Today's Liberal News

Trump Organization and Top Company Exec Charged with Tax Fraud. Is Donald Trump Next?

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has charged former President Donald Trump’s family business with operating a 15-year tax fraud scheme, accusing the Trump Organization of helping executives evade taxes by giving them compensation off the books. Allen Weisselberg, the company’s chief financial officer, who has worked with Trump for decades, was also charged with grand larceny for avoiding taxes on $1.7 million in perks that he did not report as income.

Supreme Court “Hijacking” Democracy with Rulings That Gut Voting Rights & Allow More Dark Money

In a pair of major rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court has gutted more of the Voting Rights Act while making it easier for billionaires to secretly bankroll political campaigns. In a 6-3 vote, the conservative justices upheld two Arizona election laws that have been widely criticized for their impact on minority voters, sending a signal that other voting restrictions in Republican-led states are also likely to be ruled constitutional if challenges are brought to the high court.

3 Rules for Politeness During a Confusing Social Transition

The abrupt abandonment of handshakes and hugs. An expansion of personal space in public to six feet. And detailed conversations preceding any social plans about who else was invited and what risky behaviors they might have recently engaged in. Before the pandemic, any of these actions would have been considered rude, but over the past year, they became polite. Although etiquette has always had an undertone of safety first, during the pandemic, safety became the main point of politeness.

The Only Thing Integrating America

Stephen Menendian, a researcher at UC Berkeley, has long worried that Americans don’t understand how pervasive housing segregation is. They couldn’t, he reasoned: Much of the research on it has failed to fully capture its scope. The dominant tool that scholars have used to assess the problem, known as the dissimilarity index, measures how racially mixed a given area is. According to the dissimilarity index alone, America is more integrated now than at any point in the 20th century.

News roundup: Top Trump exec indicted, SCOTUS guts voting rights, the Select Committee is named

In the news today: Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer for Donald Trump, was indicted in New York on 15 felony counts that allege a “15-year-long tax fraud scheme.” And yes, there’s an un-indicted co-conspirator. The Supreme Court took another step towards dismantling the Voting Rights Act. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi named the members of the Select Committee that will be investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

A walk down memory lane and roundup of reactions to Meghan McCain’s departure from ‘The View’

Americans have endured years of listening to bad take after bad take and hypocritical statement after hypocritical statement, all because the person offering up these under-qualified opinions was the under-qualified child of wealthy and politically powerful parents. The View’s Meghan McCain announced on Thursday that she will be leaving the morning talk show at the end of July.

This Week in Statehouse Action: Scorn in the USA edition

Happy July!

… except it’s not happy.

Or maybe it is!

… in which case, you should stop reading right now.

Because this is gonna be a summer bummer for sure.

Voice of America: Of course, the big news kicking off July is one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s final decisions of the term; specifically, Brnovich v.

Woman shown attacking son of Grammy Award-winning trumpeter charged with hate crime

The woman shown on viral video attacking the then-14-year-old son of a Grammy Award-winning trumpeter has been indicted on hate crime and other charges. Miya Ponsetto appeared in a Manhattan court via videoconference on Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to charges including the hate crime of unlawful imprisonment, aggravated harassment, and endangering a child, CBS News reported.

Guess Who’s Going to Space With Jeff Bezos?

In the beginning, the small group of Americans who aspired to become astronauts had to pass an isolation test. Spaceflight wasn’t going to be easy, and the country wanted people with tough minds.For his test, John Glenn sat at a desk in a dark, soundproofed room. He found some paper in the darkness, pulled a pencil out of his pocket, and spent the test writing some poems in silence. He walked out three hours later.

Trump Is Preparing for the Worst

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”“What brought it on?”“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends.”— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also RisesLike Hemingway’s Mike Campbell, the Trump Organization is confronting troubles that accumulated gradually and have coalesced suddenly. And once again, friends are at the bottom of it.