Heavy rains caused a dam in eastern Wisconsin to breach, forcing the evacuation of communities downstream in the latest emergency caused by extreme weather moving across the country, the Associated Press reports.

While the Manawa Dam appears to be largely intact except for a 50-foot section along the top that broke away, officials say significant erosion in the structure will require additional inspection.  “It looks like the dam is intact, but there is quite a bit of erosion on the north side,” Police Chief Jason Severson said Friday afternoon. ”We think the worst of it is over, so now we’re going to start assessing things and see where we go from here.”

President Biden will sit for an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, billed as yet another make-or-break moment following last week’s train wreck of a debate against the Orange Allah.

Pope Francis kicked out of the Roman Catholic Church Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former ambassador from the Holy See to the United States, who had been found guilty of schism, or an irreparable separation from the Church, the BBC reports.  Viganò served in Washington from 2011 to 2016.

An ultra-conservative, Viganò refused to recognize any of the liberal policies of Pope Francis and denied the legitimacy of all liturgical and policy changes made by the Vatican after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

Viganò had been in hiding since 2018 when he accused the Pope of covering up sexual abuse by an archbishop.  He has since grabbed on to various global conspiracies, including the illegitimacy of Pope Francis, posting on social media last month, “I repudiate, reject, and condemn the scandals, errors, and heresies of Jorge Mario Bergoglio,” referring to Pope Francis by his given name.

Nevermind that the crimes alleged in the Florida documents case all occurred after Donald Trump was out of office, regarding retaining documents, obstructing justice and lying to federal officials after he left office.  He’s not charged with taking the documents; he’s charged with plotting to keep them after the government demanded them back.  Trump’s lawyers claim the Supreme Court’s recent decision about presidential immunity will make the Florida documents case moot.

“The Court should stay all other proceedings in the case, except the pending gag-order motion, until the motions relating to Presidential immunity and the Appointments and Appropriations Clauses are resolved,” Trump’s lawyers argue in his latest filing.

If Clarence Thomas has his way, Aileen Cannon won’t have to do anything more to delay the Florida case; Clarence will have it tossed by voiding the Special Counsel’s authority.

Two separate textbook authors have told the Orlando Sentinel Florida state officials demanded textbook publishers remove or modify multiple references to man-made climate change in texts if they wanted them used in the state, including forcing one publisher to remove a 90-page chapter on climate change from a middle school science book.

Ken Miller, the co-author of that textbook and a professor emeritus at Brown University, said his publisher had to remove or add substantiation to a high school-level text referring to man-made climate change, and his publisher told him about the chapter being removed from his middle school text for Florida.  Miller is not just a textbook author; he’s president of the board of the National Center for Science Education.

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s latest attempt to expand convicted felon and guy loving the Two-tiered Justice System Donald Trump’s gag order merited a summary for In-Pocket Judge Aileen Cannon that wraps up the rationale for gagging Trump judicially, metaphorically and physically.  His latest filing sums it up nicely:

CONCLUSION:  Over the past year, Trump has repeatedly targeted public servants with vitriolic attacks, resulting in a torrent of death threats, doxing, swatting, and other forms of harassment. When he recently decided to falsely accuse the law enforcement agents involved in this case with taking part in a plan to kill him and his family, he knowingly exposed them to similar treatment. The Court should modify his conditions of release to prohibit similar conduct moving forward.

Standing firm with union workers, President Joe Biden canceled his address to the National Education Association, the union representing three million education workers across the country and the largest labor union in the United States, because the NEA’s staff is on strike and Biden won’t cross their picket line at the Philadelphia convention site, Politico reports.

Citing unfair labor practices against the NEA, the National Education Association Staff Organization is out on strike for the second time this year.  The strike is the second for NEASO this year, and will limit the programming and functions at the union’s 103rd Representative Assembly.

The district clerk in Hays County, Texas resigned on Friday ahead of an expected move by the court to suspend him for incompetence and poor job performance, the Austin American-Statesman reports, noting that testimony into the Democrat’s performance including accounts that jury summonses weren’t mailed, resulting multiple times in trials unable to get underway for lack of jurors.

Avrey Anderson didn’t appear to know the duties of a district clerk.  “We hit a stretch where we didn’t have any juries showing up,” an assistant district attorney testified. “Mr. Anderson did not seem aware that he needed to be doing that.”  Anderson was also accused of fostering a hostile workplace and failing to properly track court filings.  Anderson was elected to the post in 2022 in his first campaign, ousting an incumbent Republican who had served in the position for 12 years in the suburban Austin county.

“I do not believe it is good for justice and the courts for me to continue in my role currently,” Anderson wrote. “Perhaps one day I will be able to get back into the government sector but for now I believe it is best for the people of Hays County to have someone who hopefully attracts less negative attention to themselves.”  It’s unclear whether the 20-year-old Anderson will return to school or take a job at an Appleby’s.

President Joe Biden will hold a rally in Wisconsin on Friday, one in which his performance will be heavily scrutinized and if he does well will be written-off as an aberration by the media.

Convicted felon former President Trump personally thinks he can handle Vice President Kamala Harris were she to take over as the Dem presidential nominee as he believes she’s “too liberal, too hostile to business and secure borders, and too inexperienced, weak and phony to be president. But some of his advisers are quite concerned that a fresh, youthful, non-Biden ticket presents a bigger threat than Trump assumes,” Axios reports, adding that they’d be even more worried that Harris would pick a “moderate Midwestern male” as her running mate for November.

Who knows what Axios’s agenda is here, if there is one. It’s obvious enough that having Harris take over would remove the age liability and even put it back on Trump. But this whole situation fucking sucks and as much as we hate to admit it, this is on Joe Biden for not showing up to the debate the way he did for the State of the Union. All this douchey pile-on “insider” reporting – case in point from Axios themselves with “Biden staff ‘miserable,’ alarmed as pressure builds” – is accelerating this spiral into what Talking Points Memo editor and fellow Axios-skeptic Josh Marshall writes is “very likely when, not if” Harris takes over as the 2024 Dem nominee or maybe even as president sooner.

This is not where we or any other anti-MAGA voters wanted to be right now. You can see how we’ve been trying to skirt around it in our coverage while every other site is going balls-to-the-wall with Biden-is-Old-a-Mania for the past week. The Narrative™ is starting to coalesce around Harris and the hard truth is that The Narrative™ all too often gets what it wants. The good news at least is that’s not what the MAGA Reich wants, if we’re to take Axios’s “scooping” at face value.

Convicted felon former President Trump on Friday tried to distance himself from the fascist agenda his own advisers have been devising, posting “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them,” even though obviously he’s voiced much of these ambitions himself.

My take on 9/11: It's hard to tell what is a conspiracy theory and what isn't. But conspiracy theories flourish when the government routinely lies to the public. As President I won't take sides on 9/11 or any of the other debates. But I can promise is that I will open the files…

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 5, 2024

When someone who aspires to be the leader of the Free World and the President of the most powerful nation on Earth, but refuses to deny myriad insane conspiracy theories about the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, he immediately disqualifies himself from public office.

A Levittown, New York 11 year-old managed to inflict “extensive damage” on not one but two homes plus completely burn down a wooden shed on Thursday after an unspecified type of firework they had lit malfunctioned during a 4th of July celebration in the suburban community, WNBC reports.

Karamjit Singh, the 33 year-old homeowner who had given the kid the firework and told them to light it, faces arson, reckless endangerment, child endangerment, and various fireworks-related offenses on top of he and his neighbor’s houses having been burned extensively. And his shed too.

The now-liberal majority Wisconsin state Supreme Court on Friday overturned the previous conservative majority’s 2022 decision banning ballot drop boxes, one which prompted convicted felon former President Trump to demand that his roughly 20,000 vote defeat in the state in the 2020 election be “decertified” and the 10 electoral college votes retroactively awarded to him.

Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose 45 days leading the country were remarkable for the record brevity, that a head of lettuce on a webcam outlasted her, and that Queen Elizabeth II died, lost her formerly safe seat Thursday to a Labour challenger by 640 votes, the Guardian reports.

Truss was not seen as in danger given her 26,000 vote win in 2019 and had held the seat since 2010. Locals in her Norfolk district told the Guardian they had seen little of her during the campaign, which tracks with the entitlement and arrogance that led her to blame the Deep State for her being tossed from the premiership for also now ex-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2022, with Truss writing a book titled Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons From the Only Conservative in the Room.

Loser former Brazilian dictator Jair Bolsonaro was hit with another indictment on Thursday, this one certainly more serious than falsifying his COVID-19 vax record, as this one concerns the undeclared diamonds the asshole received from Saudi Arabia during his administration, the AP reports.

Reigning Nathan’s 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest Women’s Division eating champ Miki Sudo on Thursday won again and set a new record of 51 wieners in her 10th victory, a streak that was only broken when she sat out 2021’s face-off due to pregnancy, Yahoo Sports reports. Sudo even out-ate her husband, Nick Wehry, who finished in third on the men’s side at 48 hot dogs, 10 fewer than new champ Patrick Bertoletti, who downed 58 on the street stage in Coney Island.

However this year’s men’s competition was marred by the absence of the all-time great Joey Chestnut who was in El Paso to face four soldiers at Fort Bliss. He fucking crushed them – and arguably Bertoletti too – downing 57 to 49 in five minutes, half the time Bertoletti had to eat 58. It’s absolutely fair to declare Chestnut the default winner of the Nathan’s contest too.

Less than a day after white nationalist provocateur Tucker Carlson claimed to have an interview scheduled with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian President’s office firmly denies any such event would take place, Politico reports.

This surely comes as a letdown for Carlson, who boasted about working for years to get an interview with the leader of Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion.  “Looks like we’ve got the Zelenskyy interview. We’ve been trying for two years, and with particular intensity after interviewing Putin in February,” the former Fox host posted on social media on Wednesday.  “The point is to bring Americans much-needed information about the conflict that’s completely reshaping their country’s position in the world. Coming soon we hope.”

Kyiv disagrees.  When asked about the claim, presidential spokesperson Sergii Nykyforov responded, “The President of Ukraine has a completely different schedule, and Tucker Carlson is not on it.”

First exit polls reported by British media outlets confirm pre-election day forecasts:  the end of the 14-year, five prime ministers reign of the Conservative Party, with the Keir Starmer-led Labor Party taking 410 of the 650-seat House of Commons, according to the BBC.  Before the Parliament was dissolved before the elections, the Conservative Party held 344 seats to Labor’s 205.

The breakdown of seats per the exit polls, which had been fairly accurate in British elections:  410 for Labour, 131 for the Conservatives, 61 for the Liberal Democrats, 13 for Reform U.K., 10 for the Scottish National Party and 2 for the Green Party.  Just 236 are needed for a majority.

Well it sure feels like things are going awesome for conservatives lately. First there was Sleepy Joe Biden’s train wreck of a debate then the patriots on the Supreme Court gave President Trump the freedom to govern without having to worry about the Deep State trying to take him down when he returns to the White House. Libs are screaming in terror and butthurt knowing he will destroy them.

Still, it’s not a sure thing. Polls can be wrong, Democrats can rig it on the margins, and it’s all pretty close. What Republicans really need to help seal the deal with American voters is a deadly foreign terrorist attack that can be blamed on the Biden Administration’s open border policies.

Just think of it: An ISIS or Hamas suicide bomber detonating a vest packed with nails and ball-bearings in the middle of a Fourth of July parade would be the perfect opportunity for Republicans in Congress to go on Fox News and say it’s a direct consequence of the 2020 election being stolen since it obviously never would have happened if Trump was still in power.