Tweet of the Day

New Ford pickup truck goes electric, hauls more than 1 million pounds

The new Ford F-150 sped into the future Tuesday, while dragging an enormous cargo behind it.

America’s best-selling pickup truck has gone electric as demonstrated by a video showing off the new model hauling 10 double-decker railroad cars 1,000 feet, according to USA Today. Ford said those railroad cars, which were filled with F-150 trucks, weighed more than a million pounds.

The truck’s chief engineer, Linda Zhang, said the demonstration shows the battery-powered version of the F-150 is shockingly powerful.

"What we’re trying to show is the benefits of that instant torque from that electric motor,” said Zhang.



https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-ford-truck-one-million-pounds-20190723-j4q66tzotfgpzfloxthpysfsbi-story.html

Tweet of the Day

My first House and Senate endrosements.

IL-03: Maria Newman
IL-13: Betsey Dirksen Londrigan
GA-07: Carolyn Bordeaux
NY-27: Nate McMurray
OH-01: Kate Schroder
PA-10: Eugene DePasquale
TX-21: Wendy Davis
TX-23: Gina Ortiz-Jones

ME-SEN: Sara Gideon

Reverend Horton Heat - Where In The Hell Did You Go With My Toothbrush?

Cilla Black - Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart

Lawyers For Trump 'Super Fan' Cesar Sayoc Say Trump's Rhetoric Inspired Terrorist Plot On Democrats

Cesar Sayoc, the fanatical Donald Trump fan who mailed package bombs to the president’s political opponents, is a cognitively limited sexual abuse survivor who thought of the now-president as a “surrogate father” and came to believe in an “alternative reality” fueled in part by Trump’s attacks on his political opponents, his attorneys told a federal court on Monday.

Sayoc has admitted to mailing pipe bombs to Democratic politicians, media figures and celebrities he perceived as Trump’s enemies last fall, and pleaded guilty to several federal crimes in March. He could face life in prison when he’s sentenced on August 5, but his federal public defenders said Monday he should serve 10 years in prison followed by community supervision (as well as mental health counseling and drug treatment).

Sayoc, his attorneys wrote in a sentencing memo filed in federal court in New York on Monday, was a Trump “super fan” and “began to consider Democrats as not just dangerous in theory, but imminently and seriously dangerous to his personal safety.”

“President Trump did nothing to dissuade this message,” they write. Their filing cites Trump’s Twitter attacks on the figures Sayoc targeted.

Sayoc was a Trump fan before the reality television host ran for president, and viewed him as “everything he wanted to be: self-made, successful, and a ‘playboy,’” his attorneys wrote.

But Sayoc “began watching Fox News religiously,” started following political news on Facebook and and “threw himself into” Trump’s campaign once he announced his candidacy because he “came to view Trump as a personal champion—someone who had helped him through the most difficult periods of his life and who could do the same for other people across the country.”


https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cesar-sayoc-trump-bombing_n_5d3635b1e4b004b6adb48758

Army Lets Slip That It's Conducting Secret Operation Around D.C.

The Pentagon has revealed a few details about a secret Army mission that has Black Hawk helicopters flying missions over the Washington, D.C., area backed by active-duty and reserve soldiers.

The mysterious classified operation was disclosed when the Army asked Congress for approval to shift funds to provide an extra $1.55 million for aircraft maintenance, air crews and travel in support of an “emerging classified flight mission.”

It’s part of a $2.5 billion request this month to “reprogram” funds in the current fiscal year’s budget to programs considered high priorities. “Without additional funding, the Army will not be able to perform this classified mission,” the Defense Department said.

“Soldiers from assault helicopter company and aviation maintenance units will be supporting the mission with 10 UH-60s and maintenance capabilities for four months,” according to the document, referring to the Black Hawks. The money will also pay for a specialized “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility” at Davison Army Airfield at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, just outside Washington.

Army spokesman Wayne Hall declined in an email to comment on some possibilities -- including whether the mission involved protecting the White House or other federal buildings and whether it’s making use of specialized commando units of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which includes the Army’s Delta unit and Navy’s Seal Team Six.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-22/army-lets-slip-that-it-s-conducting-secret-operation-around-d-c

Journalist Digs Into Years Of Corruption, Dysfunction At Border Protection Agency

GROSS: You call Customs and Border Protection America's most troubled law enforcement agency. What makes it qualified for that dubious distinction?

GRAFF: Customs and Border Protection is the nation's largest law enforcement agency, with 45,000 gun-carrying officers and agents. That's larger than the NYPD. It's larger than the Coast Guard. And yet at the same time, it has been wracked by what is now really more than a decade of an epidemic of crime, and corruption and mismanagement that is unparalleled in American policing. From 2005 to 2012, there was one CBP officer or agent arrested every single day. And even today, there's an officer or agent arrested for misconduct or violence, drug smuggling, even murder, every 36 hours.

GROSS: And then, like, a new development that was discovered is that there's a Facebook group of Border Protection agents with approximately 9,500 members in which agents have made racist and misogynist comments. And the chief of the Border Patrol has been part of that group. What kinds of comments? Have you read these posts?

GRAFF: Yeah. And this is the latest example of what has been a very long-running and actually well-known insular racist and misogynistic culture that has pervaded the work of the Border Patrol and CBP really since its founding in 2003. The agents and officers routinely use misogynistic and racist terms to even refer to the people that they are detaining on the border, the people that they are entrusted with keeping safe and rescuing and detaining.

That - and probably the most egregious example - it's been shown in court that agents actually refer to people caught crossing the border as Tonks, which is a phrase that agents will tell you derives from the sound that comes from when you hit one of them over the head with your flashlight.



https://news.wjct.org/post/journalist-digs-years-corruption-dysfunction-border-protection-agency

NM-SEN: Senate candidate Maggie Toulouse Oliver reads Mueller report aloud from kitchen

SANTA FE, N.M. — A Democratic contender for U.S. Senate in New Mexico staged a live-broadcast reading on social media Monday of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, highlighting her support for immediate impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

In a social media feed from her home kitchen table, New Mexico Secretary of State and Senate candidate State Maggie Toulouse Oliver read from a bound paperback version of the report, in anticipation of Mueller’s scheduled testimony this week before Congress.

Rival Senate candidate and Congressman Ben Ray Luján has stood by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in resisting attempts to begin impeachment before additional evidence is collected. Three Democrats are jockeying for the Senate nomination in 2020 as Sen. Tom Udall retires.

Campaign spokeswoman Heather Brewer said Toulouse Oliver would spend about seven hours in all on Monday and Tuesday reading aloud the second of two volumes from the report that focuses on obstruction of justice.



https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/22/new-mexico-senate-candidate-maggie-toulouse-oliver-reads-mueller-report-aloud/1799331001/