Karen Handel Sucks. Wonkagenda For Tues., June 20, 2017

Happy Taco Tuesday, Wonketariat! Georgia Sixth, GO VOTE.


Otto Warmbier has died from injuries sustained while being incarcerated in a North Korea prison after attempting to steal a propaganda poster; so Trump mumbled some words about "dealing" with the regime's dictator, a man he's called a "smart cookie."

House Democrats want to know why Mike Flynn forgot to mention his 2015 trip to the Middle East to help build 40 nuclear power reactors that included Russian financing operations, because it looks pretty goddamn suspicious that someone could just oopsie the shit out of their security clearance forms.

Devin Nunes says he never really recused himself from the House's Trump Russia investigation, despite that time he publicly recused himself from the Trump-Russia investigation. He was just ON A BREAK.

Democrats are trying to grind Senate proceedings to a slow, lurching halt by talking a lot about Mitch McConnell's super secret zombie TrumpCare plans.

Some Democrats are being a little cautious about how far they're willing to go to stall Senate procedures because they're afraid of looking like a common do-nothing Republican.

The rumor mill on Capital Hill says that the Senate may start their TrumpCare vote next week by repealing Obamacare/ACA, and they're terrified of going into the July 4th recesses without revoking Americans' access to healthcare.

A US District Court judge in Hawaii pulled back from a previous ruling on Trump's travel ban as the 9th Circuit Court said the judge's ruling was too broad as it didn't let Trump's administration study exactly how messed up the Muslim ban,travel ban,travel restrictions on Muslim majority countries might be.

Trump's White House is attempting a media blackout now that they realize they can't simply call up the gossip pages and give quotes with fake names and raspy voices in order to drive their own stories.

Spicey is trying to "You're Fired" himself as White House Press Secretary, and he's looking at rightwing talking heads and blowhards like Laura Ingraham and David Martosko of the Daily Mail to replace him as literally nobody else wants the job. According to Steve Bannon, the media blackout and Spicey's departure is because, "Sean got fatter."

The Air Force is really sorry that it might have given 135 patients HIV and hepatitis at a base in Qatar between 2008 and 2016. Band-aids and lollipops won't fix this, Uncle Sam!

Tech CEOs went to Washington to talk about modernizing government IT, and true to form, Trump blurted out incompetent and self-aggrandizing nonsense instead of dealing with legacy government systems that still run on floppy disks.

SCOTUS has ruled that offensive names are protected by the First Amendment, and now many people think a Washington DC sportsball team has precedent to argue it's cool to identify itself as a racial slur.

Paul Ryan hasn't given up on "tax reform" because screwing the poor is the only thing that gets him off at night.

Over 100 CEOs sent a mean letter to Congress over Trump's plan to privatize the air traffic control system with the hope that legislators can make air travel suck less.

SCOTUS has made it more difficult for lawyers to go "court shopping" in a new 8-1 ruling with Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissenting that it may "make it difficult to aggregate the claims of plaintiffs across the country whose claims may be worth little alone."

Republicans in small-town America are loath to admit support for Trump, as if he were the paste-eating kid in class who smells terrible and only talks about his rich family.

A pro-Trump Super PAC has a new fucked up race-baiting ad about how Democrats stole all the Christmas Turkeys, and they're taking clips from Obama's audiobook horribly out of context.

Genuine scumbag and Florida man Alan Grayson is fundraising off of Jon Ossoff, promising that he'll give Ossoff HALF of whatever you absentmindedly give Grayson.

ICYMI: Karen Handel has a storied history of being just a really bad person who, in her capacity at a state official, purged voter rolls, blocked Democratic candidates from running in local elections, and supported the nation's first voter ID laws. Bless her heart.

State election officials are starting to realize how completely screwed they are about securing electronic voting machines, but they're still standing in the middle of the road like a deer in headlights.

The UK wants MORE power to spy on social media accounts, even if it means killing freedom of speech; and Conservative MPs are yelling at Silicon Valley for giving hate speech a platform to spread.

Customs and Border Patrol agents are using military surveillance tech and tactics used in Afghanistan as an alternative to building Trump's Tortilla Curtain to combat human trafficking and drug smuggling, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than a giant concrete speed bump with "TRUMP" drilled into the facade.

Pharma-Bro Martin Shkreli will go to court next week and he's hoping people don't take his flamboyant douchebaggery and personal threats to victims and their children seriously.

And here's your late night wrap-up! Seth Meyers took A Closer Look at Trump-Russia, and "HAH-VANNAH"; The Daily Show wondered why the NRA was silent about Philando Castile, a legal gun owner; Colbert wondered how Trump will plead in front of a judge; Jimmy Kimmel made another Drunk Donald Trump on "HAH-VANNAH"; and James Corden had some talky time with Eddie Izzard about human sacrifice

And here's your morning Nice Time! TRASH PANDAS!

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Dominic Gwinn

Dominic is a broke journalist in Chicago. You can find him in a dirty bar talking to weirdos, or in a gutter taking photos.

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