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Time magazine has released the cover of its newest issue, and it makes quite a visual and political statement. The cover shows the faces of U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin morphing together. The close-up image shows the leaders' faces blended so that it's unclear where one begins and the other ends. An animated version online shows President Trump fully transforming into Putin in about 15 seconds. The cover illustrates an article on the two leaders' recent Helsinki summit and the persistent controversy over what author Brian Bennett calls President Trump's "puzzling affinity for Putin."

Just weeks after the UK’s i News published James Comey’s call for more gun control in America, the former FBI director is using Twitter to urge Americans to vote Democrat in November. On July 1, 2018, Breitbart News reported excepts from Comey’s i News interview, in which he claimed the NRA tells “lies” and called for limitations on the types of guns Americans can purchase, as well as limits magazine capacity for those guns. Comey said, “There’s no slippery slope in America when it comes to guns. It’s a concrete staircase, which is our constitution…. We just have to decide...

Ten Washington University students, all black and all incoming freshmen, were stopped by Clayton police this month while walking to a MetroLink stop from a late-night dinner and told they were suspected of leaving the IHOP restaurant without paying, university officials said. Even though some of the students had receipts showing they had paid for their meals, police made all of them walk three blocks back to the restaurant, with six squad cars following them. At the restaurant, the manager told officers the students were not those who had left without paying...

Awake early in the morning as I am (happening to me as time passes), thought it would be interesting to check how the LOCAL TV stations are covering the hand wringing over the Trump news conference yesterday. Doesn't seem like there is an independent voice among the bunch. But we'll see.

Peter Strzok, the FBI’s former head of counterespionage, owed the American public explanations about the vitriolic messages he sent on his work devices while investigating Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And he deserved the opportunity to be heard. In testifying to Congress last week, Strzok ended up side-stepping many questions, stating that the FBI had directed him not to answer. But we still discovered a lot. Here are ten things we learned from Peter Strzok’s testimony to Congress about his text messages and other actions: 1. Strzok’s hatred for Trump did not impact any of his professional actions or judgments....

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page on Friday afternoon faced a grilling from House Republicans keen to uncover any discrepancies between her testimony and Peter Strzok’s, the counterintelligence agent who testified in public for 10 hours the day before. Where the Strzok hearing was a pageant display of the animosity and deeply divided politics surrounding the bureau, Page’s closed-door deposition led to few fireworks. She did not answer questions from reporters entering and exiting the Judiciary Committee’s closed spaces — and the handful of lawmakers who conducted the interview provided few details.Multiple Republican lawmakers described Page as cooperative and credible —...

Looking at American media coverage I see no criticism of the silly Trump balloon. But what would the reaction be if a group created a mocking balloon of B Hussein Obama?

James Woods has been dropped by his talent agent, and received the announcement in an email sent during the Fourth of July holiday. The Oscar-nominated actor shared a screenshot of the email with the subject line “Well…” on his personal Twitter account. The talent agent, Ken Kaplan, said that he’d come to the decision to no longer represent the outspoken conservative star because he was “feeling patriotic.” “It’s the 4th of July and I’m feeling patriotic,” Kaplan wrote. “I don’t want to represent you anymore. I mean I can go on a rant but you know what I’d say.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has announced it will stop publishing the newspaper two days a week. According to a letter sent to the newspaper's employee union Wednesday, the newspaper is shrinking its printing schedule as part of a plan to become a digital news organization. The change will go into effect Aug. 25. Officials have not specified which days will be cut. Senior Human Resources Manager Linda Guest says in the letter, “the nature of our operations will change substantially.” The owners of the 232-year-old paper, Ohio-based Block Communications, have not responded to requests for comment.

An “off-the-record” private discussion group for left-wing journalists, similar to the controversial “JournoList” cabal, has been discovered. The group, which is hosted on Google Groups, was discovered after messages from New York Magazine journalist Jesse Singal were leaked. “The listserv, per its ‘About’ page, aims to provide an ‘off-the-record discussion forum for left-of-center journalists, authors, academics, and wonks.’ It has been around for at least eight years (I found discussion posts dating back as far as 2010), and has just over 400 members (403 at the time of this writing),” reported Jezebel. “These members include New York Times best-selling authors,...

Not that this will come as a surprise, but it is entertaining to watch NBC’s John Heilemann gleefully explain how “we” have a great opportunity to bludgeon President Trump and the GOP with the faux crisis at the border. In a mere 47 seconds, he gives the game away on a couple of fronts:

Usa today, link only. Note the date of the article. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/18/immigrant-children-detention-centers/10798643/

Article's full title: "Trey Gowdy: With All This Bias At The FBI, I Don’t Know How Mueller Successfully Prosecutes Anyone" Excerpt: The key bit from a long interview on “Fox News Sunday.” Watch for about two and a half minutes where the clip picks up below. On Friday, marveling at Gowdy’s anger over the IG report, I flagged the following quote about Peter Strzok from his interview with Bret Baier the night before. No one within the GOP has been as stalwart a defender of the Russiagate probe as Gowdy has. The despair was palpable:

President Trump declared in a spur-of-the-moment interview with "Fox and Friends" Friday morning that he wants people to sit at attention for him like they do for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Kim stands accused of leading a murderous regime that starves its own people. But Mr. Trump has heaped praise on Kim since meeting with him in Singapore, saying repeatedly that the two have "good chemistry." "Hey, he is the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head," Mr. Trump told Fox News' Steve Doocy on the White House lawn Friday. "Don't let anyone...

TEHRAN - The spokesman for the Iranian government is warning North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that President Donald Trump could nullify any nuclear deal with North Korea. The semi-official Fars news agency quotes Mohammad Bagher Nobakht, as saying Tuesday: "We are facing a man who revokes his signature while abroad." Nobakht's remarks are the first by an Iranian official after Trump and North Korea's Kim concluded their nuclear summit. The U.S. pulled out of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in May.

SINGAPORE - Over the past week, President Donald Trump alienated allies and cut a deal with a brutal dictator. He praised North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as “honest, direct and productive” and lambasted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “dishonest.” For critics, Trump’s moves are confounding and perilous evidence of incoherence. For his allies, they’re a reminder of his no-apologies approach to foreign policy. For everyone, it's a reminder that the Trump Doctrine, as one senior White House official told the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, is "We're America, Bitch." But Trump has also increasingly shown an affinity for the idea that...

President Trump's break with American allies at the G-7 Summit was the worst foreign policy outing of his presidency, and the worst summit since they started back in 1975, according to Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the Eurasia Group. Bremmer called Mr. Trump's performance "the geopolitical equivalent of the Comey firing." German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the president's reversal "via tweet" from signing onto the G-7 statement was "sobering and a bit depressing." On "CBS This Morning" Monday, Bremmer, said, "It was Trump unable to control his emotional impulses in doing something that I am sure felt very satisfying...

The algorithms that Google uses to filter out "fake news" and ensure that its readers get the straight story ended up labeling the California Republican Party's ideology as "Nazism" in its "search results." This timely smear comes just a week ahead of the state's primary elections next Tuesday. Google CEO Pichai Sundararajan (alias: Sundar Pichai) explained the seeming "snafu" as "a logical end point for the algorithms we coded into our search engine. Historically, the ideologies of Nazism and Communism have been the most vociferous opponents of one another. Since the platform of the California Democratic Party is fundamentally indistinguishable...

HOUSTON -- President Donald Trump spent more than an hour privately Thursday with some of those impacted by a Texas mass school shooting that killed 10 and wounded more than a dozen on May 18. But at least one of the victim's parents came away unimpressed. Rhonda Hart, whose 14-year-old daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was killed at the school, told The Associated Press that Mr. Trump repeatedly used the word "wacky" to describe the shooter and the trench coat he wore. She said she told Mr. Trump, "Maybe if everyone had access to mental health care, we wouldn't be in the...

Race Forward president Glenn Harris on why Starbucks’ mandatory anti-bias training is a good start, but far from a cure for what ails America. Today (May 29), Starbucks is closing more than 8,000 stores for an afternoon while nearly 175,000 employees undergo training meant to address demonstrated racial bias. But what follows the training is even more important. The arrest of Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson for simply existing as Black men at one of the coffee retailer’s Philadelphia locations last month is far from an isolated incident. Rather, the display of racism that drove Starbucks to respond is emblematic...