“Richard Quinn Sr., once a top South Carolina Republican consultant, told a state grand jury that Attorney General Alan Wilson was not paying him for drafting press statements and other documents – but that was a lie, according to a new indictment. The new 38-page indictment, issued May 20 and supervised by new special prosecutor Barry Barnette, accuses Quinn of 12 different counts of perjury and two counts of obstruction of justice. Until now, the indictment had not been publicized. The State newspaper obtained the public record from the State Grand Jury’s Office in Columbia. This indictment is modeled on a 33-page indictment from April 2019, issued by a former state grand jury and directed by former special prosecutor David Pascoe. The 2019 indictment had 11 perjury charges and one count of obstruction.”

“Both indictments detail secret payments of some $900,000 Quinn made to former state Rep. Jim Harrison, R-Richland, and the tens of thousands of dollars in a ‘kickback scheme’ to former state Sen. John Courson, R-Richland. The new indictments allege that Quinn committed perjury and lied about the payments to a state grand jury. The new indictment also charges Quinn with lying to the state grand jury about money his son, former state Rep. Rick Quinn, R-Lexington, received from the Quinn consulting firm, Richard Quinn & Associates. As a result of Pascoe’s investigation, Rick Quinn pleaded guilty to one act of misconduct and resigned from public office. A new count of perjury accuses Richard Quinn of lying to the state grand jury when asked about an email he sent to state Attorney General Alan Wilson’s office in 2014. That email suggested that Pascoe be told he could not investigate Quinn’s son, who had been accused in a confidential State Law Enforcement Division report of ‘numerous allegations… of official misconduct,’ the new indictment said. The allegations concerned the son’s practice of directing House Republican Caucus business to his own company while serving as the chamber’s House majority leader, the new indictment said. Richard Quinn’s attorney, Rauch Wise of Greenwood, said Thursday that he had not seen the new indictment and was learning of it through The State’s reporter. Wise had no immediate comment. ‘You would think the courteous thing to do would be to call the lawyer,’ Wise said” – Columbia State.

Paul Krugman: “Last Tuesday President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers published a blog post warning everyone not to make too much of any one month’s employment report. It presumably released this in advance of Friday’s report to fend off possible accusations that it was just trying to make excuses for a weak number. As it happened, however, the report came in strong: The economy added an impressive 850,000 jobs. The job gain was especially impressive given widespread claims that businesses couldn’t expand because generous unemployment benefits were discouraging workers from taking jobs. (Recent benefit cuts in many states came too late to have affected this report.) Well, somehow employers are managing to hire a lot of people anyway. Oh, and so much for Donald Trump’s warnings that there would be a ‘Biden depression’ if he weren’t re-elected.”

“That said, the council’s points were well taken. Covid-19 created huge dislocations in the economy, and as we recover from these dislocations economic data are unusually noisy – largely because the standard adjustments statisticians make to smooth out things like seasonal variation don’t work well in an economy still distorted by the pandemic. At this point, however, we have enough data in hand to declare that the economy is booming. In fact, it’s booming so strongly that Republicans have pivoted from claiming (falsely) that we’re experiencing the worst job performance in decades to lauding the employment numbers and giving credit to… Trump’s 2017 tax cut. Back to that in a minute. First, let’s try to put this boom in context, by noting that the economy is running hotter than it did during the ‘Morning in America’ boom that gave Ronald Reagan a landslide victory in the 1984 presidential election. We’ve gained three million jobs since Biden took office, or 600,000 jobs a month. This compares with gains of 340,000 a month in the year leading up to the 1984 election. To be fair, Reagan-era job gains took place from a lower base, so it may be more appropriate to compare growth rates. But this still gives Biden the advantage: 5 percent at an annual rate, versus 4.4 percent in 1983-84. And the disparity grows if you compare jobs with the working-age population, which was growing around 1 percent a year in the 1980s but has stagnated in recent years. So it’s a boom. “

The recently published book “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything” reveals author Mike Rothschild’s laser focus on the QAnon movement, targeted at their believers, deconstructing the core pillars of their mythology, and that’s about as far as the double-meaning wordplay offered by a long piece of investigative analysis of QAnon by a guy named Rothschild can go. While it appears to be a well-written book in its own right, it’s almost worth reading solely to see if the author’s surname is addressed in the book, and if any Q fans he interviewed were suspicious of him given what they “know” about his “family”.

“Some Republican National Committee (RNC) officials didn’t vote for then-President Trump in last November’s election, according to a forthcoming book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender. And excerpts from ‘Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,’ exclusively obtained by Fox News also spotlight the alleged friction between RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and Bill Stepien, who took over as Trump reelection campaign manager last summer… Bender wrote that under Stepien ‘Ronna was often left on the outside looking in – sometimes literally. In June, she had arrived at the White House for a political meeting, but waited in the lobby for more than an hour before she was brought into the Oval. When she walked in, the president asked why she was so late. ‘They don’t want me sitting in the meetings with you,’ Ronna told him.’ ‘The president’s handling of Covid and the White House’s treatment of Ronna had top staffers inside the RNC openly musing – for the first time in their lives – about not voting for the Republican nominee for president. Ultimately, some did not cast their Election Day ballot for Trump.'”

“Bender charged that the creation of WinRed – the exclusive online fundraising program used this past cycle by the Trump campaign, the RNC, and down ballot GOP campaigns to compete with the Democrats very successful ActBlue operation – ‘exposed tensions at the highest level of Trump World that finally exploded into an intense argument between Ronna and Jared inside the Trump Hotel.’ According to the excerpts, ‘Jared didn’t think the RNC could pull off the new operation and considered doing it himself.’ And Bender claimed that McDaniel ‘viewed the WinRed deal as a legacy project that could benefit the party for years to come. Keeping the new company as a nonprofit, she told Jared, would make sure it remained as an arm of the RNC.’ Bender alleged that ‘Jared wasn’t interested. ‘I don’t give a fuck about the future of the Republican Party!’ he told Ronna inside the hotel meeting room'” – Fox News.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Herschel Walker hasn’t lived in Georgia for decades. He’s never held public office, doesn’t attend the sort of Republican events that are mainstays on the political calendar and has bypassed the backslapping fundraising circuit that helps decide winners and losers in the state’s premier races. And yet Walker is viewed by many Republicans as the front-runner in next year’s GOP primary to challenge U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, even though he hasn’t yet entered the race that other contenders joined weeks ago. Walker’s sudden rise in Georgia politics from his estate in Texas has alternately energized, mystified and frustrated state conservatives who see the football great’s potential candidacy as a chain reaction of events that could only play out in the Donald Trump era. It was Trump who publicly urged Walker to run shortly after his own election defeat, saying his old friend would be ‘unstoppable.’ And it was Trump last week who said on a conservative radio show that Walker was readying to run.”

“Walker’s potential candidacy triggers more questions than a conventional candidate would face, some more freighted than others. His history of mental illness, including violent episodes he’s publicly addressed, will be invoked by rivals from both sides of the party divide. And he must move to Georgia from Texas, where he’s lived most of his adult life, to woo a conservative base that knows him for his athletic legend – and not for his ability to connect with voters, his grasp of policy ideals or his prowess on the campaign trail. ‘Herschel Walker will need to come back to Georgia and campaign. He will need to show that he is a conservative,’ Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman and 2020 Senate candidate, said on his radio show. ‘I have never heard Herschel Walker’s position on pro-life. I haven’t,’ Collins said. ‘I’ve never heard his position on gun control. I’ve never heard his position on a lot of these issues that are conservative issues.'”

“Hong Kong authorities said they have thwarted an alleged plot to bomb train stations, court buildings and tunnels organized by advocates for the city’s independence from China. Steve Li, the senior superintendent of the police’s National Security Department, said Tuesday nine people between the ages of 15 and 29 had been arrested, including six high school students, a high school employee and a university staff member. ‘(The) plans are shocking because it seems to target a lot of people,’ Li said. The alleged plot aimed to ‘maximize damage to society,’ he added. The suspects had rented a hotel room in Tsim Sha Tsui, a popular shopping district known for its sweeping views of Hong Kong Island and Victoria Harbour, to build explosives, Li said.”

“The room had been rented since early June, but the lab had only been ‘recently’ set up, he said. The suspects had the tools and materials to make triacetone triperoxide (TATP), police said. TATP is a powerful high explosive that was used in terrorist atrocities like the 2015 Paris bombings and Brussels attacks in 2016. Officers said they found an ‘operation manual’ which allegedly contained plans for an attack in early July. Police said the main source of the group’s financial resources was among those arrested. Authorities said they found about $10,300 in local currency and $1,300 worth of foreign currency, and froze about $77,200 in at least one bank account tied to the suspects. The suspects had allegedly scouted two court buildings and were targeting some of the three tunnels that connect Hong Kong Island to the Kowloon Peninsula, some of the city’s most important transport infrastructure. Speaking at her weekly news conference ahead of the announcement by the police, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam warned of ‘underground hidden terrorist activities’ and urged the public ‘to join hands to say no to violence.’ ‘We should not find any excuses for attackers. Violence is violence,’ she said” – CNN.

Daily Beast: “We’re about to see how much a Trump endorsement is worth. The former president is taking aim at Republican defectors like Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who voted for impeachment after Donald Trump had given him a ride on Air Force One. What an ingrate, Trump railed at a late June rally, calling the 36-year-old congressman a ‘sellout’ and ‘fake Republican’ as the ex-president threw his endorsement in a crowded field to Max Miller, a 32-year-old former White House aide with a thin resume and a rap sheet that includes multiple charges in his home state of Ohio for assault, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. The most recent charge was in 2010 and related to a fight; Miller says he has since grown up and won’t be repeating those mistakes. Maybe so, but do Republicans really want to trade out two-term congressman Gonzalez, the son of Cuban immigrants and a former wide receiver at Ohio State before turning pro, for someone with the inexperience and background of Miller?”

“Until Gonzalez voted to impeach Trump, he was on the shortlist of Republicans to replace the retiring Rob Portman in next year’s Senate election. ‘He’s young, he’s a former NFL player, he’s telegenic, and he’s Hispanic,’ said Jacob Rubashkin with Inside Elections, a nonpartisan newsletter that covers House races. ‘In a universe where Donald Trump is not around, Gonzalez would be running for the Senate – but that’s not the universe we’re in. Impeachment turned that on its head.’ Trump’s chosen replacement to represent Ohio’s 16th District worked in the White House Office of Personnel Management, where he and several other twentysomethings from the campaign drew media attention for their partying and lack of qualifications. Under scrutiny, Miller removed from social media his claim that he was a Marine recruiter. He is a former Marine reservist.”

https://youtu.be/0EbxlaALpJ0

Neighbors in the Essex Place condo complex in Mount Laurel, New Jersey cheered as Edward Cagney Matthews was taken away by police a day after going on a racist tirade directed at one of his neighbors, WTXF Fox-29 Philadelphia reports.

Matthews, a 45-year-old white man, had been charged with bias intimidation and harassment following the incident Friday where he called is neighbor a “monkey” and the n-word in the presence of a police officer.  The county prosecutor’s office added charges of assault after it determined, by watching the video linked here, that Matthews spit at the neighbor. 

Former NYC Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik launched the crowdfunding campaign on June 25th, which means currently with 18.3% of the duration already over, 0.14% of the goal has been raised. That’s freaking pathetic and hilarious that pretty much all of Rudy’s massive criminal and civil liabilities stem from his hilariously incompetent and ultimately failed attempts to make sure Trump won a second term. For which Trump has rewarded him with nothing but grief and misery.

Author and announced Republican candidate for the US Senate J.D. Vance says that he now regrets posting tweets that criticized Donald Trump, his lifestyle and his policies, as Vance faces criticism himself for flip-flopping, CNN reports.

Vance has been genuflecting at the altar of Trump in hopes of getting The Donald’s endorsement, which could attract a significant portion of the GOP base to his campaign for the Ohio Senate seat opening up due to the retirement of Republican Rob Portman.

Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan, who is vying for the Democratic nomination for the seat, tweeted, “.@JDVance1 and I have exactly one thing in common — neither of us voted for Donald Trump.”

https://youtu.be/com6mNEBkSI

A 51,000-year-old carved piece of bone found in Germany may be the oldest piece of artwork ever found, making anthropologists question previous assumptions about the intellectual capabilities of Neanderthals.

NBC News reports that the toe bone of deer, carved with multiple lines across it almost like chevrons, came from an in the Harz mountains near Einhornhöhle.  Researchers believe the carving, which was believed to have been a pendant, had a spiritual connotation to whoever wore it.  It also implies Neanderthals had a greater sense of existence than was previously understood.

“This is clearly not a pendant or something like that,” said Thomas Terberger, a professor and prehistoric archaeologist at the University of Göttingen, who co-authored a study of the object published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. “It’s clearly a decoration with a kind of symbolic character… you might even call it the initial start of art, something which was not done by accident, but with a clear plan in mind.”

With accused child sex trafficker Matt Gaetz as one of his warm-up acts, Donald Trump has claimed to know nothing about QAnon conspiracy theorists–except that “like me very much”–but he knew enough about them to grant two QAnon social media stars press passes to cover the rally he held in Sarasota, Florida Saturday night.

According to Vice News, Trump gave QAnon adherents the cult knows as “In The Matrixx” and “Shady Grooove” were granted official press passes to the rainy rally, where they sat in the media gallery and called reporters “fake news.”

The podcasters still profess that Trump is still President of the United States (though he lost the last election), that Trump was denied the victory due to massive voter fraud (though they can’t find any evidence), and that a cabal of child sex traffickers run Washington, DC. (did I mention Matt Gaetz was a speaker?). 

Business Insider: “Donald Trump’s family has cut off Rudy Giuliani, and the former president has been irked that the lawyer asked to be paid for his work challenging Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, a new book says. On Sunday, The Times of London published an excerpt from ‘Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,’ the coming book on the Trump presidency from the author Michael Wolff. In the extract, Wolff delves into Trump’s post-presidential life at his Mar-a-Lago resort and describes Trump as frustrated by the lack of progress in his quest to overturn the 2020 election result. Giuliani, a longtime ally and personal lawyer of the president, started leading the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the election on November 4 but departed sometime in February after a series of setbacks. Since then, reports have detailed how Giuliani and his allies have sought to get paid for the legal work, but to no avail, falling foul of the president in the process. ‘Trump is annoyed that he tried to get paid for his election challenge work,’ Wolff wrote.”

“The excerpt said Giuliani had ‘gotten only the cold shoulder’ while seeking payment from Trump amid the prospect of expensive legal battles of his own. Trump’s family has ‘cast out, cut off’ Giuliani, the excerpt said, without specifying which members of the clan. Giuliani is the subject of a Justice Department investigation into whether he broke foreign lobbying laws while working as Trump’s lawyer. Giuliani has not been charged with a crime. According to Wolff, Trump has also taken to asking visitors to his Mar-a-Lago resort ‘if they know any good’ lawyers to help him continue his plan to overturn the election via the US courts. Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.”

As a former GOP chair, I never thought I'd say this, but thank you to the Democrats for being good stewards of the Constitution when America needed them most.

— Jennifer Horn (@NHJennifer) July 5, 2021

Jennifer Horn was the head of the New Hampshire Republican Party from 2013 to 2017.  She announced that she was leaving the GOP in December 2020.

This essay will elaborate further on the “ego maintenance process”, which was introduced in earlier essays in the Unified Theory of Fascism series and described as the key factor which identifies a fascist movement and provide a brief introduction to the role of conspiracy theories as “grievance narratives” that are ultimately fuel for that process. Later essays in this series will describe how the grievance narratives typically employ the same “ego defense mechanisms” elaborated on by Sigmund and Anna Freud.

National Hockey League goalie Matiss Kivlenieks of the Columbus Blue Jackets was killed Sunday night after an errant firework from an unlicensed Fourth of July display tilted and hit him in the chest, a Michigan medical examiner announced Monday.

According to the Associated Press, the 24-year-old Kivlenieks was in a hot tub with other people when a mortar-style firework tilted and started firing into a crowd.  Kivlenieks and others scrambled out of the hot tub to get to safety when Kivlenieks was struck in the chest.

Police and EMTs from Novi, Michigan responded to the incident and rushed Kivlenieks to the hospital, where he was declared dead.  There were no other serious injuries reported in the incident.

AP: “John Rogers waited months after becoming eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. It was only after talking with friends that the 66-year-old retiree from rural Spencer County, Kentucky, was persuaded to get the shot. ‘They said, ‘You know, the vaccine may not be 100%, but if you get COVID, you’re in bad shape,’’ Rogers said. ‘You can die from it.’ With the nation falling just short of President Joe Biden’s goal of dispensing at least one shot to 70% of all American adults by the Fourth of July, public health officials in places like Spencer County have shifted the emphasis away from mass vaccination clinics toward getting more information out in a more targeted way about the benefits of getting inoculated. The hope is that word of mouth will ease fears and misperceptions about the vaccine and change people’s minds, one person at a time if necessary.”

“That’s especially important in places like Spencer County, an area of rolling green hills and farmland southeast of Louisville, where the state reports that about 22% of eligible adults are at least partially vaccinated. Public health officials there think the numbers are improving and may already be higher. Biden administration officials are increasingly turning their attention nationwide to some 55 million unvaccinated adults seen as persuadable, a group they have dubbed the ‘movable middle.’ Many of those being targeted are under 30, an age group that has an especially low vaccination rate. But they also include people like Rogers, who said many people in his community are hesitant to get shots because ‘they just don’t trust the government.’ Rogers, who worked for a packaging supplier in nearby Shelbyville, said he shook off the skepticism and is now looking forward to a summer of ‘things going back to normal as they can be.’ Nationally, resistance to getting vaccinated tends to run higher in conservative and rural parts of the country. Overall, 49% of all Kentuckians have received at least one dose, compared with about 55% nationwide.

“The Suez Canal Authority on Sunday said it has reached an agreement to settle a financial dispute with the owners of a hulking container ship that blocked the crucial waterway for nearly a week earlier this year. The head of Egypt’s Suez Canal Authority, Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie, said last month the parties had agreed on a compensation amount. But he said it would not be made public as they had signed a non-disclosure agreement until the signing of the final contract. The vessel had run aground in the single-lane stretch of the canal on March 23 before it was extracted six days later after a massive salvage effort by a flotilla of tugboats. Since it was freed, the Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned vessel, which carries cargo between Asia and Europe, has been ordered by authorities to remain in a holding lake mid-canal, along with most of its crew, as the two sides negotiated a settlement. The disagreement had centered on the compensation amount the Suez Canal Authority is claiming for the salvage of the vessel.”

“The money would cover the salvage operation, costs of stalled canal traffic, and lost transit fees for the week the Ever Given blocked the canal. At first, the Suez Canal Authority demanded $916 million in compensation, which was later lowered to $550 million. The two sides have traded blame for the vessel’s grounding, with bad weather, poor decisions on the part of canal authorities, and human and technical error all being thrown out as possible factors” – ABC News.

I will say this about “The Antifa”—-they’re all pretty good at WEIGHT CONTROL. Seriously, very few “fatties” in their ranks. But I’m afraid it’s THE DRUGS. https://t.co/zcoqhuTxWj

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) July 5, 2021