As Kamala Harris closes in on her selection of a running mate this weekend, a renewed focus is being placed on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, people familiar with the search told CNN, even as the vice president continues to weigh whether Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly would help deliver a victory in their battleground states.
The potential for a VP pick helping deliver electoral votes has to be a consideration, which is why Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, perhaps the most popular Democratic governor in the U.S. doesn’t get a mention in the lede.
NEW: We've published our latest governor and senator approval ratings.
Yes, a VP pick historically is no sure thing on that score, but history may have little to say about this crazy election. Beshear is “said to still be under consideration” nonetheless.
“Harris’ top consideration is electability, sources familiar with her thinking told CNN.”
“The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.”
-J. Robert Oppenheimer
Hiroshima, following the 1945 nuclear bombing that killed an estimated 66,000 people in seconds.
[Shame mode] All the times I’ve zipped by the I-82 turn-off to Richland, Washington while driving on I-90 and thought “hey, isn’t that where that Hanford superfund nuclear thingy is?” I’ve never stopped to ponder its historical significance. Adjacent to the Hanford Nuclear Site that was built in the early 1940s to house nuclear government workers at the height of the Manhattan Project, Richland is, in essence, a company town; a true “atomic city” with a problematic legacy.
Then again, according to Irene Lusztig’s absorbing documentary Richland (which I caught at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival), how “problematic” depends on who you talk to. Many current residents don’t see why anyone would fuss over the local high school football team’s “mascot”, which is …a mushroom cloud.
The town manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for decades following the end of WW2-to which they had a direct hand in “ending”, via providing the plutonium for the ”Fat Man” nuclear bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Lusztig incorporates archival footage for historical context; these segments reminded me of the 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe. I wasn’t able to track down whether the film is streaming anywhere; but here’s the trailer:
Speaking of which…we are several days away from the 79th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. So what have we learned since 8:15am, August 6, 1945-if anything? Well, we’ve tried to harness the power of the atom for “good”, however, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, that’s not working out so well (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, et al).
Also, there are enough stockpiled weapons of mass destruction to knock Planet Earth off its axis, and no guarantees that some nut job, whether enabled by the powers vested in him by the state, or the voices in his head (doesn’t matter-end result’s the same) won’t be in a position at some point in the future to let one or two or a hundred rip. Hopefully, cool heads and diplomacy will continue to keep us above ground and rad-free.
After all, if history has taught us anything, it doesn’t take much to trigger a global conflict. Interestingly, just last week TCM ran their premiere showing of Nathan Kroll’s 1964 documentary The Guns of August. The film is based on historian and journalist Barbara W. Tuchman’s eponymous Pulitzer Prize-winning 1963 book, which focuses on the first year of World War I (1914) and the events leading up to it (Kroll’s film covers the entire conflict through 1918).
I hadn’t seen the film in decades; I’d forgotten how straightforward and sobering it was in illustrating how an unfortunate series of blunders, miscalculations, misinterpretations and failed diplomacy among the ruling houses of Europe triggered a conflict that ultimately led to 20 million people dead and 21 million wounded (military and civilian casualties combined).
Most famously, the flashpoint occurred on June 28, 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne) and his wife Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg by a Bosnian Serb revolutionary (and the rest, as they say, is History).
Now we’d like to think that such arcane regional bickering and random acts of political violence half a world away from our comfortable living rooms cannot possibly lead to a horrific global conflict ever again…right? I mean, in this day and age? What are the odds?
The U.S. is adding to its military presence in the Middle East in an effort to help defend Israel from possible attacks by Iran and its proxies in the coming days, as well as to protect U.S. troops, the Pentagon says.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Friday that he ordered more ballistic missile defense-capable cruisers and destroyers to the Middle East and Europe. An additional fighter jet squadron will also be sent to the Middle East. Austin added that the U.S. is also taking steps “to increase our readiness to deploy additional land-based ballistic missile defense.”
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group will also be moved to the Middle East in order “to maintain a carrier strike group presence.” It will replace the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group after the end of its deployment.
This week, tensions in the Middle East pushed to a critical point after top leaders from the militant groups Hamasand Hezbollah were killed and Iran and its proxies vowed revenge. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Saturday that Tehran’s retaliation will be “severe and (taken) at an appropriate time, place, and manner,” Reuters reported. […]
Austin said in a statement on Friday that while the U.S. is taking additional measures to support Israel, its priority is to prevent a wider war in the Middle East.
Let’s hope so. In such volatile regions of the world, prevention is preferable to escalation.
Speaking of which …in light of the upcoming presidential election in November, one of the most pressing questions (no pun intended) voters should ask themselves before marking their ballots is this:
Whose finger would you rather see hovering over the proverbial “red button”? Which candidate is less likely to fumble the “nuclear football”? The what?
Officially called the “ Presidential Emergency Satchel, ” the “nuclear football” is a bulky briefcase that contains atomic war plans and enables the president to transmit nuclear orders to the Pentagon. The heavy case is carried by a military officer who is never far behind the president, whether the commander-in-chief is boarding a helicopter or exiting meetings with world leaders.
Today, nearly 80 years after the beginning of the nuclear age, the risks posed by nuclear weapons are escalating. U.S. presidential leadership may be the most important factor in whether the risk of nuclear arms racing, proliferation, and war will rise or fall in the years ahead.
As UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a June 7 statement: “Humanity is on a knife’s edge. The risk of a nuclear weapon being used has reached heights not seen since the Cold War. States are engaged in a qualitative arms race. [W]e need disarmament now. All countries need to step up, but nuclear weapons states must lead the way.”
American voters are increasingly aware and, according to recent polling, deeply concerned about nuclear weapons dangers. A 2024 national opinion survey found that a majority of Americans believe that nuclear weapons make the world more dangerous. Overall, just one in eight Americans (13 percent) think nuclear weapons are making the world a safer place, while 63 percent think the opposite, and 14 percent say neither.
In 2024, the candidates’ approaches to these dangers deserve more scrutiny.
How exactly the winner of the 2024 race will handle the evolving array of nuclear weapons-related challenges is difficult to forecast.
Just something to keep in mind come November. No pressure.
With those happy thoughts in mind, I thought I’d share my picks for the top 15 cautionary films to watch before we all go together (when we go). Uh…enjoy?
The Atomic Café – Whoopee, we’re all gonna die! But along the way, we might as well have a few laughs. That seems to be the impetus behind this 1982 collection of cleverly reassembled footage culled from U.S. government propaganda shorts from the Cold War era (Mk 1), originally designed to educate the public about how to “survive” a nuclear attack (all you need to do is get under a desk…everyone knows that!).
In addition to the Civil Defense campaigns (which include the classic “duck and cover” tutorials) the filmmakers have also drawn from a rich vein of military training films, which reduce the possible effects of a nuclear strike to something akin to a barrage from, oh I don’t know- a really big field howitzer. Harrowing, yet perversely entertaining. Written and directed by Jayne Loader, Pierce Rafferty and Kevin Rafferty (Kevin went on to co-direct the similarly constructed 1999 doc, The Last Cigarette, a take down of the tobacco industry).
Black Rain– For obvious reasons, there have been a fair amount of postwar Japanese films dealing with the subject of nuclear destruction and its aftermath. Some take an oblique approach, like Gojira or I Live inFear. Other films, like the documentary Children of Hiroshima and the anime Barefoot Gen deal directly with survivors (who are referred to in Japan as the hibakusha).
One of the most affecting hibakusha films I’ve seen is Shomei Imamura’s 1989 drama Black Rain (not to be confused with the 1989 Hollywood crime thriller of the same title that is also set in Japan). It’s a simple tale of three Hiroshima survivors: an elderly couple and their niece, whose scars run much deeper than physical. The narrative is sparse, yet contains more layers than an onion (especially considering the complexities of Japanese society). Interestingly, Imamura injects a polemic which points an accusatory finger in an unexpected direction.
The Day after Trinity– This absorbing 1981 film about the Manhattan Project and its subsequent fallout (historical, political and existential) remains one of the best documentaries I have seen on the subject. At its center, it is a profile of project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose moment of professional triumph (the successful test of the world’s first atomic bomb, three weeks before Hiroshima) also brought him an unnerving precognition about the horror that he and his fellow physicists had enabled the military machine to unleash.
Oppenheimer’s journey from “father of the atomic bomb” to anti-nuke activist (and having his life destroyed by the post-war Red hysteria) is a tragic tale of Shakespearean proportion. I think this documentary provides a much more clear-eyed (and ultimately moving) portrait than Christopher Nolan’s well-acted but somewhat overwrought 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer.
Two recommended companion pieces: Roland Joffe’s 1989 drama Fat Man and Little Boy, about the working relationship between Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz) and military director of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves (Paul Newman); and an outstanding 1980 BBC miniseries called Oppenheimer (starring Sam Waterston).
Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb- “Mein fuehrer! I can walk!” Although we have yet to experience the global thermonuclear annihilation that ensues following the wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove’s joyous (if short-lived) epiphany, so many other depictions in Stanley Kubrick’s seriocomic masterpiece about the tendency for those in power to eventually rise to their own level of incompetence have since come to pass, that you wonder why the filmmakers even bothered to make it all up.
It’s the one about an American military base commander who goes a little funny in the head (you know…”funny”) and sort of launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Hilarity and oblivion ensues. And what a cast: Peter Sellers (as three characters), George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens, Keenan Wynn, James Earl Jones and Peter Bull. There are so many great quotes, that you might as well bracket the entire screenplay (by Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George) with quotation marks.
Fail-Safe– Dr. Strangelove…without the laughs. This no-nonsense 1964 thriller from the late great director Sidney Lumet takes a more clinical look at how a wild card scenario (in this case, a simple hardware malfunction) could ultimately trigger a nuclear showdown between the Americans and the Russians.
Talky and a bit stagey; but riveting nonetheless thanks to Lumet’s skillful knack for bringing out the best in his actors. Walter Bernstein’s intelligent screenplay (with uncredited assistance from Peter George, who also co-scripted Dr. Strangelove) and a superb cast that includes Henry Fonda (a commanding performance, literally and figuratively), Walter Matthau, Larry Hagman, and Fritz Weaver.
There’s no fighting in this war room (aside from one minor scuffle), but there is an almost unbearable amount of tension and suspense. The final scene is chilling and unforgettable.
I Live in Fear-This 1955 Akira Kurosawa film is one of the great director’s most overlooked efforts. It’s a melodrama concerning an aging foundry owner (Toshiro Mifune, unrecognizable in Coke-bottle glasses and silver-frosted pomade) who literally “lives in fear” of the H-bomb. Convinced that South America would be the “safest” place on Earth from radioactive fallout, he tries to sway his wife and grown children to pull up stakes and resettle on a farm in Brazil.
His children, who have families of their own and rely on their father’s factory for income, are not so hot on that idea. They take him to family court and have him declared incompetent. This sends Mifune spiraling into madness. Or are his fears really so “crazy”? It is one of Mifune’s most powerful and moving performances. Kurosawa instills shades of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” into the narrative (a well he would draw from again in his 1985 film Ran).
Ladybug, Ladybug– I didn’t have an opportunity to see this chilling 1963 drama until 2017, which is when Turner Classic Movies presented their premiere showing (to my knowledge, it had never been previously available in any home video format). The film marked the second collaboration between husband-and-wife creative team of writer Eleanor Perry and director Frank Perry (The Swimmer, Last Summer,Diary of a Mad Housewife).
Based on an incident that occurred during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the story centers on how students and staff of a rural school react to a Civil Defense alert indicating an imminent nuclear strike. While there are indications that it could be a false alarm, the principal sends the children home early. As teachers and students stroll through the relatively peaceful countryside, fears and anxieties come to the fore. Naturalistic performances bring the film’s cautionary message all too close to home.
Miracle Mile- Depending on your worldview, this is either an “end of the world” film for romantics, or the perfect date movie for fatalists. Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham give winning performances as a musician and a waitress who Meet Cute at L.A.’s La Brea Tar Pits museum. But before they can hook up for their first date, Edwards stumbles onto a fairly reliable tip that L.A. is about to get hosed…in a major way.
The resulting “countdown” scenario is a genuine, edge-of-your seat nail-biter. In fact, this modestly budgeted, 90-minute sleeper offers more heart-pounding excitement (and much more believable characters) than any bloated Hollywood disaster epic from the likes of a Michael Bay or a Roland Emmerich. Writer-director Steve De Jarnatt stopped doing feature films after this 1988 gem (his only other feature was the sci-fi cult favorite Cherry 2000).
One Night Stand – An early effort from filmmaker John Duigan (Winter ofOur Dreams, The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting, Sirens), this 1984 sleeper got lost in the flurry of nuclear paranoia movies that proliferated during the Reagan era (Wargames, The Manhattan Project, Red Dawn, et.al.).
Four young people (three Australians and an American sailor who has jumped ship) get holed up in an empty Sydney Opera House on the eve of escalating nuclear tension between the superpowers in Eastern Europe. In an effort to quell their anxiety over increasingly ominous news bulletins droning from a portable radio, the quartet find creative ways to keep up their spirits.
Uneven, but for the most part Duigan (who scripted) deftly juggles romantic comedy, apocalyptic thriller and anti-war statement. There are several striking set pieces; particularly an affecting scene where the group watches Fritz Langs’s Metropolis as the Easybeats “Friday on My Mind” is juxtaposed over its orchestral score. Midnight Oil performs in a scene where the two young women attend a concert. The bittersweet denouement (in an underground tube station) is quite powerful.
Special Bulletin– This outstanding 1983 made-for-TV movie has been overshadowed by the nuclear nightmare-themed TV movie The Day After, which aired the same year (I’m sure I will be raked over the coals by some readers for not including the aforementioned on this list, but frankly I always thought it was too melodramatic and vastly over-praised).
Directed by Edward Zwick and written by Marshall Herskovitz (the same creative team behind thirtysomething), Special Bulletin is framed as a “live” television broadcast, with local news anchors and reporters interrupting regular programming to cover a breaking story.
A domestic terrorist group has seized a docked tugboat in Charleston Harbor. A reporter relays their demand: If every nuclear triggering device stored at the nearby U.S. Naval base isn’t delivered to them by a specified time, they will detonate their own homemade nuclear device (equal in power to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki). The original airing apparently panicked more than a few South Carolinian viewers (a la Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938). Riveting and chilling. Nominated for 6 Emmys, it took home 4.
Testament- Originally an American Playhouse presentation, this film (with a screenplay adapted by John Sacred Young from a story by Carol Amen) was released to theaters and garnered a well-deserved Best Actress nomination for Jane Alexander. Director Lynne Littman takes a low key approach, but pulls no punches; I think this is what gives her film’s anti-nuke message more teeth and makes its scenario more relatable than Stanley Kramer’s similarly-framed but more sanitized and preachy 1959 drama On the Beach.
Alexander, her husband (William DeVane) and three kids live in sleepy Hamlin, California, where afternoon cartoons are interrupted by a news flash that nuclear explosions have occurred in New York. Then there is a flash of a different kind when nearby San Francisco (where DeVane has gone on a business trip) receives a direct strike.
There is no exposition on the political climate that precipitates the attacks; this is a wise decision, as it puts the focus on the humanistic message of the film. All of the post-nuke horrors ensue, but they are presented sans the melodrama that informs many entries in the genre. The fact that the nightmarish scenario unfolds so deliberately, and amidst such everyday suburban banality, is what makes it very difficult to shake off.
As the children (and adults) of Hamlin succumb to the inevitable scourge of radiation sickness and steadily “disappear”, like the children of the ‘fairy tale’ Hamlin, you are left haunted by the final line of the school production of “The Pied Piper” glimpsed earlier in the film… “Your children are not dead. They will return when the world deserves them.”
Thirteen Days– I had a block against seeing this 2000 release about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, for several reasons. For one, director Roger Donaldson’s uneven output (for every Smash Palace or No Way Out, he’s got a Species or a Cocktail). I also couldn’t get past “Kevin Costner? In another movie about JFK?” Also, I felt the outstanding 1974 TV film, The Missiles of October (which I recommend) would be hard to top. But I was pleasantly surprised to find it to be one of Donaldson’s better films.
Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp make a very credible JFK and RFK, respectively. The film works as a political thriller, yet it is also intimate and moving at times (especially in the scenes between JFK and RFK). Costner provides the “fly on the wall” perspective as Kennedy insider Kenny O’Donnell. Costner gives a compassionate performance; on the downside he has a tin ear for dialects (that Hahvad Yahd brogue comes and goes of its own free will).
According to the Internet Movie Database, this was the first film screened at the White House by George and Laura Bush in 2001. Knowing this now…I don’t know whether to laugh or cry myself to sleep.
The War Game / Threads– Out of all of the selections on this list, these two British TV productions are the grimmest and most sobering “nuclear nightmare” films of them all.
Writer-director Peter Watkins’ 1965 docudrama, The War Game was initially produced for television, but was deemed too shocking and disconcerting for the small screen by the BBC. It was mothballed until picked up for theatrical distribution, which snagged it an Oscar for Best Documentary in 1967. Watkins envisions the aftermath of a nuke attack on London, and pulls no punches. Very ahead of its time, and it still packs quite a wallop.
The similarly stark and affecting nuclear nightmare drama Threads debuted on the BBC in 1984, later airing in the U.S. on TBS. Director Mick Jackson delivers an uncompromising realism that makes The Day After (the U.S. TV film from the previous year) look like a Teletubbies episode. It’s a speculative narrative that takes a medium sized city (Sheffield) and depicts what would likely happen to its populace during and after a nuclear strike, in graphic detail.
Both productions make it clear that, while they are dramatizations, the intent is not to “entertain” you in any sense of the word. The message is simple and direct-nothing good comes out of a nuclear conflict. It’s a living, breathing Hell for all concerned-and anyone “lucky” enough to survive will soon wish they were dead.
When the Wind Blows– This animated 1986 U.K. film was adapted by director Jimmy Murakami from Raymond Brigg’s eponymous graphic novel. It is a simple yet affecting story about an aging couple (wonderfully voiced by venerable British thespians Sir John Mills and Dame Peggy Ashcroft) who live in a cozy cottage nestled in the bucolic English countryside. Unfortunately, an escalating conflict in another part of the world is about to go global and shatter their quiet lives.
Very similar in tone to Testament (another film on this list), in its sense of intimacy amidst slowly unfolding mass horror. Haunting, moving, and beautifully animated, with a combination of traditional cell and stop-motion techniques. The soundtrack features music by David Bowie, Roger Waters, and Squeeze.
The Washington Post has published a blockbuster expose about a big Trump payoff when he was president in 2017. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that his cronies at DOJ shut the investigation down:
Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.
Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt, employees were soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags, according to records from the bank. Four men arrived and carried away the bags, which U.S. officials later described in sealed court filings as weighing a combined 200 pounds and containing what was then a sizable share of Egypt’s reserve of U.S. currency.
Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found.
Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump,potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House toinject his campaign with $10 million of his own money.
Those questions, at least in the view of several investigators on the case, would never be answered,The Post found.
Within months of learning of the withdrawal, prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked by top Justice Department officials from obtaining bank records they believed might hold critical evidence, according to interviews with people familiar with the case as well as documents and contemporaneous notes of the investigation. The case ground to a halt by the fall of 2019 as Trump’s then-attorney general, William P. Barr, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probe of Trump.
The first Trump administration was the most corrupt in American history. No other presidency even comes close. We’re talking about bags of money here. If you read further you’ll see that there were other henchmen involved in cover this up. Imagine what he will get away with in a second term with the entire DOJ filled with MAGA loyalists dedicated to presidential immunity and punishing his rivals. He’ll be carrying out his vengeance on his enemies — and making a profit at it.
This is the tech billionaire election and they’re almost all supporting Trump. One of them is Elon Musk. This is his latest contribution:
Elon Musk’s new super PAC is collecting scores of voters’ personal information under the guise of inviting them to register to vote, as part of his effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Earlier this month, Musk denied reports that he would be donating $45 million a month to Trump’s campaign during an interview with right-wing commentator Jordan Peterson. Instead, the technocrat clarified that he had created a new super PAC, called the America PAC.
Musk’s America PAC is a door-to-door canvassing operation, which allows it to work in direct coordination with the Trump campaign, according to an FEC advisory from earlier this year. This allows Musk, and his fellow Silicon Valley donors, to stick their hands—and their cash—right into the presidential race on Trump’s behalf.
How exactly they plan to do this is even more disturbing.
The America PAC has launched a series of digital ads using the image of Trump’s assassination, to invite people browsing Google to “register to vote,” CNBC reported Friday. In states where the outcome is certain, such as California, the ads actually do direct them to a voter registration site.
But in key battleground states, users are directed to a very different page, which prompts them to enter their phone number, address, and age. Once complete, users are then greeted by a “Thank You” page, with no actual link to voter registration in sight.
Musk’s America PAC has poured $800,000 into digital advertisements to target voters in the key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, according to AdImpact. The information collected from user responses to this ad campaign will inform the PAC’s canvassing efforts in those states.
Musk’s America PAC has already attracted the financial support of a few Silicon Valley billionaires. Douglas Leone and Shaun Maguire, general partners at Sequoia Capital, donated a whopping $1 million and $500,000 respectively, according to The American Prospect. (Their V.C. firm is also an investor in Musk’s SpaceX.) Joe Lonsdale, one of the co-founders of the military contractor Palantir, donated $1 million in June. Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel, who helped to fund J.D. Vance’s start in politics.
Apparently, Musk’s plan for the America PAC is already off to a rough start. After spending at least $15 million with In Field Strategies, a field vendor that organizes canvassers, the PAC ended its relationship with the company, two people familiar told The New York Times. It’s unclear what happened to that money, and now, more than 100 canvassers who had been hired by In Field on America PAC’s behalf in mid-June have been left scattered across the country, looking for work.
The PAC will now have to scramble to mount its canvassing campaign before early voting can begin, according to the Times. Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita called the Times report “more fake news … the New Program 100% better than the old gang. Solidly support this effort,” in a post on X.
Yeah, right, If Musk’s operation is as savvy as most right wing voter operations LaCivita is lying.
Remember, Elon Musk never invented anything. He buys companies he doesn’t create them.
There are election deniers in important jobs in many swing states. But Arizona is ground zero for MAGA wackos. Bolts has the latest from the Arizona primaries this week:
Democrat Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, the elections head in Arizona’s Pima County, says she drove to work in silence on Wednesday morning, after her counterpart in Maricopa County, Republican Stephen Richer, lost his primary to a far-right challenger.
“Are you allowed to print expletives?” she told Bolts.
Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and 4.5 million residents, is the nation’s most populous swing county—and it’slately seen a torrent of right-wing activism pushing false claims about recent elections. Richer, who came into office in 2021, relentlessly defended how elections are run in the county, taking it upon himself to constantly debunk unfounded claims—pushed by everyone from Arizona politicians to Elon Musk—that fraud is rampant and results are rigged.
He faced persistent harassment and criticism from fellow Republicans for this stance, and even got death threats; one local Republican, who chaired Arizona’s delegation at last month’s Republican National Convention, said she wanted to “lynch” Richer.
He was ousted on Tuesday in the GOP primary by state representative Justin Heap, who drew support from some of the country’s most vocal election deniers, and whose campaign was led by an indicted 2020 “fake elector” for Donald Trump. Heap beat Richer by about seven percentage points and moves on to face Democrat Timothy Stringham in the general election.
“This November, we will end the laughingstock elections that have plagued our county, state and nation,” Heap posted on the social media platform X after his win.
Arizona’s elections infrastructure has largely held up since 2020 amid a barrage of Trumpian lawsuits and extensive organizing by conservatives who falsely say that state elections are stolen from them. But the Arizona primaries underscored the potency in Republican politics of the false narrative that elections can’t be trusted—and that something drastic has to be done about it.
[…]
Republicans Kari Lake, Abe Hamadeh, and Mark Finchem, all of whom lost statewide races in 2022 and then refused to concede, won congressional and legislative primaries. A rare Republican senator who had opposed new restrictions on voting in the state’s most recent session lost his reelection bid. Wendy Rogers, another senator who is a member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group, beat back a more moderate challenger. In Yuma County, just west of Maricopa County, the race between a recorder who resisted election conspiracies and a staunch election denier remains too close to call as of publication. And in Maricopa County, primary results left the local elections system several steps closer to falling in the hands of Republicans who have echoed Trumpian lies.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is planning to announce next week that one of the 18 defendants in the state’s fake elector case will become a witness for the prosecution.
In April, the fake electors were indicted by a grand jury for signing bogus documents claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, after Trump’s campaign allegedly urged them to do so.
In the indictment, all of the fake electors are implicated in an attempt to deceive “the public with false claims of election fraud in order to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency.”
They are accused of attempting to keep “President Donald J. Trump in office against the will of Arizona voters, and depriving Arizona voters of their right to vote and have their votes counted.”
According to the indictment, the fake electors forged certificates of Electoral College votes for President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Michael Pence and filed those with the Arizona Secretary of State and the chief judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Arizona.
The fake electors include two Arizona State Senators who were also delegates at this year’s Republican National Convention.
Each of the 11 Trump electors was charged with nine felonies related to trying to subvert the election, including conspiracy, fraud and forgery. All of the defendants pleaded not guilty.
This could be big depending on what this person knows about the fake elector scheme.
Trump’s relationship with GOP Senators has always been a little bit fraught. It’s clear that there are some who are not true believers, they’re just cynical opportunists and cowards. It never fails to amaze me to see them demonstrate it in public, however. It’s as if they’re actually proud of their lack of backbone:
For weeks, Senate Republicans delighted in the misery of their Democratic counterparts. The political story of the summer — whether President Biden would back down from his run at a second term — left GOP senators smiling and away from the media’s glaring spotlight on their foibles.
But the tables quickly turned. Their party’s presidential nominee recently returned to his natural form and lashed out against Vice President Harris in divisive terms that had little basis in truth. Republicans went right back into the political PTSD of the Donald Trump era, mouthing the same platitudes that they grasped onto during his presidency.
“He needs to focus on the policies of the Biden-Harris administration,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) told reporters Thursday morning.
Was she comfortable with Trump’s rhetoric? “He needs to focus on the Biden-Harris policies. That’s the successful pathway to November,” Capito said.
If that’s the path to success, why does Trump instead dive right into attacks on race instead of policy?
Capito let out a roaring laugh that lasted six whole seconds, incapable of answering the question — or unwilling to share her honest answer.
“I’m a really good mother and grandmother. I can’t answer that one,” she said.
How adorable. She laughed — at Trump’s verbal incontinence and flagrant racism. And she’ll stump for him and tell everyone to vote for him anyway. She is actually worse than the dim-witted true believers like Tommy Tuberville. She knows.
“My god, imagine being a reporter and being this bad at it,” tweets TPM’s Josh Marshall on a CBS News reporter taking anything Donald Trump says at face value.
What did Trump say this time? Marcy Wheeler explains and makes clear, “This is a ploy.”
What remains so remarkable, Josh, is that virtually every day there is one of these NYT framing decisions that (a) usually lean in this 'Pitchbot' direction, (b) are never attributed to an actual person, and (c) are never discussed or explained.
TRUMP BACKS OUT OF SCHEDULED ABC NEWS DEBATE, SAYS HE WILL ONLY DEBATE HARRIS IN PACKED ARENA WITH FOX MODERATORS.
THIS is the only way to accurately describe Trump's latest head fake. It's JOURNALISM MALPRACTICE for news outlets to amplify his head fake as if its legit. pic.twitter.com/Ll7Tg3gfv4
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There are few certainties in life, but alongside death, taxes, and the arrival of hot weather in July, at least one other thing is inarguable: baby penguins are almost impossibly cute.
Guests visiting the Tennessee Aquarium during the Fourth of July holiday can join Aquarium staffers in excitedly welcoming the newest addition to the Penguins’ Rock gallery — a fluffy (and shockingly fast-growing) Macaroni Penguin chick.
The chick hatched on June 2 from an egg laid in late April by parents Bacon and Merlin. This baby bird is the first offspring ever produced by Bacon, who hatched in 2015 to two other Aquarium penguins, Hercules and Little Debbie. Though Little Debbie now lives at another facility, the newest chick’s grandsire, Hercules, still calls Penguins’ Rock home. With this latest arrival, the Aquarium is home for the first time ever to three generations of Macaroni Penguins.
The new chick is the Aquarium’s first hatchling since the 2021 arrival of Carla, a Gentoo Penguin. This latest baby is the first Macaroni Penguin chick since Pedro hatched in 2019. The Aquarium’s colony now has 23 birds: 9 Macaronis and 14 Gentoos.
The Aquarium’s keen-eyed penguin care team first noticed the egg pipping — that’s the cracking that occurs when a baby bird begins to chip away at its shell from the inside — on a Friday afternoon when they spotted a dime-sized hole with a tiny beak moving around inside. The new chick seemed to get cold feet on Saturday with little progress. However, by Sunday morning, the chick had fully emerged with an unusual level of precision that surprised even its veteran caregivers.
“It seems like it has a little type A personality,” says Assistant Curator of Forests Loribeth Lee. “It cracked the egg perfectly, straight down the middle. We’ve never really seen that.”
When Lee discovered the emerged hatchling, it was sitting in the center of its stacked shell, which was broken neatly around the side in an almost perfect circle.
The chick’s precocious attitude didn’t end there. So far, it has displayed confidence and fearlessness both in its nest and around caregivers when briefly removed for tri-weekly weigh-ins to monitor its health and rate of growth.
“We’ve seen it pick up rocks multiple times in the nest, which is very impressive that it can do that at its size,” Lee says. “It’s been throwing them around, so it’s a strong, tough little bird.”
Speaking of size, the chick has been growing at an astronomical rate, thanks largely to its parents’ diligence. A day after hatching, it weighed just 145 grams (5.1 ounces, or a little less than an iPhone 15). Three weeks later, it had ballooned to a whopping 1,592 grams (3.5 pounds). To put that in perspective, that’s the same as a 7-pound human infant weighing 77 pounds before it was a month old.
Lee credits those gains to the skillful parentage of Bacon and Merlin, who has fathered several previous chicks and kept the chick well fed. A penguin growing quickly isn’t all that unusual, though. Macaroni Penguin chicks must mature quickly to be ready for the harsh winters in their native Antarctic climates, where they reach adult size in just two and a half months.
