Man Down: After three months of protests in Portland, Oregon, a man was shot and killed Saturday night when a caravan of Trump supporters clashed with black lives demonstrators.

  The Trump contingent consisted of hundreds of vehicles, many of them trucks bearing American flags and Trump 2020 banners. Some of the occupants fired paintballs from the backs of trucks and street protesters threw objects in return. 

  The man who was killed was wearing a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a far-right Portland group area that has previously clashed with protesters.  The group’s Facebook page says  it seeks to combat “corruption, big government and tyranny, using God for strength and the power of love.” 

  President Trump called for the National Guard to be sent in to Portland, saying people want law and order.  “They want Safety & Security, and do NOT want to Defund our Police!” Trump tweeted yesterday. He tweeted “Rest in peace” for the man who was killed.

  In the Midwest, a Christian fundraising website has already raised more than $200,000  for the defense of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois 17-year-old accused of the shooting deaths of two protesters and blowing off the arm of a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

  A statement on the website says, “Kyle Rittenhouse just defended himself from a brutal attack by multiple members of the far-leftist group ANTIFA – the experience was undoubtedly a brutal one, as he was forced to take two lives to defend his own. Now, Kyle is being unfairly charged with murder 1, by a DA who seems determined only to capitalize on the political angle of the situation.”

  Rittenhouse crossed state lines with his assault rifle to go to Kenosha and was not of legal age for open carry in Wisconsin. The three people he shot were unarmed.

The Madness of King George: In a weekend barrage of Twitter postings, President Trump threatened to use federal forces against demonstrators and demanded the resignation of the mayor of Portland, Oregon, attacked CNN and NPR, called for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to be put in prison, and mocked Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

  The President also embraced fringe conspiracy theories claiming that the coronavirus death toll has been exaggerated and that street protests are an attempted coup d’état against him.

On the Road: Joe Biden is hitting the road in the battleground state of Pennsylvania today, according to his campaign, posing the question of whether Americans feel safer under President Trump. It will be Biden’s first major address since the Democratic convention.

  So far there are almost no new polls to determine whether either candidate got a bump out of their convention. Trump’s favorable rating stood at 32 percent in an Ipsos’ poll last week. Today, it’s 31 percent.

  Biden’s favorable rating was at 45 percent last week. It’s now at 46. 

Lack of Intelligence: Senior intelligence officials say they will no longer brief Congress in person on foreign interference in the 2020 election. Instead, they are going to do it in writing. 

  The intel people say they are doing this because information from the briefings has been leaked. We should point out here that it’s easier to leak a document than a conversation and the difference is that members of Congress won’t be able to ask a document to answer questions. 

Life Support: Connecticut’s Senator Chris Murphy has become a rising force in the gun control movement since the Sandy Hook school shooting. 

  In an interview with The NY Times about his new book about guns, “The Violence Inside Us,” Murphy says he is worried about the future of democracy in America; “I have a real belief that democracy is unnatural. We don’t run anything important in our lives by democratic vote other than our government. Democracy is so unnatural that it’s illogical to think it would be permanent. It will fall apart at some point, and maybe that isn’t now, but maybe it is. So I feel like my job is to hold this together so that it survives to the next administration.”

Viral News: The world surpassed 25 million cases of the coronavirus over the weekend and the US is just shy 6 million. California is far ahead of every other state with 706,000 cases. All of Russia has only 280,000 more cases. 

  As of this morning, 183,068 Americans are dead of the coronavirus.

Steal this Book:  Writer Vicky Osterweil argues in her new book, book, “In Defense of Looting”, that under some circumstances, mobs of people emptying out the shops and stores is a good thing.

  She told NPR, “It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that’s unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.”

The Bulletin Board: the Minneapolis police officer charged with the death of George Floyd claims is arguing that he died of a drug overdose, not asphyxiation with the officer’s knee on his neck. The medical examiner says Floyd died of several causes, drugs included. — The NY Times announced that it will no longer print the daily television listings and its What’s on TV column. — Cedarburg High School in Cedarburg, Wisconsin decided that students returning to school will not be required to wear masks but girls may not wear tops with spaghetti straps.

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