Classy guy indeed… And he’s having a normal one today.
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You cannot make this stuff up: Former president Donald Trump called on congressional Republicans to withhold military support for Ukraine until the Biden administration cooperates with their investigations into the president and his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The demand, delivered at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, echoed Trump’s conduct at issue during his first impeachment, when Trump withheld aid from Ukraine while pressuring the country’s president to announce an investigation of Biden. “Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” Trump said at the rally. He added that any Republican lawmakers who didn’t join the effort should face primary challenges, a tactic he used last year to unseat Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Floridians prefer Trump: The warning signs were there even before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stepped onto the stageat a luxury hotel near Miami. Ticket sales for the local Republican Party’s biggest annual fundraiser were down by two-thirds. One group of reliable supporters skipped the event entirely. The ballroom at the JW Marriott Turnberry Resort & Spa was far too big for the 380 people who showed up. Staff hustled to arrange paneled “air walls” around the room to make the space look smaller. When DeSantis arrived at the gathering in early July, he gave what two people who attended described as a familiar and lackluster speech. “It kind of came off like a bar mitzvah speech,” said a party member who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from Miami-Dade GOP leaders. “The only time people really applauded was when he was introduced, and when he was done.
As if Pensacola News Journal: In a recently published research letter regarding emerging infectious diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that Florida is witnessing an increase in leprosy cases lacking traditional risk factors and recommending that travel to Florida be considered when conducting leprosy contact tracing in any state. […] The number of reported leprosy cases across the country has doubled over the past decade, according to the CDC. Citing data from the National Hansen’s Disease Program, the CDC says there were 159 new cases reported in the U.S. in 2020. Nearly 70% of these new cases were reported in Florida, California, Louisiana, Hawaii, New York and Texas. Florida stands out in the report for two reasons: Central Florida alone accounted for nearly 20% of the total number of cases reported nationally and several new-case patients in central Florida demonstrated no clear evidence of zoonotic exposure or traditionally known risk factors. Not to panic. DeSantis is more of a threat. But not treatable with antibiotics.
Arkansas is going after booksellers too: Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday. U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1. A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged. The judge also rejected a motion by the defendants, which include prosecuting attorneys for the state, seeking to dismiss the case. The ACLU of Arkansas, which represents some of the plaintiffs, applauded the court’s ruling, saying that the absence of a preliminary injunction would have jeopardized First Amendment rights.
Maureen Dowd wrote a typically snotty column excoriating Joe and Jill Biden for failing to acknowledge their granddaughter, Hunter’s child by a woman with whom he’d had a brief affair four years earlier. It gave the right wingers fodder to proclaim that despite Joe’s reputation as a family man, the Biden Crime Family is cruel to little children and other living things. It seemed obvious that there was more to the story than what we knew which was already complicated. The first family put out this statement: President Joe Biden has offered his first statement on 4-year-old grandchild Navy Joan Roberts, the daughter of Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts, an Arkansas woman who filed a paternity suit against the president’s son in May 2019. “Our son Hunter and Navy’s mother, Lunden, are working together to foster a relationship that is in the best interests of their daughter, preserving her privacy as much as possible going forward,” President Biden said in a statement provided exclusively to PEOPLE.
Until now, I’ve avoided getting myself worked up about ChatGPT. Prompted by this article by a Columbia undergraduate this past spring, I thought that if a student knows enough about paper-writing to make ChatGPT work for them, in the way this student describes in his piece, without detection by a minimally alert instructor, that student has probably already mastered the skills of essay-writing far more than the author of this piece seems to realize. I at least could rest easy with the knowledge that if a student used ChatGPT to write a paper for me, and it was good, I wasn’t not teaching that student what they needed to learn how to do. But this recent article, by a Harvard […]
He reluctantly endorses mail-in votes but says “you’re never going to get an honest vote… it’s disgraceful.” As usual, he will accept the results if it goes his way.
This week the House held a hearing on UFOs Not content with chasing phantom “Biden Crime Family” investigations, the Republicans decided to take a spin in a spaceship: David Grusch, the former US intelligence officer who claims that the US government is harboring “intact and partially intact” and “non-human” pilots, appeared in Washington, under oath, to repeat the same. The US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected, and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UFOs, Grusch told the oversight committee. He added that unnamed federal agencies had even recovered “biologics” from these craft, which he described as “non-human”. Moreover, Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, said he had encountered “people who have been harmed or injured” in the course of the government’s efforts to keep this alien program secret. Grusch told the committee that after going public with his allegations he had feared for his life.
Trump discusses the surveillance tapes He’s at a loss on this one. His excuse is lamer than usual: “These were my tapes that we gave to them,” Trump told conservative radio host John Fredericks. “These were security tapes. We handed them over to them. … I’m not even sure what they’re saying.” That’s a non-sequitur. Yes, they were his tapes. It’s what he ordered his henchman to do with them that was criminal. The Department of Justice alleged that Trump and Nauta had asked De Oliveira to delete the footage from Mar-a-Lago, so the video would not get into the hands of a grand jury. The new court documents claimed De Oliveira and Nauta were captured on surveillance video moving boxes that may have contained documents with classified markings before DOJ and FBI officials visited the property to collect subpoenaed items. It also alleged that in June 2022, on the same day that the DOJ emailed Trump’s attorney another subpoena for surveillance video, De Oliveira had a private conversation with an employee in an audio closet during which he asked how long a server containing the video kept its footage.