Informed

Reading Time: 4 minutes He’s flailing and can’t get anything done.
Today’s national emergency declaration from Donald Trump is an obvious fraud, detectable if nothing else by the reality that various White House and congressional officials have been teasing it as a possibility for months. In a real emergency, you act fast.

In a fake emergency, you act when you’ve decided the political timing is right as part of a larger ass-covering move because you need to back down from an ill-advised congressional fight that, itself, followed from an ill-advised campaign promise.

Reading Time: 2 minutes “An economic miracle is taking place in the United States — and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations,” Trump said, per his prepared remarks. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way! We must be united at home to defeat our adversaries abroad.”

Though he said he would cooperate with the Watergate investigation, Nixon argued that the country had other things to worry about that required Washington’s full attention. He resigned from office less than a year later, in August of that year.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Shirley Chisholm became the first African-American congresswoman in 1968. Four years later, she became the first major-party black candidate to make a bid for the U.S. presidency.

Reading Time: 2 minutes West was quiet by nature and that kept people from knowing how instrumental she was in the development of the technology for most of her life. West admits that she had no idea, at the time, when she was recording satellite locations and doing accompanying calculations—that her work would affect so many.

Reading Time: 3 minutes There were at least 50 extremist-related killings in the US in 2018, according to the report, making it the fourth-deadliest year on record for domestic extremist-related killings since 1970.

“The extremist-related murders in 2018 were overwhelmingly linked to right-wing extremists,” the report states. “Every one of the perpetrators had ties to at least one right-wing extremist movement, although one had recently switched to supporting Islamist extremism. White supremacists were responsible for the great majority of the killings, which is typically the case.”

Reading Time: 3 minutes Lawyers representing a Louisiana abortion clinic and at least two physicians filed an application in the Supreme Court on Monday asking the court to halt a Louisiana law that is identical to a Texas law the justices struck down in 2016.

The court is almost certain to deny this application in a 5-4 vote — possibly as soon as tonight. When it does so, it will effectively mark the end of Roe v. Wade.

Reading Time: 5 minutes In the end, I believe I will cut and paste this next series of sentences half a dozen times over the next 18 months. There are plenty of issues to criticize Kamala Harris about. Her attorney general office’s support of prison labor to fight California wildfires, her refusal to back independent investigations in police shootings, her relatively timid attempts to fix prison overcrowding, her failure to properly cite Tribe Called Quest lyrics. There is a lot in her past worth digging into and evaluating. However, Kamala Harris’ dating life, is not one of those issues.