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TODAY'S HEADLINES:

Middle-aged white cops in North Carolina got caught on tape fantasizing about killing black people en masse. But Donald Trump says Black Lives Matter is the real problem.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Courts strip refugees of their lawful human right to a judicial hearing. Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggests her liberal colleagues succumbed to political pressure.

And lastly, former Vice President Joe Biden continues to gain in key polls against Donald Trump. The signs are encouraging, but overconfidence has plagued the Democrats before.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

Racist Cops Praise Murder

Trump yesterday on Twitter accused Black Lives Matter protesters of treason, sedition, and insurrection. Back in the real world, a second New York City cop was arrested and charged with violating a new state law banning the police from using chokeholds. In Wilmington, North Carolina, three cops were fired after accidentally recording themselves during an extended racist tirade. One, Officer Michael “Kevin” Piner, predicted BLM protests would lead to civil war, adding QUOTE we are just going to go out and start slaughtering them F-word N-words... Wipe 'em off the Eff-ing map. That’ll put 'em back about four or five generations ENDQUOTE. Another, Corporal Jesse Moore the Second, said a black woman recently arrested should instead have been shot. Moore said QUOTE She needed a bullet in the head right then and move on. Let’s move the body out of the way and keep going ENDQUOTE. Is that what they call cop humor?

A new study by the McClatchy news service links excessive force cases to police departments that received military surplus weapons. The analysis found that between 1990 and 1999, the Defense Department transferred more than thirteen thousand weapons to US police departments. In the past decade, it sent many times more wepons to police – nearly two-hundred and two thousand guns and gun accessories, such as assault rifles with night vision sights. What’s more, McClatchy found that seven of the top 15 police departments with the highest number of police officer-involved fatalities — when adjusted for population — also

received a higher share of the Defense Department’s excess guns. Those departments were in Orlando, Florida; Bakersfield, California; Spokane, Washington; Aurora, Colorado; Albuquerque, New Mexico.; and Tucson, Arizona. In 1990, the military transfered four- hundred and forty thousand dollars worth of guns to police departments. Last year, it shipped two-hundred and ninety millio dollars’ worth of hardware to the cops. And now those same cops are turning those weapons of war against peaceful members of the public. So who is really out there promoting insurrection? BLM or the DOD?

SCOTUS Sells Out Refugees

The US Supreme Court wants you to know that in spite of upholding the Obama-era program that protected the children of migrants from deportation last week, it is not in the business of doing good. Yesterday the court ruled that asylum seekers who get turn downed by federal immigration agents do not have the right to take their case to a judge. This ruling gives Trump what he wants: the power to turn away migrants to the US for any reason, without judicial review, and deport people more quickly – or at whatever pace he feels like.

The ruling was seven to two in Trump’s favor, with only Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissenting. The liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer sided with the rightwing majority on the court. In her dissent, Sotomayor said QUOTE Today’s decision handcuffs the judiciary’s ability to perform its constitutional duty to safeguard individual liberty and dismantles a critical component of the separation of powers ENDQUOTE. She also alluded to political concerns and other, as she put it, burdens on the judiciary that influenced the outcome. The plaintiff in the case that led to the court’s decision was a Sri Lankan farmer who described being beaten by strangers before fleeing his country. He was arrested in California in 2017 only yards away from the Mexican border. Immigration agents said he failed to establish that he was persecuted. Justices Breyer and Ginsburg agreed, arguing, per The New York Times, that the farmer’s stories of being beaten were too vague to be considered credible. One wonders how they might have fared in his shoes.

Biden's Lead Still Growing

Polls show that Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump in key swing states continues to grow. A New York Times poll with nearly thirty-nine hundred respondents showed Biden up by eleven percentage points over Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin; ten percentage points in Pennsylvania, nine in North Carolina; seven in Arizona; and six in Florida. Those are all states that Trump won by some margin in 2016. The results indicate that if the election were held today, and Biden held all the states Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Biden would sweep with at least three-hundred and thirty three electoral college votes.

Trump is fully aware that his reelection effort is not going well and has been lashing out at the fake news, fake polls, and et cetera. He was in Wisconsin yesterday to visit a private shipyard with US Navy contracts. Fox News host Sean Hannity joined Trump on Air Force One. They also recorded a town hall event in Green Bay that was broadcast last night.

Biden is making the most of Trump’s malaise. The presumptive Democratic nominee compared Trump to a whining, self-pitying child, and said QUOTE this pandemic didn’t happen to him. It happened to all of us. And his job isn’t to whine about it, his job is to do something about it ENDQUOTE. Trump did do something, though. Remember? He told people to try injecting themselves with disinfectant chemicals, or maybe sunlight.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

The head of the US Centers for Disease Control, Robert Redfield, told reporters yesterday that the actual number of coronavirus cases in the country is likely ten times higher than officially reported – so, twenty-three million instead of two-point-three million. Texas halted its reopening because the virus is so out of control. In Houston’s Texas Medical Center, the intensive care unit is entirely full – they have no beds – but the hospital CEO says that’s no cause for alarm. Whatever you say, pal.

A former Republican elected official in Mesa, Arizona, Paul D. Peterson, pleaded guilty on charges of conspiracy to smuggle humans. Peterson ran a scheme that paid pregnant woman in the Marshall Islands up to ten thousand dollars to travel to the US and give up their babies for adoption. He was reportedly arrested last October and resigned from his job as Maricopa County’s tax assessor in January.

A wild story about worker abuse in the Washington Post: Workers at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, were fired for following instructions. When Elon Musk kept the factory open in spite of a county lockdown order, workers were told that if they felt uncomfortable returuning to work, they should stay home. But multiple workers who did just that were fired. That’s Elon for you. Whattaguy! Also yesterday, for the fourteenth week in a row, the latest Labor Department figures show that new unemployment claims exceeded one million.

Pakistan International Airlines grounded one-hundred and fifty pilots for having bogus aviation credentials. The action resulted from an official investigation following a PIA crash last month that killed ninety-seven people. Pakistan’s aviation minister said that more than one in three pilots had either cheated on their exams or had a fake license to fly. So hopefully at least one person in the cockpit actually knows what they’re doing, at any given time.

That’s all for the AM Quickie. Join us this afternoon on the Majority Report.

June 26, 2020 - AM Quickie

HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner

WRITER - Corey Pein

PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn