UNPOPULAR OPINION: A lot of "mental health issues" disappear when bills are paid, rent is secure, and the fridge is full. Peace is expensive. And pretending money doesn't affect mental health is privilege.
‼️In Dnipro, 9 people were killed as a result of a Russian attack. The fate of 6 more people is unknown, the search is ongoing, President Zelenskyi said.
‼️In Dnipro, the bodies of a woman and an 8-year-old boy were pulled from the rubble. The number of people killed in the city has increased to 11 people.
‼️A 22-year-old man who was injured during the Russian attack in Dnipro on June 2 died in hospital. The number of people killed has increased to 17, the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration reported.
#ukraine#russia is a terrorist state#russia invades ukraine#russian war crimes#russia ukraine war#russian invasion#russian agression#russian terrorism#russia must burn#fuck russia#russia#russian culture
Millions of dollars’ worth of contraceptives meant to be distributed to low-income nations in Africa have expired, but the Trump administrat
Millions of dollars' worth of contraceptives meant to be distributed to low-income nations in Africa have expired, but the Trump administration is paying tens of thousands of dollars a month to keep them in storage in Belgium, according to a report from the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) inspector general.
About $9.7 million worth of taxpayer-funded contraceptives purchased by USAID and originally destined for low-income nations in Africa got stuck in Belgium after the Trump administration shut down the agency last year.
According to the report, about $8 million worth of hormonal contraceptives, injectable contraceptives and other family planning commodities are no longer usable after they were moved from climate-controlled storage.
But the administration has been paying approximately $5,000 per month to store those unusable products.
The additional $1.7 million in family planning commodities remain viable and continue to be stored in climate-controlled facilities in Geel, Belgium, the report stated. However, the expiration dates on that supply are approaching in the coming years, and the administration has not presented a plan on what it intends to do with them.
Expiration dates for these items range from April 2028 to September 2031.
Meanwhile, USAID has paid more than $360,000 in storage and freight costs for the contraception commodities between January 2025 and March 2026, according to the advisory.
The advisory, sent to USAID principal and Chief Operating Officer Eric Ueland, said the storage costs will escalate and warned that without a final plan from USAID, the remaining commodities will go to waste.
Progressive Lt. Gov Peggy Flanagan is surging as moderate Rep. Angie Craig runs from her immigration votes that aided Trump.
Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost:
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mowlid Mohamed was eager to be a first-time delegate at Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party convention. Decked out in campaign pins and lanyards, Mohamed, 42, was one of hundreds of diehard Democratic voters late last month taking part in the event here, where the state party endorses its slate of candidates.
A Somali-American resident of St. Paul, he was emphatic about his pick for the U.S. Senate race: “Peggy.” He was referring to Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, the progressive candidate leading in what’s become a testy primary against moderate Rep. Angie Craig.
For most of 2025, the race for this seat — the first open Senate seat in Minnesota in 20 years — looked like it was going to result in a standard-issue clash between the left and centrist wings of the Democratic Party. Things changed this winter, when the Trump administration sent thousands of federal immigration enforcement officers into the state for a monthslong occupation, traumatizing immigrant communities, breaking apart families and fatally shooting two American citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, in broad daylight.
In Minnesota and nationally, Democrats are at a crossroads in defining who they are as a party. Party leaders failed to offer a collective path forward after a crushing loss in the 2024 presidential election and amid an incredibly dark two years of GOP domination in Washington. Progressives and moderates seem even further apart on what they think it takes to win elections and what voters want in the November midterms.
Craig, a four-term congresswoman who flipped her suburban Twin Cities district from red to blue in 2018, seems to think “electability” and a record of working well with Republicans are what Democratic voters are looking for. In normal times, maybe it would have been.
But the Immigration and Customs Enforcement invasion scrambled everything. It jolted the state’s already civic-minded Democratic base to get even more engaged; a whopping 57% of the delegates at the party’s convention were first-time participants.
Mohamed, for one, said a main reason he was backing Flanagan was that, after the DFL endorsement process began in February and as the ICE occupation was in full force, Faith In Minnesota, a racial and economic justice nonprofit he is associated with, invited both Senate candidates to meet with them. Only Flanagan came.
“Angie Craig never showed up,” he said. “Peggy did come. We’ve been meeting with her.”
The invasion flipped the local political environment, replacing voter anger over the state’s fraud scandal — which Republicans used to justify the immigration crackdown — with far deeper resentment of the Trump administration. Republicans, who thought they had an edge because of dissatisfaction with Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, are now seen as long shots for any statewide success.
And it turned Craig’s votes for stronger immigration enforcement from smart plays for the center of the electorate into millstones associating her with a despised invasion. In January 2025, the congresswoman voted for a Republican bill that gave President Donald Trump new powers to detain immigrants accused of crimes, paving the way for the administration’s ICE assault on Minnesota. She also voted for a GOP resolution last summer condemning an antisemitic attack that included a line expressing gratitude to ICE “for protecting the homeland.”
The result has given Flanagan clear momentum and left Craig making arguments about the fraud case and electability at a time when Democratic voters think they have little reason to care about either of those things.
In an interview, Flanagan said Craig’s campaign effort seems like “a great strategy for 2016.”
“Things have changed here,” she said. “Minnesota was rocked by Operation Metro Surge that she played a hand in by her Laken Riley vote and by praising ICE. That’s for real.”
[...]
A pivotal moment in Flanagan’s campaign was a couple of weeks ago, when she stood on stage at the Democratic Party’s state convention and accepted her party’s endorsement for Senate.
A community organizer by trade, Flanagan’s speech assailed Trump’s war in Iran and his plans for a lavish, taxpayer-funded White House ballroom. She vowed to fight to raise the federal minimum wage, codify access to abortion and pass Medicare for All. She also took a thinly veiled shot at Craig, lumping her in with nameless powerful people in Washington who she said have left regular Americans behind.
“We got here in part because too many Democrats have been weak,” Flanagan said to cheers from the event’s 1,200 delegates. “Everywhere I go, people tell me they’re sick and tired of Democrats bending to Republicans and fighting from a defensive crouch. We can’t just be the lesser of two evils, and we will never, ever win by being a pale shadow of our opponents.”
Craig wasn’t there for Flanagan’s comments. In fact, she was nowhere near her party’s convention. She was at a brewery more than an hour away in the town of Woodbury, hosting a roundtable with a dozen people her campaign described as “disaffected voters,” though one turned out to be a Democratic state legislator, Rep. Ethan Cha.
With beers flowing, the congresswoman told the group she didn’t want her state party’s endorsement anyway and had always planned to run directly for the primary. She said her time was better spent meeting directly with the 550,000 people in the state expected to vote in the primary election, not with the 1,200 Democratic delegates gathered in Rochester.
[...]
She also argued that Flanagan is vulnerable in the general election because Republicans are eager to tie her to Minnesota’s fraud scandal, which centers on the nonprofit Feeding Our Future in 2021 exploiting a federal child nutrition program to steal $250 million. Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people in the case, and the group’s leader was sentenced to 41 years in prison. Gov. Walz responded by working with the state Legislature to put new anti-fraud measures in place, but the situation roiled his administration and was part of the reason he dropped his reelection bid this year.
Trump, who ran against Walz in 2024 when he was Kamala Harris’ vice presidential pick, has been trying to breathe new life into the issue and directed fresh investigations into the matter, baselessly accusing Walz and other Democrats of facilitating that fraud. Craig’s argument is that Flanagan, by proxy, is culpable.
“Primary voters, if they care about winning, do they care that selecting Peggy Flanagan is putting in the person who’s been responsible for the last eight years’ No. 2 in state government?” said the congresswoman. “Republicans are dying to run against Peggy Flanagan because they believe they will be able to attach the fraud issues to her.”
A Minnesota US Senate primary between Angie Craig and Peggy Flanagan has been a test of which direction the Democratic Party goes, with Flanagan well to the left of Craig.
The ICE raids of Minneapolis/St. Paul further divided the already volatile race.
I think leftists need to refer to the United States as a slave state more often. It has one of the highest prison populations per capita of any nation, slavery is legal as punishment for a crime, and Black people are disproportionately imprisoned and given longer sentences. The prison industrial complex is modern-day slavery
The spectacle of Donald Trump's cage fight shows spits at the memory of Abraham Lincoln and trashes our White House
Steve Beschloss at America, America:
Elect a clown, expect a circus.
The truth of this proverb was on painful display this weekend in Washington, D.C., courtesy of a deeply unwell man who spits on our history, glorifies violence and sows hatred.
He turned our White House grounds into a gross commercial venue for violent cage fights, adding fresh evidence that his malignancy knows no bottom.
It’s hard to overstate what a perverse irony it is—in this, the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding—that such a man was returned to the presidency to accelerate America’s decline while enriching himself.
But there on the South Lawn—with the White House bathed in blue in the background—cage fighters were beating each other up on a platform advertising Bud Light, online betting and Monster Energy drinks. These fighters were seen on camera doing their preparations from inside the White House, while nauseating sycophants like Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg and House Speaker Mike Johnson cheered from the audience.
This is the kind of demoralizing spectacle Donald Trump wanted for his 80th birthday—lying that it has anything to do with the 250th celebration of American independence.
We can take some solace in knowing that just 16 percent of Americans find such an event appropriate at our White House. Still, the sight of the White House in the Paramount+ streaming was enough to make me cry.
Yet I’d like to focus here not on this sickening show, but on what happened Friday night at our sacred Lincoln Memorial. The disgrace and dishonor that took place there should not be forgotten—and it should remind us why this memorial is such a meaningful part of our nation’s history.
First, what happened:
The cage fighters, part of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), descended the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with our greatest president’s marble statue in the background.
And they descended for a press conference—which included shoving and trading insults—between the two columns of the Armed Forces Full Honor Cordon. These are uniformed soldiers deployed to honor heads of state, other visiting dignitaries, top government officials or fallen military heroes.
This respected corps is not meant to honor bloody cage fighters.
But what made this display particularly vile was the choice of venue. The Lincoln Memorial was completed and dedicated in 1922 when Warren G. Harding was president, just 57 years after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War.
Those tragedies were not just distant memories. From today’s perspective, that would be equivalent to looking back to 1969. (I suspect many of older readers would say that they remember well that year when American astronauts landed on the moon.)
Steven Beschloss nailed it here on the UFC Freedom 250 farce: “Elect a clown, expect a circus.”
See Also:
DemsMight: America Descends Further Into Idiocracy
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