Media mogul Oprah Winfrey continues to keep people talking about the killing of Breonna Taylor by the Louisville Metro Police Department.
"For the first time ever, just last week, Oprah Winfrey dedicated the cover of her magazine to someone other than herself -- Breonna Taylor. Now, that cover will be all over Louisville in the form of billboards big and small," WLKY-TV reported Thursday.
"She and the O Magazine team say they are amplifying Taylor's story and the fight for justice by erecting 26 billboards across the city. That's one for every year of her life," the station reported.
Taylor, a BLack EMT, was fatally shot in March by plainclothes officers Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove while they were executing a so-called "no-knock" search warrant.
"Demand that the police involved in killing Breonna Taylor be arrested and charged," the billboards read.
Thursday was also the 20th week in a row when the federal government has reported that more than one million Americans signed up for unemployment benefits.
President Donald Trump and some of his allies are hoping that the New York lawsuit into the National Rifle Association for financial fraud will be a gift to the campaign, by scaring pro-gun voters to the polls. The president himself has referred to the suit as a "very terrible thing that just happened," and former Betsy DeVos aide Greg McNeilly called it an "incredibly tangible, specific attack on a core Republican value … This is a gift to the Trump campaign, and it’s an unforced error on the [Democratic] side. It’s a real mistake."
But according to Politico, many other strategists, including Republicans, don't think the president will be able to leverage it to save his campaign.
"The NRA is not the institution it was in American politics even four years ago, when it spent heavily to help Trump win election," wrote David Siders. "Beset by financial problems and infighting, public support for the NRA has declined during the Trump era, falling below 50 percent last year for the first time since the 1990s, according to Gallup. At the same time, nearly two-thirds of Americans want stricter gun laws. That's when voters are even thinking about gun control. Three months before Election Day, they mostly aren’t — it's all about coronavirus and the economy, stupid. That's a problem for Republicans even the NRA has acknowledged."
According to Frank Miniter, who edits the NRA publication America's First Freedom, "only 17% of gun owners in the survey said ‘gun-related issues’ were one of their three top policy areas going into this election (15% did say ‘crime’ and 18% said ‘civil rights’)." Meanwhile, longtime GOP strategist Frank Luntz said, “America has changed. Every person who cares about the NRA is already voting for Trump. Suburban swing voters care about the right to own a gun, but they don't care about the NRA.”
To some extent, an effort to drag the NRA to the forefront of the election would be an extension of Trump's broader effort to fight a culture war.
He has repeatedly run ads trying to link former Vice President Joe Biden to calls from Black Lives Matter activists to "defund the police" — which has failed partly because voters broadly support Black Lives Matter, and partly because Biden hasn't advocated defunding the police. And early on Thursday, Trump claimed that Biden would "hurt God" and "hurt the Bible" — an odd claim given that Biden is a lifelong practicing Catholic.
On Thursday, CNNreported that President Donald Trump's advisers were afraid to give him military options to resolve conflicts — and warned hostile foreign powers that the president was unpredictable and might declare war.
"These accounts are contained in my upcoming book, 'The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World,' which will be published August 11 by Harper Collins," reported Jim Sciutto. "'We used to only think of Kim Jong Un as unpredictable. Now we had Trump as unpredictable,' Joseph Yun, who served as President Trump's special representative for North Korea policy until 2018, told me. 'And I would communicate that.' Yun recalled that during the worsening standoff with North Korea in 2017, the Pentagon hesitated to give the President a broad range of military options, concerned that he might indeed order a major military attack on the North."
The president's bellicosity on Iran reportedly also alarmed officials.
"Earlier, in September 2018, when a handful of mortar shells struck near the US Embassy in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone causing no casualties or serious damage, Pentagon officials were surprised when they received a call from a senior official on the National Security Council demanding military options for the President to retaliate against Iran. That NSC official said the President wanted to know immediately how and when the United States could respond," said the report. Pentagon officials were reportedly "dumbfounded," with Gen. Paul Selva briefly muting the conference call and asking his colleagues, "is this a joke?"
Ultimately, the Trump administration has managed to avoid getting involved in new wars, although there have been a number of close calls, with the president getting into a war of words with "little Rocket Man" Kim Jong Un, and killing Iranian general Qassim Suleimani in a strike.
The White House and Congress remain trillions of dollars apart on the next coronavirus stimulus bill.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters following a three-hour negotiation meeting that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows slammed the table and walked out of the meeting, to which Pelosi replied that the Trump administration was slamming the table on our children.
Here's some of what Capitol Hill correspondents tweeted following the end of the meeting:
On Thursday, The Daily Beast reported that the Justice Department is moving to seize assets from a Ukrainian oligarch who was involved in the scandal that led to President Donald Trump's impeachment — and who is now accused of laundering billions of dollars in stolen money from a bank he once owned.
"A complaint filed by the Justice Department that seeks to seize commercial properties in Texas and Kentucky from Ihor Kolomoisky and his business partner, Gennadiy Boholiubov, alleges that the pair moved billions through various companies to 'thoroughly disguise their nature, source, ownership, and control,'" reported Madeline Charbonneau.
Kolomoisky was involved with Rudy Giuliani's plan to dig up dirt on the Biden family's business transactions in Ukraine, which ultimately led to Trump trying to coerce the Ukrainian president with military aid. Giuliani had asked him for assistance, but he reportedly refused and called it a "clear conspiracy" against Trump's political rival.
Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice exercised her Netflix stock options on Tuesday.
Rice, who was appointed to the streaming video company's board of directors in 2018, filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission showing that she sold about $300,000 in the transactions.
The financial move occurred as the former Vice President is close to announcing his choice of running mate. Rice is considered a leading contender for the position.
Other VP contenders reportedly include Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Rep. Val Demmings (D-FL), Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-MN).
[caption id="attachment_1652242" align="aligncenter" width="464"] Susan Rice SEC form.[/caption]
Earlier in the week, CNN's Brianna Keilar and Trump campaign official Mercedes Schlapp clashed over mail-in voting, with Keilar losing patience with Schlapp's lies and barking, "You're just saying a bunch of crap!"
In an op-ed published on RealClearPolitics, Schlapp punched back at Keilar, but in an unusual broadside, Schlapp also made a personal attack on Keilar's husband, an active duty Green Beret. "I was further disturbed to learn that Brianna Keilar’s husband is a ferocious opponent of the president, a former director of the National Security Council under President Obama, and a man who tweets, among other things, that Donald Trump makes him 'throw up,'" she wrote.
However, this attack was baseless — Keilar's husband never tweeted any such thing.
In addition to a fierce response from Keilar, CNN anchor Jake Tapper weighed in, saying "to smear with lies Brianna's husband, an active duty Green Beret, as part of her political vendetta is truly despicable. Truly vile."
The vice-chair of the House Republican Caucus called for Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. to step down.
"Jerry Falwell Jr’s ongoing behavior is appalling," Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC) posted on Twitter.
"As a Music Faculty Advisory Board Member and former instructor [at Liberty University], I’m convinced Falwell should step down," Walker said.
"None of us are perfect, but students, faculty, alumni and [the Liberty University choir] deserve better," he explained.
Walker was a baptist pastor prior to his political career.
Falwell, Jr. has been in a scandal ofter posting -- and then deleting -- a picture of him holding a woman who is not his wife on a yacht -- with both of the pants unbuttoned.
On Thursday, Politico reported that James Miles, the Trump administration's choice to run the federally-backed Open Technology Fund, was involved in a pair of multilevel marketing schemes, including one that was shut down after a government investigation.
"The Federal Trade Commission shut one of them down, calling it 'an allegedly illegal pyramid scheme.' A 2010 government legal filing describes Miles as a 'participant' in that company, Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing, which he acknowledged was a 'pyramid' — but insisted was legal," reported Daniel Lippman. "Miles publicly vouched for the second company, Excel Communications, while he was a top South Carolina official and his wife was being paid by the firm. But today he denies he ever had any formal involvement with either company."
"Miles and his wife were never accused of wrongdoing, and he said in a statement that the two companies’ legal woes began after her involvement with them had ceased," said the report. "In fact, his wife was affiliated with the company in the 1990s during years when a number of state attorneys general investigated it."
Multilevel marketing companies work by encouraging salesmen to recruit more people into the company, offering rewards and a percentage of sales based on recruitment. While some of these businesses operate legitimately, there is overlap between this business model and illegal "pyramid schemes," in which the product being sold is just a front to scam money up the chain from new recruits.
The United States Senate adjourned on Thursday, allowing members a three-day weekend despite the fact enhanced unemployment has expired and there has been no deal reached on the next round of COVID-19 stimulus.
The decision to leave Washington, DC for the weekend comes the same day the federal government reported over 1 million Americans have filed new unemployment claims -- for the 20th week in a row.
Protesters remain on the streets demanding equality and justice for Black Americans. What they’re feeling, I believe, is something I call “intolerance fatigue.”
This exhaustion is not the sort that lays people out on their beds and couches, unable to move. Rather, it’s a frustration and anger about systemic racism that drives people to act, to demand change and become part of creating the social change they want.
Similarly, the 2020 protests arose in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis. Taking a stand against injustice, people again – still – are tired of being discriminated against, profiled and murdered because of the color of their skin.
Marchers are tired of intolerance, worn out by racism and refusing to be silent in the face of unjust treatment and inequality.
Just as their elders were, today’s protesters and those they support are “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Susan Rice SEC form.[/caption]
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