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Good morning and Happy Friday! Thanks for starting your day with me, and a special shout-out to all the new subscribers.
Because I completely lost track of the days this week, we didn’t have a Thursday Roundup — that’s when I take a break from longform writing and give you a quick rundown of the latest headlines. I missed writing about so many things this week (thanks to the Graham Platner discourse), but I didn’t want to end the week without mentioning the biggest stories. So this will be a hybrid Roundup/Regular Newsletter combo today. We’ll be back to the normal format on Monday.
Here we go.
It’s rubbed me the wrong way for a while that we have murals across America to Renee Good and Alexi Pretti, while the names of the Black and brown people who have also been killed by ICE or CBP remain unknown to most Americans. The name we need to be talking about right now is Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who was killed by ICE on his way to work on Tuesday after living in the US for 25 years and raising three children here. Turns out, Araujo wasn’t even ICE’s target that day. Oh, and the ICE agents weren’t wearing body cameras, because of course they weren’t.
ICE claims that Salgado refused their verbal commands, rammed into their van, and that they fired their weapons in self-defense. The “the victim rammed our car” defense is one that ICE always pulls out as a get out of jail free card, just as they did with Renee Good in Minneapolis, Marimar Martinez in Chicago, and at several others. Too often, the truth of those allegations has unraveled in court.
According to The New Republic, the three other men in the car when Salgado was shot are now being pressured to self-deport, because witnesses can’t give evidence against your agents if they aren’t in the country! And Mexico says it will pursue criminal charges against those responsible for the deaths of 17 Mexican citizens who died in ICE custody. Unfortunately, those charges won’t have any weight in the US, though they could be sent to the DOJ along with a request for cooperation from the Mexican government.
Speaking of investigations that are great to see but probably won’t go anywhere, the human rights group FairSquare referred FIFA President Gianni Infantino to the IOC Ethics Commission for a breach of political neutrality, thanks to his cozy relationship with Donald Trump, the FIFA Peace Prize, and the debacle they both made of Flo Balogun’s red card during the World Cup.
Trump took credit Monday for FIFA's decision — unprecedented in modern World Cup history — to let United States forward Folarin Balogun play Monday against Belgium despite getting a red card in the team's previous game. A Belgium team clearly fired up by the furor won 4-1 in Seattle.
The IOC cites neutrality among "fundamental principles of Olympism" for sports bodies like FIFA, and has jurisdiction over Infantino since he joined its exclusive group of 100-plus invited members in 2020.
"FairSquare will file a complaint to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) regarding FIFA President Gianni Infantino's repeated breach of political neutrality rules," the London-based sports and human rights NGO said in a statement Wednesday.
This comes on the heels of another complaint to the IOC about Infantino’s ties to Trump, submitted in December and backed by dozens of members of the European Parliament. The USMNT might have crashed out of the World Cup, but if Infantino gets forced out, I’ll consider it a huge win. In other fun, Landon Donovan is going all-in on dragging Christian Pulisic.
As every single person who saw the Super Bowl ad pointed out, Flock cameras are highly susceptible to government use for nefarious purposes. Turns out, it’s already happening. Cops in Orange County, CA, have been using them to track protestors via license plates for a while.
Cops across the Golden State accessed the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s (OCSD) Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) system at least 145 times to track protesters within the span of a year and seven months, newly obtained data shows. Eleven California police agencies, one as far as Daly City, located almost 400 miles away, searched for protesters using OCSD’s Flock data, which contains license plate numbers, timestamps, locations, and photos of vehicles and their surroundings. The majority of the dates that police searched for people landed directly on or around dates when protests against ICE were held.
Great investigative work here by the indie outlet Inadvertent.
I’ve really resisted thinking about Graham Platner over the last 24 hours, but he’s making it very difficult. After demanding a say in who Maine Democrats will run in his place, Platner, who still hasn’t filed the paperwork to withdraw from the November ballot, reportedly told his team that he’ll officially drop out on Monday, one day before the deadline to withdraw. No, we don’t know why he’s waiting so long, other than the obvious temper tantrum.
If that doesn’t convince you that Graham Platner had no business running for Senate, maybe this will (gift link):
But behind the scenes, his campaign was messy, disorganized and haphazardly run. Mr. Platner did not disclose explosive, politically damaging secrets to key members of his team. And he was guarded by an insular and zealously protective inner circle of advisers who did not always seem to grasp the seriousness — or strangeness — of what quickly became a steady drip of scandal, according to party strategists, Democratic officials and former staff members.
Repeatedly, Mr. Platner promised there was nothing else damaging from his past to come. And each time, he was wrong.
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.Mr. Katz said he had asked Mr. Platner directly and repeatedly whether anyone had made sexual assault allegations against him and the candidate had said no, according to two people familiar with the discussion who described it on the condition of anonymity.
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But by June, Mr. Platner was trailing far behind Ms. Collins in campaign funds. Mr. Platner’s campaign had only about $1.3 million cash on hand a few weeks before he exited the race, according to his campaign — a fraction of Ms. Collins’s $9.7 million war chest as of late May. A person familiar with the campaign’s finances said the amount of cash available to spend was even lower — under $100,000.
They blew through $9 million in a single quarter! The problem? “Campaign aides told top Democratic strategists that donors kept raising concerns about the tattoo and his other controversies.” Yeah. Maybe his campaign should have listened to the donors.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear is demanding proof of life from Mitch McConnell.
Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky sent a letter to Senator Mitch McConnell on Wednesday demanding that he update his constituents on his health as rumors swirl about the Republican senator’s condition after his hospitalization last month.
Mr. McConnell, 84, has been in the hospital since June 14, when medics were called to his Washington address to respond to a report of an unconscious individual. A worker later informed his supervisor over emergency radio that CPR was “in progress.”
Mr. McConnell’s staff members have not disclosed what prompted his hospitalization or what treatment he is receiving. On Tuesday, several Republicans said they had spoken to Mr. McConnell for about 20 minutes each.
Beshear is much more genteel about this whole thing than I would be. I’d demand a picture of McConnell sitting up and holding a copy of today’s newspaper. And I have an unexpected ally in … *checks notes* … Nacy Mace (R-SC), who said on X, “This charade can’t continue. We can't demand of others what we won't demand of ourselves.” What a shockingly normal thing for Mace to say.
Trump doesn’t know if the war with Iran is back on, but the strikes against Iran continue, which would seem to suggest yes.
Donald Trump has fired the remaining members of the US Election Assistance Commission, leaving the upcoming midterms vulnerable to partisan shenanigans (thanks a lot, SCOTUS!):
President Donald Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration at a moment when Trump has sought to reshape federal voting rules.
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The firings leave the four-member commission with no commissioners, meaning it cannot take official action until new members are installed. They also come days after the Supreme Court granted the president power to fire leaders of independent agencies, weakening a legal framework that for decades had insulated bipartisan federal commissions from direct White House control.
Three more courts rule that Trump has to pay E. Jean Carroll. How delightful.
And finally, New Mexico’s Attorney General has accused the DOJ of obstructing the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch near Santa Fe.
Raúl Torrez, New Mexico’s top law enforcement officer, first requested original documents related to the convicted sex offender’s Zorro Ranch property in February. He said he reiterated the request five times in the following months, through a range of channels, but Justice Department officials so far had not responded.
The records, he said, contain names of survivors, witnesses, co-conspirators and other individuals who may aid the long-delayed state investigation into the deceased financier’s crimes in New Mexico.
“The U.S.D.O.J.’s continued withholding of unredacted records is causing real and escalating harm,” Mr. Torrez wrote to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, in a letter sent last week but made public on Thursday. “Every day that the U.S.D.O.J. withholds these records, the foundation upon which a New Mexico prosecution could be built erodes.”
By “DOJ,” Torrez means Blanche, who has been running interference on the Epstein Files since before he became acting Attorney General, which is exactly why Trump installed him at the DOJ in the first place.
Before I leave you, I ask again that you consider becoming a paid subscriber to Losing My Perspicacity. Independent media is so important, given (gestures around wildly to everything), and it’s impossible to do this work without financial support. You can upgrade to a paid monthly plan, leave a tip, or even help me out by taking five seconds to click on the ad below. Every penny helps keep the lights on here.
The Wild World of the Van Gogh Truthers
In 1990, after years of practicing medicine and reviewing Van Gogh’s case history via his hundreds of letters, Arenberg published a paper in JAMA diagnosing Van Gogh as suffering not from epilepsy, as the artist’s physician claimed a century earlier, but from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear affliction that can cause vertigo, of which Van Gogh complained, and tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears. Ménière’s, to Arenberg, could better explain Van Gogh’s decision to slice off his ear. After retiring, in 2017, Arenberg recommitted himself to studying Van Gogh and became convinced that art historians had made an even more alarming mistake: Van Gogh had not committed suicide. He’d been murdered.
Read the article for free on Air Mail, a lively digital read for the world citizen, with stories both foreign and domestic that you won’t find anywhere else, written by some of the world’s finest journalists.
The High Note
Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.
You guys know that something that combines Lord of the Rings and the World Cup is 100 percent in my wheelhouse, so I couldn’t resist sharing:
Someone also put together a really good supercut of all the ESPN soccer-related SportsCenter ads over the last few decades.
And for those of you on Bluesky, I can’t recommend this thread of the most moving works of art people have seen in person enough:
I spent an hour scrolling through last night.
Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Have a great weekend!
