Texas residents warned of tap water tainted with brain-eating microbe

the hill:

Tom Ridge, the former Republican governor of Pennsylvania and the first U.S. secretary of Homeland Security, has announced he will be backing former Vice President Joe Biden in the presidential race, saying in an op-ed that President Trump “lacks the empathy, integrity, intellect and maturity to lead.” 
Ridge, who served in former President George W. Bush’s administration, said in an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday that his decision to vote for Biden in November will mark the first time he has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate.  
Ridge, who has a history of criticizing Trump, accused the president of sowing “division along political, racial and religious lines” in the op-ed on Sunday morning and said he “routinely dismisses the opinions of experts who know far more about the subject at hand than he does – intelligence, military, and public health.”
“Our country has paid dearly in lives lost, social unrest, economic hardship and our standing in the world,” he wrote.
Ridge took aim at Trump for comments he made during a speech in Oshkosh, Wis., last month, in which he falsely claimed that the only way he would lose reelection in November is “if the election is rigged.” His comments came as he has alleged without evidence that an increase in mail-in voting efforts seen nationwide in recent months amid the pandemic would open the door to voter fraud later this year.
“Can you imagine the hubris? Can you imagine any other president in our lifetime — or ever — saying something so dangerous and un-American?” Ridge wrote in the op-ed. “We are in the midst of a health crisis, when we should be doing all we can to help citizens vote safely, yet he continues to cast doubt on the sanctity of the vote.”

“He’s done so multiple times here in Pennsylvania. It’s deplorable, yet utterly consistent with past reprehensible behavior,” he said.
[…]
In his op-ed on Sunday, Ridge said it’s “time to dismiss Donald Trump” and added that he believes the “responsible vote” in November is one for Biden. 

“It’s a vote for decency. A vote for the rule of law. And a vote for honest and earnest leadership. It’s time to put country over party,” he wrote.

still the sound of silence?  last week in wapo

Another woman says the president assaulted her. Is anyone listening?
[…]
Dorris’s allegation was reported by the Guardian, then by additional news organizations. Her name was briefly all over Twitter. But was the revelation accompanied by a bipartisan avalanche of elected officials demanding serious investigation into the matter, saying that it raised questions about the president’s fitness for office? No.
[…]
Politicians talk about what they think matters. Not just what matters to the fate of their political allies and opponents but also what matters to the country, its values and its culture. That’s why many politicians, Democrat and Republican, spoke up after “Access Hollywood.” You couldn’t not talk about it, because how the president treats women matters.
Except, apparently, it really doesn’t. Not enough, not in 2020, an election year in which Amy Dorris is likely to end up a footnote on a footnote.
[…]
Three years post-#MeToo, I find myself repeatedly unable to wrap my brain around this state of not-mattering, this sense that a parade of women have come forward, opening themselves up to scrutiny, threats and ridicule, when by now they must know that it doesn’t matter.
I have had a hundred discussions about the mechanics of the not-mattering: Is it because Trump’s defenders believe all of the women are lying (All of them, together, really?)? Or is it because they believe that rich and famous men often have to fend off advances from groupies or hangers-on — and that’s what these women probably were? Do they believe this was all a long time ago, and so there’s no need for an apology or even an acknowledgment? Or do they believe the women are telling the truth, they just don’t think it’s as important as, say, another shot at another appointee to the Supreme Court?
Which of these options are you most comfortable explaining to your daughter?
[…]
If there are more allegations, those probably won’t matter, either. If a woman came to me with a story, it’s hard to imagine encouraging her to come forward publicly. It would be a lie to promise her that her story would change anything.
The most she could hope for would be a reckoning in the future, and a willingness to suffer public scorn to be counted. That way, in three or four decades, when historians try to piece together this era and how it got like this, they would have an accurate tally of things: Back in 2020, 12 women, or 18 women, or 26 women had all come forward to say they had been abused by the same powerful man, and the country decided none of it mattered.

transcript:

CLINTON: For 40 years, everyone running for president has released their tax returns. You can go and see nearly, I think, 39, 40 years of our tax returns, but everyone has done it. We know the IRS has made clear there is no prohibition on releasing [returns] when you’re under audit.

So you’ve got to ask yourself, why won’t [Trump] release his tax returns? And I think there may be a couple of reasons. First, maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is. Second, maybe he’s not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don’t know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks.

Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.

TRUMP: That makes me smart.

and later when he denied saying it:

DANA BASH: My question for you is, first of all, it sounds like you admitted that you hadn’t paid federal taxes and that, that was smart. Is that what you meant to say?

TRUMP: No, I didn’t say that at all. I mean if they say I didn’t, I mean it doesn’t matter. I will say this, I hate the way our government spends our taxes because they are wasting our money. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re running it so poorly. Whether it’s spent in Iraq or wherever they’re spending it, they are wasting our money. So I do hate the way our government spends our money.

chickens are coming home to roost or shall we say videos like these mother jones released last week:

and this one last month: