Ryan Clark called out by LeSean McCoy over crying ‘for clicks’ after ESPN firing

Ryan Clark’s firing by ESPN last week took the sports media world by storm. Clark was fired in the middle of “NFL Live” last Monday, and he later grew emotional addressing his departure on his “The Pivot” podcast.

Stampede of GOP blunders has achieved the unimaginable — given Dems a grasp on Alabama

There’s a hypothesis I can’t shake after years of observations.Alabama Republicans are getting bad at politics.So far, that hasn’t threatened their hegemony. The party controls all state offices; holds seven of the state’s nine congressional seats and enjoys supermajorities in the Alabama Legislature.For that, the GOP can thank an opposition that for the better part of 16 years has been weak, underfunded and divided. It’s like watching a high school baseball team take the field against a sixth-grade rec squad whose coaches are screaming at each other.No need for brilliant skill. Swing the bat and jog the bases while the ball rolls past the fielders and toward the outfield fence.But playing weak opponents can weaken your grasp of the fundamentals. And two developments this month felt like unforced errors.A pair of Republican congressmen — Gary Palmer of Hoover and Robert Aderholt of Haleyville — went out of their way to announce their support of a federal bill that would ban transgender women from joining the Daughters of the American Revolution.If your reaction to that sentence was “huh?” well, it was mine too. I hate to describe what’s happening, because it implies there’s a good-faith disagreement that requires the mediation of Congress. There isn’t. It’s just another instance of bigots demanding the imposition of bigotry.Here’s a summary. Leaders of the Daughters of the American Revolution said in 2023 that they would welcome transgender people who meet their membership requirements. As is the now-tedious inevitability, a few gonad obsessives lost their minds. Earlier this month, about 60% of the delegates at a DAR conference (called a “Continental Congress”) voted to keep the policy. The people who lost now want Congress to intervene.Good for the DAR for preserving common decency. There is zero issue with transgender people being in the organization. A responsible official might turn away from the hate and toward issues like grocery prices, healthcare costs and the quality of education.Yet Palmer and Aderholt consider this issue just as important as those, if not more so. They think this niche obsession is a winner. Maybe with Alabama’s identity-obsessed, lickspittle conservative media. The rest of us may properly scratch our heads.Then there’s Tommy Tuberville’s stampede toward data centers.The Republican gubernatorial nominee told Alabama sheriffs that he opposed statewide moratoriums on data centers; that concerns about their community impacts were “bullcrap” and that China drove opposition to them. He stuck with this argument (and the ludicrous Chinese connection) in later comments to a Huntsville TV station.Tuberville was taking his cues from President Donald Trump, who attacked New York for creating a statewide moratorium on data centers. The U.S. senator has always played Smithers to Trump’s Burns, so that’s not surprising.But it’s one thing for Tuberville to make the case for data centers in his read-the-assignment-minutes-before-class kind of way. Politics 101 demands that you acknowledge the widespread concerns the projects are sparking in Alabama, over power consumption and environmental effects.Here’s a non-exhaustive list of Alabama communities that have seen strong local opposition to data centers or moved to ban them: Bessemer. Pinson. Wilsonville. Cullman. Birmingham. Mobile. Leeds. Homewood. Fairfield. Nationwide, more Americans oppose having data centers in their neighborhoods than support them.This is not manipulation by a foreign government. These are citizens in an ostensible democracy voicing their concerns. A sensible politician would not antagonize people packing town halls and organizing against data centers.Yet Tuberville feels comfortable not only dismissing the critics, but impugning their motives. Even in a place like Cullman, not known for green politics or liberal ideas. If the Republican gubernatorial nominee thinks data centers are the future, he has to acknowledge the concerns. You won’t make data center opponents more comfortable with the facilities by calling them stooges.In the DAR example, we have a willful ignorance of Alabama’s needs. In data centers, we have an open opposition to them. And in both, there’s a seeming disconnect between the politicians and the voters.But this isn’t the only example from Team Red. There was the odd move to rename the Gulf of Mexico 15 months after Trump likely forgot that he ever raised the issue. Or responding to outrage over Alabama’s high power bills by kneecapping the state’s electric regulatory commission. Or the all-Republican Supreme Court confidently ending IVF treatments in the state without considering the political consequences. In each case, you see a party paying more attention to donors or its weird obsessions than what’s happening beyond them.I doubt this will lead to any profound change in November. The Republicans’ institutional advantages are significant.

ICE Reportedly Set to Ramp Up Operations Against Haitian Migrants After TPS Ruling

The potential crackdown follows a Supreme Court ruling that allowed the Trump Administration to end Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status.

A little-known loophole could help Trump halt the midterms with one firing

Democrats have been speculating about and prepping for the numerous ways in which President Donald Trump could meddle with forthcoming midterms, but according to a new piece from The New York Times, there is one person he could fire that would completely upend the results — and it is completely legal.Writing on Monday for the Times, veteran reporter Jeffrey Toobin stressed that Trump's "obsession" with preventing a GOP wipeout in the midterms remains a very live threat, even as his efforts to spread claims about election fraud have fallen flat so far. Toobin spoke with Rep. Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat, about his efforts to game out various scenarios, including ways that the president could try to block the certification of certain results after the elections, an idea that has gotten less attention recently as Trump has focused on efforts to control who is allowed to vote."The process for installing a new House of Representatives begins when the states certify the results in each of the 435 races. The rules vary by state, but most require election officials to certify by late November or early December," Toobin explained. "In recent years, Trump-aligned local officials have frequently used false claims of fraud or noncitizens voting as justification to decline to certify election results. Since 2020, more than 30 local officials in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have refused to certify election results, many in hopes of forestalling Democratic victories."Morelle said that the plan for this possibility is to take Trump to court over it, something the "Democrats have had success" with recently, using courts to force local officials to certify results.Still, there is another person that Trump could potentially target as a way to halt the process of swearing in a new Democratic-majority: the House of Representatives Clerk, who has "the job of assembling the 'roll' of new members to be sworn in on Jan. 3, 2027." The current clerk, Kevin McCumber, is widely considered to be a "nonpartisan" figure, and would be unlikely to go along with demands from Trump to interfere with the swearing-in process."One disaster scenario, according to Mr. Morelle, would be this: After results show the Democrats winning a majority in the House, the president declares that the election is full of fraud and the winners don’t need to be certified," Toobin explained. "Mr. Trump could then demand that Speaker Mike Johnson fire Mr. McCumber, which Mr. Johnson has the legal right to do. Under the procedures of the House, the speaker can install a more compliant successor — that is, a G.O.P. toady. In this scenario, Speaker Johnson’s designee, at Mr. Trump’s instigation, would produce a roll of new House members that included Republicans in races that Democrats believed they had won."He added: "While the speaker does have the unilateral power to remove the clerk, his choice for a permanent replacement would have to be approved by a vote of House members. Mr. Morelle said that in that case, Speaker Johnson might not be able to persuade his slim Republican majority to replace Mr. McCumber."“You’d have a number of members who are retiring, who I think would no longer be beholden to Johnson or the president, who I think would take a very, very dim view of efforts to overturn the election," Morelle said.

DHS admission suggests sham emergency will justify ICE arrests at midterm polls

ICE won’t rule out making arrests at polling places during the November midterm elections in the event of “an active public safety threat,” the Department of Homeland Security admitted to Raw Story.The details of what would constitute such a threat were left vague.The statement comes as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement faces an Aug. 7 deadline to begin turning over some 11,000 documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Democratic Party, and Secretary Markwayne Mullin is threatening prison time for election officials who refuse to go along with a demand by the Trump administration that states purge alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls.“ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” the department said in an email to Raw Story last week that was attributed to a “DHS official.” “ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement and if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action.”The statement from DHS is the strongest signal yet of the administration’s intentions to potentially deploy federal agents or soldiers to polling places — an intimidation tactic promoted by Trump ally Steve Bannon that has raised alarms among Democrats and democracy advocates.ICE had previously told the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, it had no records in response to its FOIA Lawsuit seeking documents from DHS, the Department of Justice and Department of Defense on potential deployment of federal forces to voting sites and other election locations.But the agency was forced to take a second look after the DNC pointed to media reports on ICE agents showing up at voting sites during primary elections in Texas and California, and entering a polling place in New York state to question a poll worker about a social media post she made that was critical of the agent who fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.Separately, the government disclosed that the Department of Justice’s FOIA office is consulting with “other DOJ components and Executive Branch agencies,” suggesting a high-level review of 55 pages of “potentially responsive records,” according to the government’s report to a federal judge overseeing the case. The government has committed only to “issuing a response” on those documents by Saturday.While Democrats brace for the presence of ICE agents and other federal officers at polling places in November, the Trump administration is making wide-ranging claims about supposed foreign interference in U.S. elections and trumpeting a claim that DHS found 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.David Becker, executive director of the pro-democracy group Center for Election Innovation & Research, cast doubt on that claim.“The public voter files used by the federal government do not have any unique identifiers, so no matter what list they compare to, there’s no methodologically sound way to get valid voter registration matches,” he said, adding that it’s impossible to accurately match names from public voter lists with commercial data if either is missing a Social Security number.“All you would get — and this may have been the intent — is a boatload of false positives,” Becker continued. “I suspect this is why DHS is hiding the ball, refusing to share its list with the states or even disclose in detail its methodology, even as they threaten the states. This number has no bearing on reality and may just as well have been made up.”DHS’s statement to Raw Story about ICE potentially making arrests at polling places echoes Mullins’ comments during an interview last month with CNN’s “State of the Union.”“ICE agents are there to flex, if we need to,” Mullin said. “You saw ICE at TSA lines, not processing, but in the soft areas. If a threat were to arise, for whatever reason, at a polling station — say a bomb threat would be called in — our ICE agents are more than just immigration customs enforcement; they’re also trained to have SRT, which means that we can have an emergency team respond quickly.”Mullin added that agents would not engage in “voter identification.”Todd Blanche, who is up for confirmation as attorney general, has also expressed support for deploying ICE agents to polling places.“Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?” Blanche asked during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. “Illegals can’t vote.”The White House did not respond on the record to an inquiry about whether Trump or other White House officials have held discussions with Mullin, Blanche or other leaders about the possibility of deploying federal agents to voting sites during the midterm elections.During his July 17 press briefing, Mullin invoked “national security” as a component of election administration, moving the midterm elections into a realm in which courts have historically granted the...

Homan spars with Bash over ‘deadly mistakes’ by ICE

White House Border Czar Tom Homan insisted Sunday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will keep conducting vehicle stops. The stops were briefly paused after agents were […]

Netanyahu and Zelenskyy to arrive in Washington for Graham funeral – with hopes of winning Trump’s ear

Both men scheduled to meet Trump at time where US policy towards wars in Iran and Ukraine in state of fluxBenjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are set to arrive in Washington simultaneously with the goal of winning the ear of Donald Trump at pivotal moments in wars affecting their respective countries.Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, will attend Tuesday’s funeral of Lindsey Graham, the former Republican senator for South Carolina, who died suddenly on 11 July and was a close ally of both leaders. Continue reading...

This Senate Dem Candidate Is Going to Be Left All Alone. She Should Just Accept It.