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Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My engineer is Leti. Today’s show is a fundraising show, so, with apologies, we can’t take on-air phone calls,

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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]: 

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1. HarrisVotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) Dr. Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk
   1. In Texas, but outside Harris County? VoteTexas.gov
      1. You may vote early by-mail if
      2. you are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
      3. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
      4. Sick or disabled;
      5. 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
      6. Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
      7. Make sure you are registered:
   2. Sample Ballots are now available!
   3. HARRIS CTY – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR VOTING: Do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of these IDs?
      1. Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
      2. A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
      3. Current utility bill
      4. Bank statement
      5. Government check
      6. Paycheck
      7. (a) A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
   4. Outside Texas? Try Vote.org.
   5. Make it a point to listen to my April 22, 2019 Interview with Harris County Clerk Dr. Dianne Trautman
2. 1. Jeffrey Epstein charged with running sex trafficking ring, By Mike Hayes, Meg Wagner and Elise Hammond, CNN, Updated 1:07 p.m. ET, July 8, 2019
      1. What we’re covering here
         1. JUST IN: Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein has been indicted. US prosecutors allege he operated a sex trafficking ring where he paid girls as young as 14 to have sex with him.
         2. About the charges: He is charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors.
   • Later today: Epstein is expected to appear in federal court in New York following his Saturday arrest.
   1. As of 11:15am ET 10 min ago
      1. Investigators found “at least hundreds—and perhaps thousands” of lewd photos during Epstein raid
      2. In advance of the scheduled bail hearing this afternoon, US prosecutors submitted a letter to the court requesting Epstein be detained pending trial, calling the billionaire “an extraordinary risk of flight.”
   • In the letter, prosecutors said Epstein “cannot meet his burden of overcoming the presumption that there is no combination of conditions that would reasonably assure his continued appearance in this case or protect the safety of the community were he to be released.” 
   1. “If allowed to remain out on bail, the defendant could attempt to pressure and intimidate witnesses and potential witnesses in this case, including victims and their families, and otherwise attempt to obstruct justice,” the letter says.
   2. Investigators said in their memo that Epstein possesses three US passports, two private jets, and at least 15 cars.
   1. What police found when they raided Epstein’s mansion: The US Attorney’s Office also provided detail on what was seized during its raid of Epstein’s NYC mansion, which they said is worth $77 million.
      1. Prosecutors alleged Epstein “has continued to maintain a vast trove of lewd photographs of young-looking women or girls in his Manhattan mansion.” 
      2. Investigators said they recovered “at least hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of sexually suggestive photographs of fully- or partially nude females” 
   2. They continued: “Some of the nude or partially-nude photographs appear to be of underage girls, including at least one girl who, according to her counsel, was underage at the time the relevant photographs were taken.”
   3. “Some of the photographs referenced herein were discovered in a locked safe, in which law enforcement officers also found compact discs with hand-written labels including the following: “Young [Name] + [Name],” “Misc nudes 1,” and “Girl pics nude.”
3. After supporting flood bond, Houston-area developers want to delay new building rules, Zach Despart and Mike Morris | HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM | July 8, 2019
   2. Houston-area developers, engineers and real estate professionals were among the most vocal supporters of last summer’s $2.5 billion Harris County flood bond, the largest storm infrastructure investment in county history.
   3. They contributed to a political action committee established by bond backers and helped shepherd the initiative to passage on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Harvey, the devastating 2017 storm that flooded more than 204,000 homes and apartments in Harris County.
   4. For the past several months, however, many of those players quietly have lobbied Houston and Harris County officials to delay implementation of new building rules developers say will increase housing costs but county engineers insist are needed to protect neighborhoods from future storms.
   5. The changes under consideration would expand the area subject to flood-related building restrictions by roughly 65 percent in areas of the county outside the city of Houston, and would require developers to devote a larger share of their properties to holding back stormwater, among other changes.
   6. Pressure from the development community already has delayed a Commissioners Court vote on the regulations by five weeks, though builders’ pleas for even more time have not prevented the Harris County Flood Control District from asking the court to approve the new rules on Tuesday.
   7. The city of Houston — despite an initial plan to have the city and county jointly adopt the rules in early June — has no set date on which it will adopt similar changes, said Houston Public Works Director Carol Haddock, though she hopes city council will vote before Harvey’s second anniversary in late August. The changes would take effect sometime in 2020, she said, to give builders time to submit plans already in progress.
4. Eric Swalwell expected to end presidential bid after failing to gain traction, By Rebecca Buck and Dan Merica, CNN.COM Updated 1:58 PM ET, Mon July 8, 2019
   1. California Rep. Eric Swalwell is expected to announce Monday that he’s dropping out of the 2020 race for president, according to a source familiar with his plans.
   2. Swalwell is expected to make the announcement at a 4 p.m. ET news conference at his campaign headquarters in California, concluding a short-lived bid for the Democratic nomination that failed to gain any traction.
   3. A spokesperson for Swalwell’s campaign declined to comment.
   4. Swalwell’s expected exit from the 2020 race will make him the first candidate to drop out since the campaign began in earnest.
5. Elizabeth Warren rakes in $19 million despite no fundraisers, By ALEX THOMPSON | POLITICO.COM | 07/08/2019 02:00 PM EDT,
   19. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign announced Monday she raised $19.1 million in the second quarter of the year, more than tripling her first-quarter total despite holding no fundraisers.
   20. The haul far exceeded expectations, as Warren surpassed both Bernie Sanders ($18 million) and Kamala Harris ($12 million) and came close to Joe Biden ($21.5 milllion). Her outpacing of Sanders is particularly notable, given the army of small-dollar donors he amassed in 2016 and their similarly progressive stances.
   21. The eye-popping total is a validation for Warren after months of second-guessing from Washington strategists who questioned the wisdom of publicly vowing not to hold fundraisers or do “call time” with wealthy donors during the primary.
   22. Warren and Sanders, who also has essentially spurned the fundraising circuit, have both managed to fund their campaigns and outraise rivals like Harris through donations online. They also were within range of Pete Buttigieg, who raised a pack-leading $25 million but who attended about 50 high-dollar fundraisers plus 20 other fundraisers with lower ticket prices in the second quarter.
6. NY gov. grants Congress access to Trump state tax returns, By Adam Edelman and Allan Smith| | NBC NEWS | Jul 8th 2019 11:18AM
   1. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday signed a bill that would allow certain members of Congress to access to President Donald Trump’s New York state tax returns.
   2. The bill, which Cuomo had been expected to OK, requires New York officials to release tax returns of public officials that have been requested by “congressional tax-related committees” that have cited “specified and legitimate legislative purpose” in seeking them.
   3. “(T)his bill gives Congress the ability to fulfill its Constitutional responsibilities, strengthen our democratic system and ensure that no one is above the law,” Cuomo, a Democrat, said in a statement.
   4. The tax bill, which was passed weeks ago by the Democratically controlled state Legislature,makes it easier for New York to turn over the state tax returns of certain public office-holders, along with entities those people control or have a large stake in, that are requested by the leaders of the three congressional tax-writing committees.
   5. The bill is seen as a clear shot at the president, who has refused to release his tax returns. But it’s been met with resistance from the one Democrat who could actually utilize it.
   6. House Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., said he won’t request the state returnsbecause he feels doing so would harm his efforts at obtaining Trump’s federal returns. Just this week, Neal sued the IRS and the Treasury Department for those federal returns.
7. Iran passes new nuclear deal limit as China blames US for crisis = Tehran begins enriching uranium beyond deal limit as Beijing denounces US’s ‘unilateral bullying’. ALJAZEERA.COM | 7/8/20195 hours ago
   1. Iranhas passed the uranium enrichment cap set in its 2015 nuclear deal, marking the second time in a week that it made good on a promise to reduce compliance with the international pact following the United States‘ unilateral exit last year.
   2. The announcement on Monday from Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization came amid growing frustration in Tehran over a failure by the landmark accord’s remaining signatories to deliver on its promised economic benefits.
   3. Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the nuclear agency, confirmed Tehran had enriched uranium beyond the 3.67 percent purity that the deal allows, passing 4.5 percent, according to the Iranian students’ news agency ISNA. 
   4. On July 1, Iran passed the uranium stockpile limit permitted by the deal, and officials on Sunday pledged to keep scaling back their commitments every 60 days unless Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia protected it from the punishing sanctions imposed by the US following its withdrawal.
8. Amazon staff will strike during Prime Day over working conditions – They’re unhappy with quotas and a reluctance to hire permanent workers. Jon Fingas, @jonfingas | engadget.com | 7/8/2019 2h ago in Internet
   1. Staff at a warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota will hold six hours of strikes on July 15th (the start of Prime Day) to demand less stringent quotas and the conversion of more temporary workers into permanent employees. The quotas make the work dangerous and unreliable, according to the workers, and permanent work will help create a “livable future.” Workers in the US have protested before (including a December protest in Minnesota over support for East African workers), but not during crucial sales days — you’ve only really seen that practice in Europe until now.
   2. The company has declined to comment on the strike.
   3. It’s not certain how Amazon will respond. Although Amazon isn’t likely to face a major disruption due to the sheer number of fulfillment centers in the US, the strike could draw attention to ongoing worries that Amazon is demanding too much from its staff and putting them on a tight leash. The company recently raised its minimum pay to $15 per hour, but that mainly came after pressure from Senator Bernie Sanders and others calling for laws to rein in Amazon and other firms accused of shortchanging workers.
9. How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours, BBC.COM | 7 July 2019
   1. What is the point of sending someone to prison – retribution or rehabilitation? Twenty years ago, Norway moved away from a punitive “lock-up” approach and sharply cut reoffending rates. …
   2. [Are Hoidal governor of Halden Prison ] says “… in the early 1990s, the ethos of the Norwegian Correctional Service underwent a rigorous series of reforms to focus less on what Hoidal terms “revenge” and much more on rehabilitation. Prisoners, who had previously spent most of their day locked up, were offered daily training and educational programmes and the role of the prison guards was completely overhauled. … since our big reforms, recidivism in Norway has fallen to only 20% after two years and about 25% after five years. So this works!”
   3. In the UK, the recidivism rate is almost 50% after just one year.
   4. The architecture of Halden Prison has been designed to minimise residents’ sense of incarceration, to ease psychological stress and to put them in harmony with the surrounding nature …
   5. … “We start planning their release on the first day they arrive,” explains Hoidal, as we walk through to the carpentry workshop where several inmates are making wooden summer houses and benches to furnish a new prison being built in the south of Norway.
   6. “In Norway, all will be released – there are no life sentences,” he reminds me.
   7. Normalising life behind bars (not that there are any bars on the windows at Halden) is the key philosophy that underpins the Norwegian Correctional service. At Halden, this means not only providing daily routines but ensuring family contact is maintained too. Once every three months, inmates with children can apply to a “Daddy In Prison” scheme which, if they pass the necessary safeguarding tests, means they can spend a couple of nights with their partner, sons and daughters in a cosy chalet within the prison grounds. …
   8. … It takes 12 weeks in the UK to train a prison officer. In Norway it takes two to three years. Eight kilometres north-east of Oslo in Lillestrom, an impressive white and glass building houses the University College of the Norwegian Correctional Service, where each year, 175 trainees, selected from over 1,200 applicants, start their studies to become a prison officer.
   9. Hans-Jorgen Brucker walks me around the training prison on campus, which is kitted out with reproduction cells and prison-style furniture. I note a bulging pile of helmets and stab vests in one storage room. Brucker acknowledges that prison officers will undergo security and riot training, but he’s fairly dismissive of this part of the course.
   10. “We want to stop reoffending which means officers need to be well educated,” he says. He shows me a paper outlining the rigorous selection process, which involves written exams in Norwegian and English (about a third of the prison population is non-native, so officers are expected to be fluent in English) and physical fitness tests.
   11. “My students will study law, ethics, criminology, English, reintegration and social work. Then they will have a year training in a prison and then they will come back to take their final exams.” …
10. The hidden hunger affecting billions, By Michael Marshall | BBC.COM | 7-JULY-2019
    1. Two billion people do not get enough micronutrients in their diets, which can lead to severe health conditions.
    2. New kinds of crops could help to create better, more nutritious foods to beat these deficiencies.
    3. When children do not get enough iron in their food, the results are heartbreaking. They are slower to acquire language, struggle with short-term memory, have poor attention spans and ultimately do less well at school.
    4. “They can never live up to their full physical and mental potential,” says Wolfgang Pfeiffer, director of research and development at HarvestPlus, an organisation that develops nutritionally improved crops in Washington DC. “If they are deficient in their childhood, they learn 20% less as adults.”
    5. In the poorest parts of India and China, millions of children have their lives stunted through lack of iron. In South Asia, an estimated50% of pregnant women have iron deficiency, and it is also prevalent in South America and sub-Saharan Africa.
    6. But iron is only one small part of the story. There are several dozen other “micronutrients” – substances that we need to consume, in small quantities but regularly, to remain healthy. They include zinc, copper, vitamins and folates such as folic acid and vitamin B9.
    7. The traditional solution to micronutrient deficiencies has been to add more micronutrients to common foods, or to supply pills … But these strategies have limits. If people can’t afford pills or don’t have access to a pharmacy, they may still not get enough micronutrients. What’s more, adding micronutrients to food is a constant process: every batch of breakfast cereal has to be artificially dosed with iron and vitamins.
    8. A much simpler approach would be to go back to the crop plant from which the cereal is made, and ensure that it packs itself full of the micronutrient in the first place.
    9. This is the thinking behind “biofortification”, the process of creating crops that have unusually high levels of micronutrients like iron. HarvestPlus was founded in 2003 by economist Howarth Bouis, after a decade of lobbying and raising moneyto create biofortified crops and make them available where they are needed. Today HarvestPlus has members in more than 20 countries and has biofortified over a dozen crops, from rice to sweet potatoes.
11. Supreme Court takes up insurers’ $12 billion Obamacare dispute, By Nate Raymond | REUTERS.COM | June 24, 2019 / 8:46 AM /
    1. (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether the federal government must pay insurers $12 billion under an Obamacare program aimed at encouraging them to cover previously uninsured people after the healthcare law was enacted in 2010.
    2. The justices will hear an appeal by a group of insurers of a lower court ruling that Congress had suspended the government’s obligation to make the payments. The insurers have argued that the ruling would allow the government to pull a “bait-and-switch” and withhold money they were promised. …
    3. …Republicans, who have opposed Obamacare from the outset and sought numerous times to repeal it in Congress, have called the risk-corridor program a “bailout” for the insurance industry
    4. In December 2014, Congress passed an appropriations bill for the 2015 fiscal year that included a rider barring the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from using general funds to pay the government’s risk corridor obligations.
    5. As a result, the government could compensate insurers only with the money it collected from insurance companies that paid less than they took in from premiums. Congress enacted identical riders for fiscal years 2016 and 2017.
    6. Payments from insurers, though, could not fund all of the claimed risk corridor payments. In November 2017, HHS published statistics indicating that payments from insurers for the three-year period fell short of claimed payments by $12 billion. …
12. Russia Did Not Offer to Free Ukrainian Sailors it Captured | INFO | June 28, 2019
    1. 24 Ukrainian sailors who were captured by Russia last November appearing in Lefortovo court, Moscow, Russia on January 15, 2019. …
    2. On June 27, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said via Facebook that … she has been compelled to respond to numerous inquiries regarding Kyiv’s refusal to accept Moscow’s offer to free Ukrainian sailors.
    3. Zakharova was referring to the 24 Ukrainian sailors who, along with their three ships, were captured by Russia last November while heading to the Kerch Strait, the only passage between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov via international waters. … Zakharova accused Kyiv of using the sailors to “blackmail” Russia while “caring nothing” about their fate.
    4. … While Zakharova is right that Russia sent a note to Ukraine regarding the captured sailors, she mischaracterized what Russia actually proposed in the note, as well as the controversy more generally.
    5. On May 25, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), which is an inter-governmental organization established by the United Nations, ordered Russia to “immediately release” the 24 Ukrainian sailors and three ships without any preconditions.
13. FedEx will no longer provide express shipping for Amazon in the US, by Eugene Kim (@eugenekim222) | CNBC.com | Fri, Jun 7 2019 2:02 PM EDT Updated Fri, Jun 7 2019 2:58 PM EDT
    1. Key Points
       1. FedEx announces Friday that it won’t renew its express U.S. shipping contract with Amazon.
       2. The move comes as Amazon is more aggressively building out its own shipping and delivery network.
14. India’s blowout election is a lesson for US Democrats, By Annalisa Merelli | COM/ | May 24, 2019
    1. Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, defied expectations when he won his second election in an even bigger landslide than the first one. He did so at the expense of India’s Congress party, which campaigned on a secular and pluralist platform.
    2. Turns out the nationalist message of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hugely popular with voters. It was a massive defeat—the second in a row—for India’s more liberal Congress party. It’s a bitter loss that came with many lessons, ones that Democrats in the United States would be wise to heed. …
    3. … Politics in India have traditionally been about the economy. This time, however, Modi and the BJP’s support of Hindu nationalism took a more prominent position than it had in past campaigns, exploiting tension with Pakistan to redirect the debate toward national security and anti-Muslim sectarianism. As Modi’s message grew stronger, [the once-dominant Congress Party] failed to really fight for India’s long-established secular ideals. …
    4. … The Congress isn’t known for its ability to learn lessons, but there are some more to note. And given that a left-leaning party promoting pluralism just lost to a right-leaning party promoting nationalism, the Democratic Party in the United States should probably read a long as it prepares for its own election season.
    5. Don’t make it about the candidate: Modi’s leadership of the BJP is strong, and there is no separating his party or government’s success and work from his own. His party capitalized on this, turning the election into a referendum on him—rather than his government’s record. Polarizing figures like Modi tend to benefit from these kinds of politics. His party understood this. His adversaries did not.
       1. Turning the campaign into a vote for or against Modi prevented the opposition from asserting its own ideas. Even when the Congress proposed policies that could have appealed to a broad electorate — for instance, guaranteed minimum income … — they received little attention. As George Lakoff explained in his 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, obsessing over a candidate’s flaws only makes him or her more popular.
       2. Democrats in the United States made this mistake in the 2016 election, running a campaign against Donald Trump instead of for their own policies.
    6. Dare to be different: … For many voters, the Congress party is associated with old-school elitist politics, corruption, and a perceived inability to bring change to India. Gandhi’s candidacy didn’t do much to change anyone’s minds.
    7. Make friends: Congress also failed to make strong alliances with other, smaller political parties…. Progressives seem to make this mistake a lot. While conservatives often stick together (the Republican Party’s support of Trump during the campaign is a textbook example), liberals often fail to find common ground. In the last presidential campaign, the Democratic primaries went on long after Trump was the presumed nominee. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent more time tearing each other apart than focusing on the bigger fight. The extremely crowded field of potential democratic candidates suggests the same thing could happen again.
    8. Focus the narrative: Modi’s narrative of a new, strong, corruption-free India—one with international power, credibility and gravitas—appealed to many voters. It delivered a clear vision of what he was promising, and one that Indians were fast to embrace. Congress never presented a clear vision of its own.
       1. [The Congress Party] decried the threat to secular values [Modi’s Party] posed, and held itself up as its defender. But rather than communicating how those values could help India succeed, the party focused more on what would happen if protections further deteriorated.
    9. This is not unlike what happened during the 2016 election in the United States. Just look at the campaign slogans: Trump’s “Make America Great Again” had a clear if suspect mission. Clinton’s “Stronger Together” described a status, not an intention. Democrats could face the same problem they did in 2016—and the same problem India’s Congress party faced this week—unless they forget about the opposition, stop playing defense, and promote their own, clear vision.
15. Opinion – The Old Scourge of Anti-Semitism Rises Anew in Europe, Jews face threats from extremists on the left and the right. A third of European Jews have considered emigrating. By The Editorial Board (The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section. |com | May 26, 2019
    1. For years, Europe maintained the comforting notion that it was earnestly confronting anti-Semitism after the horrors of the Holocaust. It now faces the alarming reality that anti-Semitism is sharply on the rise, often from the sadly familiar direction of the far right, but also from Islamists and the far left.
    2. The worrisome trend was underscored by a report issued by the German government this month showing that anti-Semitic incidents in Germany had increased by almost 20 percent in 2018 from the previous year, to 1,799, with 69 classified as acts of violence. The most common offense was the use of the swastika and other illegal symbols; the rest ranged from online incitement and insults to arson, assault and murder.
    3. Of the total, the report attributed 89 percent of the incidents to the far right. Germany, like many other European nations, has seen a resurgence of a neo-fascist right, but much of the recent reporting in Germany on the rise of anti-Semitism has focused on hostility to Jews among Muslim migrants. A European Union survey conducted in 2018 likewise found that among German Jews who had experienced anti-Semitic harassment over the past five years, 41 percent perceived the perpetrators of the most serious incidents to be “someone with a Muslim extremist view.” …
    4. … That the rise in incidents was in Germany made the government report all the more concerning. But anti-Semitism is on the rise all across Europe, as well as in the United States. France reported an increase of 74 percent in anti-Semitic acts in a single year, with 541 incidents reported in 2018, including widely viewed videotaped insults shouted at the French Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut during one of the Yellow Vest protests. In Britain, nine Labour members of Parliament quit their party in part over the cloud of anti-Semitism hanging over the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. …
    5. … In the United States, attacks on synagogues by white-supremacist gunmen have led the growing list of assaults on Jews. [From ADL (the Anti-Defamation League – “The U.S. Jewish community experienced near-historic levels of anti-Semitism in 2018, including a doubling of anti-Semitic assaults and the single deadliest attack against the Jewish community in American history, according to new data from ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) issued today. ADL’s annual Audit of Anti-Semitic incidents recorded a total of 1,879 attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions across the country in 2018, the third-highest year on record since ADL started tracking such data in the 1970s.”]
    6. A tally of incidents does not tell the full story. To a degree, the numbers reflect the way hate speech, intolerance, anger and once-taboo themes have found their way into the open on social media or via populist movements, allowing hatred of Jews to come out of the shadows. But far-right and far-left politicians have often learned to project themselves as defenders of Jews while drawing on blatantly anti-Semitic tropes, as Mr. Orban has done in Hungary. Among the Muslims of Europe, and among some leftists, a resentment of Israel often crosses into hostility to all Jews. …
    7. … A CNN poll last November on the state of anti-Semitism in Europe found that a third of respondents said they knew little or nothing about the Holocaust. Nearly a quarter said Jews had too much influence in conflict and wars; more than a quarter said they believed that Jews had too much influence in business and finance. A 2015 survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 51 percent of Germans believed it was “probably true” that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.” These are the stereotypes that make anti-Semitism an especially pernicious form of bigotry, a grand conspiracy theory in which Jews spread evil in their countries through some illusory subterfuge, whether controlling capital, or the media, or whatever.
    8. All this is not news to European Jews, who for some time have been feeling less and less safe and welcome in their home countries. After polling more than 16,000 Jews in 12 European countries at the end of last year, the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights concluded that anti-Semitic hate speech, harassment and fear of being recognized as Jews were becoming the new normal. Eighty-five percent of the respondents thought anti-Semitism was the biggest social and political problem in their countries; almost a third said they avoided Jewish events or sites because of safety concerns. More than a third said they had considered emigrating in the five years preceding the survey.
    9. As appalling as these statistics should be to every European, they should also ring a loud alarm for every American leader of conscience. Speak up, now, when you glimpse evidence of anti-Semitism, particularly within your own ranks, or risk enabling the spread of this deadly virus.
16. Report: Texas to lose billions if new major storm hits coast, Updated 9:00 am CDT, Sunday, May 26, 2019 (COM)
17. The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News – The current system for delivering news online is broken. Readers and journalists will need to work together to find a new one. By Michael Luo | NEWYORKER.COM | April 10, 2019
18. Commentary: The 45th president of the U.S. is poisoning his nation, By Michael Orton | Special to The [SALT LAKE CITY] Tribune | APR-14-2019
19. TALKED ABOUT THIS LAST WEEK, WANT TO RE-EMPHASIZE: FIGHT FOR YOUR State Legislature
    1. In 2010, the Republicans won a a swath of state legislatures which allowed them to gerrymander Dems out of State and Federal legislatures. It’s vital we must not allow that to happen again in 2020.
    2. Look for “flippable” seats in the State Lege and try to support this candidates.
    3. The battle for the Lege is gonna be lit, by Charles Kuffner | Off the Kuff | Jun 24th, 2019
       1. Citing from the Texas Tribune by Patrick Svitek | texastribune.org | June 13, 20193 AM: Some Democrats are mobilizing in hopes of taking the nine House seats they need for a majority in 2020 …
       2. …“Everything is focused on redistricting,” state Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, said at a recent tea party meeting as he fielded questions about the demise of some controversial legislation this session. “There is nothing more important — not only to Texas, but literally the nation — than to make sure that we maintain the Texas House … going into redistricting because if you look at the nation — we lose Texas, we lose the nation. And there’s no other place to go.”
    4. ANALYSIS FROM CHARLES KUFF: At this point, the name of the game is one part candidate recruitment and one part raising money, which will be the job of the various PACs until the candidates get settled. In Harris County, we have two good candidates each for the [GOP] main targets: Akilah Bacy and Josh Wallenstein (who ran for HCDE [Harris County’s Trustee for its Department of Education] in 2018 …) in HD138, and Ann Johnson and Ruby Powers in HD134. In Fort Bend, Sarah DeMerchant appears to be running again in HD26, while Eliz Markowitz (candidate for SBOE7 in 2018) is aiming for HD28. We still need (or I need to do a better job searching for) candidates in HDs 29, 85, and 126, for starters. If you’re in one of those competitive Republican-held State Rep districts, find out who is or may be running for the Dems. If you’re in one of those targeted-by-the-GOP districts, be sure to help out your incumbent. Kelly Hancock is absolutely right: This is super-duper important.

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