TV News LIES

President Joe Biden called on Americans to cool down partisan fervor in the wake of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, encouraging peaceful debate but decrying any form of political violence in a Sunday evening address to the nation.

"There's no place in America for this kind of violence or any violence, ever, period, no exceptions," Biden said. "We can't allow this violence to be normalized."

Trump said Sunday that "God alone" had spared him from Saturday's brazen assassination attempt, the likes of which America had not seen since an attack on President Ronald Reagan's life 43 years ago. Trump, who was injured in the right ear when a sniper opened fire, traveled to Milwaukee on Sunday for this week's GOP convention.

Former President Donald Trump was rushed off stage with blood dripping on his face after gunshots rang out at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One spectator at the rally is dead, and two are in serious condition.

The incident is being investigated as an assassination attempt, a source told Reuters. Trump, in an email sent to reporters late Saturday night after the shooting, declared "I will never surrender."

Secret Service Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement that the suspected shooter, who officials confirmed is dead, fired multiple shots toward the stage at approximately 6:15 p.m. He said the shooter was in an elevated position outside the rally.

A major conservative thinktank previewed rightwing efforts to overturn the 2024 election on Thursday, with a top official saying there was a “0% chance of a free and fair election”.

Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation, made the comments at an event in Washington sharing the results of a hypothetical exercise mapping out several implausible scenarios that could take place after the election. The outlandish scenarios involved Barbara Streisand being kidnapped by Hamas, antifa-BLM protesters taking over a detention facility and the FBI arresting Donald Trump after winning the election.

The effort was designed to muddy the waters over the threat to the 2024 election posed by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results and tried to overturn the 2020 vote. Instead, the Heritage Foundation, which is also behind the extreme Project 2025, wanted to suggest that it was Joe Biden who could try to overturn the result of the election, echoing the ex-president’s repeated claims that it is actually Biden who is the threat to democracy.

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An amendment to legalize abortion in Arkansas has been thrown out for procedural errors.

The Secretary of State's office sent a letter on Wednesday announcing the decision to reject the Arkansas Abortion Amendment. The amendment was sponsored by the group Arkansans for Limited Government. They said they had collected over 101 thousand signatures to put the amendment on the ballot, surpassing the 90,704 threshold.

Secretary of State John Thurston said he could not certify the amendment because the sponsors did not submit two specific pieces of paperwork. The first was a list of paid canvassers and the second was a document proving that paid canvassers had access to the signature gathering handbook. The office said they were then forced to throw out the over 14 thousand signatures collected by paid employees. This means the canvassers did not collect enough signatures to put their amendment on the ballot.

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Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced articles of impeachment against the conservative US supreme court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito on Wednesday over the justices’ “pattern of refusal to recuse from consequential matters before the court”.

The articles of impeachment are unlikely to gain traction in the US House, which is controlled by Republicans. The effort follows calls from two US senators, Sheldon Whitehouse and Ron Wyden, for the US attorney general to appoint a special counsel to investigate potential criminal violations of federal ethics and tax laws by Thomas.

“Justice Thomas and Alito’s repeated failure over decades to disclose that they received millions of dollars in gifts from individuals with business before the court is explicitly against the law. And their refusal to recuse from the specific matters and cases before the court in which their benefactors and spouses are implicated represents nothing less than a constitutional crisis,” Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, said in a statement.

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Donald Trump’s “preposterous” efforts to disavow Project 2025, a rightwing blueprint for a radical takeover of the US government if the former president is re-elected in November, have been derided by former Republican figures.

The Project 2025 plan includes calls for replacing civil servants with Trump loyalists, eliminating the education department, putting the justice department under the president’s thumb and banning the abortion pill.

Democrats have made concerted efforts to say the 900-plus page document from the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank would be representative of a second Trump presidency.

But although it was written by former members of Trump’s first administration, and he regularly echoes its policies in his speeches, last week Trump tried to disown the initiative.

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