Sat - Can Sarah Palin See the North Pole From Her Porch?

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Today's Worst Joke in the World

I have a fear of over-engineered buildings.  It's a complex complex complex.
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Who's Defunding the Police?  It's the QOP, Of Course.

Large cities with Democratic mayors spend far more money on policing and hire far more police officers than large cities with Republican mayors.

The 25 largest Democrat-run cities employ 75% more police officers than the 25 largest Republican-run cities, on a per capita basis.

The 25 largest Democrat-run cities spend 38% more on policing than the 25 largest Republican-run cities, on a per capita basis.

In the most recent budget cycle, the 25 largest Democrat-run cities collectively increased their police budgets more than the 25 largest Republican-run cities, albeit by a modest +4.34% versus +4.11%.

Watch what they do, not what they say.
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees

Ginni and Clarence, Sitting in DC.  Commiting a Nasty Felony 



Can She See the North Pole From Her Porch?

Alaska’s new voting system and an unexpected special election have attracted a crowd of 48 candidates to run for the state’s lone House seat this year, including former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and a Democratic socialist from the city of North Pole who legally changed his name to Santa Claus.

The contest Saturday is the state’s first foray into nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting after a narrowly passed 2020 ballot measure upended the typical party primary system.

You Can Thank Facebook for Josh Hawley

A change to Facebook’s recommendation system likely accounted for a disproportionate boost in visibility and engagement to conservative political groups on the social media platform starting in 2018, according to research published Wednesday.

The research, published in the journal Research & Politics, looked at posts from the pages of nearly every county party in the U.S. and found a marked increase in shares, comments and reactions to Republican posts.

Researchers at Miami University and Wright State University, both in Ohio, used CrowdTangle, a social media analysis tool owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to collect the data. They found that posts from local Democratic and Republican party pages generally had the same rate of interactions until 2018. By 2019, both parties were receiving more interactions, but a large gap formed. By July 2019, posts from local Republican parties were being shared more than three times as often as posts from local Democratic parties.

The Jan 5th Committee is Not a Debating Society.  It is Seeking Facts...Truth







This is What They Learned.  Note that All Seven Are About Previous Guy

“President Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the 2020 election and prevent the transition of presidential power.

1) President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.

2) President Trump corruptly planned to replace the Acting Attorney General, so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims.

3) President Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes in violation of the US Constitution and the law.

4) President Trump corruptly pressured state election officials, and state legislators, to change election results.

5) President Trump’s legal team and other Trump associates instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives.

6) President Trump summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the US Capitol.

7) As the violence was underway, President Trump ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol.

These are initial findings and the Select Committee’s investigation is still ongoing. In addition, the Department of Justice is currently working with cooperating witnesses, and has disclosed to date only certain of the information it has identified from encrypted communications and other sources.”

They Went to Jared





They Are Getting the Best Government (for Them) That Money Can Buy



"The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office" - Will Rogers

QOP Free Speech

The irony is rich: Truth Social, Donald Trump’s Twitter copycat claiming it is “free from political discrimination,” has reportedly banned users who posted information from Thursday’s congressional hearing on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — in which the former president is a key focus.

That’s according to several posts on Twitter by users who claimed Truth Social was censoring them. Reps for Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns and operates Truth Social, did not respond to a request for comment.

Travis Allen, whose Twitter bio describes him as an information security analyst, on Thursday evening posted a screenshot from the Truth Social app that said “Account suspended,” and he wrote: “My Truth Social account was just permanently suspended for talking about the January 6th Committee hearings.”







Isn't This the Guy A Lot of Trojans Wanted to Coach Their Football Team?



Perhaps They Should Book Generalissimo Francisco Franco



QOP Emergency Tactic:  In Case of Trouble, Blame Nancy

Fact checker called out Republican leaders Friday over newly resurrected claims that President Donald Trump was not responsible for a no-show by the National Guard during the Jan. 6 insurrection last year.

Trump has repeatedly blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for blocking some 10,000 members of the Guard that day. But Pelosi has no control or jurisdiction over the National Guard in the District of Columbia. Trump does.

A number of media outlets, from USA Today to The Washington Post and CNN have debunked Trump’s claims that he called out the Guard and Pelosi blocked them protecting the Capitol.



It Took Them THIS Long?

The District of Columbia office that polices attorneys for ethical misconduct filed charges on Friday against President Donald Trump's former attorney, Rudy Giuliani, over baseless claims he made in federal court alleging the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

The D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel alleges that Giuliani, who is a member of the D.C. bar, made baseless claims in federal court filings about the results of the 2020 presidential election in Pennsylvania.

Gableman is In Trouble Because the Man Won't Gab

A Wisconsin judge on Friday found the investigator hired by Republicans to look into former President Donald Trump's 2020 loss in the battleground state in contempt because of how his office responded to open records requests related to the probe.

The ruling against the office led by Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who briefly worked for Trump, came after Gableman berated the judge and refused to answer any questions on the witness stand. Gableman had not wanted to testify, but Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington ordered him to appear.

Remington did not immediately announce a penalty in court on Friday, saying he would provide that in a written decision.

Gableman was hired a year ago by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, under pressure from Trump to investigate the former president's loss to President Joe Biden by just under 21,000 votes in Wisconsin. The investigation has cost taxpayers about $900,000 so far.

Biden's victory has survived two recounts, multiple lawsuits, a nonpartisan audit and a review by a conservative law firm. Only a couple of dozen people out of nearly 3.3 million voters have been charged with fraud, numbers on par with past elections.

Gableman has issued two interim reports, but his work has faced a barrage of bipartisan criticism and Vos put his work on hold this spring pending the outcome of lawsuits challenging his ability to subpoena elected officials and others who worked on elections.

American Oversight, a liberal watchdog group, filed three open records lawsuits against Gableman, Vos and the Wisconsin Assembly. The group has won a series of victories before Remington and another Dane County judge after Gableman and Vos failed to produce the requested records in a timely manner.
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Today's Best Person in the World Nominees

What Did the Committee Get Right?  Other Than the Facts?

There were several tactical and presentation decisions that made last night’s Jan. 6th Committee hearings so effective:

1. They dispensed with the dumb “every member gets 5 minutes” rule. Congressional committees cling to the format, and it makes many hearings incoherent.

2. It was bipartisan. Yes, Rep. Liz Cheney is on the outs with her fellow Republicans for her role here. But she is a leader and from one of the most prominent Republican families. The hearing showed Democrats and Republicans working together for a common cause.

3. They let the staff take a lead in questioning. You even got to see the staff engage witnesses. Most committee members want to hog the spotlight for themselves, ignoring the fact that not all congresspersons are actually good at this. And some are really bad at it.

4. Seamless integration of audio and video. Hearings barely ever do this.

5. They broke news. We heard, for the first time, eyewitness accounts of what Trump was doing and saying during the insurrection and saw raw, searing, previously unreleased video of the attack.

6. They teased ahead to more news. The committee said members of Congress sought legal pardons from President Trump for their roles in the insurrection. Who were they? Committee indicated we will learn their names in hearings to come.

AOC Tweets Truth





Let's Have Names.  Who Likes Your Hair?  Someone Other Than Teenagers You Paid for Sex.







We'll Remember Always, Graduation Day





The Trial Must Go On

The New York attorney general's lawsuit against the National Rifle Association is no mere “witch hunt,” a New York judge ruled Friday in dismissing the gun rights advocacy group's claims that the case is a political vendetta.

Manhattan Judge Joel M. Cohen's decision means the nearly 2-year-long legal fight can continue.

The ruling comes after mass shootings last month in New York and Texas reanimated debate over U.S. gun policy and refocused attention on the NRA.

The New York case began when James, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit that accused some top NRA executives of financial improprieties and sought to dissolve the group. The attorney general's job includes oversight of nonprofit organizations incorporated in the New York, where the NRA was chartered in 1871.

In March, Cohen rebuffed James' bid to shutter the NRA. But the judge let the case go on, with the potential for fines or other remedies if the attorney general prevails.


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Invasions Have Consequences

Day 108

Fighting

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence said “intense street to street fighting is ongoing” in Severodonetsk, the small city that has become the focus of Russia’s advance in eastern Ukraine, adding that “both sides are likely suffering high numbers of casualties”.

Russian forces around Severodonetsk have not made advances into the south of the city, the UK defence ministry said.

Ukraine’s army command said Russian troops had secured positions in two communities near Severodonetsk, while Serhiy Haidai, the Luhansk governor, said Russians were in control of “most” of the city.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said his army’s ability to hold off Russian forces in the Donbas region depends on the supply of Western weapons, calling for modern artillery to be supplied.

“This is an artillery war now,” Vadym Skibitsky, Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “Everything now depends on what (the West) gives us. Ukraine has one artillery piece to 10 to 15 Russian artillery pieces.”

Russia is looking for weak points in Ukrainian defences near the Siversky Donets river in eastern Ukraine, said Ukrainian defence ministry spokesperson Oleksandr Motuzyanyk.

The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general says it has learned about the deaths of 24 more children in Mariupol, bringing the total confirmed to 287 children killed since the start of the Russian invasion.

Cholera and other deadly diseases could kill thousands in the southern port of Mariupol as corpses lie uncollected and summer brings warmer weather, its mayor said. The UK’s Ministry of Defence also warned of the risks of a significant cholera outbreak as Russia struggles to provide basic public services to the population in territories it has occupied.

Economy

Russia’s central bank cut its key interest rate to the pre-crisis level of 9.5 percent and kept the door open to further easing as inflation slowed, while noting uncertainty related to external risks such as the Western embargo on Russian oil.

Germany, the world’s fifth-largest arms exporter, plans to revise its rules on arms exports to make it easier to arm democracies like Ukraine and harder to sell weapons to autocracies, Der Spiegel reported.

The United Nations food agency said reduced exports of wheat and other food commodities from Ukraine and Russia could inflict chronic hunger on up to 19 million more people globally over the next year.

Ukrainian grain exports are now rising and nearing two million tonnes per month, said European Commissioner for Agriculture Janusz Wojciechowski.

Diplomacy

Zelenskyy called for Ukraine to be accepted as an EU membership candidate, with binding guarantees for its protection. “The European Union can take a historic step that will prove that words about the people of Ukraine belonging to the European family are not just words,” he told a conference in Copenhagen by video link.

Russian passports will be distributed in parts of Zaporizhia, which is under Moscow’s control, starting on Saturday.

The UK condemned Russian proxy authorities in the Donbas for what it called an “egregious breach” of the Geneva Conventions in sentencing to death two British nationals captured in the separatist region while fighting for Ukraine.

Putin Looks Even More Like a Nazi.

The Russian occupation authorities in southern Ukraine say they have started handing out Russian passports to locals in two cities - Kherson and Melitopol.

Ukraine condemns the creation of Russian citizens on its territory as "Russification". President Vladimir Putin is fast-tracking the procedure.

Russia's Tass news agency says the first 23 Kherson residents got Russian passports at a ceremony on Saturday.

Tass says thousands have applied for them, but its claim cannot be verified.
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Only the Strong Get Water

People in Khadimal village in the western Indian state of Maharashtra have been forced to risk their lives every day for one bucket of water.

The village is in Amravati district in Maharashtra's drought-prone Vidarbha region, which also faces frequent heat waves.

The residents say the local village council sends tankers twice or thrice a day. The tanker drivers pour water into a well, triggering a desperate rush to fill buckets before the stock runs dry.

Their troubles are worsened because of the poor quality of the water - children, they say, often fall ill after drinking unclean water.

Click here to see video
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Today's Dumbest Idea in the World

Canada's government is proposing putting health warnings on individual cigarettes in what would be a world-first way of tackling the habit.

Mental Health and Addictions Minister Carolyn Bennett said she hoped the measure would help reach more people.

She said the key target were young people who often access cigarettes "in social situations sidestepping the information printed on a package".
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Correction



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Is Someone Tamping Down Supply?

With high demand and supply chain issues leading to a national shortage, tampons, like baby formula, have become another essential product that’s hard to find in U.S. stores.

The shortage, addressed in a Time report earlier this week, means that groups that collect menstrual hygiene products for economically disadvantaged people are seeing donations decline. It’s also created an opportunity for some Amazon sellers to hike up their prices, as Time reported.

Procter & Gamble, the producer of Tampax tampons, says it has experienced a 7.7% increase in demand since 2020, which it attributes to the success of an ad campaign that year with comedian Amy Schumer, according to Time.

Schumer shared a screenshot of a headline linking her to the shortage, and quipped that she doesn’t “even have a uterus,” a reference to her 2021 uterus removal due to endometriosis.

Other reasons for the shortage cited in the Time story include staffing issues and rising costs to get raw materials. The article also notes that because tampons are used by people with uteruses ― and many of the people who make “procurement and supply chain decisions” about feminine care products don’t use the products themselves ― there’s a possible gendered aspect to the tampon shortage because it simply may not be seen as a priority.

“It’s still hard to find anyone doing anything about the tampon shortage,” Time’s Alana Semuels writes, “even though tampons have been hard to find for the past six months.”
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90 Years Later, This "Study" is Still Killing Black People

For almost 40 years starting in the 1930s, as government researchers purposely let hundreds of Black men die of syphilis in Alabama so they could study the disease, a foundation in New York covered funeral expenses for the deceased. The payments were vital to survivors of the victims in a time and place ravaged by poverty and racism.

Altruistic as they might sound, the checks — $100 at most — were no simple act of charity: They were part of an almost unimaginable scheme. To get the money, widows or other loved ones had to consent to letting doctors slice open the bodies of the dead men for autopsies that would detail the ravages of a disease the victims were told was “bad blood.”

Fifty years after the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study was revealed to the public and halted, the organization that made those funeral payments, the Milbank Memorial Fund, is publicly apologizing to the descendants for its role. The move is rooted in America's racial reckoning after George Floyd's murder by police in 2020.

The apology and an accompanying monetary donation to a descendants' group, the Voices of our Fathers Legacy Foundation, will be presented Saturday in Tuskegee during a gathering of children and other relatives of men who were part of the study.

Endowed in 1905 by Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, part of a wealthy and well-connected New York family, the fund was one of the nation's first private foundations. The nonprofit philanthropy had some $90 million in assets in 2019, according to tax records, and an office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. With an early focus on child welfare and public health, today it concentrates on health policy at the state level.

The current president of the fund, Christopher F. Koller, said there's no easy way to explain how its leaders in the 1930s decided to make the payments, or to justify what happened. Generations later, some Black people in the United States still fear government health care because of what's called the “Tuskegee effect.”  (Part of Why Many Black People Don't Get the COVID Vaccine)

“The upshot of this was real harm," Koller told The Associated Press in an interview. “It was one more example of ways that men in the study were deceived. And we are dealing as individuals, as a region, as a country, with the impact of that deceit.”

Lillie Tyson Head's late father Freddie Lee Tyson was part of the study. She's now president of the Voices of our Fathers group. She called the apology “a wonderful gesture and a wonderful thing” even if it comes 25 years after the U.S. government apologized for the study to its final survivors, who have all since died.

“It’s really something that could be used as an example of how apologies can be powerful in making reparations and restorative justice be real,” said Head.

Despite her leadership of the descendants group, Head said she didn't even know about Milbank's role in the study until Koller called her one day last fall. The payments have been discussed in academic studies and a couple books, but the descendants were unaware, she said.

“It really was something that caught me off guard,” she said. Head's father left the study after becoming suspicious of the research, years before it ended, and didn't receive any of the Milbank money, she said, but hundreds of others did.

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Where Was Willie Wonka?

Two people were rescued after they somehow fell into a partially filled chocolate tank while doing maintenance work at a candy factory in Pennsylvania.

The incident at the Mars Wrigley plant in Elizabethtown occurred shortly before 2 p.m. Thursday.

The two people work for an outside contracting firm, officials said, and it's not clear how they fell into the tank. Emergency responders were able to free the pair by cutting a hole in the bottom of the tank, officials said.


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It Wasn't Char Broiled.  It Was Car Broiled.

As the blistering summer heat encompasses Arizona, one TikToker decided to take advantage of the scorching conditions and create meals from the rising temperatures.

TikToker Joe Brown decided to try preparing meals from burgers, steaks and even cakes inside his vehicle. In one of his videos, Brown can be seen placing a tray of hamburger buns and patties on the dashboard of his car in Phoenix, Arizona.

Brown then uses a thermometer to check the temperature of the patties, which reached over 203 degrees Fahrenheit. In another video, Brown mixes cake mix into a pan and placed it on the dashboard.

Not all meals go according to plan for Brown, however. When attempting to cook a pizza on a tray, the blistering heat simply liquefied the creation. The 20-year-old's TikTok videos have helped give his account millions of followers.



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