From The Hill
Vice President Vance defended his jab about Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen’s weight after the price of a $20 burrito sparked a GOP debate over affordability. In an interview with Salem News Channel’s Hugh Hewitt, Vance doubled down on his joke directed at Thiessen as part of an ongoing online conversation…
Sydney Towle’s family is dealing with an “unimaginable loss” following the influencer’s tragic death … while also raising money to make sure she is remembered. A GoFundMe was launched for the Towle family to create a memorial bench at Dartmouth…
From TMZ.
Sophia Laforteza, a singer with the popular girl group Katseye, is taking a temporary break to focus on her “mental health and wellness,” the group has announced. In a statement posted to social media site Weverse, the group said that Laforteza “will be temporarily unable to participate in upcoming promotional activities” and noted, “it is […]
Source: Deadline.
It was the mistake heard ’round the world. In late June, NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg misheard an announcement on the final day of the Supreme Court’s most recent term and reported that Justice Samuel Alito was retiring.
The report sent shockwaves through legal and political circles, but as NPR soon made clear, it was wrong and the conservative jurist had made no such announcement.
Nevertheless, the reporting generated a new round of chatter about Alito and his future, and in the weeks that followed the NRP error, there were even some reports about who Donald Trump might consider as Alito’s successor, which struck many observers as a signal from the president to the justice who so consistently sides with the Republican White House.
If Alito noticed the hints, he chose to ignore them. The Wall Street Journal recently spoke to the 76-year-old jurist in his chambers and reported:
“Obviously I’m here for another term,” Justice Alito [said]. … Some conservatives have publicly suggested he should retire and take one for the team, as Stephen Breyer did in 2022 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t when Barack Obama was president, both under intense pressure from the left. Do such calls bother Justice Alito?
“It’s not pleasant, in the sense that it’s a reminder of mortality,” he says. “It’s like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around. But it goes with life tenure.”
Alito, the second-oldest sitting justice on the high court (Clarence Thomas is two years older), did not elaborate as to when he might step down, although his on-the-record comments suggest his retirement is not near and won’t happen this year.
The political relevance of this is significant: If Alito had decided to retire, he could take comfort in knowing the incumbent president would appoint a successor who shared the justice’s ideology and who would very likely be confirmed by the Republican majority in the Senate.
His decision to put off that decision opens the door to a provocative possibility. If he were to retire in 2027 or 2028, would a potentially Democratic-led Senate confirm Trump’s nominee? (The last time a Senate led by one party confirmed a Supreme Court nominee chosen by the president of the other party was 1991.)
The stakes in the midterm elections were already high. Alito just pushed them a little higher.
The post ‘I’m here for another term’: Alito quashes speculation about his possible retirement appeared first on MS NOW.
From MS Now.
Trump is once again threatening to fire Cook over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud after an earlier effort to remove Cook was struck down by the Supreme Court.
(Image credit: Kevin Dietsch)
Source: NPR.
From The Hill
The White House is amplifying calls from agricultural associations for the Senate to pass a $95 billion framework for a third budget reconciliation package, which includes a tranche of farm aid along with emergency Iran war funding. In statements first provided to The Hill by the White House, the American Sugar Alliance, the Farm Credit…
Model and artist Serena Wardell married Fishbowl founder Casper Ettelson at her family’s ancestral home of Crom Castle in rural Ireland, with the bride making the wedding stationery, keepsakes, and her bouquet herself.
Source: Vogue
This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 6 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
On Tuesday, voters in Tennessee had their first election under a new congressional map that was pushed through by state Republicans in May, after the Supreme Court gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act.
It is one of the most extreme Republican gerrymanders in the country, one that took the state’s last majority-minority congressional district, in Memphis, and split it into three pieces. The goal was to make a map that favors the GOP in all nine of the state’s House seats. Just like President Donald Trump wanted: Let the party pick their voters instead of the other way around.
This is how Republicans plan to win the midterms: first and foremost, rig the board with gerrymandering, then sabotage and subvert fair elections through any means at their disposal.
It is a torrent of hate. It is beyond anything I can ever remember in the post-9/11 era of Islamophobia.
But they also have a backup plan. It’s not to make people’s lives better or to bring down prices — it’s to flood America with pure hate and demagoguery.
The masks are off. As more candidates emerge from these primaries, you are seeing that hatred play out among Republicans and on right-wing media. They’re spewing the most vile demagoguery they can muster, particularly the disgusting anti-Muslim bigotry and hateful rhetoric that is being whipped up at levels that are through the roof.
The vitriol they beta-tested against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now all being brought to bear on one candidate in particular: Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan’s contentious Democratic Senate primary this week.
El-Sayed is a native-born U.S. citizen, a Rhodes scholar and an epidemiologist who is the child of two engineers from Egypt. Since his victory on Tuesday, he has become target No. 1 for Republicans. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have launched racist attacks against the Democrat. On Wednesday his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, put out a statement saying he was “running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11,” which is a malicious lie. The National Republican Senatorial Committee called El-Sayed “the most radical candidate in America” and referred to him by his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, something it had not done in any previous press releases.
It is a torrent of hate. It is beyond anything I can ever remember in the post-9/11 era of Islamophobia.
It is also toxic. How do you think these messages of irrational fear and hatred sound in the ears of the remaining MAGA faithful, the people who gleefully held signs that said “Mass Deportations Now” at the last Republican National Convention? What Trump and other Republicans are doing is to provide their base with a permission structure for ghastly levels of racism.
If you are wondering about the effect this rhetoric is having on the people that Trump and his allies are targeting the most, we got two incredible examples this week.
One came at the president’s rally in Las Vegas on Wednesday, one day after the shooting death of a local police officer, a 30-year-old Marine veteran named Austin Abdelnabi. Before Trump spoke, the Republican governor of Nevada, Joe Lombardo, tried to honor Abdelnabi with a moment of silence. Instead, he was met with boos from the MAGA crowd. Just his name was enough to elicit boos. You can’t stop that hatred once you’ve unleashed and weaponized it.
And it’s already affecting Republican races in the most surprising of ways. Take Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, which Trump won in 2024. In this week’s primary, Trump endorsed a Republican named Amir Hassan for that seat. He is a Flint native and a Navy veteran. He was a Muslim but converted to Christianity, and now he is anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant. He also got endorsements from House Speaker Mike Johnson and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.
Hassan’s main competition in the primary came from Tom Smith, a small-business man whose campaign page on Facebook had 95 followers. Smith had raised less than $2,000 for the race.
We know that because it is written in his last campaign filing with the Federal Elections Commission, which Smith hand-wrote and snail-mailed. It read, “Dear FEC Inspector: This is to notify you that Tom Smith for Congress was a late entry into the race … P.S. I could not file this form electronically because I have had no success logging in and have not been able to get a response from the help desk.”
Last month, Smith cut a 15-second video saying he was dropping out of the race and endorsing another candidate who had gathered petition signatures to get on the ballot.
It’s clear you can’t stop that hatred once you’ve unleashed and weaponized it.
From there should have been clear sailing for Hassan — except that a lot of Trump’s followers assumed Hassan was Muslim and wondered why the president had endorsed him. The disinformation and hatred got so bad, Hassan felt compelled to address it in a selfie video filmed in his car.
Then, on Tuesday, Hassan had his day at the polls — and lost. Hassan was defeated by nearly 20 points by Smith, the guy who raised less than $2,000 and dropped out of the race.
There is one — and only one — explanation for why this happened: The Republican Party’s reason for being is now utterly organized around open bigotry.
We’ve seen some of this before with the so-called Muslim ban and with Trump’s abuse of prominent Muslim, Arab American and Asian American politicians. But now it’s kicked into overdrive. Republican elected officials, from the president to Congress to statehouses across the country, are engaging in a racist project to make everyone with a last name like El-Sayed or Hassan or Abdelnabi feel like they are not really American, like they don’t belong here.
And the reason they are doing this is to turn all the pent-up anger and rage and frustration at Trump’s corrupt failure of an administration toward our Muslim neighbors.
It’s already ugly, and as we approach the midterms, it’s going to get even uglier.
Allison Detzel contributed.
The post The GOP’s midterm backup plan: Bigotry appeared first on MS NOW.
From MS Now.
In a combative face-to-face confrontation on Thursday night in San Diego, angry military families challenged the acting secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao, over difficult conditions aboard the USS Lincoln as its combat mission against Iran stretches onward with no clear date to return home, according to two people who attended the in-person meeting.
Tensions boiled over again during a separate virtual meeting later that night between Navy leadership and family members of the 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard the Lincoln, according to audio and video recordings of the virtual meeting reviewed by MS NOW.
In both of those meetings, family members expressed concerns directly to Navy leaders about the well-being and safety of their loved ones after the aircraft carrier set a modern-day record during the ongoing Iran war for the most continuous days at sea.
Among the concerns brought up in the contentious meetings: the sailors’ mental health, safety on deck, a lack of supplies, food shortages, water contamination and disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages en route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.
Loved ones pleaded for information on when their sailors would return home. It remains a question that does not have any answer.
In the tense and fiery in-person town hall at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego, Cao said that the Navy is preparing another carrier strike group — the USS Theodore Roosevelt — to deploy to the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln, according to two people who attended.
But Cao was unable to specify when that relief would come, citing operational security.
About 200 family members packed into a banquet room at the Island Club, a catering and event center on base, demanding answers from the acting secretary of the Navy. At times, spouses of sailors on the ship were in tears asking leaders what was being done to address issues of mental health and exhaustion, the two people who attended told MS NOW.
One parent said her daughter feels that she is never going to come home and believes she is going to die on the ship. Others asserted that the Navy had not done enough to take care of the sailors as they fight this war.
One woman questioned the mission and said she found it difficult to be proud of her sailor when she believed the military was “killing innocent civilians” and her sailor expressed guilt about what he was doing. Her comment was met with applause from the audience.
While the deployment of the Lincoln appears to have been extended for a second time, in both meetings Navy leaders emphasized the professionalism and grit of the sailors on board.
Vice Adm. Joseph Cahill and Vice Adm. Douglas Verissimo, the top commanders for Naval surface forces and Naval air forces for the Pacific Fleet, along with the senior enlisted leaders addressed the 200-plus attendees virtually Thursday night.
“I cannot even tell you how proud we are of them. They have executed with a level of precision and professionalism that just goes to the quality of our people that have chosen to put the cloth of our nation on our shoulder and answer this call,” Cahill told attendees, noting that the families are an important touchpoint for leadership to understand the challenges the sailors are facing.
As of Friday, the aircraft carrier had been on deployment for 259 days, after leaving its home port of San Diego on Nov. 21. The ship has only stopped twice, once in Guam in December and then July 7, when it briefly pulled into Oman — keeping the crew at sea for 208 continuous days.
After this deployment, the Lincoln and its sailors will be assigned to a different home port in Bremerton, Washington, from San Diego, which has left many of the families stuck in limbo as they wait to figure out when they should make the move north from California.
For now, Navy leaders say that there is a 58-day window for the families to move after the Lincoln comes back and that they are looking at Dec. 31 as a potential target for them to have a “time frame” of when that could happen.
The families expressed frustration that their loved ones were missing many once-in-a-lifetime events, including births of new children and funeral services for close relatives.
One spouse said they have a baby at home who was born during the Lincoln’s deployment.
“My husband has gotten no time with her,” the spouse said. The spouse acknowledged other attendees were feeling the same way, as many expressed their frustrations via the town hall’s virtual chat room, according to audio and video of the virtual meeting reviewed by MS NOW.
“We have friends that are on this boat as well that — they have yet to meet their children,” the spouse continued. “And I just think, like, a lot of us are kind of confused and just feeling frustrated that right now we’re in limbo of not having a date to come home.”
“I wish we could give that to you,” Verissimo responded. “We are working to finalize that, and I can’t … I look forward to the day when we can have at least a date window for home port, and that means they’re heading in the right direction. But we don’t have that right now.”
Verissimo acknowledged that long deployments seem to be becoming “more frequent” in the Navy, reflecting back to deployments during Covid-19, but he said he recognized that the circumstances are different, as the military is engaged in active fighting.
“We hear you loud and clear the impact this has on families, on service members, and the long-term ability of us to stand, sustain our forces’ health,” Cahill said.
But many family members are concerned about potential exhaustion, low morale and the mental health of the sailors and Marines as the war with Iran nears its 23rd week with no clear end in sight.
Many in the virtual town hall questioned what mental health resources are currently available on the carrier and what will be made available upon its return, according to audio and video of the meeting reviewed by MS NOW.
Cahill detailed an approach that includes having deployment-resilience counselors and chaplains on the warships, paired with “Human Factors Councils,” which Navy policy says are “designed to review the human factors that impact the wellness of individuals within the command and identify primary prevention efforts to reduce relevant risk(s).”
“It’s about the unit understanding and sitting down with sailors individually on their Human Factors Councils and having a conversation about where they’re at in their moment in time,” Cahill said.
As for when the Lincoln will return home, Cahill said the leadership team is addressing a number of requirements to “understand each individual sailor” that will be communicated back through a team of fleet and family support centers.
On top of the timeline and mental health concerns, family members expressed worry about the living conditions and food supply on board the carrier, conditions recently reported by MS NOW.
The leaders acknowledged that there had been a “stubborn clog” that caused many of the toilets in a certain zone on the ship not to work for an extended period of time, but maintained that sailors on the ship had been trained to address these plumbing issues and that most of the non-operational toilets were repaired quickly.
They also said that what many sailors think is mold in the showers might actually be mildew “that is not appealing to any of us” as a result of difficult ventilation systems on a ship, but that they take these health concerns seriously and use industrial hygienists to test the bathrooms to make sure fans are working and air is flowing.
They also discussed the unique supply chain challenges that caused a domino effect for timely deliveries of mail, inventory for the ships’ stores and food to the aircraft carrier and the supporting ships that are part of the larger carrier strike group.
The active war with Iran in the Persian Gulf made it hard for supplies to get to the ship from the Navy 5th Fleet’s base in Bahrain, Verissimo said during the virtual town hall meeting.
“When Bahrain was no longer a port for logistics, food and mail … all of the gear that was there when the shooting started got stuck there,” Verissimo said, according to audio and video of the meeting reviewed by MS NOW.
“So, that was an initial very large backlog. That also caused us to, under very contested logistics, very difficult and long supply lines, we had to prioritize food, which was also a challenge and remains on occasion to be a challenge,” Verissimo said.
Verissimo said the Navy prioritized food, then items for the ship’s store like toothpaste and shampoo, and then mail when it can figure out the logistics of getting shipments out to sea. The officials said getting fresh fruit and vegetables to the ship will continue to be a problem because the food spoils by the time it gets there.
“We’re doing a better job with supplies and mail. It’s getting better, it’s still not good, and it was extremely bad for a little while,” Verissimo said. “But we are, we are as a nation doing the best we can.”
Near the end of the virtual town hall, a force master chief said they had been “texting the Lincoln” to get answers on some of the concerns. The text messages that came back, they said, said there was no mold but there was working air conditioning on board, as well as clean water and two protein options for meals. It is unclear whom the force master chief was texting.
The leaders closed out the virtual meeting by thanking the families for their support of the service members during the deployment and encouraging them to reach out to their ombudsmen with any concerns or questions.
“I couldn’t be more proud of young people, old people, all of them working together in some extremely tough circumstances, tougher than I’ve ever experienced in 39 years in uniform,” Verissimo said in closing. “This has been some prolonged work that the Lincoln Strike Group has been under, and I am personally looking forward to the day that we can declassify some of the work that they’ve been doing.”
The post In fiery meeting, military families confront acting Navy secretary over conditions on the USS Lincoln appeared first on MS NOW.
From MS Now.
Stefon Diggs claims his male sexual assault accuser, Christopher Griffith, is full of it … and only trying to make new claims in their legal battle in an attempt to get more publicity for himself. The NFL star filed court docs, obtained by TMZ,…
From TMZ.
Hair removal cream promises smooth skin in minutes, but is it safe? Dermatologists break down how it works, who should avoid it, and the best products to try.
This post was originally published on NBC News.
From The Hill
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will equip its officers with body cameras over the next two months, according to reports, but the agency’s policy gives officials broad discretion over footage released to the public that’s deemed in its “best interests.” More than half of the agency’s field officers have already been outfitted with the body…