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Former Oath Keppers lawyer and defacto leader Kelleye SoRelle, who last year was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial – and she is definitely insane – after she was charged with conspiracy for her involvement in the far right terrorist group’s plot to overthrow the government on January 6th, has reached a plea deal with with federal prosecutors, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.

Sunday set a record for the number of air travelers around the country, with the Transportation Security Authority screening more than three million passengers in one day for the first time, ABC News reports.  The big travel day, brought on by the end of an extended Independence Day weekend, topped the 2.99 million passengers last month on June 23rd.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas used he record day to urge Congress to approve pay increases for TSA employees, who work on a different, lower pay scale than other similar government officers.  The Agency has faced recruitment and retention problems because of the pay imbalance, leading to overworked staff in some places and underserved airports in others.

Noting that “President Biden has not seen a neurologist outside of his annual physical,” White House Physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor attempted to knock down conspiracy theories relating to visits a Walter Reed neurologist made to the White House, ABC News reports.

O’Connor said Biden sees neurologist Dr. Kevin Cannard, an expert in Parkinson’s, as part of his annual exam.  Cannard, O’Connor noted, is a member of the White House medical staff who treats thousands of service members who work at the White House and in support of its operations.

Cannard “has held regular Neurology Clinics at the White House Medical Clinic in support of the thousands of active-duty members assigned in support of White House operations. Many military personnel experience neurological issues related to their service, and Dr. Canard regularly visits the WHMU as part of this General Neurology practice.”

Michael Bloomberg provided a grant that will cover tuition and living expenses for medical students at The Johns Hopkins Medical School, making obtaining an education at one of the leading medical schools possible for thousands of students who previously couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t take out loans.

According to the Baltimore Banner, the grant will cover any student whose household income doesn’t exceed $300,000.  With tuition and school expenses at around $70,000 and living expenses at $30,000, a student who takes loans to attend would otherwise end up more than $400,000 in debt.

An undergraduate alumnus of the university, Bloomberg has donated more money to Johns Hopkins than its namesake benefactor.  Bloomberg’s earlier donations provided funds to improve diversity and opportunities for populations traditionally underrepresented at the school.  It also replicates a similar grant made to Albert Einstein Medical School by Ruth Gottesman, the widow of a Warren Buffett business partner.

Three days ago, when the Anchorage Daily News reported that 46-year-old federal judge for the Alaska Federal District Court Joshua Kindred abruptly resigned his seat on the bench just four years into a lifetime appointment, things smelled fishier than a barroom in Dutch Harbor.

It wasn’t until a 30-page complaint of judicial misconduct against Kindred became public Monday that the reasoning became clear.  “In its Order and Certification, the Judicial Council concluded, among other things, that Judge Kindred engaged in misconduct by creating a hostile work environment for his law clerks and by having an inappropriately sexualized relationship with one of his law clerks both during her clerkship and after she became an Assistant United States Attorney,” a statement from the Ninth Circuit said.  “The former law clerk did not appear on any case before Judge Kindred while she was employed as an Assistant United States Attorney.”

Previously known only for blocking an attempt to keep Trump off Alaska’s 2024 ballot, Kindred now gives up a lifetime appointment on the bench, a pension, his future legal career and possibly even his law license for behavior that would be condoned by conservatives if Clarence Thomas did it.

“There are only two people I can find in Washington, DC that want Joe Biden in the race, and that’s the Biden family and his White House physician both of whom are in a lot of trouble in these Biden family influence peddling scheme[.]”

Why does virtually every Republican starting a segment on Fox sound like your drunk uncle on Open Mic Night at the Yuk Yuks at the back of the old mall, where the abandoned multi-plex used to be?  Republican Jamie Comer–the Oversight Committee chair who relied on a Russian agent and an arms dealer for Iran to fuel his last round of committee weaponization–has created a conspiratorial backstory for the White House Physician is a Biden family friend who discussed a business deal with a family member after Joe Biden left office at the end of the Obama Administration.

Two men riding on personal watercraft in a Miami-Dade County canal opened fire at a house hosting a holiday weekend party on Sunday, leaving at least one person wounded, the Miami Herald reports.  The shooting apparently stemmed from an argument between a party-goer and one of the men on the personal watercraft, who pulled out a weapon and opened fire.  The perpetrators were able to flee through the canals to get away from the site of the shooting in Golden Glades.

After hearing Texas Republican Congressman and generations-tardy confederate Chip Roy on what Democrats should do concerning President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign during which he called Vice President Kamala Harris the “DEI Vice President,” rising Democratic star, Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, tells Republicans to “get over their incompetence and come up to [Democrats’] level.” This is how you counter conservative talking points.

Convicted felon former President Trump on Monday raged over President Biden’s accurate statements about which of them is responsible for reducing the price of insulin, posting he “got the price of Insulin for seniors brought WAY DOWN, not Biden. He just inherited this, and many other things, and then always tries to take credit for it. He’s done nothing but destroy our Country!!!”

Surprise, the fat fuck is lying. Political pressure from the Biden Administration led to Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi – the three largest insulin manufacturers responsible together for 90 percent of annual US consumption – voluntarily capping the price at $35 per month for all patients in 2022 after the Inflation Reduction Act capped it for Medicare patients (Senate Republicans had blocked the general cap). Trump’s only “achievement” on this front was a smaller-scale voluntary program.

The week of July 4th this year saw its lowest number of gun violence victims since 2019, continuing a downward trend in violent crime in the US since the last year of the Trump administration when violent crime spiked across the country, CBS News reports.

Between July 1st to July 7th, 1,096 people were shot in the US, with 340 ending in fatalities.  During July 4th week in 2023, 1,130 people were shot, including 451 killed.  The number of mass shootings also dropped from 28 in 2023 to 20 this year.  At peak violence in 2020, more than 1,700 people were shot, with 536 fatalities.

Petitioners seeking a ballot measure to exempt diapers and feminine hygiene products from Arkansas’s state sales tax failed to collect enough signatures, the Fort Smith Times Record reports.

Canvassers were unable to collect the roughly 44,000 signatures – 10 percent of total turnout in the previous gubernatorial election – before Friday’s deadline. It’s not clear why a ballot measure for such a law was needed when Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders – a woman, a mom, and a supposedly free market conservative opposed to taxation of everyday necessities – could just call on the Republican supermajority in the state legislature to pass a bill for her to sign.

Another petition that failed was to strengthen the state’s Freedom of Information Act. That one we can totally understand why Huckabee Sanders wouldn’t want to have to sign that kind of bill.

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez has yet to make any noteworthy public statement on whether President Joe Biden should remain in the race against convicted felon former President Trump.

In related news a federal jury is expected to begin deliberating this week on whether Menendez is guilty of a shit ton of felonies following closing arguments by his defense on Tuesday, ABC News reports. Menendez’s lawyers are expected to blame his wife, Nadine Menendez.

The billionaire co-founder of business social media site and annoying spammer LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has made a multi-million dollar investment in election software company Smartmatic designed to fund the business’s defamation lawsuits against Fox and other conservative misinformation outlets, the Washington Post reports.

Following the lead of his former colleague at PayPal, Hoffman’s money will support Smartmatic’s legal efforts the same way Peter Theil’s wealth brought down Gawker by funding Hulk Hogan’s defamation case against the website.

“Smartmatic’s technology has counted 7 billion votes on 6 continents with zero security breaches,” Smartmatic chief executive Antonio Mugica said in his personal statement commenting on the deal. “Voters, candidates and election officials in all of those elections are watching to see if we still stand up for the truth against lies. Rest assured, we do.”

Backing down from his intervention plan reported last week, Dem Virginia Senator Mark Warner on Monday instead issued a statement calling on President Joe Biden to do something to demonstrate that he’s up for the job of defeating convicted felon former President Trump in November.

“Another Trump term would be perilous for rule of law and for our democracy. President Biden has made America stronger, guiding the nation through some of our most difficult days. I am proud of my work on his agenda. With so much at stake in the upcoming election, now is the time for conversations about the strongest path forward. As these conversations continue, I believe it is incumbent upon the President to more aggressively make his case to the American people, and to hear directly from a broader group of voices about how to best prevent Trump’s lawlessness from returning to the White House,” said Warner in the statement, a little less forceful than planned.

Last week the Washington Post had reported that Warner had been seeking a group of Dem Senators to stage an intervention to get Biden to drop out and let another candidate run in his place.

Texas Gov Low Energy Greg Abbott is in South Korea doing who the hell knows on Monday while the eastern half of his state gets hit with the remnants of Hurricane Beryl, the Daily Beast reports.

Pro-Colin Allred PAC Lose Cruz also on Monday tweeted a photo of Senator Ted Cruz in California with his daughter, which makes sense since Cancun got hit by Beryl before it churned up to Texas.

Fox anchor John Roberts became audibly frustrated Monday as Massachusetts Dem Congressman Jake Auchincloss shredded convicted felon former President Trump during an afternoon bit.

A US Army neurologist specializing in Parkinson’s Disease visited the White House eight times in eight months between last summer and earlier this spring, the New York Times reports citing visitor logs obtained by the Times’s request. At least one of the visits was for a meeting between Walter Reed’s Dr Kevin Cannard and Biden’s personal physician, Dr Kevin O’Connor.

Well guess this sort of news isn’t going away for now. Seems we’ll just have to twiddle our thumbs until something else happens. Something big enough to at least crowd out this “political crisis” if it isn’t going to end one way or another soon. It’d be great if we could have a timeframe on that though. Some sort of hint at when the media can stop reporting every single minute of Biden’s aging process and focus on something like a UFO crash or a military coup in Canada.

Something that’s entertaining but doesn’t potentially have a negative impact on Dems in the 2024 election. Would be extra cool if it isn’t fuel for another pundit class circlejerk. We’re thinking Wednesday morning, maybe early afternoon works for a news cycle shift. That way all the columnists and former political consultants who became columnists can get in another two days of Biden-is-Old-a-Mania before time’s up and they have to write about something else. Sound good?

The Republican National Committee on Monday advanced a draft policy platform that reads like it were a more coherent version of a Trump rally speech, the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reports confirming the passage while linking to his article about the specific details of the platform.

What’s in it: Calls for a massive deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, shutting down the US Department of Education, ending the electric vehicle mandate, embracing tariffs that will supercharge inflation, “end the weaponization of the Department of Justice,” implementing “measures to secure our elections, including voter ID, highly sophisticated paper ballots, proof of citizenship, and same day voting,” and building a “great Iron Dome” over the United States.

What’s not in it: Puerto Rican statehood, plans to make Social Security solvent, a constitutional amendment for fetal personhood, softened to “We proudly stand for families and life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the states and to a vote of the people. We will oppose late term abortion while supporting mothers and policies that advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”

Spandex-wearing grapple-freak Jim Jordan’s big hearing this Friday with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Assistant DA Matt Colangelo has been postponed, NBC News reports.

This should’ve been expected since the whole point was that the two would only be free to testify about the case after convicted felon former President Trump’s sentencing hearing, originally set for Thursday. Now that’s been pushed back to September while Judge Juan Merchan looks into whether the last week’s fascist Supreme Court ruling in Trump’s favor has any implications on the verdict. Jordan’s been particularly eager to get Colangelo – formerly a DOJ official – under oath to scream at him about that horseshit conspiracy theory that Biden directed Bragg to prosecute Trump.

“Two Missouri vacationers won’t be charged in a girl fight in The Villages,” Villages-News.com reports in the lede of a Saturday article credited simply to “Staff Report” in the byline.

Cops in the vast Floridian retirement community responded to the May 6th “girl fight,” and arrested 31 year-old Katherine Northrup of St Peters, Missouri and 28 year-old Gina Danforth of Fenton, Missouri, the two presumably renting a home in The Villages while visiting Disney World, with the police report mentioning screaming, spitting, pushing, punching and hair pulling, in a dispute over a golf cart rental and tickets to the world-famous amusement park. Sumter County prosecutors last week declined to pursue misdemeanor battery charges against the two “girls” for the altercation.

Great for them but we still have questions about the editorial decision-making process that led to the words “girl fight” being used to describe the brawl. Was there some pushback in the newsroom on an earlier draft that said “cat fight” and “girl fight” ended up being the compromise? The use of “Staff Report” does at least appear to be standard operating procedure for crime reports at Villages-News, as every article we’ve seen this morning says the same in the byline. Probably smart considering that other Villagers might seek violent retribution against local media for correctly reporting on their punching old women and peeing on lawns. The “girl fight” between grown women is just weird and whoever wrote that needs to get out of The Villages for a while to clear their head.