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Ilhan Omar’s grifty and sordid reelection campaign

Ilhan Omar has spent $2.97 million on her reelection this year. If you set aside refunds and transfers, her operating expenditures are $2.59 million. Only five members of Congress have spent more on operating expenditures so far this cycle.

Where is all that money going?

Much of it is going to her husband.

In March, the congresswoman (who perpetually scolded anyone who inquired about her multiple marriages) married her top campaign consultant, Tim Mynett. Mynett’s ex-wife alleged in divorce filings that her husband and Omar were carrying on an affair while both were married. Why does the congresswoman’s extramarital affair matter?

For starters, marital fidelity and sexual ethics reflect on character, which matters for elected officials.

But also, when Omar is funneling the lion’s share of her fundraising to her paramour-turned-husband, it’s a matter of public corruption.

As of June 30, according to her campaign’s latest filing, Mynett’s firm, the E Street Group, has pocketed $1.04 million of her $2.59 million in operating expenditures. That means that 40% of every dollar donated to reelect Omar lands in the bank account of her husband’s firm.

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Don’t. Side. With. The. Powerful.

Don’t side with the powerful against the disempowered. Just don’t.

Learning to distinguish between empowered parties and disempowered parties can be a little tricky, because nobody likes to think of themselves as siding with the powerful against the weak. It’s something we all know intuitively to be wrong, so we’ll often find clever ways of using an incomplete analysis of the power dynamics at play which allows us to feel as though we’re fighting the power when we’re really doing the exact opposite.

And propagandists are of course all too eager to help us do this.

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DARPA’s Man in Wuhan

Michael Callahan’s career began in USAID and in the bioweapons labs of the former Soviet Union, advancing the agenda of the global bioweapons and pharmaceutical cartels. He would take what he learned there to execute a massive expansion of DARPA’s biodefense portfolio and today finds himself squarely in the center of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

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It started as a noise complaint. It ended in another fatal Phoenix police shooting

Ryan Whitaker had heard a stranger knock on his Ahwatukee apartment door in the middle of the night earlier in May. So when he heard a similar knock on a Thursday after 10 p.m. later that same week, he answered the door holding his 9 mm gun.

Holding the gun in his right hand, he was confronted by two Phoenix police officers standing on either side of the door. They appeared surprised by the sight of the firearm, body camera footage shows.

Three seconds after Whitaker opened the door, Phoenix Officer Jeff Cooke shot Whitaker in the back at least two times, killing the 40-year-old man. 

The deadly episode, which happened on May 21, is part of a string of Phoenix police shootings this year that has, yet again, reinvigorated criticism from advocates who say officers are too quick to use deadly force to resolve incidents.

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Court overturns Boston Marathon bomber’s death sentence

A federal appeals court Friday threw out Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, saying the judge who oversaw the case did not adequately screen jurors for potential biases.

A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new penalty-phase trial on whether the 27-year-old Tsarnaev should be executed for the attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.

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