"Film censorship in America is almost as old as the industry itself. In 1897, the state of Maine banned the showing of a film of a heavyweight championship fight. In 1907, Chicago became the first U.S. city to enact a censorship law authorizing its police chief to screen all films to determine whether they were fit to be seen by the public. Some 100 cities and states soon created local censorship boards. In the 1930s, self-censorship gradually replaced state bans and restrictions. Fearful of federal regulation, the motion picture industry adopted morality codes that persisted until the breakdown of the studio system and the rise of independent filmmakers, in another culturally revolutionary moment in America -- the late 1960s."

"Top House Republicans said the consideration of any reauthorization of recently expired Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorities should be held off until the Justice Department's inquiry into the Russia investigation is complete.

"A 'Dear Colleague' letter, authored by Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking member of the House oversight panel, and signed by eight top subcommittee Republicans, was sent to the entire GOP conference in the House.

"'Many of us were encouraged when President Trump declared his principled opposition to proceeding with reauthorizing provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,' the letter reads. 'The President is right.'

"The letter pointed to a late May tweet by Trump, which derailed the FISA reauthorization effort that appeared set to pass in the House as it had in the Senate. Trump tweeted, 'I hope all Republican House Members vote NO on FISA until such time as our Country is able to determine how and why the greatest political, criminal, and subversive scandal in USA history took place!'

"Jordan and the others argued on Tuesday that 'we need to allow the ongoing federal investigations to be completed so that Americans can fully understand how and why the Obama-Biden Administration weaponized our national security apparatus and the FISA process to target its political adversaries.'"

"President Trump took an important first step Tuesday to address problems that exist within the law enforcement system when he signed an executive order to spur reforms 'encouraging police departments nationwide to adopt the highest professional standards to serve their communities.'

"As the president correctly said, the vast majority of law enforcement officers do an excellent job protecting their communities and don't employ excessive force -- much less kill people they are arresting. But he is right that a tiny minority engage in serious misconduct, and that police departments must remove such officers from their ranks. ...

"In my three decades in law enforcement, which started as a police officer, I have dealt with thousands of law enforcement officers at the local, state and federal levels. I do not hesitate to say that these men and women are the finest 1 percent of our population.

"However, like every other occupation out there, there are some people working in law enforcement who do not uphold the values of the profession and need to be held accountable. ...

"More than 800,000 men and women are employed in U.S. law enforcement agencies. In the wake of killings by police of unarmed African-Americans, we must redouble our efforts to address misconduct and restore trust between law enforcement officers and communities."

Read entire article here.

"Thousands of nursing homes across the country have not been checked to see if staff are following proper procedures to prevent coronavirus transmission, a form of community spread that is responsible for more than a quarter of the nation's Covid-19 fatalities.

"Only a little more than half of the nation's nursing homes had received inspections, according to data released earlier this month, which prompted a fresh mandate from Medicare and Medicaid chief Seema Verma that states complete the checks by July 31 or risk losing federal recovery funds.

"A POLITICO survey of state officials, however, suggests that the lack of oversight of nursing homes has many roots. Many states that were hit hard by the virus say they chose to provide protective gear to frontline health workers rather than inspectors, delaying in-person checks for weeks if not months. Some states chose to assess facilities remotely, conducting interviews over the phone and analyzing documentation, a process many experts consider inadequate.

"In places where state officials claimed that in-person inspections have taken place, the reports found no issues in the overwhelming majority of cases, even as Covid-19 claimed more than 31,000 deaths in nursing homes. Less than 3 percent of the more than 5,700 inspection surveys the federal government released this month had any infection control deficiencies, according to a report on Thursday by the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit patient activist group.

"'It is not possible or believable that the infection control surveys accurately portray the extent of infection control deficiencies in U.S. nursing facilities,' the report states."

Read entire article here.

"There are specific, urgent, and immediate questions that demand answers in Minneapolis, and those are questions mainly for its Democratic mayor, its Democratic city council, its progressive leadership and management class, for Democratic elected officials such as Representative Ilhan Omar, and a great many other people who are very comfortable talking about the ghastly moral failures of the Confederacy a century and a half ago but rather less eager to talk about the facts on the ground in Minneapolis in the here and now.

"Of course the past matters. (It is incredible that some people who call themselves conservatives have to be reminded of that.) But the present matters, too, and surely it deserves more of our attention than some potential slight to the very mixed legacies of Braxton Bragg or John Bell Hood. Given current events, the Democrats are very eager to change the subject. They should not be accommodated."

"Even for 2020, events in Seattle are bizarre: Armed radicals have taken over six blocks downtown, with the de facto blessing of city officials.

"It's the 2011 Occupy Wall Street takeover of Zuccotti Park, but multiplied by a factor of 10 or 20. Indeed, the OWS radicals were tame by comparison, with their drum circles and chants: This crew has at least one guy running around with a pistol and an AK-47.

"After nights of violent attacks on the Seattle Police Department's East Precinct, Mayor Jenny Durkan ordered a pullout.

"The cops boarded up their building -- and the radicals moved in, throwing up barriers (sorry, John Lennon), dubbing the area the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, and declaring it cop-free.

"Yet guards, who've reportedly been checking IDs at the CHAZ borders, are declaring that they are now the police -- even if they have no authority or proper training. (Untrained 'police': That's a fine response to George Floyd's death.) ...

"Yet the real cops say they've gotten many complaints and cite potential extortion of businesses and residents. Given that the area was peaceful until the radicals began attacking the East Precinct, there's every reason to expect things to head downhill."

"White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx says that dozens of COVID-19 testing sites have been destroyed by rioters during the recent Black Lives Matter protests, a setback the Trump administration fears could contribute to the continued spread of the disease throughout the country.

"Numerous recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, sparked by the killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of local police, have descended into chaos and violence as some protesters have taken to property destruction, clashing with police and looting.

"Among the consequences of those riots has been the destruction of 70 COVID-19 testing sites across the country."

"Small business has been crushed by the lockdown era. For instance, as much as 30 percent of restaurants are likely to never reopen because of the steep financial losses of the past several months. Surveys of small business owners find that as many as half worry that they will not have the financial resources to avoid bankruptcy this summer.

"Given that small business has accounted for 61 percent of the job growth in this country over the last two decades, without healthy small businesses, we could see double-digit unemployment rates through the November elections and beyond. To address that, we need policies that will foster small business startups.

"Of course, the secret to capitalism is right there in the word -- capital. In order to start a business, the prospective owner must accumulate capital (usually savings and often capital from investors or banks). The entrepreneur then places that capital at risk. Whether the entrepreneur takes that risk depends on how easy it becomes to accumulate capital and the expected rate of return.

"That brings us to Biden's economic strategy for the country. Especially in a down economy, business startups and expansions require low-cost capital, labor, energy, taxes and regulations. Incredibly, Biden' entire platform is to raise those costs on business startups. His program is so bad that, if enacted, it could plunge the United States into a serious depression."

"The people who live in high-crime neighborhoods understand more about policing than the anti-cop agitators. Since the early 1990s, when the homicide toll in New York City was more than 2,000 a year, tens of thousands of minority lives have been saved, thanks to the NYPD's fiercely responsive, data-driven policing.

"That policing model, known as Compstat, holds precinct commanders ruthlessly accountable for crime in their jurisdiction; it has driven homicide down 86 percent from 1990, to 319 in 2019. Most of the lives that would have been lost had killings remained at their early 1990s levels have been black and Hispanic.

"At the same time that the department has lowered crime to levels that would have been viewed as unimaginable three decades ago, it has radically cut its use of lethal force. In 2018, the NYPD recorded the lowest number of shooting incidents since records were first kept in 1971 -- 35 -- and the lowest number of subjects shot and killed: five. Four of those suspects were threatening officers with guns or knives; the fifth, reported as being armed by bystanders, pointed what appeared to be a gun at the responding cops. ...

"Defunding the police will hurt the very people its proponents think they're helping."

Read entire article here.

"Who is responsible for the mess in Minneapolis? The answer to that question is not unknowable -- but it is, in many political quarters, unspeakable.

"Minneapolis's municipal government, its institutions, and its police department are what they are not because of the abstract Hegelian forces of capital-H History, but because of decisions that have been made by people. Who these people are is a matter of public record. We know their names: Jacob Frey, Betsy Hodges, R. T. Rybak, Sharon Sayles Belton, Medaria Arradondo, Janee Harteau, Tim Walz, Mark Dayton ... the rogues' gallery is practically inexhaustible.

"But, oh, the transmuting magic of partisanship! Minneapolis is a Democratic city, with a Democratic mayor and a Democratic city council (0.0 Republicans on that body), in a state with a Democratic governor and a Democratic state house; these are the people who hire police chiefs and organize police departments, who specify their procedures and priorities, who write the laws that the police are tasked with enforcing -- Democrats and progressives practically to a man. (Not every member of the Minneapolis city council is a Democrat -- there's a Green, too.) That's a lot of lefty power, hardly anything except lefty power -- but, somehow, the bad guy in this story must be Donald Trump. ...

"Cue the retreat into abstraction: The problem mustn't be political leaders and the decisions they make -- that can't be it, because progressives have all the power in these cities -- and so the problem instead must be something without a fixed address and regular business hours: systemic racism, white supremacy, white privilege, capitalism, etc. It isn't that racism is imaginary, any more than crime, poverty, or government corruption is imaginary. But Minneapolis hasn't been governed by abstractions all these years. It has been governed by people."