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BY BRIAN BEUTLER, PRIYANKA ARIBINDI & CROOKED MEDIA Monday, July 1, 2019 |
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| —New York Attorney General/Donald Trump's worst nightmare Letitia James |
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| DEMILITARIZED FRIEND ZONE |
| President Trump had a disastrous weekend at the G20 summit in Japan and on an impromptu trip to North Korea.
You’re probably thinking: What else is new? Every day of his presidency seems like a disaster! That’s usually how we feel, too. But this was actually quite bad—both for the country and for what it says about how the political media is likely to cover the 2020 elections.
Let’s start at the end:
Trump capped off his trip abroad with a hastily-prepared visit to the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. There, he had a photo op with Kim Jong Un and became the first president to set foot in North Korea in history.
Why is this bad? Because even though Kim has taken no steps toward denuclearization, he has nevertheless been rewarded with a kind of gesture that a non-terrible president would have reserved for a diplomatic breakthrough. It’s a propaganda victory for North Korea, a terrible lowering-of-the-bar for liberal values, and a message to other adversaries that the ticket to being normalized by the United States is developing nuclear weapons and refusing to surrender them. Art of the deal!
How has the national press reacted to this breach of basic diplomacy? ABC’s Jon Karl said, "In terms of sheer performance... this may be the biggest moment of the Trump presidency so far," and the Washington Post published a piece about it headlined, “Beyond ‘Freedom’s Frontier,’ Trump scores his biggest live show yet in North Korea.” Hero President shakes hand with vicious murderer. World rejoices!
And that’s just the worst of it!
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| Seven months after Florida voted overwhelmingly to restore voting rights to 1.4 million people with felony convictions, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a law denying voting rights to anyone with a past felony conviction who still owes money to the state. A poll tax in 2019.
This new law could prevent 500,000 Florida residents who still owe restitution and other fees to the state, in many cases tens of thousands of dollars, from voting. It also effectively overturns the will of the people who voted to overturn Florida’s policy of felon disenfranchisement. This is another reminder both that Republicans are hostile to democracy, and that elections matter. DeSantis won his gubernatorial race by just 30,000 votes, and now wants to solidify his party’s power by locking as many newly enfranchised voters out of the democracy all over again.
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| Iran has deliberately exceeded the 2015 nuclear deal’s limits on how much nuclear fuel it can possess. Thanks, conservatives, for sabotaging a deal that was working, so that our worst and most incompetent president could confront two nuclear crises at once.
At a fundraiser hosted by a gay-rights leader in Seattle, Joe Biden commented that mocking a gay waiter would’ve been acceptable five years ago, inviting vocal objections from the audience. Biden went on to say that homophobic comments would not be accepted today, and that public sentiment toward the LGBT community has changed relatively quickly, raising the question, who was Biden dining with five years ago!?
On the 22nd anniversary of the transfer of the city’s sovereignty from Britain to China, protesters in Hong Kong forced their way into their legislature and took over the building. They oppose Beijing’s recent attempts to exert control over their semi-autonomous, democratic government.
Anonymous Twitter accounts amplified by Donald Trump, Jr., launched racist attacks on Kamala Harris’s identity as a black American shortly after she criticized Joe Biden’s record on desegregation during Thursday night’s Democratic primary debate. The apple doesn’t fall far from the birther. Fellow 2020 Democratic hopefuls, including Biden, responded with support for Harris and denounced Trump, Jr., and the trolls.
Shaquille Duke, a black man undergoing treatment for pneumonia and asthma in an Illinois hospital, was arrested outside the facility while taking a walk on his doctor’s orders. Duke, who was wearing a hospital gown and wheeling his IV equipment, said he was stopped by a hospital security guard, who claimed that he “was trying to leave the hospital to sell the IV equipment on eBay,” and called the police, who arrested him and took him to jail. What, and we mean this sincerely, the fuck?
Trump wants tanks and armored military vehicles to be stationed on the National Mall in Washington, DC, for his Fourth of July “Salute To America.” On a completely unrelated note, George Washington warned in his farewell address that republics “will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty.” Mase also once reminded us “Mo Money, Mo Problems.”
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| The music industry became embroiled in drama on Sunday after celebrity talent manager Scooter Braun purchased Taylor Swift’s former record label, which owns her albums and master recordings. Swift responded on Tumblr by accusing Braun and his former client Kanye West of bullying her in the past, and noted her former-label’s CEO knew about the bullying, but sold the company (along with her recordings) to Braun anyhow—without offering her the opportunity to buy her masters back first. Braun’s camp and the label dispute Taylor’s version of events, and now artists have begun taking sides, so the world waits with bated breath to find out which side Lil Nas X will come down on. |
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| Protesters across the country will demand on Tuesday that migrant detention centers at the border be shuttered, in response to last month’s revelation that children in those facilities endure horrific, inhumane conditions. Advocacy groups have planned to protest outside of congressional district offices and call on members of Congress to refuse to authorize any funding for "family detention and deportation."
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