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.

House Democrats on Monday got an email from leadership informing them that their weekly caucus meeting set for Tuesday 9:00 AM will be held at a location that “will be shared with Chiefs of Staff and Schedulers,” rather than at the Capitol. “Hot breakfast will be provided,” the email adds.

Well that ought to help plug leaks with detailed lists of every member who stood up and called for a contested presidential nomination process or for Joe Biden to resign from office immediately.

President Joe Biden on Monday called into MSNBC’s Morning Joe to continue to dig in, telling all those within the party who would take him on to “Run against me. Challenge me at the convention.”

OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein, who left the company a decade before its business model suddenly imploded during a Titanic tour last June, has launched a brand new undersea adventure tour concern called “Blue Marble,” now booking a trip to the bottom of Dean’s Blue Hole, a 663-foot deep sinkhole in the Bahamas that locals call the “Portal to Hell,” NewsNation reports.

Blue Marble’s website sells the excursion as a unique “opportunity to discover the hidden secrets of cave-dwelling species, geological climate history and unique ecosystems.” NewsNation’s article states that the site had previously said that “Locals believe that Dean’s is a portal to hell and the devil himself lurks in the black depths.” They don’t explain why it was on the site “previously” rather than “currently,” but it’s not hard to imagine that Söhnlein might want to downplay any sort of superstitions going into such a hazardous environment, especially considering what happened to his former partner, Stockton Rush, and three of his paying customers plus a tour guide employee.

For now at least Söhnlein does not plan on taking tourists on the excursions as the first few rounds will be strictly for researchers. There’s been no recent update on the status of Söhnlein’s grander ambition to send 1,000 people to live in a floating blimp colony in Venus’s atmosphere by 2050.

Facing a potential mass exodus now that Congress is in town, President Biden on Monday sent a letter to Hill Dems informing them “that despite all the speculation in the press and elsewhere, I am firmly committed to staying in this race, and to beating Donald Trump,” CNN’s reports.

Putin targets children’s hospitalhttps://t.co/KDORsTta5f

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) July 8, 2024

Shady American aerospace manufacturer Boeing on Sunday reached an agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to felony fraud and pay a $243.6 million fine, CNBC reports.

The charge stems from Boeing’s violation of a 2021 non-prosecution settlement following the deadly crashes of two 737 Max planes. Under the agreement an independent compliance monitor will be installed for three years and Boeing will have to invest at least $455 million in safety measures.

Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban on Monday endorsed convicted felon former President Trump, telling Politico EU that the Orange Autocrat “would be good for the world,” praising Donald as a “self-made man” who has a “different approach to everything. I believe that will be good for the world politics. He is the man of peace. Under his four-year term he did not initiate a single war, and he did a lot in order to create peace in old conflicts in very complicated areas of the world.”

Orban recently met with fellow dictator Vladimir Putin in Moscow, endorsing Vlad’s plan for “peace” between Ukraine and Russia that demands Kyiv give up territories currently under occupation.

A wildfire that broke out Sunday near dead pederast Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch property threatens to burn the amusement park-like estate to the ground, the New York Times reports.

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick–who once paid a $25,000 bounty in a publicity stunt gone wrong to a whistleblower who uncovered pro-Trump election fraud in Pennsylvania–warned Texans living along the Gulf Coast between Corpus Christi and Galveston to evacuate inland as Hurricane Beryl approaches, according to CNN.

Expected to hit landfall as a hurricane early Monday morning, Beryl has already claimed at least nine lives after crossing the Caribbean and the Yucatan Peninsula, regaining strength in the Gulf of Mexico before hitting Texas.

Storm surges along the coast were expected to peak at around one to one-and-a-half feet for most of the coast before noon on Monday, but officials warned some areas living around Matagorda Bay could see surges up to seven feet at times.

After a frustrating outing on the mound in a relief effort against the Los Angeles Angeles in which he gave up three runs, hit a batter and had a throwing error in two-thirds of an inning, Chicago Cubs pitcher Colten Brewer learned that he does not possess enough force to move Wrigley Field.

According to ESPN, Brewer returned to the dugout mid-inning after being pulled from the mound and decided to take his frustration out on the dugout wall.  Wrigley Field dugouts are made of concrete, brick and metal.

The wall won, and while Brewer was smart enough to use his left, non-throwing hand to wallop the wall, he still broke some bones in his hand, landing him on the disabled list for at least two months.  Not to worry, though:  Brewer’s injury likely won’t impact the Cubs’ playoff chances given they’re already eleven games out of first place, nor will it impact his $656,000 salary for 2024.

“Like Stalin said it doesn’t matter how many people vote, it matters who counts the votes. Will see what happens here in November” – Top comment on Breitbart’s article about the French elections.

Come Monday morning it will have been a week since the far right Supreme Court further throttled Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s conspiracy case against convicted felon former President Trump for his failed post-2020 election coup attempt and, minus one federal holiday for the Fourth of July, about three and a half working days have gone by without any response from Smith’s team on what the next step is going to be in the pre-trial motions that can now continue.

Most in the media are, not entirely incorrectly, more focused on the fact that the Supremes just gave the fat fuck a blank check to do whatever he wants if elected again, but the whole reason they made that ruling in the first place is that Team Orange successfully gamed the system he had already rigged and got their interlocutory appeal for “presidential immunity” decided there.

It’s far from over though. Most legal commentators see libs getting a consolation prize of a “mini-trial” in which Smith will have to present to Judge Tanya Chutkan evidence to see if it colors inside the lines of the MAGA majority’s intentionally vague definition of what is and isn’t an official act, all of it expected to be at least as politically damaging on the scale of the House January 6th Committee hearings. Maybe worse, if you want to indulge in some speculation floated earlier this year.

Another option fewer commentators have raised is that the trial is still doable in September if Smith rips out everything that implicates an official act and files a superseding indictment covering only what Trump did as a candidate but it’s unlikely to work given the way the ruling was precision designed to make seemingly everything Trump did potentially an at least “semi-official act” and thus subject to appellate review, allowing him to keep running out the clock past November.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff tested positive for COVID on Saturday and will remain off the campaign trail, quarantined, for at least the next five days, CBS News reports.  Vice President Kamala Harris continues to test negative, according to an aide to Emhoff.  After experiencing mild symptoms on Saturday, Emhoff reportedly is asymptomatic Sunday but will remain isolated as a precaution.

Four senior House Democrats forcefully called for President Joe Biden to step down from the Party nomination for President during a conference call convened by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Politico reports.

Jerry Nadler (NY), Adam Smith (WA), Mark Takano (CA) and Joe Morelle (NY) called for Democrats to replace Biden on the ticket, while several others expressed doubts that Biden can prevail in November.  (One of those reportedly expressing doubts, Don Beyer of Virginia, later said through a spokesperson, “To be clear [Beyer] supports President Biden and said so on this call and any reporting to the contrary is a misunderstanding of what he said and what he believes.”)

Early projections coming from exit pollings show the liberals in France controlling the most seats in the national parliament.  The centrist party of President Emmanual Macron finished second, and the far-right supporters of Marine Le Pen ended with the third most seats, according to the Associated Press.  No group has a clear majority, so it will take bargaining to form a majority government.

It should be noted that this is the second national election in which polling greatly underestimated the support liberal candidates garnered.  In the July 4th British elections, Labor Party candidates greatly overperformed, taking nearly two-thirds of the seats in the British Parliament.

South Carolina’s Little Pee Dee River has shrunk to an even littler pee dee amid a drought cutting off circulation to the once lengthy and girthy waterway, the Myrtle Beach Sun News reports.

National Weather Service meteorologist Adam Weiner told the Sun News that the drought in Horry County has only intensified, with rainfall shrinking to just one inch in June. There’s a chance it could get wetter later this week, but Weiner stiffly warned that it’ll take more wetness to help.

And to all the readers snickering at this story, just imagine if this was your Little Pee Dee that wasn’t able to flow properly, how painful that would be to experience that and the embarrassment of telling your partner the Pee Dee just can’t get it up, let alone discharge any swimmers. This isn’t funny.

“This evening at approximately 9:20pm, Deputies assigned to the NPSO Patrol Operations Bureau responded to NATCOM 911 Center reports of a group in Kisatchie National Forest needing assistance according to the Natchitoches Parish Sheriff’s Office. The group consisting of recent Houma graduates traveled from Houma to camp out in Kisatchie National Forest approximately 1 1/2 miles down off of Back Bone Trail in southern Natchitoches Parish After setting up camp, one member of the group ranging in ages of 17-18 called 911 frightened requesting assistance because they reportedly heard a growl and saw what appeared to be an animal that had glowing eyes and stood about 5-feet tall. Deputy B Remo and Cpl D Halliburton responded to the area. Deputies arrived on scene and began to walk towards the camp site looking for any suspicious activity or glowing eyes. Deputies then heard the group’s whistle and located them unharmed.”

“Deputies arrived at the camp site and successfully escorted the group out of the forest. Deputies reported the disposition as unable to locate any suspicious activity involving a growl with glowing eyes and standing 5-feet tall. We congratulate the Houma graduates, thank you for visiting Natchitoches Parish, Kisatchie National Forest and good luck in your future,” says a Facebook post from the Natchitoches Parish Sheriff’s Office, dated June 28th and headlined “IT COULD HAVE BEEN ‘BIGFOOT’ OR A BEAR – DEPUTIES RESCUE HOUMA GRADUATION GROUP.”

How the hell could it have been a bigfoot if it was only five feet tall? And what kind of red-blooded American teenager just runs away and calls the cops when encountering a predatory monster with glowing eyes in the woods at night? Shouldn’t at least some of them have been stoned and/or drunk enough to want to fight it with their bare fists while the others filmed it for a TikTok post?