COURTING CHANGE: With the Supreme Court appearing to be increasingly politicized … and corrupt … President Biden yesterday proposed legislation that would impose an 18-year term limit on the justices and an enforceable code of ethics.

  He also called for a constitutional amendment declaring that presidents don’t have immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office which would override the Supreme Court’s recent ruling to the contrary.

  Biden will accomplish little more than making a political point. In a social media post, Speaker Mike Johnson called the proposal “dead on arrival.”

   Biden is tapping into widespread unhappiness with the court for political purposes that are not clear. The President said yesterday in a speech in Austin, Texas that the country’s courts were being weaponized as part of an “extreme and unchecked” conservative agenda. Of course, that’s what Donald Trump has said about his legal problems.

  After the court overturned the national right to abortion and granted Donald Trump near total immunity from criminal prosecution, Biden said in an op-ed published in The Washington Post yesterday that, “What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms.” 

  In his Austin speech, referring to the presidential immunity ruling, he said, “For all practical purposes, the court’s decision almost certainly means that the president can violate the oath, flout our laws and face no consequences.” 

THE COCONUT TREE: In a display of the enthusiasm Kamala Harris has generated, 60,000 participants joined a video call yesterday under the umbrella of “White Dudes for Harris.” In opening remarks actor Bradley Whitford from “The West Wing” said, “It’s like a rainbow of beige.”

  Out there campaigning, Vice President Kamala Harris has begun referring to any state law that restricts abortion as a “Trump abortion ban.” 

  In a newly released video, she condemned a six-week abortion ban that went into effect in Iowa yesterday, continuing to pin abortion restrictions on the former president. She said that Iowa became the 22^nd state to have a “Trump abortion ban” and that, “What this means is that one in three women of reproductive age in America lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban.”

  Harris has also begun to use a new label for Trump and his circle, calling them “weird.” She took up the cudgel from Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who said over the weekend about Trump and his running mate JD Vance, “The nation found out what we’ve all known in Minnesota: These guys are just weird.”

  Trump is an inveterate liar, fabulist, and convicted felon and the most damning thing that Harris and company can say about him is that he’s “weird.”

  NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes that, “I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters ‘weird.’” He says, “If this campaign is descending into name-calling, no one beats Trump in that arena.”

WOKE UP: A federal judge in Florida has blocked a significant portion of that state’s “Stop WOKE Act” that was part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke ideology.” The bill in part was written to prevent teachings or mandatory workplace activities that suggest a person is privileged or oppressed based on their race, color, sex or national origin.

  Chief US District Judge Mark Walker ruled in a permanent injunction against the law’s workplace training provisions that it “violates free speech rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.”

BANANA REPUBLIC: Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado claims that the country’s political opposition won 73.2 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election, that they won despite a declaration by the national electoral authority that incumbent President Nicolas Maduro was the winner of a third six-year term. 

 Independent pollsters called that result implausible. Machado said the tallies in possession of the opposition show a total of 2.75 million votes for Maduro and 6.27 million for his rival, former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez.

  Citizens of Venezuela fleeing corruption, violence, and a crippled economy in some recent months have been second only to Mexicans seeking asylum in the US.

MOST FOUL: Three girls ages 6, 7, and 9, were killed yesterday in a stabbing spree during a Taylor Swift-themed dance event in the small town of Southport, England. Eight others were wounded and a 17-year-old boy is in custody.

  Some first responders said it was the worst thing they had ever seen.

FIVE RINGS:  The US men’s gymnastics team won bronze in Paris, their first Olympic medal since 2008.

THE OBIT PAGE:  Former Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr., who was the only American convicted in the murder of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam war, is reported to have died in Florida this past April at age 80. 

  In March of 1968 Calley’s platoon entered the village and killed as many as 500 women, children. and older men as well as raping some of the women and girls.  

THE SPIN RACK Former BBC News anchor Huw Edwards, one of the most recognized people in England after a career of 40 years on television, was charged with posting indecent images of children online. Edwards, 62, quit the network in April while he was under investigation. — Scientific study has found that as the Great Salt Lake dries up, the dry lakebed is becoming a significant emmiter of greenhouse gases that cause global warming. The lake has shrunk by half in recent years. — Covid-19 is surging in California with cases reaching nearly a two-year high. It’s attributed to the new FLiRT variants, which are highly transmissible.

BELOW THE FOLD: Comedian Jon Stewart said last night on “The Daily Show that, “In the span of a week, Democrats have gone from the despair of a certain Trump presidency to the joy of a statistical tie.” 

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