Michael Wolff writes: To the degree that Trump had, for four years, been running the government with scant idea of the rules and practices of running the government, he was now doing it virtually without anybody who did have some idea and desire to protect both him and themselves from embarrassment or legal peril. Jared Kushner was, to his own great relief, in the Middle East, wrapping up what he saw as his historic mission: his peace deals. The president…
NBC News reports: Clarence Thomas, one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative justices, said Monday that because of the hodgepodge of federal policies on marijuana, federal laws against its use or cultivation may no longer make sense. “A prohibition on interstate use or cultivation of marijuana may no longer be necessary or proper to support the federal government’s piecemeal approach,” he wrote. His views came as the court declined to hear the appeal of a Colorado medical marijuana dispensary that…
The people are on our side and they know what’s at stake. ⁰⁰We need to pass an infrastructure bill that invests in communities and creates a robust #CivilianClimateCorps. Just so we're clear @POTUS, we’re coming to D.C. tomorrow. We’ll be the ones in black. Can't miss us 😈 pic.twitter.com/aAYuchnovC — Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) June 27, 2021 Jim Lardner writes: It was a rare case of Presidential understatement in the unveiling of a program: the Secretary of Agriculture and the…
Jonathan D. Karl writes: Trump was sitting at the table. Meadows was sitting next to him with his arms crossed; the White House adviser Eric Herschmann stood off to the side. The details of this meeting were described to me by several people present. One told me that Trump had “the eyes and mannerism of a madman.” He went off on Barr. “I think you’ve noticed I haven’t been talking to you much,” Trump said to him. “I’ve been leaving…
Peter S. Canellos writes: When Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, went before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation in early 2017, he offered a surprising choice of role model. Gorsuch — a conservative member of the Federalist Society, carrying the personal imprimatur of Mitch McConnell — named John Marshall Harlan, the progressive 19th-Century justice best known as the sole member of the Supreme Court to stand up for Black rights and economic protections. “Justice Harlan got the…
USA Today reports: Daniel Berry said he was searching for camaraderie. The 40-year-old Army veteran yearned to forge the sort of bonds he had in the military: a brotherhood of like-minded men watching one another’s backs, holding one another up, united in a common goal. Last year, Berry said, he remembered a guy at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall asking him if he had heard of the Proud Boys. The group was vocal in its support for then-President Donald…
Jamie Mackay writes: At the dawn of the 20th century, Italian patriots were struggling to overcome a profound inferiority complex. Ever since 1861, when Giuseppe Garibaldi unified the country’s disparate regions into a nation-state, politicians and intellectuals had been anticipating the arrival of a glorious new era. Decades on, however, the economic, diplomatic and cultural results were wanting. Nationalists knew they needed a new mythos to boost public confidence, something to make Italy seem strong and competitive on the world…
The New York Times reports: The Biden administration has defended a contentious pipeline project that would carry hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil through Minnesota’s delicate watersheds, urging in a court brief that a challenge brought by local tribes and environmental groups be thrown out. The closely watched filing in federal court was the latest in a series of actions taken by the administration to back Trump-era approvals of oil and gas infrastructure, despite President Biden’s pledge to aggressively…
Adam Serwer writes: Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism and disenfranchisement become not only justified but worthy of celebration. This approach has a long history in American politics. The most consistent threat to our democracy has…
Reuters reports: Canada officially named the U.S. right-wing militia group Three Percenters a terrorist entity on Friday, saying it posed a “significant threat” to Canadian domestic security. Earlier this month U.S. prosecutors obtained a conspiracy indictment against six men associated with the Three Percenters, the latest in a series of such charges arising from the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol by former President Donald Trump’s supporters. Canadian officials cited the Jan. 6 riot in their listing. Public Safety…
Zeynep Tufekci writes: There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia and killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world. For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to a strain that circulated in the 1950s. People born before that had immunity that protected them, and younger people didn’t. But how on earth had it…
The Washington Post reports: The 12-story condo tower that crashed down early Thursday near Miami Beach was built on reclaimed wetlands and is perched on a barrier island facing an ocean that has risen about a foot in the past century due to climate change. Underneath its foundation, as with Miami Beach, is sand and organic fill —over a plateau of porous limestone — brought in from the bay after the mangroves were deforested. The fill sinks naturally and the…
Politico reports: A new intelligence report sent to Congress on Friday concludes that virtually all of the 144 sightings of unidentified flying objects documented by the military since 2004 are of unknown origin, in an extremely rare public accounting of the U.S. government’s data on UFOs that is likely to fuel further speculation about phenomena the intelligence community has long struggled to understand. The report — the government’s first unclassified assessment in half a century — does not offer any…
The New York Times reports: The young couple posing in front of the faux Eiffel Tower at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas fit right in, two people in a sea of idealistic Democrats who had arrived in the city in February 2020 for a Democratic primary debate. Large donations to the Democratic National Committee — $10,000 each — had bought Beau Maier and Sofia LaRocca tickets to the debate. During a cocktail reception beforehand, they worked the room of…
Mother Jones reports: In its first major action to combat GOP voter suppression laws, the Biden Justice Department announced on Friday that it is suing the state of Georgia over its new voting restrictions. The lawsuit was first reported by Mother Jones. “Today the Department of Justice is suing the state of Georgia,” Attorney General Merrick Garland announced at a press conference at the Justice Department headquarters. Gov. Brian Kemp has said “there is nothing Jim Crow” about the Georgia…
The Associated Press reports: Nearly all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. now are in people who weren’t vaccinated, a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been and an indication that deaths per day — now down to under 300 — could be practically zero if everyone eligible got the vaccine. An Associated Press analysis of available government data from May shows that “breakthrough” infections in fully vaccinated people accounted for fewer than 1,200 of more than 853,000 COVID-19…