Make sure to restock your popcorn supplies so you’ll be ready to join us tonight at 5 PM Pacific Time for our live-blogging the third night of the Republican National Convention. |
Today’s comic by Matt Bors is (Don't) Shoot the Cops:
• Big military contractor accused of inflating costs, but it still has Pentagon contract:
The US justice department has accused a security contracting giant of defrauding the public even as the same firm continues to contract with the Pentagon.
Papers filed in a Washington DC federal court on Tuesday allege that DynCorp, a fixture of wartime US contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, knowingly inflated costs during a four-year stretch when the company held a contract with the US state department for training Iraqi police.
• Increased asthma attacks linked to natural gas production in Pennsylvania.
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• Quite the contrast between that and Speaker Paul Ryan’s selfie with Republican House interns posted on Instagram interns of three days ago. Even Strom Thurmond had more people of color on his staff than shown in Ryan’s photo.
• Film director Garry Marshall dies at 81
If one were to count up the number of times any American — or maybe anyone anywhere — laughed in the last half-century, the person responsible for more of those laughs than anyone else might well be Garry Marshall, who died on Tuesday in Burbank, Calif. He was 81. [...]
It would be difficult to overstate Mr. Marshall’s effect on American entertainment. His work in network television and Hollywood moviesfattened the archive of romantic, family and buddy comedies and consistently found the sweet spot in the middle of the mainstream.
• Donald Trump’s star on Hollywood Boulevard gets a baby wall:
Los Angeles provocateur Plastic Jesus just rained on Donald Trump's parade. On a day when the real estate mogul is celebrating his official coronation as the Republican Party's presidential nominee for 2016, Plastic Jesus has built a wall around Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The wall only measures 6 inches, but its statement is mighty.
• Our jails and prisons are filled with the disabled:
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, state and federal prison inmates are nearly three times as likely—and jail inmates are more than four times as likely—to report having a disability as the nonincarcerated population. One in five prison inmates have a serious mental illness. In fact, there are now three times as many people with mental-health conditions in federal and state prisons and jails as there are in state mental hospitals.
• Organizing in a brave new world:
Austerity, growing inequality, and the economic and political domination of billionaires, bankers, hedge funds, and giant corporations make the current moment ripe for birthing a movement that can radically transform the country and the world. This is a time of great peril, but also of extraordinary opportunity and—yes—reasons for hope. The last four decades have been characterized by unrelenting attacks on the working class, the weakening of unions and the financialization of capitalism. The fiscal crisis of 2007-2008, the burgeoning wealth gap, and the flood of money from corporations and the rich drowning our democracy have exposed the nation’s political, moral, and economic decay, creating conditions that beg for an alternative to a system that increasingly only works for the super-rich.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin and Joan McCarter discuss the continuing garbage fire that is the Gop convention. The plagiarism story continues. Trump again signals his willingness to phone in his presidency. Ailes is out, thanks to Megyn Kelly. But Ryan Bundy isn’t.
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