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“It’s outrageous to me that Republicans in Congress and in state offices fought so hard against a program that would have helped millions of their own constituents,” a downright angry Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said Friday after the Supreme Court shot down the Administration’s student loan forgiveness program.  “They had no problem handing million-dollar tax cuts to big corporations and the super-wealthy.  And many of them had no problem in accepting millions of dollars in forgiven pandemic loans like Senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma had more than $1.4 million in pandemic loans forgiven.  He represents 489,000 eligible borrowers that were turned down today.  Representative Brett Guthrie from Kentucky had more than $4.4 million forgiven; he represents more than 90,000 eligible borrowers who were turned down today.  Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia had more than $180,000 forgiven; she represents more than 91,800 eligible borrowers who were turned down today.  I want all the students and borrowers to know President Biden, Vice President Harris and I will not stop fighting for you.”

The man named in the lawsuit filed by Colorado web designer Lorie Smith as the individual who contacted her to build a website for a gay marriage claims he never attempted to contact Smith nor did he seek to have a website designed to celebrate his upcoming nuptials to his male partner because he was married at the time.  To a woman.

According to court filings, “Stewart”–the name of the person who allegedly contacted Smith’s firm, 303 Design, via email in September 2016–wanted a website designed to celebrate his upcoming wedding to his partner, “Mike.”  According to the New Republic, Stewart’s full name, contact information, and address were listed in the filing.  When New Republic reporter Melissa Gira Grant called the listed number, she reached a man named Stewart who was very confused.  (The outlet did not list the man’s last name to protect his privacy.)

“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he said confused after the reporter told him he was the subject of the pending Supreme Court case. “I’m married [to a woman], I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”

For the second time in as many days President Biden will address the nation in response to a verdict by the MAGA Supreme Court majority’s war on higher education. This time however he may have some cards to play to rain on the parade of the fanboys celebrating the libs getting owned.

Fox Corp. agreed to pay former Tucker Carlson producer Abby Grossberg $12 million to settle her lawsuit alleging the network allowed sexual harassment, misogyny and bigotry in the workplace, NPR reports.

A key witness in the Dominion Voting Machines lawsuit, Grossberg provided the plaintiffs with key recordings and communications showing key Fox staff knew their claims of vote fraud in the 2020 election were false.  Grossberg later made the claim that Fox executives pressured her to change her testimony in the Dominion case, which was later settled for $787.5 million.  Grossberg later filed a lawsuit against Fox claiming Carlson, his staffers and others at the network regularly engaged in anti-Semitic, misogynistic activity that made her employment threatening and untenable.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer lit into the increasingly suspicious “IRS whistleblower” Gary Shapley in a letter sent Friday to House Ways and Means Chairwiener Jason Smith, Axios reports.

“Since taking the majority in 2023, various leaders of the House and its committees have discarded the established protocols of Congress, rules of conduct, and even the law in what can only be called an obsession with attacking the Biden family. Your recent actions and joint statement with Chairmen Comer and Jordan make clear that you have joined this ignoble group, adopting their irresponsible tactics as your own. In fact, yesterday’s press release by the three of you seeking the testimony of a dozen law enforcement personnel based on the unsworn and slanted statements of the IRS agents is now the proverbial card castle – something that looks real but has no foundation.”

“Releasing the transcripts of and exhibits from interviews of self-styled IRS ‘whistleblowers’ who may be claiming that title in an attempt to evade their own misconduct was an obvious ploy to feed the misinformation campaign to harm our client, Hunter Biden, as a vehicle to attack his father. It is no secret these interviews were orchestrated recitations of mischaracterized and incomplete ‘facts’ by disgruntled agents who believed they knew better than the federal prosecutors who had all the evidence as they conducted their five-year investigation of Mr Biden,” wrote lawyer Abbe Lowell.

A Brazilian election court on Friday sentenced disgraced former President Jair Bolsonaro to a seven year ban from running for any elected office for abusing government communications channels to promote his “Stop the Steal” bullshit ahead of the 2022 election he lost, the AP reports.

The case against Bolsonaro centered on a July 2022 meeting, broadcast on state-run TV, in which he summoned foreign diplomats to the presidential palace to tell them the country’s electronic voting machines were rigged, a moment that seriously alarmed the US State Department.

“This decision will end Bolsonaro’s chances of being president again, and he knows it,” said Insper University political science professor Carlos Melo. “After this, he will try to stay out of jail, elect some of his allies to keep his political capital, but it is very unlikely he will ever return to the presidency.”

Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley on Friday told some anchor the MAGA Supreme Court’s decision to squash Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt won’t trigger any sort of electoral backlash against Republicans, but didn’t exactly do the best job of selling it. “I think what [Biden and Democrats] are banking on is that [borrowers] will feel aggrieved that somehow conservative justices denied them thousands of dollars. Of course, that’s not true,” said Turley, who maybe could have made himself look just a little less apprehensive and a lot more self-assured that such voters would completely understand and accept it. Might’ve helped too if he elaborated on the reasons why it’s “not true” instead of leaving it there and hoping it’ll all work out on its own.

“NOW EXTENDED 🍟 Due to popular demand, we’re extending any-size FREE FRIES with any purchase weekly in the BK App through 12/31/23! At participating US restaurants. Terms apply,” Burger King announced in a landmark app push notification on Friday. The ruling by Burger King’s marketing department is an affirmation of the right of all Americans, regardless of race, color, or creed to a free serving of fries once a week if they’re a member of the BK Rewards program.

The US Supreme Court on Friday issued a 6-3 ruling squashing the Biden Administration’s plan to kill up to $20,000 worth of student loan debt, owning the libs once again at the court.

“The Secretary asserts that the HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal. It does not. We hold today that the Act allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. Complete and utter devastation for the leftist sky screamers.

Reuters reports the White House will address the ruling with some sort of new protections for student borrowers. It’s not clear what cards they can play at this point after the pandemic-era pause on repayments is set to resume this October as condition of the Biden-McCarthy debt ceiling deal.

In a 6-3 partisan decision the Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of a bigoted web designer who refused to create a wedding website for a non-existent gay couple, Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports.

In her dissent, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote “By issuing this new license to discriminate in a case brought by a company that seeks to deny same-sex couples the full and equal enjoyment of its services, the immediate, symbolic effect of the decision is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status. In this way, the decision itself inflicts a kind of stigmatic harm, on top of any harm caused by denials of service. The opinion of the Court is, quite literally, a notice that reads: ‘Some services may be denied to same-sex couples.'”

Woke white lady (she/her) claims:

“No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system…”

I strongly disagree with this racist allegation. https://t.co/ZegZaqJIto

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) June 30, 2023

There is no “Erica Marsh.” The account is fake, per Twitter champ Ron Filipkowski. Congressman Statutory Rapist probably even knows this but is propagating it anyway just because it “feels” true.

A critical satellite-based Russian military communications network was knocked offline late Wednesday by hackers who claimed to be connected to the Wagner Group, raising the possibility that the rogue mercenary company’s war on the Kremlin isn’t over, the Washington Post reports.

It’s unclear if the network is back up yet or if the hackers were just stirring shit by claiming ties to Wagner. What did happen is that the Russian military was forced to use land-based backups leaving them vulnerable to communications being intercepted by the Ukrainians.

It might not be fair to call top Trump 2024 campaign minion Susan Wiles – recently famous for her testimony to Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s grand jury about Donald showing her a classified map – simply a right wing scumbag as the New York Post reports she’s got a wider array of political interests when it comes to making money: Lobbying for ChiCom entities described as potentially posing “a national security threat and help Beijing commit human rights abuses.”

Wiles’s other job as co-chair at Mercury Public Affairs, a lobbying shop that has worked to help shady ChiCom companies Yealink, Hikvision, and Alibaba push back against American regulators seeking to curtail their access to our market probably pays pretty well, and is not at all off brand from the Trump ethos of talking a lot of shit about the Xi Regime but happily taking their money while knowing full well the fanboys don’t give a shit about such revelations.

Twice-impeached and indicted former President Trump told a Reuters reporter on Thursday he would force the ChiComs to vacate their not actually new spy outpost in Cuba within two days after he’s reelected before lowering the timeframe to one hour in the very next sentence of the interview.

“I’d give them 48 hours to get out. And if they didn’t get out, I’d charge them a 100% tariff on everything they sell to the United States, and they’d be gone within two days. They’d be gone within one hour,” Trump said about the base that has actually been known to American intelligence officials since 2019, when he was still in office. There’s a non-zero chance there’s a map or some other details about the base among the classified documents Trump stole from the White House.

On the subject of Ukraine and Russia, the disgraced loser said his boss Vladimir Putin has been “somewhat weakened” after the attempted mutiny by the Wagner Group mercenaries, but above all else he wants “people to stop dying over this ridiculous war” and that the Ukrainians “would be entitled to keep much of what they’ve earned and I think that Russia likewise would agree to that. You need the right mediator, or negotiator, and we don’t have that right now.”

French President Emmanuel Macron convened another emergency cabinet meeting as massive civil unrest racked the country for a third night on Thursday over the police shooting death of a 17 year-old of North African descent identified as Nahel M in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, the BBC reports.

At least 667 people have been arrested in the raging clashes that saw as many as 40,000 cops deployed to the streets in scenes that will no doubt eventually end up being used in American right wing political campaign ads to depict “Biden’s America” if it isn’t already.

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1674440845355896838

The Chinese spy balloon that transited the United States, soaring over a number of sensitive military installations, did not collect any significant intelligence information, the Pentagon state, according to CNN, with officials crediting unspecified countermeasures taken by military officials for the probe’s lack of success.

“We believe that it did not collect while it was transiting the United States or flying over the United States, and certainly the efforts that we made contributed,” Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said.  The military collected the debris after the balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on February 4th, and technicians continue analyzing the wreckage to determine if it was transmitting information back to China.

Referring to a Wall Street Journal report that some of the parts found in the debris were manufactured in the United States, Ryder responded, “We are aware in previous cases, for example, things like drones and other capabilities … where off the shelf, commercial US components have been used.”

In today’s edition of The World is Trying to Kill Us, growing blooms of algae are poisoning sea lions off the coast of California, leading to more aggressive interactions with humans along the beaches, including an incident where a child reported being bitten in the leg while wading in the surf, NBC News reports.

The algae, Pseudo-nitzschia, gets eaten by fish who digest it, creating a neurotoxin called domoic acid, which then gets ingested by the sea lions higher on the food chain.  In sea lions, domoic acid accumulates and starts poisoning them, impacting their neurological system and turning the normally non-aggressive into an aquatic Real Housewives. “It literally affects their brains, and the behavior of sea lions — especially when the concentrations of domoic acid are quite high — is drastically changed,” John Warner, CEO of Los Angeles non-profit Marine Mammal Care Center, said. “They become symptomatic in ways that are just unpredictable in terms of their behavior, aggressiveness that we don’t normally see.”

Rudy Giuliani, the former Trump lawyer and hair dye test mannequin at the center of efforts to overturn the 2020 election through legislative and legal efforts, reportedly sat for an interview with prosecutors from Jack Smith’s office under a proffer agreement, an arrangement that frequently precedes a formal cooperation agreement, the New York Times reports.

Mike Roman, a 2020 Trump campaign official involved in the plot to assign fake pro-Trump electors from various states to the Electoral College tally to disrupt the proper certification of Joe Biden’s victory, is cooperating with prosecutors from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office, CNN reports. Roman’s phone had already been confiscated under a seizure order, and his deputy on the campaign testified before the grand jury last week.

Both Giuliani and Roman are working under proffer deals that allow them to testify via interviews with investigators rather than before a grand jury.  While these interviews are done on the record, prosecutors agree to not use any information gathered in the interview against the witness.