We finally have a new poll of the Gavin Newsom recall election in California, and it shows a tightening race with some big warning signs for the governor. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom pledged to house and feed the world’s homeless population this week during a whirlwind “Comeback California” tour that is designed to stave off a September recall by angry voters.

 

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More than 4 million U.S. children have tested positive for COVID-19, 16,756 were hospitalized and 346 have died, which is why experts recommend masking for schoolchildren who are ineligible for vaccines. Though the percentage of young children who develop severe illness from COVID-19 is relatively small compared to adults, the actual number of kids affected is rising as the delta variant spreads among adults.

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The arguments against mask mandates are plentiful. Those opposed to the public-health measure say it restricts people’s freedom, represents government intrusion and that it distorts science. Officials at a Catholic school in Michigan are making a less-common claim: Forcing students to wear masks, they say, is a violation of religious freedom. In a case set to be heard Wednesday, attorneys for Resurrection School in Lansing and two parents will tell the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that Catholic doctrine holds that every person is made in God’s image.“Unfortunately, a mask shields our humanity,” the school argued in its lawsuit. “And because God created us in His image, we are masking that image.”

A federal judge has temporarily blocked an Arkansas law banning nearly all abortions, calling it an “imminent threat” to the constitutional rights of women seeking abortions in the state.

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Nancy Pelosi rejected two of the five Republicans choices for the January 6 committee. Kevin McCarthy said it's all or nothing. 

General Milley affirms his allegiance to the constitution.

Joe Biden sounded very Presidential this evening.

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In a new political low in Texas, the Republican-dominated state Senate has passed a bill to eliminate a requirement that public schools teach that the Ku Klux Klan and its white supremacist campaign of terror are “morally wrong.”

The cut is among some two dozen curriculum requirements dropped in the measure, along with studying Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the works of United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony’s writings about the women’s suffragist movement, and Native American history.

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Unpredictable winds, fire clouds that spawn lightning, and flames that leap over firebreaks are confounding efforts to fight the blaze, which is sweeping through southern Oregon. A pair of fast-moving wildfires in California have chewed through nearly 100,000 acres while spewing noxious smoke, generating pyrocumulus clouds, lightning and other dangerous weather conditions and adding to the state’s growing wildfire misery.

We’re in a drought. What happens when we run out of water?

We must get motivated and deal with the infrastructure of this state.

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The two men — the country’s top infectious-diseases doctor and the junior Republican senator from Kentucky — have a history of heated exchanges and escalating accusations, with Paul often using the congressional hearings to inveigh against Fauci over his handling of the  pandemic and Fauci responding with an increasingly vigorous defense. Today they traded their most barbed public remarks yet, accusing one another of lying during a fierce debate over U.S. funding for a lab in Wuhan, China. “Senator Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at one point. “You do not know what you are talking about.”

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Pacific Gas and Electric, said that blown fuses on one of its utility poles may have sparked a fire that has burned through 30,000 acres in Northern California. The blaze, known as the Dixie Fire, has spread through remote wilderness about 100 miles north of Sacramento, in an area close to the burn scars of 2018’s devastating Camp Fire, which itself was caused by PG&E equipment failures.

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