed the farce 'Something Different,' which ran for a few months in 1967-68; helmed 'Tough to Get Help' in 1972; penned the book for the musical 'So Long, 174th Street,' which had a very brief run in 1976; and directed 'The Roast' in 1980."
"While the last film he directed was the 1997 romantic comedy 'That Old Feeling,' starring Bette Midler and Dennis Farina, Reiner was an active presence in guest roles on television and in supporting roles in films during the 1990s and 2000s, even as he neared and then surpassed his 90th birthday.An outspoken progressive for his entire life, and active on social media, two of his last postings on Twitter reflected his chagrin over the regime in the White (Supremacist) House:
He guested on 'Frasier' in 1993; reprised the role of Alan Brady on an episode of 'Mad About You' in 1995 and won an Emmy for it; and guested on 'Ally McBeal,' 'Boston Legal', and 'House.'"
As I arose at 7:30 this morning, I was saddened to relive the day that led up to the election of a bankrupted and corrupt businessman who had no qualifications to be the leader of any country in the civilized world...— carl reiner (@carlreiner) June 29, 2020
... At the same time, Hillary Clinton, who had all the needed— carl reiner (@carlreiner) June 29, 2020
qualifications to lead our beloved nation, had received 3 million more popular votes than our Russian-installed puppet president.
Carl Reiner was a
baller in every sense of the word. I’m only sorry he didn’t live long
enough to see Trump gone. In his honor, register or check your
registration at https://t.co/1XZ7S2z9h6, and
tell a friend to do the same.
RIP, legend. https://t.co/fRgltsMfUi
—
shauna (@goldengateblond) June
30, 2020
Top officials in the White House were aware in early 2019 of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than has been previously reported, according to U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence.
The assessment was included in at least one of President Donald Trump’s written daily intelligence briefings at the time, according to the officials. Then-national security adviser John Bolton also told colleagues he briefed Trump on the intelligence assessment in March 2019.
The White House didn’t respond to questions about Trump or other officials’ awareness of Russia’s provocations in 2019. The White House has said Trump wasn’t — and still hasn’t been — briefed on the intelligence assessments because they haven’t been fully verified. However, it’s rare for intelligence to be confirmed without a shadow of a doubt before it is presented to top officials. [snip]
The administration’s earlier awareness of the Russian efforts raises additional questions about why Trump didn’t take punitive action against Moscow for efforts that put the lives of American service members at risk. Trump has sought throughout his time in office to improve relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin, moving this year to try to reinstate Russia as part of a group of world leaders it had been kicked out of. (our emphasis)(You probably noted the name "John Bolton" in the above account. This latest bombshell has "To DJT with love from JB" chalked all over it.)
EXCLUSIVE: Data intercepts showed GRU-to-Taliban $ transfers & a key intermediary fled to Russia, bolstering earlier detainee accounts about a Russian bounty op. Trump WH omitted in its briefing to GOP lawmakers as it downplayed intel as murky/contested. https://t.co/bmMd4V7Fjt
— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) June 30, 2020
Jones went on CNN’s Inside Politics with John King and Anderson Cooper 360 to enthusiastically commend Trump’s executive order—even as it was being criticized as cynical and unproductive by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and “delusional” by the Color of Change, an influential racial justice organization that Jones himself co-founded in 2005.
CNN viewers weren’t informed that he had actually attended secret White House meetings with his new friend Jared Kushner, discussing ways to frame the presidential project. [snip]
Hours later, Jones doubled down on Anderson Cooper 360—again without disclosing his role advising the Trump White House. “What do you make of this executive order?” Cooper asked him.
“I think it’s pushing in the right direction,” Jones told the CNN anchor. “What you got today is, I think, a sign that we are winning,” he added. “Donald Trump has put himself on record saying we need to reform the police department… We are winning! Donald Trump had no plan a month ago to work on this issue at all. The fact that we are now in the direction of moving forward, I think, is good.”
During a Rose Garden ceremony that was actually a Trump campaign event—at which the president defended the police, touted his commitment to “law and order,” boasted about the stock market and the pre-coronavirus economy, and attacked Joe Biden—Trump was flanked by uniformed officers and police union officials as he signed the executive order in response to the pandemic of unjustified killings of unarmed Black Americans by white cops.Wonkette's Stephen Robinson adds more texture:
The Jones/Kushner relationship is something out of a Jordan Peele movie. In early 2017, Jones was dragging Trump like any Black man who's alive and conscious would. He (correctly) noted that Trump was "one of the worst people ever born." Then CNN's Washington Bureau Chief, Sam Feist, introduced Jones to Trump's creepy Ken doll son-in-law and a week later Jones is claiming Trump “became president" when he said something nice about the widow of Navy SEAL Ryan Owens during his first address to Congress:
JONES: [T]hat was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics. Period…For people who had been hoping that he would become unifying, hoping that he might find some way to become presidential, they should be happy with that moment.Owens was the first American to die in combat during Trump's administration, but the squatter-in-chief still tried to pin the blame on Barack Obama. That moment during Trump's address to Congress wasn't “extraordinary" or “unifying."
Kushner and Jones became “fast friends" and the undercover brother even has dinner sometimes with Jared and Ivanka Trump. He comes in through the front door and everything! The couple has also introduced Jones to the mid-tier celebrities willing to socialize with them.How very sweet. As Robinson notes, the Jones- Kushner alliance has roots, and Jones has been helping Kushner out of media scrapes before. His appearances from now on need to be vetted better by his employer or at least a warning should appear in the chyron: "Opinion may be influenced by unethical considerations."
Dallas, Texas:— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) June 28, 2020
Lovely young Karen throwing a fit over being asked to wear a mask... pic.twitter.com/CnxRFMvMqf
The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a Louisiana law regulating abortion clinics, reasserting a commitment to abortion rights over fierce opposition from dissenting conservative justices in the first big abortion case of the Trump era.
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.
In two previous abortion cases, Roberts had favored restrictions.
The Louisiana law is virtually identical to one in Texas that the court struck down in 2016.
“The result in this case is controlled by our decision four years ago invalidating a nearly identical Texas law,” Roberts wrote, although he did not join the opinion written by Justice Stephen Breyer for the other liberals.
President Trump — who has repeatedly downplayed the virus, sidelined experts and misled Americans about its dangers and potential cures — now finds his presidency wracked by an inability to shepherd the country through its worst public health calamity in a century. The dysfunction that has long characterized Trump’s White House has been particularly ill-suited for a viral outbreak that requires precision, focus and steady leadership, according to public health experts, administration officials and lawmakers from both parties.
As case numbers began rising again, Trump has held rallies defying public health guidelines, mused about slowing down testing for the virus, criticized people wearing masks and embraced the racially offensive “kung flu” nickname for a disease that has killed at least 123,000 Americans.
A similarly garbled message for the country has also been put forward by the president’s top aides and other senior administration officials, who contradict one another on a daily basis. On Friday, Vice President Pence used the first White House coronavirus task force briefing in almost two months to praise Trump’s handling of the virus and cast aside concerns about a record spike in new infections.
“We have made a truly remarkable progress in moving our nation forward,” Pence said, a few minutes after announcing that more than 2.5 million Americans had contracted the coronavirus. “We’ve all seen the encouraging news as we open up America again.”
Later Friday, the United States recorded more than 40,000 new coronavirus cases — its largest one-day total.
When the lines go parallel
The US now has reproduced its March-> April trajectory for new confirmed cases and #COVID19 spread pic.twitter.com/GkvpmKw9Vv— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) June 28, 2020
...[O]ne American official had told The Times that the intelligence finding that the Russians had offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants and criminals had been briefed at the highest levels of the White House.
Another said it was included in the President’s Daily Brief, a written document which draws from spywork to make analytic predictions about longstanding adversaries, unfolding plots and emerging crises around the world. The briefing document is given to the president to read and they serve as the basis for oral briefings to him several times a week.
Asked on Saturday evening how the president could not have known about the report if it had been in his daily brief, a National Security Council spokesman did not immediately respond.
Ms. McEnany notably did not question the substance of the intelligence assessment, saying only that her statement “did not speak to the merit of the alleged intelligence.” She also did not challenge the Times’s reporting that the National Security Council had convened an interagency meeting about what to do about the report in late March.
Ms. McEnany did not explain why such an important report would have been withheld from Mr. Trump. Nor did she indicate whether Mr. Trump was upset at his subordinates for purportedly withholding the information from him.
Donald Trump can take all his empty words about respecting our service and shove them. #TRE45ON #TraitorTrump pic.twitter.com/7vxGxLBYh0— VoteVets (@votevets) June 28, 2020
... That level of voting security — signature verification, ballot barcode verification — is only the beginning. The ballot itself has been tested to insure the ballot scanners will read ONLY authentic ballots, and only authentic ballots for that particular election cycle. The scanners aren’t able to read ballots from previous election cycles, even if those ballots were created to use the same scanning system.
But wait, there’s more. There are 3,007 counties in the United States. There are another 236 first-order administrative divisions, which are basically counties by other names (for example, Louisiana has parishes instead of counties, Alaska has boroughs, and the District of Columbia has…well, the District of Columbia). Why is that important? Because there is NO national ballot.
That’s right. Every voting jurisdiction designs and creates its own unique ballot. We’re talking the typeface, the weight of the paper used for the ballot, the size of the ballot, the phrasing of the text instructing the voter on how to vote by mail, the envelope in which the ballot is mailed to the voter, the security envelope containing the marked ballot to be returned, and the actual return envelope. These designs are deliberately changed from election to election.
So in order for Comrade Trump’s claim that “millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries, and others” to be true, those foreign countries (and ‘others’ — I have no idea WTF he could possibly mean by ‘others’) would have to exactly duplicate thousands of distinctly different ballot packets unique to every voting jurisdiction in the United States for the 2020 election cycle PLUS be able to match the signatures on file of the individual voters they were attempting to impersonate.But, of course, Trump's only interested in planting seeds for contesting the election, so the inanity of his lies is beside the point.
New reporting from the Times:
“American official had told The Times that the intelligence finding that the Russians had offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants and criminals...WAS INCLUDED IN THE PRESIDENT’S DAILY BRIEF.”
https://t.co/U4O6rnMhy8— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) June 28, 2020
Well, if you're going to hide it in an obscure document like his daily briefing notes, how can you expect him to know about it? He would have to know how to read. You have to draw pictures.— Laura T (@torontolaura) June 28, 2020
Donald Trump will defend a Confederate statue but not an American soldier.— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 27, 2020
Trump is gaslighting “White Power” to distract from this story. Please keep pushing this.— Greg Meyers 🎱 (@SemGeek) June 28, 2020
40,000,000 unemployed
2,525,900 infected
125,545 killed by coronavirus
429 killed by cops
20 killed by Putin-backed Afghan militants
1 asshole golfing— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) June 28, 2020
Hi. It’s the President’s Daily Brief guy.
Let’s look at the logic and the implications of the claim that neither Trump nor Pence were briefed on the intelligence assessment that Russia offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill US/coalition troops in Afghanistan.
1/10 https://t.co/Laafqaocg3— David Priess (@DavidPriess) June 28, 2020
“The BMI have notified the Trump campaign on behalf of the Stones that the unauthorized use of their songs will constitute a breach of its licensing agreement,” the Stones said. “If Donald Trump disregards the exclusion and persists, then he would face a lawsuit for breaking the embargo and playing music that has not been licensed.’’The Stones join a growing list of artists that have objected to Trump's use of their songs as a campaign backdrop, including Neil Young, Axl Rose, Rihanna, and many others.
"Three serious research efforts have put numerical weight — yes, data-driven evidence — behind what many suspected all along: Americans who relied on Fox News, or similar right-wing sources, were duped as the coronavirus began its deadly spread.
Dangerously duped.
The studies 'paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others,' wrote my colleague Christopher Ingraham in an analysis last week.
Here’s the reality, now backed by numbers:Fox's role in disseminating false ("fake") information, dangerous "cures", and a view that the coronavirus was just "a flu" that would disappear, just like their cult leader said, contributed to their viewers' exposure to the virus, something we're dealing with now in its resurgence.
Those who relied on mainstream sources — the network evening newscasts or national newspapers that President Trump constantly blasts as 'fake news' — got an accurate assessment of the pandemic’s risks. Those were the news consumers who were more likely to respond accordingly, protecting themselves and others against the disease that has now killed more than 123,000 in the United States with no end in sight.
Those who relied on Fox or, say, radio personality Rush Limbaugh, came to believe that vitamin C was a possible remedy, that the Chinese government created the virus in a lab, and that government health agencies were exaggerating the dangers in the hopes of damaging Trump politically, a survey showed." (our emphasis)
Here was Florida
Governor Ron DeSantis a month ago puffing out his chest about
'successfully' ignoring public health experts. pic.twitter.com/f2epgxe4lI
—
Matt Rogers 🎙️ (@Politidope) June
26, 2020
Russian spies secretly paid bounties to Taliban militants to kill U.S., British and other allied troops in Afghanistan. So far Trump has done nothing about it. w/@charlie_savage, @mschwirtz https://t.co/01bMvulVST— Eric Schmitt (@EricSchmittNYT) June 27, 2020
For those keeping score at home: In the months since the Administration knew about these bounties, the President invited Putin to join the G-7 summit, planned for pulling troops out of Germany and failed to act against growing Russian cyber action in the U.S. https://t.co/dcwx7O1EcT— David Sanger (@SangerNYT) June 26, 2020
Trump’s response will be something along the lines of “I called Vladimir Putin and he denies it *very* strongly, so that’s good enough for me!” https://t.co/ievfsMiD0Z— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) June 26, 2020
What part of "support the troops" includes ignoring Russians paying bounties to Taliban forces to murder American soliders?#TraitorTrump's part.— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 26, 2020
Trump allowed Russia to put a bounty on US Soldiers and did nothing to stop it, didn’t retaliate.
Do our Senators denounce Trump’s actions and want to keep our troops alive?
Quote tweet this and tag your US Senators.— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 27, 2020
How to second term pic.twitter.com/WTuH277sUA— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) June 26, 2020
"Vice President Pence held the first public briefing of the coronavirus task force in nearly two months and sought to deliver an upbeat message that was at odds with warnings from public health experts. The vice president dodged the question of whether people should wear masks in public, as his own administration recommends, and said campaign rallies that pack people together, in violation of public health guidance, will continue.
Pence offered no new strategies to combat the rapidly spreading virus and minimized record daily case counts in several states as 'outbreaks in specific counties'.” (our emphasis)Pence has a ways to go to catch up to his cult leader's phenomenal record of lying, but at this rate, Pence is making "truly remarkable progress."
We did it, America. We flattened the curve. pic.twitter.com/kiyKecXt37— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 25, 2020
"The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.This particular unit of Russian military intelligence is thought to be responsible for the attempted poisoning of Russian dissident Sergei Skripal in England in 2018, and other acts of international terrorism.
Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.
The intelligence finding was briefed to President 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." (our emphasis)
"Any involvement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States, a strategy of destabilizing adversaries through a combination of such tactics as cyberattacks, the spread of fake news and covert and deniable military operations." (our emphasis)Trump's been sitting on this intelligence since March, doing nothing. It's clear that he doesn't want to confront his Russian benefactors, even if it involves betraying our forces in Afghanistan. It took this report to again show the extent of his treasonous behavior and where his loyalties lie.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) responded to the brief by saying there is “no moral excuse for the Trump Administration’s disastrous efforts to take away Americans’ health care." Dismantling the ACA would leave more than 23 million people without healthcare plans, according to a recent analysis by the liberal-leaning think tank Center for American Progress.
“President Trump and the Republicans’ campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty,” Pelosi, who on Wednesday filed a bill to expand the ACA, said in a statement.
The Trump brief is about what you'd expect -- pure chewy, malicious wingnut. But don't just take our word for it:The administration’s brief was filed in support of a challenge to the ACA by a coalition of Republican attorneys general, following through on Trump’s pledge last month to overturn President Obama’s landmark healthcare legislation.
Here’s the DOJ plea just filed in SCOTUS urging immediate invalidation of the entire ACA. It’s legally crazy, morally indefensible, and politically bizarre. In other words, pure Trumpian BS.https://t.co/UcJsvwPLnm— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) June 26, 2020
While failing in his response to the pandemic, the Trump is fighting to take away people's health insurance. When he says there are no cases of COVID-19 if you don't test for the virus, it's not a figure of speech. It's his Supreme Court brief. https://t.co/wcBYXKdsFa— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) June 26, 2020
The Trump administration just filed a brief with the Supreme Court calling for the ACA to be overturned. The president has not proposed a replacement plan. Trying to repeal the ACA, along with the response to COVID-19, will define President Trump on health care in the election.— Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) June 26, 2020
The Supreme Court won't hear the case challenging the existence of the health law until next term (probably before the election but there's no date yet) Here's what the case is about: https://t.co/t2lI4ObfvG 2/— julie rovner (@jrovner) June 26, 2020
