POSSIBLE TOPICS: VOTETEXAS.GOV—Voter Information; BALLOT FATIGUE?; ‘That’s a myth’ | Petroleum engineer busts gas mileage myths; Sugar Land to launch resident portal; Conroe City Council reverts vegetation ordinance to pre-2018 language in effort to preserve trees; Harris County Election Commission continues search for new administrator; Looming end of Medicaid protections sounds alarms; They thought they bought Obamacare plans. What they got wasn’t insurance; John Cornyn says bipartisan gun legislation won’t include weapons bans or expanding background checks; Fact Checker: Biden’s startling statistic on school-age gun deaths; India scrambles to contain fallout over insulting comments about Islam; More.

Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio) is now on Wednesdays at 11AM (CT) on KPFT-HD2, Houston’s Community Station. You can also hear the show:

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Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig where we discuss local, state, national, and international stories. My co-host and show editor is Andrew Ferguson.

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

1. Make sure you are registered to vote! VoteTexas.GOV – Texas Voter InformationTEXAS SoS VOTE-BY-MAIL BALLOT APPLICATION (ALL TEXAS COUNTIES) HarrisVotes.com­ – Countywide Voting Centers, (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965), Harris County Clerk
   1. Harris County “Vote-By-Mail’ Application for 2022
      1. Fort bend County Elections/Voter Registration Machine takes you to the proper link
      2. GalvestonVotes.org (Galveston County, TX)
      3. Liberty County Elections (Liberty County, TX)
      4. Montgomery County (TX) Elections
      5. Brazoria County (TX) Clerk Election Information
      6. Waller County (TX) Elections
      7. Chambers County (TX) Elections
      8. For personalized, nonpartisan voter guides and information, Consider visiting Vote.ORG.   Ballotpedia.com and Texas League of Women Voters are also good places to get election info.
      9. If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
      10. HarrisVotes.com – Countywide Voting Centers, HARRIS COUNTY – 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 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)
          8. You may vote early by-mail if:You are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
             1. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
             2. Sick or disabled;
             3. 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
             4. Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
             5. Make sure you are registered:
             6. Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar
             7. CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE
             8. CLICK How to register to vote in Texas
             9. Outside Texas, try Vote.org.
2. BE REGISTERED TO VOTE, and if eligible, REMEMBER TO FILL OUT AND MAIL YOUR MAIL-IN BALLOT APPLICATIONS FOR 2022
   1. You can track your Mail Ballot Activity from our website with direct link provided here https://www.harrisvotes.com/Tracking
3. BALLOT FATIGUE?
   1. Joint Runoff for City of Nassau Bay, Council Position 4 and Houston Community College System (HCCS), District II. Early voting has started. You can find information for these elections at COM.
   2. MONTGOMERY COUNTY: Conroe City Council
   3. MIKE: This is one of the best reasons to allow all voters in all elections to be “Vote-By-Mail”. Having these elections one after another discourages in-person turnout, either by fatigue or simply being unaware that elections are occurring.
4. ‘That’s a myth’ | Petroleum engineer busts gas mileage myths; “The reality is, there are very few things that you can do to save your pain at the pump,” said UH’s Chief Energy Officer Ramanan Krishnamoorti. Author: Melissa Correa | KHOU.COM | Published: 5:35 PM CDT June 7, 2022, Updated: 5:35 PM CDT June 7, 2022
   1. [F]illing up your gas tank in the morning will help your gas mileage … “that’s a myth. Whether you gas up in the morning or night makes very, very little difference.” …
   2. “Filling it up slowly, fast doesn’t make a whole lot of difference,” said Krishnamoorti. “The reality is, there are very few things that you can do to save your pain at the pump.” …
   3. While [a] Facebook post suggests you fill up when your vehicle is down to a half-tank of fuel, the UH professor confirmed, that alone will not improve mileage either.
   4. “Good driving habits, not only are they safer, but they will save you gas.”
   5. ADDITIONAL REFERENCE: Here’s why you may want to avoid waiting until your tank reaches ‘E’; COM
   6. MIKE: Here are some basic bullet points for stretching your gas:
   7. Keep your tires inflated to the manufacturer-recommended COLD pressure.
   8. If you have nitrogen-filled tires, never mix them with regular air. The benefit of nitrogen in tires is that it expands and contracts less in response to temperature changes than air does. Green stem caps mean your tires are filled with nitrogen.
   9. Buy the gas your car is designed for. Buying a higher octane than necessary has no benefit and wastes money.
   10. Accelerate moderately and break gradually. Sudden acceleration will blow more unburned gas out your tailpipe, reducing gas mileage and increasing air pollution. Gradual braking — taking your foot off the gas in anticipation of stopping to decrease speed, then braking moderately to a stop — will not only conserve gas but also conserve your brake pads and disks,
   11. Use speed in moderation. Ideally, you want to go at the slowest speed in the highest gear. Above that, the faster you go, the more gas you burn per mile. If you go 50 miles at 50 mph, you’ll burn less gas than going 50 miles at 70mph. Balance speed with the time and distance you have to travel, while always driving safely for the conditions you’re in and speed limits.
   12. Use your air conditioner. You may save some gas with no AC and windows open at low speeds, but (according to “Myth Busters”), windows open at speeds above about 40 mph waste more gas fighting air drag then running the AC.
   13. Try to keep your engine properly maintained and tuned. Good maintenance isn’t cheap, but it does save gas. More importantly, it will extend the life of your engine.
   14. Don’t try to circumvent your pollution controls. Modern engines will likely burn more gas if you do.
   15. Consider using Top Tier ®™ fuels exclusively. They don’t cost much more if you shop wisely. Sometimes they’re even priced below average. Top Tier fuels have high-quality cleaning agents that help your engine stay clean. Clean engines run better and require less maintenance. Find info here: https://www.toptiergas.com
   16. MIKE: As a side note: When your low gas light goes on, it’s not a measure of gallons left. It’s an estimated number of miles, based on your car’s typical mileage. Usually, when the “FILL” light goes on, it means you have about 20-40 miles left in your tank, depending on how you drive and the driving conditions. BEST ADVICE: Don’t push your luck.
5. Sugar Land to launch resident portal; By Laura Aebi | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 4:31 PM Jun 6, 2022 CDT | Updated 4:31 PM Jun 6, 2022 CDT
   1. The city of Sugar Land will launch a new self-service portal for its residents on June 14, according to a May 31 news release.
   2. The launch is an initiative to provide open, easy access to city government and use smart solutions to improve services, the release states.
   3. The portal will streamline the submittal process for plans, permits and licenses to an online only platform.
   4. Other portal features include step-by-step processes for submissions; integration with mapping tools; the ability to start and save permits for submittal at a later date; submitting online inspection requests that allow for multiple inspections; and the ability to add and pay for multiple itemized invoices across multiple devices. To learn more about the transition, visit sugarlandtx.gov/CSSLaunch.
6. Conroe City Council reverts vegetation ordinance to pre-2018 language in effort to preserve trees; By Anna Lotz | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 8:28 PM May 31, 2022 CDT | Updated 8:28 PM May 31, 2022 CDT
   1. Conroe City Council members voted May 26 to restore its vegetation ordinance to that from before the city updated its ordinance Dec. 13, 2018; the motion comes as an effort to revisit development guidelines and preserve more trees across the city as development picks up, city leaders said.
   2. The city’s vegetation ordinance sets the minimum standards for the preservation and planting of trees during development …
   3. [R]epresentatives from the development community said during a public hearing preceding the vote that they opposed the change in language. Developers also spoke out against the city’s 3-2 vote to increase the [minimum] lot size from 40 feet wide to 50 feet wide during the same meeting.
   4. “It will not have the intended impact of increasing the number of trees; it will decrease the variety of housing options to homebuyers as many are interested in smaller, manageable lots,” said Chris Ferguson, director of land development for the Friendswood Development Co., which has developed communities such as Ladera Creek in Conroe and Moran Ranch, which is starting in Willis. “It will negatively and unfairly impact raw land values. It will increase finished home values, making homeownership further out of reach for many.” …
   5. [Council members cautioned the move to the previous ordinance language is temporary while the tree ordinance committee further refines a new ordinance.]
   6. Conroe City Council will meet again June 8-9.
7. Harris County Election Commission continues search for new administrator; By Rachel Carlton | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 6:15 PM Jun 7, 2022 CDT
   30. Following the resignation of current Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria, the Harris County Election Commission tasked an executive search firm, Recruiting Source International, with a national search to fill the elections administrator position by June 30.
   31. According to Angelica Luna Kaufman, deputy director of communications for County Judge Lina Hidalgo, Recruiting Source International is in the process of interviewing candidates. …
   32. During the April 19 meeting of the commission, the members voted to accept Longoria’s resignation, effective July 1. …
   33. Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Ann Harris Bennett said during the meeting that of the 153 applicants from the previous job posting in 2020, the commission had only seriously considered five candidates. RSI is reconsidering the resumes from the previous applicants for the 2022 search process along with new applicants.
   34. TAGS: harris county commissioners court
8. Looming end of Medicaid protections sounds alarms; By Laura Aebi, Shawn Arrajj | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 12:16 PM Jun 6, 2022 CDT | Updated 2:49 PM Jun 6, 2022 CDT
   1. When the coronavirus pandemic emerged in March 2020, the U.S. government issued a requirement that states could no longer kick people off Medicaid during the public health emergency. …
   2. That requirement is still in place …, but health care advocates in Texas and Houston said they are worried about what could happen when it ends and millions of people have their safety nets put into jeopardy.
   3. In September 2021, the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, estimated as many as 1.3 million Texans could be deemed ineligible for Medicaid once the public health emergency ends. … Roughly 73.2% of Texas Medicaid enrollees are children, according to the latest [Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC)]
   4. “Our main concern is you are looking at huge numbers having to reapply, and that’s going to take a lot of time to go through,” said Brian Sasser, chief communications officer with the Houston-based Episcopal Health Foundation, which works with health care nonprofits across Texas.
   5. The pandemic also shined a spotlight on a debate that has been ongoing in Texas since 2010: whether the state should expand Medicaid to cover more people. That debate will come up again when the state Legislature meets in January, and some local lawmakers said they are ready for change.
   6. The public health emergency was still in place as of May … [T]he government … requires a 60-day notice before Congress can allow the emergency to expire. That notice was not given May 15, meaning the emergency is likely to be extended into October, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [CBPP], a group that analyzes federal and state budget policies.
   7. In Harris County, the number of people enrolled in Medicaid hovered in the high 600,000s prior to the pandemic with little change between 2017 and 2020. … The [Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC)]’s preliminary data from February estimates around 932,000 county residents are now enrolled in Medicaid.
   8. When the public health emergency ends, a portion of Medicaid enrollees will have their coverage automatically renewed if they are deemed eligible. There will also be an unwinding period of up to 12 months during which states are to work with individuals who were not automatically re-enrolled to help them keep their coverage if they are still eligible, though a May 5 HHSC presentation on the end of continuous Medicaid coverage indicated that Texas plans to only use six months. …
   9. The CBPP recommends states increase capacity for renewals that are determined using electronic data matches, which will help avoid having to rely on enrollees to complete a renewal form or submit documentation, said Farah Erzouki, senior policy analyst with the [CBPP]. Texas uses those kind of renewals in less than 25% of its processes, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation [KFF], a nonprofit focused on health care issues.
   10. Additionally, Erzouki said it will be crucial for states to allow enrollees to renew their policies through a variety of methods, including online, by phone, by fax, by mail and in person. Texas is among the 33 states to allow renewals by all five methods, according to the KFF.
   11. There is no estimation from the HHSC at this time for how many people could be determined ineligible and unenrolled when protections expire … . Some decline in the current enrollment figures is considered inevitable as the state works to remove people who no longer qualify for a variety of reasons. …
   12. Before the pandemic, individuals on Medicaid had to regularly renew their policies, which Sasser said can be burden for many families depending on how often they have to reapply. …
   13. Certain population groups are eligible for Medicaid in Texas if they fall below a certain income level that varies by program. People who are pregnant, are children, have a disability or are over age 65 all may be eligible depending on family income.
   14. The health care policy is jointly funded by states and the federal government with the federal government paying 90% of the cost of health care for those insured by Medicaid and states paying 10%, according to the KFF.
   15. When the federal government signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, each U.S. state was given the option to expand Medicaid coverage to nearly all adults with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level, an annual income of $17,774 for an individual in 2022, according to the KFF.
   16. Texas is among 12 states that have not expanded Medicaid. Of [those 12], Texas generally has set the highest bar for people to qualify based on income, according to KFF. Based on a single parent household with family size of three, a Texas resident must have an income at 16% of the federal poverty level, according to KFF.
   17. As a result, Texas has the highest rate of uninsured individuals of all states, according to the KFF. Nationally, about 8.6% of people are uninsured, compared to 17.5% in Texas.
   18. Researchers with Texas A&M University released a study into the economic effects of Medicaid expansion in 2019. The study found expanding Medicaid would make 223,700 more people eligible in Harris County and result in 167,500 new enrollments. Expansion in Harris County would come at a cost of $949.9 million to the federal government and $105.5 million to Texas.
   19. Ahead of the next legislative session, which will kick off in January, several local representatives said Medicaid is top of mind. Those opposed to expansion say Texas would still be on the hook for program costs and question the effects it would have on improving health care outcomes in the state.
   20. “Medicaid expansion … does not necessarily equal expanded access to care. Many providers in Texas do not accept new Medicaid patients,” Republican state Rep. Cody Vasut said, citing a 2013 survey by the Texas Medical Association that found roughly 31% of Texas doctors accepted all new Medicaid patients.
   21. With the state paying 10% of the costs, that could still exceed $500 million, Vasut said.
   22. “It is also unclear if the present federal split would be maintained in the future or if Texas would end up having to pay an even higher percentage,” Vasut said.
   23. In an April 2020 report, the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation argued that targeted improvements to health programs, such as programs geared toward children, would yield better health outcomes than broader Medicaid expansion.
   24. Democratic state Rep. Ann Johnson said she is a staunch supporter of expanding Medicaid, which she said is long overdue in the state.
   25. … [One of several bills] to study the cost to Texas of not expanding Medicaid over the past five years … failed along party lines, Johnson said.
   26. “I think we all know what it would show, which is this is a poor economic decision for the state of Texas,” Johnson said. “Because when people get sick, they still show up at the [emergency room]. There is still a cost to be distributed, but it’s being distributed unevenly.” …
   27. REFERENCE: US Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] Poverty Guidelines for 2022
   28. REFERENCE: Federal poverty level (FPL)
   29. MIKE: On Tuesday night, 7 of those 12 states voted by ballot initiative to expand Medicaid. So now, Texas will be one of only 5 states without Medicaid expansion.
9. They thought they bought Obamacare plans. What they got wasn’t insurance; Bram Sable-Smith | NPR.ORG | June 7, 2022, 5:00 AM ET
   1. Tina Passione needed health insurance in a hurry in December. …
   2. … [S]he went online to search for the federal health insurance marketplace, clicked on a link and entered her information. She promptly got multiple calls from insurance brokers and bought a plan for $384 a month. Later, though, when she went to a pharmacy and doctors’ offices in Georgia, she was told she did not have insurance.
   3. In fact, it said it right on her card: “THIS IS NOT INSURANCE.” Passione is one of 10 consumers who told KHN that they thought they were buying insurance but learned later that they had been sold a membership to a Houston-based health care sharing ministry called Jericho Share. The ministry formed in 2021 when House of Prayer and Life Inc., a half-century-old Christian congregation, assumed the name Jericho Share, according to Texas business filings.
   4. Health care sharing ministries are faith-based organizations whose members agree to share medical expenses. …
   5. The Better Business Bureau gives Jericho Share an F rating, its lowest …
   6. Encountering such issues while shopping for health insurance is not uncommon, said JoAnn Volk, co-director of Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. She co-authored a 2021 report that found “misleading marketing practices” were directing consumers to alternative health plans, like ministries, that can cost more than marketplace plans and offer fewer protections. …
   7. [Susan Fauman] said she unwittingly put her information into what turned out to be several lead-generating websites. She was soon inundated with phone calls from insurance brokers, she recalled.
   8. Eager to get insurance, Fauman said, she bought a plan for about $330 a month, plus a $99 sign-up fee. She said the broker — who, she later realized, never named the plan — said she’d have basically no copays and no restrictions on where to get care. But he did not tell her that it was a health care sharing ministry, she said, or that it wasn’t insurance — something she didn’t know to ask about. When she received her Jericho Share card with its disclaimer, she thought, “What the hell did I sign up for?”
   9. Ministries and aggressive insurance marketing practices have raised eyebrows before, and the Washington state attorney general issued a consumer alert last year about “ads and websites posing as the official health insurance marketplace.” …
   10. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services manages the healthcare.gov website. “When CMS sees an ad we think is misrepresenting gov, we share it immediately with the search engines,” Deputy Administrator Ellen Montz said in a statement. ….
   11. REFERENCE: gov (I.e., “OBAMACARE”)
   12. REFERENCE: How to Choose a Plan in the Health Insurance Marketplace (Extended Version) VIDEO (I.e., “OBAMACARE”)
   13. REFERENCE: Other Info at Healthcare.gov (I.e., “OBAMACARE”)
   14. REFERENCE: Health Care Sharing Ministries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) 22:54 Now playing
   15. MIKE: The story is longer, but the essence is the same. If you want to sign up for “ObamaCare”, go to gov. You will then be referred to authorized vendors who are supposed fulfill certain criteria for (IIR) Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Catastrophic levels of coverage.
   16. MIKE: John Oliver once did a show on the Faith-based “share” programs, and I’ve included a link in “References”.
   17. TAGS: misleading ads google ads medical bills health ministry Obamacare medical insurance
10. John Cornyn says bipartisan gun legislation won’t include weapons bans or expanding background checks; Cornyn on Monday made clear in a Senate floor speech that there are limits to what he and the Senate GOP conference are willing to support in their efforts to pass bipartisan gun legislation. by Abby Livingston | TEXASTRIBUNE.ORG | June 6, 20226 PM Central
    1. S. Sen. John Cornyn, the lead GOP negotiator in the Senate’s efforts to pass bipartisan gun safety legislation, is managing expectations over what kind of bills he’s willing to get behind. …
    2. “Targeted reforms, I think, is the way to get to where we need to go,” Cornyn said in a Senate floor speech on Monday. …
11. Fact Checker: Biden’s startling statistic on school-age gun deaths; Analysis by Glenn Kessler, Staff writer | WASHINGTONPOST.COM | June 7, 2022 at 3:00 a.m. EDT
    1. “Over the last two decades, more school-aged children have died from guns than on-duty police officers and active-duty military combined.” — President Biden, in a speech on gun violence, June 2, 2022
    2. First of all, we should note that the numbers add up. Whether they should be added up or if these are apples and oranges is another question.
    3. The figure on school-age children comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has an interactive online database that provides information on fatal and nonfatal injuries and violent deaths. The White House told us that it defined “school-aged children” as between ages 5 and 18 and “two decades” as 2001-2020. Within those parameters, searching for death by firearm, you get 42,507 deaths.
    4. For military deaths for the same period, we turned to the Defense Casualty Analysis System. That database yields 25,527 active-duty military deaths between 2001 and 2020.
    5. Finally, the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund (NLEOMF) lists 3,583 deaths from active-duty officers in 2001-2020.
    6. Between the military and the police, that’s a total of 29,110.
    7. And 42,507 is larger than 29,110, so end of the story? Not quite.
    8. First of all, the number of firearm deaths for school-age children drops quite a bit when you do not include 18-year-olds. There are, of course, many students who turn 18 while they are in their senior year. But they are also adults. So it’s a judgment call whether to include them. Removing 18-year-olds would drop the gun death number to 28,559 — just slightly fewer than the total for the military and police.
    9. In fact, 17- and 18-year-olds make up almost 56 percent of the gun deaths of school-age children. The numbers also drop significantly — 60 percent — if suicides are removed. There continues to be debate among criminologists and public health specialists about whether suicides should be counted as part of gun violence. So that’s another judgment call.
    10. The military death figures show about 22 percent of the deaths are from suicide.
    11. Moreover, in the military, not all deaths are from firearms. Deaths by accident exceeded deaths by hostile action in all but five of the 20 years. In fact, over the last two decades, 8,740 service members, or 34 percent, were killed in accidents compared with 5,445 (21 percent) in hostile action. It’s unclear how many hostile-action deaths involved firearms.
    12. As for law enforcement, many of those deaths were not by firearms. In 2020, for instance, 145 were from covid, 48 were from firearms, 44 were from traffic-related incidents — and 172 were from other causes, NLEOMF said. So only 12 percent died from firearms. Together, that means the deaths from firearms in the military and law enforcement likely would be no more than about 6,000, bolstering Biden’s point.
    13. Finally, raw death numbers generally do not tell you that much. What may be more informative is the mortality rate — the number of people who died per 100,000 people in that category. That provides you with the risk of dying.
    14. For the 58 million school-age children, that number is 3.67 (or 2.66 if you exclude age 18). But for the 1.5 million in the military, it’s about 69; for the 670,000 in law enforcement, it’s 56. So the average mortality rate for the military and police is about 15 times higher than the mortality rate from firearms for school-age children.
    15. Of course, children, unlike police officers and soldiers, did not sign up for the possibility of being shot at. So that also needs to be taken into consideration.
    16. We checked with some leading experts and asked whether Biden’s comparison was kosher. The consensus was that Biden’s math was acceptable for the rhetorical point he was making.
    17. “Both are kosher — but certainly President Biden used the raw numbers to make a point,” said Anne Case, a health economics expert and professor emeritus at Princeton University. “The risk of dying from guns (which is the mortality rate) is obviously much higher for people serving in the military and police — but if someone wanted to make a point about the number of grieving families, the raw count does that.”
    18. “It is (of course) less risky to be a kid than a cop, but it is still the case that more kids have died from firearms than military and police,” Gary King, a Harvard University professor who is director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, said in an email. “You’d certainly prefer your children to grow up in a country where it is less risky for them than police and military, but it is also a perfectly reasonable (alternative) argument to say that you don’t want that many children to die from guns, and ‘that many’ is, by the comparison with the police and military, ‘a lot.’ ”
    19. “Epidemiologists usually have a strong preference for comparing rates rather than counts when the populations being compared are very different in size,” said Kathryn H. Jacobsen, a professor of health studies at the University of Richmond. “That does not mean that a comparison of counts is invalid. The counts are real and true. They are just not ideal for scientific comparisons.”
    20. She noted that a calculation of the “burden of disease,” derived from what is known as a “proportionate mortality rate,” might show that firearm-related deaths among children and adolescents are even worse than among the military, given that only about a fifth of the military deaths were from hostile action.
    21. “It is not invalid to use counts in this way — this is not a lie — but there are better ways to explain the comparison when writers or orators have sentences and paragraphs to work with rather than short sound bites,” Jacobsen said.
    22. The Pinocchio Test
    23. We are often wary when two very different categories are compared — in this case, the large number of children in school vs. much smaller sets of active-duty military and law enforcement. We are also wary when a single change in the data set — from age 18 to 17 — reduces the number enough that the statistic is no longer correct. We also do not know for sure how many military deaths were by firearms, allowing a more direct comparison. Clearly, most law enforcement deaths were not by firearms.
    24. Biden’s raw numbers add up, but they are not necessarily comparable — and the risk of dying in the military and law enforcement remains far higher than in a child’s classroom.
    25. Biden offered a striking statistic that we no doubt will hear many times in the coming months. We can’t award his statistic a Geppetto Checkmark, and it’s on the edge of deserving a Pinocchio (“mostly true”). We will leave this unrated.
12. India scrambles to contain fallout over insulting comments about Islam; By Gerry Shih | WASHINGTONPOST.COM | June 7, 2022 at 2:00 a.m. EDT
    1. After a spokeswoman for India’s ruling party made disparaging remarks about the prophet Muhammad during a recent televised debate, rioters took to the streets in the northern city of Kanpur, throwing rocks and clashing with police.
    2. It was only the beginning of a controversy that would have global repercussions.
    3. Indian products were soon taken off shelves in the Persian Gulf after a high-ranking Muslim cleric called for boycotts. Hashtags expressing anger at Prime Minister Narendra Modi began trending on Arabic-language Twitter. Three Muslim-majority countries — Qatar, Kuwait and Iran — summoned their Indian ambassadors to convey their displeasure. The governments of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Afghanistan on Monday condemned the spokeswoman, Nupur Sharma, as did the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. …
    4. NOTE: “CUT-ter” or “cut-TAR”

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