And another day of choices, voting rights, Project 2025, leaning into religious extremism, the Right flirting with a new military draft, climate change knowledge in the 1960s, and fossils even smaller than ‘hobbits’ comes to a close:
“Folks, this November presents two starkly different visions for the future of America. One rooted in joy, compassion, fairness, equality, and the common good. The other rooted in anger, vindictiveness, inequality, ego, and greed. I know which vision I'm choosing. -- Robert Reich
"Even if you wouldn't make the same choice for yourselves, there's a golden rule: Mind your own damn business." -- Gov. Tim Walz
"Make no mistake, violent crime was up under Donald Trump....That's not even counting the crimes he committed!" -- Gov. Tim Walz
“This election is officially the prosecutor and the coach, vs. the felon and the couch.” -- Troy Matthews
“Regardless of your religious affiliation, women should support the Democratic ticket, because the Trump Vance ticket is awash in misogyny and will further limit your reproductive health care.” -- Barbara Streisand
“Harris/Walz will give fourth graders free lunches, while Trump/Vance will force them to give birth. — It’s as simple as that.” -- Andrea Junker
“Remember, they called John Kerry a coward and he was a war hero. They attacked Obama for wearing a tan suit. So, they are going to attack. They are going to try to distract, deceive and demoralize. Stay strong and keep working. Be ready. Don’t be surprised. Organize.” -- Keith Ellison
Walz goes on attack against Trump-Vance: ‘Weird as hell’. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in his first appearance as Vice President Harris’s running mate, came out swinging against former President Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance.
Five things to know about Tim Walz. Vice President Kamala Harris has decided on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in her bid for the White House.
Tim Walz Has a Stellar Record on Voting Rights. It’s a stark contrast to Trump VP pick J.D. Vance, who wanted to overturn the 2020 election. Minnesota has long ranked at the top of the country in voter turnout, pioneering pro-voter reforms like Election Day registration, and as governor Walz signed bill after bill expanding access to the ballot and safeguarding the right to vote.
As the Voting Rights Act Nears 60, Conservative Judges Are Gutting It From Every Angle. Emboldened by the Supreme Court, Trump judges are trying to nullify the landmark civil rights law.
A chief architect of Project 2025 is ready to shock Washington if Donald Trump wins a second term. Russell Vought sounds like a general marshaling troops for combat when he talks about taming a “woke and weaponized” federal government. He recently described political opposition as “enemy fire that’s coming over the target,” while urging allies to be “fearless at the point of attack” and calling his policy proposals “battle plans.” If former President Donald Trump wins a second term in November, Vought may get the opportunity to go on the offensive...Critics warn this may leave the Justice Department and other investigative agencies vulnerable to a president who might pressure them to punish or probe a political foe. Trump, who has faced four separate prosecutions, has threatened retribution against Biden and other perceived enemies.
Trump leans into religious extremism to energize rightwing evangelicals. The bond between Trump and Christian nationalists has now deepened to the extent that Trump is comfortable with comparing himself with their messiah, while some on the religious right have come to believe that the one-term president has been chosen, or anointed, by God himself, especially after a recent failed assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania...“If somebody believes that it is God’s will for Donald Trump to be elected, and they believe that there are demonic and satanic forces pushing back against God’s will, and that they need to be active and pushing against [those things] to see Trump elected. That is a level of political fervor and ardency that is very, very valuable to a candidate, because those are people who are then talking to their friends, who are then mobilizing some of these groups.”...“Those of us who study authoritarian movements saw huge red flags right there. That language is unprecedented for a US presidential candidate, and I think it’s important to say that, because Trump is always saying weird things, and it’s important to just put down that marker,” she said.
Justice Thomas accepted previously undisclosed private jet flight to New Zealand, Senate Democrat says. Justice Clarence Thomas took a previously undisclosed flight on a private jet owned by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow in 2010, a top Senate Democrat said Monday – the latest in a series of revelations that come as the high court is under pressure to strengthen its ethics practices.
The Harris Campaign Is Now Actively Courting Republicans. “I was a proud Republican, but Donald Trump is unfit to lead our nation,” Whitman said. “We saw during his four years in office how he consistently chose himself, his pursuit of power, and his billionaire friends over the American people while spewing lies and spreading chaos at every turn. It’s time to move forward by electing Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Elon Musk’s X Is Under Scrutiny for Disinformation Targeting Kamala Harris. Elon Musk has said he wants X, formerly known as Twitter, to be the “public square” of the internet, an essential place for discourse and democracy. But there’s a major problem: Disinformation is running rampant on X in the lead-up to the November election, including content targeting Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As Mother Jones reported on Sunday, that content includes deepfakes shared by Musk himself and by an account that reposts Donald Trump’s feed from Truth Social. Musk, who has owned X since fall 2022, has endorsed Trump for president.
What’s behind the anti-immigrant violence that has exploded across Britain? Here’s a look. Britain has been convulsed by violence for the past week as crowds spouting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic slogans clashed with police. The disturbances have been fueled by right-wing activists using social media to spread misinformation about a knife attack that killed three girls during a Taylor Swift-themed dance event.
Rightwingers are flirting with a new military draft. Could it help disillusioned young men? In Vance’s recounting, that moment constituted something close to an epiphany: a stark lesson in humility, gratefulness, and the ability to find profound joy in a pencil eraser. Among more routine lessons (about hard work, grit, respect, etc) it was one of Vance’s great takeaways from his military service. Now he, and other American conservatives, are eager to share – or enforce – such a rare, character-defining privilege. Vance is among a cohort of politicians around the world engaging with the idea of a return to mandatory national service. The senator recently expressed enthusiasm for national service, claiming that it was a way for young Americans to get some “some skin in the game”. (Vance’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)...The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, has outlined measures for renewed mandatory service in Project 2025, its dense manifesto for reshaping the nation in its own rightwing image, under the leadership of America’s next conservative present (presumably Donald Trump).
NC Republican governor candidate Mark Robinson, who called abortion 'genocide,' took his wife to get one. Mark Robinson believes abortion should be illegal — for everyone except him and his wife, apparently. The North Carolina Republican has come out with a new campaign advertisement in his bid for governor in which he and his wife opened up about their decision to have an abortion decades ago. The commercial comes shortly after Robinson's recent promise at a campaign rally to completely ban the care in the state. "Thirty years ago, my wife and I made a very difficult decision. We had an abortion," Robinson says in the ad. He then voices support for the current abortion restrictions in North Carolina, which prohibit the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother. -- Right on brand for a Republican.
What Americans Knew About Climate Change in the 1960s Will Shock You. By the mid-1960s, climate change was already becoming a matter of concern to the federal government, the new analysis shows. A 1965 report from the National Science Foundation found that the ways humans were inadvertently changing the world — through urban development, agriculture, and fossil fuels — were “becoming of sufficient consequence to affect the weather and climate of large areas and ultimately the entire planet.” And the science was well-understood by many members of Congress...In 1970, Muskie warned his fellow senators that if air pollution went unchecked, it would “threaten irreversible atmospheric and climatic changes.”...By 1970, President Richard Nixon’s task force on air pollution proclaimed in a report that “the greatest consequences of air pollution for man’s continued life on earth are its effects on the earth’s climate.”...Why has so much of this history been overlooked? Oreskes pointed to the “general historical amnesia of Americans.” As the politician Adlai Stevenson once put it, “The trouble with Americans is that they haven’t read the minutes of the previous meeting.”
Louisiana governor tells parents against Ten Commandments in classrooms: 'Tell your child not to look'. The Republican governor defended the controversial legislation during a news conference announcing how Louisiana intends to fend off a lawsuit that argues that it is unconstitutional to hang the Ten Commandments in state-funded school and college classrooms...The U.S. Supreme Court last weighed in on the issue of the Ten Commandments in public schools in 1980, when the justices ruled 5-4 to strike down Kentucky's law.
Google loses massive antitrust case over its search dominance. A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation in a seismic decision that could shake up the internet and hobble one of the world’s best-known companies.
OpenAI Reportedly Hesitant to Release ChatGPT Detection Tool That Might Piss Off Cheaters. The tool can ‘reliably’ detect AI-generated text with watermarks, but OpenAI is still ‘weighing the risks’ of releasing it.
Parents need to talk to their kids about this online danger right now. The problem isn't new. Bad actors have long pressured teens into sending them sexually explicit imagery, then blackmailed them with it. But online safety experts say evolving tactics and tools, like deepfake software, have made it easier to ruthlessly go after teens for sextortion.
Fossils suggest even smaller ‘hobbits’ roamed an Indonesian island 700,000 years ago. Twenty years ago on an Indonesian island, scientists discovered fossils of an early human species that stood at about 3 1/2 feet (1.07 meters) tall — earning them the nickname “hobbits.” Now a new study suggests ancestors of the hobbits were even slightly shorter. “We did not expect that we would find smaller individuals from such an old site,” study co-author Yousuke Kaifu of the University of Tokyo said in an email.
The final image of Simone Biles at the Olympics was a symbol of joy — and where the sport is going. Biles, the unequivocal Greatest of All Time, and Chiles, a three-time Olympic medalist whose journey back to the Games was a testament to talent and grit, dropped down to one knee. It was a show of respect to Andrade, whose excellence is symbolic of a sport that is getting more diverse, more inclusive and perhaps more positive as it goes. “It was just the right thing to do,” Biles said about a moment that soon went viral, with even the Louvre itself suggesting it might be worthy enough for a spot somewhere in the vicinity of the Mona Lisa.
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