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.

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.