Sat - Fetterman's Got Game! The QOP Creed

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Today's Worst Joke in the World

Distracted Driving Could Have Grim Reaper Cussions.
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Can You Get It By Playing With Someone Else's Monkey?

US health officials say they do not have enough monkeypox vaccines to cope with surging demand.

The US has seen more than 1,800 cases so far, though that is thought to be an undercount as testing has also lagged.

There has been growing concern about the rate at which monkeypox is spreading - especially in New York City, the epicentre of the US outbreak.

The disease, characterised by lesions on the skin, usually clears up on its own but can be extremely painful.

Most confirmed cases have been among men who have sex with men, although anyone can be infected with the virus.  
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees

He's Not Titanium.  Fire a Wray!  Fire a Wray!

Steve Bannon:  “He’s going to fire Wray, the FBI director. He's gonna say 'Fuck you. How about that?'

It Takes One to Know One

The former White House strategist Steve Bannon told aides that former President Donald Trump would often lie to win arguments, according to a new book cited by The Guardian.

Bannon said Trump "would say anything, he would lie about anything," The Guardian reported.

He also said that Trump lies "to win whatever exchange he [is] having at the moment," according to the outlet.

The Indiana Police State.  Doctors Are Turned into Informers

A law that recently went into effect in Indiana mandates that doctors, hospitals and abortion clinics report to the state when a patient who has previously had an abortion presents any of dozens of physical or psychological conditions — including anxiety, depression, sleeping disorders and uterine perforation — because they could be complications of the previous abortion. Not doing so within 30 days can result in a misdemeanor for the physician who treated the patient, punishable with up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

The law is written so broadly that a primary care provider who sees a patient with depression, an anesthesiologist whose patient has an allergic reaction to a medication or a radiologist who notes a patient has free fluid in the abdomen could be punished with a fine and jail time if they don’t report these things as possible complications of that person’s prior abortion. Any health care provider so charged could easily become a target of national attention, with attacks against them professionally and personally.

How Often Do We Have to Say, "It's Better Than Nothing"?

Democrats' economic package may have just turned into a health-care bill

There’s been another seismic shift in the negotiations over Democrats’ long-stalled economic package.

The climate change and tax increase provisions appear out. What’s left is a health care bill — and one that’s much smaller than the once-in-a-decade remake of the system Democrats had originally envisioned.

The latest: Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) told Democratic leaders yesterday that he wouldn’t support an economic package with new climate spending or new tax increases targeting wealthy individuals and corporations, The Post’s Tony Romm and Jeff Stein scooped last night.

But Manchin is open to provisions that aim to lower prescription drug costs for seniors, as well as a two-year extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies set to expire at the end of the year.

Right-Wing Legal "Reasoning".


The Filibuster Isn't the Only Idiotic Senate Rule.  Even If It is a Good Outcome This Time, Blue Slips are a Terrible Idea.

President Joe Biden has dropped plans to nominate a Kentucky anti-abortion attorney to a lifetime federal judgeship, a White House spokesperson said Friday.

Biden had come under intense criticism from Democrats and reproductive rights groups after the Louisville Courier-Journal broke the news that he planned to pick Chad Meredith for a seat on the U.S. District Court in eastern Kentucky. Meredith’s potential nomination appeared to be part of a broader deal on a mix of judicial nominees being worked out behind the scenes between the White House and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

In the end, though, it was a Republican ― Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky ― who appeared to tank the potential nomination.

“In considering potential District Court nominees, the White House learned that Senator Rand Paul will not return a blue slip on Chad Meredith,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement. “Therefore, the White House will not nominate Mr. Meredith.”

It is a tradition in the Senate Judiciary Committee that its chair will not advance a judicial nominee until both senators from that nominee’s home state turn in a so-called blue slip ― literally, a blue piece of paper ― signaling that they are on board with moving forward. Because Paul said he would not turn in a blue slip for Meredith, he effectively killed the nomination.

Where Is the Land Of Oz?

Oz’s campaign bio says he lives in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. Oz jumped into the Pennsylvania Senate race in November 2021. He lived in northern New Jersey for three decades and, according to his campaign, moved to Pennsylvania in late 2020.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that public records show Oz didn’t buy a house in Pennsylvania until February 2022, but his campaign said he was living at his in-laws’ home ― which is in the state ― while his new house was being renovated.

The paper also pointed out that in the three months leading up to his campaign launch ― after he said he moved to the state ― more than 20 social media posts “appeared to show him at his Cliffside Park home [in New Jersey], some with New York in the background, others showing the interiors of the house that have been displayed in earlier video clips and magazine profiles.”

Molasses Merrick Would Be Proud of This Snail's Pace

Four years, five months and four days after Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, his trial for the deadliest U.S. mass shooting to reach a jury begins Monday with opening statements.

Delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and legal wrangling, the penalty-only trial is expected to last four months with the seven-man, five-woman jury being exposed to horrific evidence throughout. The jurors will then decide whether Cruz, 23, is sentenced to death or life without the possibility of parole.

“Finally,” said Lori Alhadeff, who wants Cruz executed for murdering her 14-year-old daughter Alyssa. “I hope for swift action to hold him responsible.”

All victim parents and family members who have spoken publicly have said directly or indirectly they want Cruz sentenced to death.

The former Stoneman Douglas student pleaded guilty in October to the Feb. 14, 2018, massacre and is only challenging his sentence. Nine other U.S. gunmen who fatally shot at least 17 people died during or immediately after their attacks by suicide or police gunfire. Cruz was captured after he fled the school. The suspect in the 2019 killing of 23 at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart is awaiting trial.

The QOP Creed: "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished"

The Indiana doctor who recently provided an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim whose story has garnered national attention faced serious threats in the past and is named on an extreme anti-abortion website linked to Amy Coney Barrett before she was a supreme court justice.

Dr Caitlin Bernard testified last year in a case involving abortion restrictions in Indiana that she was forced to stop providing first-trimester abortions at a clinic in South Bend, Indiana, after she was alerted by Planned Parenthood – who in turn had been alerted by the FBI – that a kidnapping threat had been made against her daughter.

The Guardian reported in January that the names of six abortion providers, as well as their educational backgrounds and places of work, were listed on the website of an extreme anti-abortion group called Right to Life Michiana, in a section of the website titled “Local Abortion Threat”. Bernard was among the list of doctors named on the extremist website.

Barrett, who voted to overturn Roe v Wade last month, signed a two-page advertisement published by the group in 2006, while she was working as a professor at Notre Dame. It stated that those who signed “oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to natural death”. The second page of the ad called Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion, “barbaric”. The advertisement was published in the South Bend Tribune by St Joseph County Right to Life, which merged with Right to Life Michiana in 2020.

Will the QOP Try To Make It Easier to Spread HIV?

Jonathan Mitchell, a former solicitor general and the architect of Texas SB 8, aka the “Texas Heartbeat Act,” now has his eye on making it unlawful for two medications that prevent HIV transmission to be covered under the Affordable Care Act.

Descovy and Truvada are called PrEP drugs, or pre-exposure prophylaxis drugs. When taken pre-coitally, they can reduce someone’s risk of getting HIV from sex or injection drug use.

In his case, Kelley v. the United States of America, Mitchell argues that each of his clients (the plaintiffs) are “Christian” and therefore “unwilling to purchase health insurance that subsidizes abortifacient contraception or PrEP drugs that encourage and facilitate homosexual behavior.”

The lawsuit states:

“The PrEP mandate forces religious employers to provide coverage for drugs that facilitate and encourage homosexual behavior, prostitution, sexual promiscuity, and intravenous drug use … It also compels religious employers and religious individuals who purchase health insurance to subsidize these behaviors as a condition of purchasing health insurance.”

PrEP is recommended for anyone who is at risk of contracting HIV—that includes straight women as well as gay men.

Obviously, making it legal for a medical professional to deny care for someone based on their own moral or religious beliefs is a frightening and slippery slope.

He Wants to Have a Say in the Finances of the US

The J.D. Vance campaign is broke.

That’s the key takeaway from Federal Election Commission filings this week, which show that between mid-April and the end of June, the Vance team raised a million dollars, spent more than that, and is a quarter of a million dollars in the hole with just four months until election day.

It’s something of a head-scratcher for a candidate with national name recognition, who won the GOP primary for a critical Senate seat smack in the middle of the fundraising period.

But the Vance campaign has never been a major money draw.

Over the first three months of the year, the campaign directly raised $38,000 in total and got so close to bottoming out its cash reserves that in late March Vance personally floated himself a $600,000 bridge loan.

Fortunes turned with Trump’s endorsement in April, and Vance caught a windfall heading into the May 3 primary, but he hasn’t seemed able to translate the win into financial support. Eight weeks later, the campaign was in the red, reporting about $628,000 in the bank and $883,000 in debt—a deficit of more than $250,000.

The Vance campaign declined to comment.

His Democratic opponent, Rep. Tim Ryan, raised $9.1 million over the same period. The Ryan campaign told NBC News that in that time it added nearly 90,000 new donors and that most of the donations were in amounts of $100 or less.

It’s not the full picture for Vance, whose fundraising operation includes a leadership PAC and joint fundraising committees. But even that isn’t much better.
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Today's Best Person in the World Nominees

Fetterman's Got Game!


Wow!  

An Indiana police department is praising a "heroic" 25-year-old good Samaritan who rescued five children from a massive house fire.

Nicholas Bostic saved an 18-year-old who was home with her siblings, ages 1, 6 and 13, Lafayette Police Lt. Randy Sherer said. Bostic also rescued a friend of the 13-year-old who was there spending the night, Sherer said. The siblings' parents weren't home, Sherer said.

The blaze broke out around 12:30 a.m. Monday, Sherer said. Bostic was driving by when he spotted the house fully engulfed in flames and pulled over, he told ABC News, beating first responders to the scene.



Bostic didn't have his phone to call 911, so he ran to the back of the house to see if he could spot anyone, he said.

Bostic went inside and raced upstairs, where he found the 18-year-old, 1-year-old and two 13-year-olds, and he led them down the stairs and outside, Bostic said.

"I asked them if anybody was left in there -- and that's when they told me that the 6-year-old was," Bostic said.

Bostic said he ran back inside to look for the 6-year-old girl, but the thick smoke made it hard to see and the overwhelming heat scared him.

That's when he heard the little girl whimper, which he said gave him the courage to keep going. All the while, he was terrified the house would explode.

"The last thing I could do was waste a second panicking," he said.

Once Bostic found the 6-year-old, he punched through a window so they could escape, he said.

Bostic was hospitalized for severe smoke inhalation and a serious cut to his arm, police said. He has since been released.

All of the children are doing well, Sherer said.  

A Target Letter is Not an Ad From the Retailer

Fulton County DA Fani Willis has issued target letters to individuals who participated in the Georgia elector fraud scheme. A target letter is to let an individual know that the investigation is centered on wrongdoing by them and that charges are likely to be forthcoming. Target letters often help people to re-evaluate cooperatio
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Invasions Have Consequences

Day 143

At least three people were killed and 15 injured following a missile attack on Friday on Dnipro in central Ukraine, the country’s fourth-largest city with more than 1 million inhabitants. “The rockets hit an industrial plant and a busy street next to it,” the regional governor, Valentyn Rezynchenko, said on his Facebook page.

The UK said the Kremlin was “fully responsible” for the death of a British captive in east Ukraine as rescue workers in Vinnytsia scoured debris for missing people after devastating Russian rocket attacks. The British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said: “I am shocked to hear reports of the death of British aid worker Paul Urey while in the custody of a Russian proxy in Ukraine. Russia must bear the full responsibility for this.” Rescue workers were still clearing debris in the wake of strikes in Vinnytsia, central Ukraine, that killed at least 23 people.

A top Ukrainian official has accused Russia of deliberately escalating its deadly attacks on civilian targets. Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, told the Guardian that monitoring of Russian strikes suggested an increased emphasis in recent weeks on terrorising Ukraine’s civilian population. “That’s not my emotions but what our monitoring is telling us.”

A wounded soldier who returned from Russian captivity has recounted how Russian forces would threaten Ukrainian soldiers with the death penalty if they refused to cooperate. Denys Piskun, an Azov soldier, told Azov Media: “They said that if you don’t testify, if you don’t cooperate, there will be the death penalty. You all have the death penalty on trial as a Nazi terrorist organisation.”

Ukrainian officials have confirmed that the US House of Representatives approved $100m in funding to train Ukrainian pilots to operate American aircraft as part of the National Defence Authorisation Act. The pilots will be trained on F-15 and F-16 jets, according to Andriy Yermak, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff.

Ukraine’s military losses peaked in May, the defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said in a new interview aired on Friday. Speaking to the BBC, Reznikov said: “The biggest peak of our losses was in May,” with up to 100 soldiers being killed a day.

Europe has “shot itself in the lungs” with sanctions aimed at Russia over its war in Ukraine, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said on Friday. Orbán, a nationalist who has ruled Hungary since 2010 and frequently clashes with Brussels, has been a fierce critic of European Union sanctions on Russian oil. In an address on national radio, Orbán urged EU leaders to change the sanctions policy.

Ukrainian rocket strikes have destroyed more than 30 Russian military logistics centres in recent weeks and significantly reduced Russia’s attacking potential, Ukraine’s defence ministry spokesperson said on Friday. The official, Oleksandr Motuzianyk, emphasised the role played by US Himars (high mobility artillery rocket systems) rocket systems, one of several types of long-range weapon supplied by the west to assist Ukraine in the war.

M270 long-range multiple rocket launch systems have arrived in Ukraine, the Ukrainian defence minister announced on Friday. “They will be good company for Himars on the battlefield.”

The UK's Ministry of Defense is a Very Reputable Source of Information.  You Might Want to Follow Them on Twitter.  (Just Don't Tell Elon Musk.)


The United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence on Thursday said that Russian forces are stifled in Ukraine by aging vehicles and weapons that are preventing them from quickly achieving advances amid its ongoing invasion.

"The ageing vehicles, weapons, and Soviet-era tactics used by Russian forces do not lend themselves to quickly regaining or building momentum unless used in overwhelming mass–which Russia is currently unable to bring to bear," the UK Defence Ministry wrote in an intelligence update on Twitter.

Russian troops achieved "no significant territorial advances" over the last 72 hours as of Thursday, according to the ministry. They are also at risk of losing any achievements made following the capture of Lysychansk, even though they continue to carry out artillery strikes across a broad front in the Donbas.

Will They Say "Da" To Iranian Drones?

Russian officials visited an airfield in central Iran at least twice in recent weeks to view weapons-capable drones it is looking to acquire to use in its war against Ukraine, the White House said.
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The Next Time You Complain About a Slow Internet Connection...


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Note to the Secret Service:  Your Secret Is Out.

A Washington, DC, police officer has corroborated to the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, details regarding a heated exchange former President Donald Trump had with his Secret Service detail when he was told he could not go to the US Capitol after his rally, a source familiar with the matter tells CNN.

The officer with the Metropolitan Police Department was in the motorcade with the Secret Service for Trump on January 6 and recounted what was seen to committee investigators, according to the source.
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It Was Probably Limu the Emu Trying to Get Away From Doug

A flightless bird was stuck using its two feet as it darted through traffic during an escape in Houston.

Police said they responded to a “traffic hazard” when residents spotted an emu roaming the city’s streets on Thursday, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Drivers in the area, including Twitter user @ratchetnerd_, shared clips of the emu ― mistaken for an ostrich, its larger cousin ― as it paraded through the city.



Police were eventually able to get the emu and return it to its owner, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The emu wasn’t the only animal to make a surprise cameo in Houston this week.


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