SAY WHAT?

INTEL REPORT--An insulting social media post by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro aimed at French First Lady Brigitte Macron offered a window into the worldview of powerful men whose destructive policies show no regard for vulnerable populations and the plant at-large, Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein observed Monday.

Bolsonaro remarked on Macron's appearance while she and her husband hosted the G7 summit and as thousands acres of the Amazon rain forest burned as a result of Bolsonaro's pro-deforestation policies. Climate action groups have pointed to the president's encouragement of farmers, loggers, and ranchers who want the forest cleared for their own use, as primary reasons for the blazes.

INTEL REPORT— On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump quoted a conservative talk show host named Wayne Allyn Root to defend comments he had made the day before that angered many in the Jewish community: that Jews who vote for Democrats show “a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” 

“Thank you to Wayne Allyn Root for the very nice words,” Trump said before quoting something Root has said previously about the president. (Photo above: Wayne Allyn Root appears on Larry King's "PolitiKING" show in 2015. (Screenshot from YouTube) 

INTEL REPORT--Planned Parenthood will no longer be part of the federal Title X program because of new Trump administration restrictions.

Planned Parenthood will no longer participate in the federal Title X program, which provides family planning services such as contraception to low-income individuals.

INTEL REPORT--Like most people, I have spent the last 18 months or so trying to make sense of Donald Trump. The real questions are whether he is actually clever in some way — after all, he beat the system and became President — and what is the thing with Russia?

This week we learned some fundamental truths about Donald Trump.

1. Trump is not a genius

INTEL REPORT--One of the nation’s most extreme antigay pastors has called for the death of comedian Sarah Silverman and the actress isn’t about to let it go unnoticed.

Adam Fannin, formerly of the Stedfast Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, now preaches at the Law of Liberty Baptist Church. Stedfast is best known for being the home of radical preacher Donnie Romero who called for God to “finish the job” after the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting that killed dozens of mostly young gay Latinos.

INTEL REPORT--President Donald Trump’s Facebook page ran approximately 2,200 ads earlier this year stoking xenophobia and warning of an “invasion” by immigrants ― a revelation receiving attention in the wake of the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in which the gunman may have been acting on a white supremacist manifesto.

One set of video ads ― of which there are three versions ― urges social media users to help fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, flashing all-caps warnings that the U.S. is in a “state of emergency” and that “America’s safety is at risk.”

Above the visuals are messages claiming it’s “CRITICAL that we STOP THE INVASION” and guard the border to protect the nation.

INTEL REPORT--Conservative politicians have been quick to shift the blame for mass shootings away from racism and guns to LGBTQ people and video games. 

Over the weekend, mass shootings happened in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and a bar in Dayton, Ohio, leaving at least 29 people dead altogether. 

In Ohio, state representative Candice Keller (R) (photo above) posted on her Facebook page that “liberals start the blame game” after every mass shooting. So she decided to start the blame game herself this time.

INTEL REPORT--This summer the U.S. women’s soccer team handily won the World Cup — for the fourth time. They never trailed during the entire tournament.

They’re the most successful women’s soccer team on earth, but the future isn’t as clear as the past was. 

Women’s soccer is gaining steam around the globe, with several debutantes at this year’s tournament. And with a European club soccer infrastructure finally investing in the women’s game, the United States cannot rest on their laurels. They have to up their own investment to keep on top of the game.

INTEL REPORT--In a bipartisan deal that one anti-war critic said demonstrates how thoroughly "broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon," 219 House Democrats and 65 Republicans on Thursday voted to approve a budget agreement that includes $1.48 trillion in military spending over the next two years. 

Just 16 Democrats—including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)—voted against the two-year, $2.7 trillion budget agreement. Largely due to expressed concerns about the deficit, 132 Republicans and Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) also voted no. 

The final vote was 284-149. (See the full roll call.)  

INTEL REPORT-- I went to graduate school thinking I was straight. Then I realized I wasn’t. 

I came out of the closet almost two years ago, right after deciding to do my graduate research in Montana. Suddenly, I had an extra consideration on my plate: What would it be like to be gay in Montana? What will it be like to be gay wherever else my career takes me?

On the whole, I love it here. Montana feels like a pretty accepting place, but it’s a mixed bag. During Pride week, the governor, Democrat Steve Bullock, flew the LGBTQ Pride flag above the state capitol for the first time in the state’s history. Republicans immediately criticized him for it.

INTEL REPORT--lhan Omar has spent most of her adult life making trouble—good trouble, as her colleague John Lewis, with whom she’s just introduced a resolution supporting Americans’ right to participate in boycott movements, likes to say. So it’s perhaps understandable that she maintains an impressive cool under the repeated onslaught of criticism, threats, and rage thrown her way, from the right as well as well as from the Democratic leadership.

INTEL REPORT--Last June, Fabian Cardoza headed to the shower in the dilapidated Merced County Main Jail. The 20-year-old had spent a month there awaiting trial on a robbery charge. Two cellmates boxed him in. One pinned Cardoza to the floor. The other slipped a braided bedsheet around his neck and tightened it.

It was just past noon, but no correctional officers took notice. No one was monitoring the video camera that watched the area and, because the facility was so outdated, officers would have had to stand directly in front of the cell to see anything inside.

INTEL REPORT--At a bail hearing on Monday, lawyers for rich white guy and accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein will have the chutzpah to ask their client be released to await trial in his $77 million, prosthetic-breast-and-child-porn-filled Upper East Side mansion, one of two homes (out of his total of six) where he allegedly “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls." 

Their request, sent initially in a letter to District Court Judge Richard Berman, comes after the sudden resignation of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta for his earlier “sweetheart deal” for Epstein and Acosta's creepy press conference to make himself look good - Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown: "In reality, there is nothing here that makes him look good." 

INTEL REPORT--Marking the unholy first time "an American president's public pronouncements have been deemed too scabrous for repetition," a federal judge ruled this week that New Orleans officials violated an artist's freedom of speech when they tried to censor a mural quoting Trump's infamous "Access Hollywood" pussy profanities. 

The mural was created in November 2017 after warehouse owner and real estate developer Neal Morris gave permission to street artist Cashy D to paint it on a Morris property on South Liberty Street. 

INTEL REPORT--Donald Trump might be weaseling out of his promise of a White House invitation after the U.S. won the Women’s World Cup, after Fox News broadcast people celebrating the victory by chanting “Fuck Trump!”

Days ago, captain of the U.S. Women’s National Team Megan Rapinoe got into a war of words with Trump. She said in an interview that, if she’s invited to the White House, she definitely wouldn’t go.

“I’m not going to the f–king White House,” she responded.

“We’re not gonna be invited. I doubt it,” she added, explaining that Trump doesn’t usually invite teams if he doesn’t think they’ll come, and several of her teammates had backed her up.

INTEL REPORT--I’m at a party in Silverlake when I meet her. She’s a model-turned-filmmaker from a place where the way people greet each other isn’t “Hello” or “How are you,” but “Do you have a cigarette?” She lives in the Hollywood Hills. I am told her friends make up most of the CW casting pool.

We are congregated around the firepit outside. It is a sea of raw denim, leather jackets, beanies, and beards: a Netflix-perfect amalgamation of LA style, whatever that might be.

INTEL REPORT--I came to this country from Mexico as a small child because my mother was escaping poverty and wanted to give my sisters and me a better life. She worked hard to make sure we had food on our table and a roof over our heads, often doing two and three jobs at a time. 

Because of poverty and systemic racism, undocumented families like mine must work multiple jobs and get paid under the table, and that often comes with mistreatment and discrimination on the job. To get by, people in our community have to develop our own survival methods, such as getting together with neighbors to share meals or take care of each other’s kids.

INTEL REPORT--Earlier this week, Rapinoe told Eight by Eight magazine that she would not visit the White House if the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team won the Women’s World Cup, which is being held now in France.

“I’m not going to the f–king White House,” she said.

INTEL REPORT (MEDIA)-Acclaimed author E. Jean Carroll publicly alleged for the first time Friday that President Donald Trump raped her in a dressing room in the mid-1990s.

Two days later, the hosts of the most popular Sunday morning talk shows in the U.S. had the opportunity to ask their guests ― often a mix of high-profile Republicans and Democrats ― about Carroll’s horrifying claim and whether to hold the president accountable.

INTEL REPORT--The Supreme Court decided to punt on the case of a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. That only delays the inevitable day of judgment.

But perhaps the biggest impact on marriage equality came in an entirely different case and Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in it.

The case in question was about legal double jeopardy, in which you can’t be tried twice for the same crime. An Alabama man who had faced both federal and state gun charges stemming from the same traffic stop claimed that he was unfairly being charged twice. By a 7-2 vote, the Court upheld the current interpretation of the law, which allows the the federal government and state governments to pursue the same charges.

INTEL REPORT --On Friday morning I was in a small courtroom at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London. Julian Assange, held in Belmarsh Prison and dressed in a pale-blue prison shirt, appeared on a video screen directly in front of me. Assange, his gray hair and beard neatly trimmed, slipped on heavy, dark-frame glasses at the start of the proceedings. He listened intently as Ben Brandon, the prosecutor, seated at a narrow wooden table, listed the crimes he allegedly had committed and called for his extradition to the United States to face charges that could result in a sentence of 175 years. The charges include the release of unredacted classified material that posed a “grave” threat to “human intelligence sources” and “the largest compromises of confidential information in the history of the United States.” After the prosecutor’s presentation, Assange’s attorney, Mark Summers, seated at the same table, called the charges “an outrageous and full-frontal assault on journalistic rights.”