Important Takeaways:
- Dozens of people were arrested after clashing with police at an un-permitted protest outside the Israeli Consulate Tuesday night.
- A crowd of about 200 protesters attempted to break through a police bike line. Hundreds of Chicago police officers with riot gear, face shields and batons held the line and boxed the group in.
- Protesters again tried to engage with police, but were instead funneled through the downtown area by bike blockades.
- One said she and her fellow protesters are critical of the current administration’s handling of the war in Gaza, and want Democratic leaders over at the Democratic National Convention to hear their concerns.
- “We want an end to the genocide, not a new person leading the genocide,” she said.
- Chicago Deputy Mayor Garien Gatewood called the rally a danger to the city and its residents, and said those arrested were specifically looking to cause harm and havoc.
- “Look, I know everyone wants to believe that we can deescalate every single situation, and we can walk away. And everybody is going to be fine. There are those people who are out there right now. It’s a non starter for them. They don’t want to talk; they don’t want to negotiate. They don’t want to cooperate. They want what they want, and that’s it,” Snelling said.
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Important Takeaways:
- Tensions over immigration have roiled local politics as funding to care for new arrivals strained public finances
- In Democrat-run Chicago, where the party is gathered to nominate Kamala Harris for president, a fight over migration has roiled local politics — pointing to a key vulnerability for her campaign.
- In Chicago, a different kind of tension is brewing in Black communities over migration. It’s focused not on job markets but on strained public finances — as neighborhoods unable to win enough funds for their own projects balk at the checks written to shelter new arrivals.
- Chicago is estimating funding plans of more than $400 million on the migrant crisis. That’s piling pressure on the city’s budget. The shortfall is projected to widen to almost $1 billion next year, exacerbating a decades-old fight over resources.
- Local leaders — beset with demands for cash to address other issues like homelessness, crime and economic development — are having to make tough choices.
- Alderperson Desmon Yancy, who represents the city’s fifth ward, described voting for a $70 million measure to care for migrants as a necessary but painful decision.
- Research by Kyle Moore, an economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, shows that Illinois has one of the highest Black unemployment levels in the nation. He says those issues, however, are linked to longstanding problems, not a consequence of recent migration.
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Important Takeaways:
- The moral logic at work here is inexorable. What you see now at the DNC you will eventually see at the RNC.
- Did you hear about the free abortions and sterilizations on offer at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week? Incredibly, the news is real. Abortion-inducing drugs (mifepristone and Plan B) will be doled out from the back of a Planned Parenthood RV, along with vasectomies, just a few blocks from a convention that will embrace a radical abortion-until-birth policy that would have been unthinkable, even for Democrats, just a decade ago.
- Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was savaged by the corporate press for repeatedly describing Democrats as “anti-family” in media appearances last week. Now, as if to prove Vance’s point, here they are with an abortion van at their convention and supporters marching through the streets dressed as abortion pills.
- What’s more difficult to understand and accept is how all of this is the inevitable consequence of a liberal worldview that the GOP has already accepted, which means what we’re seeing this week at the DNC we will eventually see at the RNC.
- I don’t just mean that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have softened their opposition to abortion in the post-Dobbs era. It’s not merely that abortion was all but removed from the GOP platform and the party’s previous position in favor of federal abortion limits was abandoned. It’s that Trump and his Republican Party would like very much to stop talking about abortion altogether now, as if the matter is settled and we can move on to more important matters, like the border and inflation.
- The choice to take these issues off the table, or try to, is usually framed as pragmatic. We want a big tent, Democrats are radical, Republicans can present their side as reasonable.
- But it doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason the Democrats went from talking about how abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” in the 1990s to celebrating it with free abortions from the back of an RV in 2024. Once you cede the principle of the thing, once you accept the premise that it’s justifiable to kill the unborn under certain circumstances, the list of allowable circumstances will continuously expand.
- The point here is not to sow discord on the right or decry a big tent strategy for the GOP, but merely to point out that when you violate the moral principles on which a social order is based, you don’t get to say when enough is enough. The slippery slope does not cease to be slippery when you think you’ve had enough. You will go all the way down it.
- Put another way, the time to say “no” was before the moral principle was violated, not after.
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Important Takeaways:
- Why it matters: The guidance comes as some Democratic lawmakers are fearful about their safety after being rattled by a series of disruptive pro-Palestinian protests since the Israel-Hamas war started last year.
- One House Democrat told Axios they are “very concerned” about their personal security and that “of course” other lawmakers are as well.
- A senior House Democrat said law enforcement is telling members “not to go to a certain area, because they expect violence.”
- “The protesters aren’t staying in a designated protest site … and there are people who are going to go and really try to cause trouble,” the lawmaker predicted.
- The bottom line: Several lawmakers expressed that there is little they can do beyond take reasonable hope that the security measures in place are enough.
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Important Takeaways:
- Free abortions are being offered to women who attend the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago. Planned Parenthood is deploying an abortion bus to the Democratic presidential campaign event.
- A local branch of the abortion giant is offering drug-induced abortions aboard its bus. It’s also handing out so-called emergency contraception which consists of the morning-after pill that some pro-lifers consider to be an abortifacient drug.
- The outcry against the free abortion news has been severe across social media. SBA Pro-Life America responded to the news with a press release labeling the DNC as an “Abortion Convention.”
- “The Democratic National Abortion Convention puts the extremism of the Democrats on full display. The days when the Democrats insisted abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare’ are history,” said SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “Today’s Democrats under the Harris-Walz ticket are officially the Shout Your Abortion Party.”
- Marjorie Taylor-Green (R-GA) also criticized the move, writing on X, “I thought this was fake but it’s not… It’s hard to even comprehend and it’s truly heartbreaking. Being a mother is the most precious gift, choose life.”
- In a first for a sitting president or vice president, Vice President Kamala Harris toured a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Minnesota back in March.
- “What we want is to put back in place the protections the Supreme Court took away, which is to codify, put into law, the protections of Roe v Wade, that’s what we want,” Harris told reporters at the scene.
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Important Takeaways:
- Protest organizers in Chicago expect between 30,000 and 40,000 people to join Monday’s march on the Democratic National Convention, and are asking the city for a permit that would get them closer to the event itself.
- “We’re going to march regardless, but we’re fighting for the best route possible,” said Faayani Aboma Mijana, a spokesperson for the March on the DNC coalition.
- The coalition, composed of more than 150 pro-Palestinian, anti-war, and left-wing organizations, has been planning its direct actions for months.
- Protesters’ focus had always been on Chicago, pressuring the Biden administration for a ceasefire and end to military aid to Israel.
- The Behind Enemy Lines coalition’s promotional material has told participants to prepare for clashes with law enforcement: “Make bruises from Chicago police batons the 2024 back to school Fall fashion!”
- Next week’s protests could fall a mile short of the baton-swinging nightmare Democrats are worried about, or that Behind Enemy Lines describe in their literature. It doesn’t need to be that bad to create problems, though: A few protesters finding a delegate hang-out could do it.
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Important Takeaways:
- A major group estimates tens of thousands of demonstrators will show up next week, including those bused in from nearby battleground states.
- Protest groups readying for the event say tens of thousands of people will descend on Chicago for the event to coronate Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee after President Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid.
- Pro-Palestinian groups say they’re expecting the same level of engagement from their members as if Biden were the nominee next week. They have already added “Killer Kamala” to “Genocide Joe” in protests
- Law enforcement officials in Chicago say that after a year and a half of planning, both the convention and the city will be safe regardless of what unfolds.
- “At this time, the FBI is not aware of any specific and articulable threats related to the DNC,” the FBI statement said. “We will continue to evaluate and share intelligence received from domestic and international partners related to the DNC just as we would for any large-scale event within the Chicago area.”
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By Dustin Volz
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the nature and scope of a cyber intrusion at the Democratic National Committee, the agency said on Monday, amid concerns hackers working for Russia are attempting to use the breach to influence the U.S. presidential election.
“A compromise of this nature is something we take very seriously, and the FBI will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace,” the FBI said in a statement.
Emails among DNC employees were released by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks over the weekend appearing to expose favoritism for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over her chief rival in the primary contest, Senator Bernie Sanders.
The correspondence prompted the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Sunday, effective at the end of the party’s convention in Philadelphia. Protesters jeered Wasserman Schultz on Monday at a meeting ahead of the convention.
Separately, the U.S. House of Representatives intelligence committee has been briefed on the hack and would seek information on any potential connection to Russia or another state, said Representative Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the panel.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told CNN on Sunday that the emails were released by suspected Russian hackers in order to sow discord at the convention and help Republican nominee Donald Trump, her rival in the Nov. 8 presidential election.
The Trump campaign dismissed the allegation as absurd.
(Reporting by Dustin Volz; editing by Grant McCool)
