In a shot across the bow of online titans like Facebook, Google and Amazon, the Justice Department announced Tuesday it has opened a wide-ranging antitrust investigation of big technology companies and whether their online platforms have hurt competition, suppressed innovation or otherwise harmed consumers.
After hitting a new high last month, mentions of immigration as the most important problem facing the U.S. increased further to 27% in July. Since Gallup began regularly recording mentions of the issue in 1993, immigration has been cited by an average of 6% of Americans, though it has been higher in recent years. There have been occasional, typically short-lived, spikes when major immigration events were occurring.
Mexico set a new record for homicides in the first half of the year as the number of murders grew by 5.3% compared to the same period of 2018, fueled partly by cartel and gang violence in several states.
Mexico saw 3,080 killings in June, an increase of over 8% from the same month a year ago, according to official figures. The country of almost 125 million now sees as many as 100 killings per day nationwide.
“Some of us very early on saw enormous conflicts [with Mueller], even conflicted as being a witness. We knew there was something wrong,” U.S. Representative Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), one of the few Republicans skeptical of the Mueller probe from the beginning, told me on Monday. “But once the inspector general report came out and revealed the bias and corruption at the top of DOJ and FBI, we started getting help.”
Over the last several months, cities and counties across California have been releasing homeless counts. The results have been grim.
San Francisco was no exception. In May, the city released data that showed homelessness had jumped 17%. That was bad enough. Last week, a more complete accounting, known as a point-in-time count, showed the problem was even worse.
The count revealed that homelessness in a city that’s become a caricature of wealth inequality in the U.S. had actually increased by about 30% from 2017, when the last count took place.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is quite the hypocrite. The 2016 Democratic presidential runner-up and 2020 contender has long championed increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and chided companies like Disney and McDonald’s for not paying their employees that much. Last week, news broke that Sanders’ presidential campaign is not paying staffers a salary equivalent to $15 per hour. Field organizers said they make $36,000 per year working 60 hours per week, an average of $13 per hour.
While delivering a speech before One Fair Wage, a political organization lobbying for an increase to the federal minimum wage, Tlaib went further than virtually all of her fellow Democrats by demanding an even higher increase to the federal minimum wage to $20 per hour.
“The (Mueller) report presents very substantial evidence that the president is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors,” Rep. Jerry Nadler told “Fox News Sunday.” “We have to let Mueller present those facts to the American people and then see where we go from there because the administration must be held accountable and no president can be above the law.”
As of yesterday we now know that corrupt former FBI Director James Comey had an agent inside the White House reporting back to the FBI about Trump and his aides. It’s clear that Comey’s spy, Anthony Ferrante, was feeding information that he stole back to Comey. That is what spies do. But what is not yet clear is whether Ferrante, who now works for CNN, attempted to frame the President as well, from within the White House.
It is worth noting that all four — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) are members of a group called the “Justice Democrats.” The group is specifically devoted to backing primary candidates against Democratic incumbents seen as being too moderate and too white.
A Georgia state lawmaker appears to have been caught lying about her allegation that she was told to “go to back to where you came from” by a white customer in an Atlanta grocery store.
On Friday, Erica Thomas, a Democrat, alleged that a “white man” called her a “lazy son of a b*tch” and told her to “go back” to where she came from.
