Good Wednesday Good Newsies, Gnusies, Newbies, and those who just stop by! The blue tide is rising, not that we can be lax, sit on our laurels or any such inaction, but it sure feels like the dumpster fire and many of his minions are in big electoral trouble. It is sad that we had to have a pandemic, rising racial injustice and inequity, a crashing economy and Mary Trump to nail this down. But here we are. Oh, Mary Trump, hahahaha, nothing we did not know but hysterical just the same. It won’t change any of the crazies minds but having our knowledge justified is like the cream on top of the cake.
Listen, we still have to work our butts off, no complacency allowed. We know how they work behind the scenes to hinder our voting rights. But I see motivation at a level higher than that in 2018. So watch out rethugs, your days are numbered!
Let’s get Mary put of the way.
As a high school student in Queens, Ms. Trump writes, Donald Trump paid someone to take a precollegiate test, the SAT, on his behalf. The high score the proxy earned for him, Ms. Trump adds, helped the young Mr. Trump to later gain admittance as an undergraduate to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton business school.
Mr. Trump has often boasted about attending Wharton, which he has referred to as “the best school in the world” and “super genius stuff.” . ..
Freddy Trump died in 1981 from an alcohol-induced heart attack when he was 42, and Ms. Trump tells the story in her book about how his family sent him to the hospital alone on the night of his death. No one went with him, Ms. Trump writes.
Donald Trump, she added, went to see a movie.
Ms. Trump, a clinical psychologist, asserts that her uncle has all nine clinical criteria for being a narcissist. And yet, she notes, even that label does not capture the full array of the president’s psychological troubles.
“The fact is,” she writes, “Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neurophysical tests that he’ll never sit for.”
The book, the virus, the economy, the fight for equality, and on and on, all lapping at tRumps door step and now this:
Deutsche Bank just came clean on Jeffrey Epstein, and it’s the last thing Donald Trump needs
Deutsche Bank, which seems to be at the financial center of every Donald Trump scandal, came clean today about what we all already long suspected: it helped facilitate Jeffrey Epstein’s payoffs to his alleged co-conspirators in his serial child rape scheme.
It’s the New York State Department of Financial Services that’s bringing this penalty, not the federal government. That means Trump can’t do anything to interfere with how this is going to play out. Further, New York says that Deutsche Bank has provided “exemplary cooperation” in the investigation.
Ruh roh...
For WYgal, cause I miss the Village, how dare they take a vacation, from yesterday.
Since I have been turned on to the Palmer Report, there is this, a bit old but just as relevant.
I hate Donald Trump
And if you can stomach it, there is this.
Full Disclosure: An Interview with Noel Casler
Please read at your leisure.
Okay, okay, I got off track there. I have been hoarding this stuff for a while.
Back on track.
Lindsey is one of those lying rethugs I so wish would go down this November.
Lindsey Graham’s Democratic Opponent Is Raking in an Absurd Amount of Campaign Cash
The fight to unseat Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is still an uphill battle—but it is also, at least, an incredibly well-funded one.
Jaime Harrison, Graham’s Democratic challenger, announced Tuesday morning that he had raised $13.9 million dollars between April 1 and June 30. It is the most money any Senate candidate in South Carolina, of either party, has raised in a single quarter—breaking a record Harrison set himself just last quarter with his $7.3 million haul. Harrison has been helped along by the distaste Democrats nationwide have for Graham, whose one-time appearance of moderation has been fully eclipsed by blind allegiance to President Trump since the president took office.
Bad news for them is good news for us.
‘Bad as it gets’: GOP insiders reveal their true feelings about being stuck on Trump’s 2020 ‘hell ship’
Polls show that President Donald Trump is trailing former Vice President Joe Biden badly in the 2020 presidential election, and many Republican insiders are fretting that the president will bring down Senate Republicans with him.
Writing in Rolling Stone, longtime GOP operative and current anti-Trump conservative Tim Miller quotes several Republican campaign staffers who are expressing a real sense of dread at where Trump is taking their party heading into November.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of the criminals still sucking at the, well you know. But I love to know they are shaking in their boots.
And he just keeps winning…
'24 Hours. 3 Dirty Pipelines Delayed': Supreme Court Rejects Trump Effort to Greenlight Keystone XL Construction
The Supreme Court late Monday upheld a federal judge's rejection of a crucial permit for Keystone XL and blocked the Trump administration's attempt to greenlight construction of the 1,200-mile crude oil project, the third such blow to the fossil fuel industry in a day—coming just hours after the cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the court-ordered shutdown of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
"Three dangerous pipelines delayed within 24 hours should serve as a clear warning to any companies hoping to double down on dirty fossil fuel projects," said Greenpeace USA climate campaign director Janet Redman. "For more than a decade now, a powerful movement has been taking on reckless oil and gas pipelines and fighting to put Indigenous rights, a just economy, and our environment before oil company profits."
"It is past time to leave fossil fuels in the ground," Redman added, "and begin a just transition to a Green New Deal and 100 percent renewable energy."
And this…
Judge rejects Dakota Access request for emergency order
A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a request for an emergency order to delay the process of shutting down the Dakota Access pipeline while attorneys appeal a ruling to shutter the pipeline during the course of an environmental review.
Go Seattle!
'Historic Victory for Working People': Seattle City Council Passes Progressive Tax on Big Business to Fund Relief
The Tax Amazon movement claimed "a historic victory for working people" on Monday when Seattle's city council passed a new tax on big businesses to fund local economic relief.
The vote on the JumpStart Seattle plan, proposed last month by Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, was a veto-proof 7-2. The plan targets corporations with payrolls of $7 million or more and employees with salaries above $150,000, with the measure expected to generate at least $200 million a year. The tax rate corporations would pay ranges from 0.7% to 2.4%. The highest rate—which would affect Seattle-based Amazon—would hit businesses with payrolls of at least $1 billion with salaries of $500,000 per year.
Mosqueda has framed the progressive tax plan as "part of the medicine to address both" the public health crisis and economic crisis, referring to the cornavirus pandemic and resulting damage to the local economy. The revenue generated would fund homelessness prevention programs and rental assistance, immigrant and refugee supports, food security programs, and assistance for small businesses.
"Seattle residents have made it clear—now is not the time for government austerity or divisiveness," Mosqueda said in a statement following the vote.
The Youth Who Turned a Prison Into a Farm
On a crisp, windy day in March, 17-year-old Norman Garcia-Lopez tries to coax a donkey and a herd of 14 sheep from a fenced yard out to open pasture. “Come on, Miss Easter,” he says, holding a shallow bowl of food under the donkey’s nose. She steps through the door in the chain-link fence, and her fleecy charges follow soon after, bleating.
Garcia-Lopez isn’t on a typical farm. Surrounded by tall fences and razor wire, he and the group of high-school-aged young men affiliated with the nonprofit Growing Change are farming in an abandoned prison in rural Wagram, North Carolina. Since 2011, this group has been working to flip the Scotland Correctional Center — a facility decommissioned in 2001 and subsequently left to decay — into a sustainable farm and education center. They’re leasing the property at no cost from the state’s Department of Public Safety.
During its first several years in existence, Growing Change engaged young men who were on intensive juvenile probation and had been kicked out of their schools and homes. But after 2016, the young people involved decided to change the eligibility requirements for future participants. Now, they welcome their peers facing chaos at home, failure at school, trouble with mental health or substance abuse, and involvement with the criminal justice system. Many are also minorities or possess multiple ethnic identities in a country where racism and xenophobia are rampant.
It is really a beautiful story, read the whole thing.
Following in the footsteps of reason to vote for Joe:
Biden preparing for 'multiple scenarios' on COVID-19 vaccine
With the November election fewer than four months away and the number of coronavirus cases again surging in the United States, former vice president Joe Biden is preparing for a range of realities when it comes to dealing with the virus if he is elected president, according to an official.
The plan reiterates many of the principles and priorities Biden has outlined in speeches and previous policies, including the more aggressive use of the Defense Production Act to manufacture Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for front-line workers.
If elected, Biden would implement a 100-day review immediately after being sworn into office "to identify critical national security risks across America’s international supply chains and will ask Congress to enact a mandatory quadrennial Critical Supply Chain Review to institute this process permanently," according to a fact sheet on the plan distributed by the campaign on Tuesday.
Biden’s plan would also use the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to make sure vaccine production is adequate and work to undo Trump administration tax incentives to encourage on-shore pharmaceutical production.
Vote Joe and vote blue all the way down the ticket.
Well folks, this work from home has been wearing on me. I thank Mokurai for filling in for me my last scheduled Wednesday. I am sure I have missed lots of great news and I know you will share it in the comments.
I leave you with these last three things.
From Yosef. GOTV!
From Indivisible:
Your 5 weekly to-dos
- Call your Senators and demand they pass the Heroes Act without watering it down. Unemployment insurance benefits from the CARES Act are set to run out on July 31. We must extend and expand coronavirus relief legislation -- vulnerable people across the country are depending on it. Read about how the Heroes Act will protect working families and call your Senators to demand they pass the Heroes Act.
- Call your local officials to express your support to defund the police and invest in Black communities. So many of you joined the fight to support and protect people of color from state-sanctioned violence, but the truth is a lot of that work has to happen locally, in your town and cities. Call your local officials and demand that they defund the police and invest those funds in resources. If you need more context, check out our latest video where we explain exactly what we mean by #DefundThePolice.
- Call your Senators and demand they cosponsor the D.C. statehood bill. This historic bill passed in the House last week, acknowledging that D.C.’s 700,000+ residents live without their constitutional rights as Americans, lacking full representation in Congress and control over their own affairs. A historically-Black city, D.C.’s lack of statehood is a remnant of Reconstruction when racist white politicians sought to prevent the District’s plurality of Black residents from gaining political power. Check out our resource about why D.C. statehood is a racial justice issue and call your Senators to demand they support D.C. statehood.
- Join the DFAD #DemocracyOpenMic to inspire our elected leaders to act now to protect our elections. While COVID-19 cases continue to rise in states across the country, too many states lack the resources to ensure safe and accessible voting this fall. The disastrous primary elections in Wisconsin and Georgia demonstrate the urgent need for Congress to act now to #ProtectOurVote. That’s why we’re calling on activists, artists, and creators across the country to make your voice heard by participating in a Democracy Open Mic. Record a video, create a protest sign, design a graphic, and more -- the possibilities are endless!
Watch ‘Hamilton’ Original Cast Virtually Reunite for ‘Helpless’