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Trump Talks Up Putin as NATO Leaders Meet - The Friday AM Quickie 7/12/24

By Corey Pein —

With the corrupt Supreme Court sucking up all the oxygen lately, important developments in the legal world are being overlooked, Beastie Boys v. Chili's first and foremost. Have a nice weekend, Jacob's back Monday! - Corey

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THE BIG NEWS

Dotard Trump Would Be a Pathetic Junior Partner in the New Fascist Axis

All eyes were on President Joe Biden for his press conference at the NATO summit in Washington, DC, yesterday, watching like hawks (or vultures) for him to show any signs of confusion or cognitive difficulty, in what's become the morbid focus of the presidential race since his troubling debate last week with deranged felon Donald Trump. Biden did, predictably, stumble (more on that below), but he also got high marks for his foreign policy fluency. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer all praised Biden's leadership at a time when the stakes couldn't be higher.

But a foreboding shadow loomed over the summit, and it wasn't Biden's health so much as Trump and his Republican Party. Congressional Republicans have been working the sidelines of the summit in an attempt to reassure European diplomats that despite Trump's vow to take the US out of NATO and allow Aspiring Tsar Vladimir Putin to invade more countries to his west, he should be taken "seriously, but not literally." But just this week the Republican candidate bragged about his "very good relationship with President Putin" and slammed NATO for "tak[ing] advantage of us very badly." And Trump is making a point to stage counter-programming to the NATO summit by hosting Putin pal Viktor Orban at Mar-a-Lago, one week after the authoritarian Hungarian prime minister met with Putin in Moscow as part of a diplomatic campaign to pressure Ukraine to cede one-fifth of its territory to Russia.

As for outcomes from the summit, "Kyiv didn't get everything it wanted, but NATO agreed to declare that the country's eventual membership is 'inevitable,'" Politico reports. There's an asterisk after "inevitable," however: If Trump wins the White House, Putin's victory in Ukraine in assured. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy knows time is short; he is pushing Biden to lift "all" limitations on using US weapons to strike inside Russia. It's not clear how Putin might react to such an escalation, but Kremlin officials are already threatening a "military response" to the fresh deployment of long-range US missiles inside Germany.

Meanwhile, CNN reports that US intelligence foiled a Russian plot this year to murder a German arms manufacturer, one of "series of Russian plans to assassinate defense industry executives across Europe who were supporting Ukraine's war effort." Armin "Papperger was an obvious target: His company, Rheinmetall, is the largest and most successful German manufacturer of the vital 155mm artillery shells that have become the make-or-break weapon in Ukraine's grinding war of attrition." German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock says the report "underlines once more that we as Europeans need to protect ourselves together as much as possible and not be naïve." Spoken like someone isn't taking future US support for granted.

Say It Ain't Joe: 'He Needs to Drop Out,' Biden Campaign Official Says

  • Biden Mistakenly Introduces Zelenskyy as Putin, Praises 'Vice President Trump' Instead of Harris "'People wanted to give him the week because they didn't want to do it while he's hosting NATO. But post-NATO, a barrage of people are going to come out,' said a Democratic strategist who works closely with House Democrats." via Rolling Stone, Politico, and the Associated Press.
  • Obama Spoke to Clooney Before His Big Break with Biden and 'Didn't Object'; Schumer Is 'Open' to Replacement Candidate At least three more Congressional Democrats called on Biden to step aside from the top of the presidential ticket following his NATO news conference yesterday, including Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. via Politico, Axios, and NBC News.
  • Biden Campaign 'Quietly' Tests Harris; Donor Network Taps 'Black Swan Fund' to Boost Her "The Trump campaign referred to her as 'Low IQ Kamala'" yesterday, which is, it must be noted, extremely racist. via the New York Times and the Washington Post.
  • Forget 'Elites,' It's Voters Who Want Biden to Bow Out One new nationwide poll shows 67 percent of US adults and 56 percent of Democrats want Biden to "step aside and let someone else run," with most favoring Harris as the replacement candidate. via the Post, the Times, and the Associated Press.

Suburban New York Republican Forms Paramilitary Gang

Fresh off yesterday's news that fascist former military officers are drawing up "Deep State target lists" for violent retribution by cops loyal to Donald Trump, the New York Times reports that Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, an ally of the deranged felon, "is recruiting 75 armed citizens, many of them former police officers, for a force of 'special deputies' to be activated whenever he chooses." Far-right militias used to be a rural thing, but Trump transformed them into a kind of personal army and inspired them to make incursions into the cities during in his first term. Nassau County Democrats and concerned local Jews liken "Blakeman's initiative to the rise of Nazi forces under Hitler" – specifically the Brownshirts – but "Blakeman, who is Jewish, called the comparison offensive." He imagines activating the militia during emergencies, including during a future "riot" he expects to break out in his wealthy Long Island enclave. Meanwhile in Washington, DC, the Project 2025 masterminds at the Heritage Foundation preemptively accused the Biden administration of rigging the November election, and predicted that Trumpists "will [not] swallow that so easily as they did in 2020" (when they stormed the Capitol).

QUICKEST QUICKIES

  • 1.1 Million Texas Are Still Without Power 3 Days After Beryl, and Half of Them Still Won't Have It Next Week In southeast Texas, 20 percent of hospitals are using emergency generators for electricity, and doctors are delaying patient discharges because their medications must be kept cool, which has led to a shortage of both rooms and ambulances; GOP Gov. Greg Abbott is off touring Asia. via the Associated Press, the Texas Tribune, and the New York Times.
  • French Unions Aren't Ruling Out Protests During the Olympics to Push Macron to Accept a Leftist Prime Minister "The expectations of workers around purchasing power and working conditions have not disappeared," CFDT union leader Marylise Léon says. "To strike is sometimes the only way to be able to unblock a situation." via the Associated Press.
  • Elon Musk Wants to Use His Own Sperm to Genetically Engineer a Martian Master Race The white supremacist billionaire also claims a second human science experiment subject will receive a Neuralink brain implant in "the next week or so." via the New York Times and the Guardian.
  • No Longer Leaving Money on the Table, IRS Collects $1 Billion from Tax Delinquent Millionaires Enforcement targeting the wealthy fell by the wayside under Trump, but became a priority again thanks to $60 billion in additional funding for the agency in President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. via the Washington Post.

SOME NUMBER

186,000

That's how many people in Gaza have died, directly or indirectly, as a result of the war there since last Oct. 7 – far more than the 38,000 tallied by the Gaza Health Ministry – according to estimates published last week in the Lancet medical journal. HuffPost reports that the new estimates inspired several groups to renew demands that the Biden administration halt military and financial support to Israel. There's no sign of that happening, but the administration did say yesterday that it expects to permanently shut down the floating aid delivery pier it built in response to criticism that it wasn't doing enough to protect Palestinian civilians.

ON THE SHOW TODAY

7/12: It's Casual Friday! Sam and Emma speak with Ryan Grim, reporter at the newly founded venture Drop Site News and co-host of Counter Points, to talk about Drop Site and break down the biggest headlines of the day.

DON'T MISS MR CLIPS‌

REPORT: Netanyahu Doing Everything He Can to Avoid a Ceasefire

Haaretz has indeed done a lot of reporting on this.

George Clooney Sends Biden Backers Into a Seething Rage

The Biden campaign's response here is truly one for the ages, but this braggy riposte from Nick Kristof wasn't really necessary.

PARTING WORDS

"You have to imagine that it's 110 degrees and I'm up on a 40-foot ladder with the sun beating down on my head. It's like working with a fever throughout my entire body. ... I worked for four years for a boss who didn't give us breaks and didn't give us water, Gatorade or electrolytes — nothing. All they care about is getting work out of you. They don't care how hot it is."

-- Veronica Carrasco, a 40-year-old construction worker in Texas, speaking to the Washington Post about what it's like to work outdoors all day in this era of climate change. New Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules proposed by the Biden administration would protect 36 million people, including 4.3 million construction workers, from extreme heat. But business groups and Republicans are already planning court challenges to the rules, which "will be dead on arrival" if Trump wins in November.

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