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Tom Nichols says it all Trump’s making us all crazy and we have to resist: The 2024 election has become a kind of waking nightmare in which many of us stare at Donald Trump as he unleashes some new attack on any number of targets: a judge’s daughter, immigrants, the rule of law, American national security, the Constitution. And we blink and shake our heads, stunned to think that many of our fellow citizens are eager to put this autocratic ignoramus back in the White House. In a more normal time in American life, people had to leave politics for having a nanogram of Trump’s baggage. Think of the late Senator Thomas Eagleton, the 1972 Democratic vice-presidential pick who had to drop out of the race because he’d been treated for depression. The idea—how old-fashioned it seems now—was that America could not risk any possible mental-health issues not only in the president, but even in the person next in the line of succession.

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It’s still happening If you wonder why so many Republicans are now backing Vladimir Putin and are hostile to Ukraine in its fight to remain a free sovereign country, you don’t have to look much farther than the fact that they are members of a cult that worships a man who seems to have an unusual affinity for Valdimir Putin. That certainly informs the cultists’ beliefs. But just as important is the right wing media’s eager dissemination of Russian talking points. Even some Republicans are becoming alarmed: The most striking example came this week. In an interview with Puck News’s Julia Ioffe, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) — none other than the GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — flat-out said that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” McCaul suggested conservative media was to blame. “There are some more nighttime entertainment shows that seem to spin, like, I see the Russian propaganda in some of it — and it’s almost identical [to what they’re saying on Russian state television] — on our airwaves,” McCaul said.

Rigging the election for Dear Leader And Trump and his henchmen are lying about it: Former President Donald Trump picked up a phone to pressure a Nebraska state senator to revive a winner-take-all system of awarding its Electoral College votes for president, sources told the Nebraska Examiner on Friday. Trump, the sources said, called State Sen. Tom Brewer, who chairs the State Legislature’s Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, and urged him to take action to get a winner-take-all bill up for debate in the waning days of the 2024 session. Four working days remain in the 60-day session. Brewer, the sources said, responded that it doesn’t work that way. The deadline is past to vote a bill out of a committee and get it passed this year. In addition, the Speaker of the Legislature on Friday said it’s also too late to amend a bill into another bill. Trump then reportedly told Brewer, who is term-limited this year, that his political career was over. Brewer, 65, is a decorated military veteran who represents Nebraska’s Sandhills area.

Australia is conducting its first climate risk assessment and developing an adaptation plan. Not only humans experience heat stress, so do other animals and plants. If you must feed wild birds, listen to the experts’ tips. Assessing Australia’s climate risks The Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) has released the Continue reading »

A criminal is one who seriously breaks the law. By that measure Albanese, Dutton and most pollies across Australia are criminals together with their supporters. Human laws can be broken and repaired with a gaol term or a fine. Nature’s laws cannot be broken without continuing adverse consequences which cannot be repaired, and which persist Continue reading »

Right now, with Israel about to bomb Rafah to smithereens, world leaders including our own are chorusing—as they have repeatedly done for decades—that ‘We support a two-state solution’. And what has that chorus achieved over the years? Other than making the people saying it feel good, nothing! The death count of Palestinians in Gaza since Continue reading »

Over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza. Amr Abdallah was one of them. On the morning Amr Abdallah was killed, he woke before dawn to say his Ramadan prayers with his father, mother, two younger brothers and aunt, in an open field in southern Gaza. “It is You we worship and You we ask Continue reading »

Very recently, the leading British daily, The Guardian, ran remarkably informing side-by-side stories covering official United States perspectives on the Gaza genocide. Story one highlighted how the US State Department argued that: “Famine is already probably present in some areas of northern Gaza” and was a risk in the center and south of Gaza. Story Continue reading »

The Washington Post took a look at what we know about the state of Trump’s health: As former president Donald Trump escalated his attacks on President Biden’s health and mental fitness last fall, Trump released the first updated report on his own condition in more than three years. This assessment, however, stood in stark contrast to the relatively detailed reports released by the White House during his term. Instead of specifics like blood pressure and medications, the letter had just three paragraphswithout specific numbers proclaiming that Trump was in “excellent health” and had “exceptional” cognitive ability. It did not disclose Trump’s weight. And after relying on a longtime personal doctor and then twoWhite House physicians who had attested to his well-being in office, Trump turned to an unknown on the national stage to providethis report: Bruce A. Aronwald, a 64-year-old osteopathic physician from New Jersey — and a longtime member of Trump’s Bedminster golf club.

When you lose Nancy Pelosi:

Israel went too far. Dems love celebrities and the NGO workers they killed were essentially Democratic party affiliated.

I think Trump’s incoherence has a lot more salience now that the right has been slagging Biden for his alleged dementia. They opened the door to a closer look at how daft he really is and how much worse it’s gotten. As long as people see it. Rachel Leingang writes about this in the Guardian today: Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it’s like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories. Curiously, Trump tucks the most tangible policy implications in at the end. His speeches often finish with a rundown of what his second term in office could bring, in a meditation-like recitation the New York Times recently compared to a sermon. Since these policies could become reality, here’s a few of those ideas: -Instituting the death penalty for drug dealers.

Netanyahu and bad faith all around It’s a struggle to manage the frustration this week. Yes, the economy (in the aggregate anyway) continues to go gangbusters. Simon Rosenberg continues to push Hopium like a street hustler. Don’t worry. Be hopey. And yet. Beneath it all is the nagging sense that the world is teetering. Gaza is a mess. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu looks more and more like a murderous autocrat with familiar echoes of our bumbling homegrown one. Like Donald Trump, he needs to stay in power to stay out of jail. So far, three years after instigating a violent insurrection, that’s one thing at which Trump seems infuriatinglly adept. Michael Tomasky laments that it’s taken President Biden this long to at least threaten Netanyahu with harsh language: It’s sad that it takes the tragic killing of seven workers for the great global humanitarian José Andrés, as opposed to the piles upon piles of dead Palestinian babies, to spur this change. And, of course, it’s not even really a change yet. It’s a threat of a change down the road if certain behaviors continue.

The confab put on by real estate site Yad2, a subsidiary of publishing giant Axel Springer, includes numerous companies doing business in the West Bank.

The post Israeli Real Estate Firm Used Genocidal Rhetoric — Then Politico’s Parent Company Put Them in a Trade Fair appeared first on The Intercept.

Plus, Maui fire survivors score vital aid, Amazon is forced to embrace its employees, and Congressional winds shift against corporate mergers.

But of course they did President Joe Biden on Friday visited the fallen Key Bridge site in Baltimore and pledged to citizens that “your nation has your back.” Politico: “My administration is committed, absolutely committed, to ensuring that parties responsible for this tragedy pay to repair the damage and be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law will allow, but I also want to be clear: We will support Maryland and Baltimore every step of the way to help you rebuild and maintain all the business and commerce that’s here now,” he said at the foot of the downed bridge, with the wind whipping behind him. Well, not the entire nation. While Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young has requested Congress to authorize “a 100 percent Federal cost share for rebuilding the bridge,” unconditional support is out of fashion for the party dominated by a former president whose every decision is transactional (also Politico): The House Freedom Caucus signaled Friday that they’re open to giving federal funds to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, but they have a few significant conditions.

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In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: The Boys, Quantum Leap, Superman, The Rock, Star Trek: Discovery, Kid Rock/FOX "News," Doctor Who, and more!

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