RAISING THE BAR: The state of Ohio is voting today in a special election on a ballot issue that would make it harder to amend the state’s constitution with the intention of blocking any effort to legalize abortion.

  Until now, Ohio voters have been able to amend the State Constitution with a simple majority vote. Issue 1 on today’s ballot would require a 60 percent vote for amendments.

  A ballot measure scheduled for a vote in November would protect the right to abortion in Ohio. If today’s measure passes, the abortion bill would be much more likely, if not certain to fail. 

  Twenty states have veto-proof Republican majorities in their state legislatures and Ohio is one of them. “We can kind of do what we want,” Matt Huffman, the powerful Ohio State Senate president, told the Columbus Dispatch in a 2022 profile. 

TRUTH BE KNOWN: Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis came out and bluntly said in an interview with NBC that Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. After dodging and hiding behind the Trump claims of election fraud for more than two years, the Florida governor said, “Of course he lost, Joe Biden’s the president.”

  It’s a major move that could pave the way for other candidates to speak the truth and maybe even go so far as to attack Trump for being the target of three criminal indictments. 

  In response, Trump spokesman Steve Cheung told NBC News, “Ron DeSantis should really stop being Joe Biden’s biggest cheerleader.”

  Running a distant second to Trump for the Republican nomination next year, DeSantis has taken out his guns but he’s not exactly blasting away. Campaigning over the weekend he said theories that the election was stolen, “did not prove to be true.”

  But he’s still hedging. “I think what people in the media and elsewhere, they want to act like somehow this was just like the perfect election. … I don’t think it was a good-run election,” DeSantis told NBC in not-good English. “But I also think Republicans didn’t fight back. You’ve got to fight back when that is happening.”

ORANGE ALERT: A federal judge in New York threw out Donald Trump’s countersuit against writer E. Jean Carroll, who won a sex abuse lawsuit against the former president, ruling that Trump can’t claim she defamed him by continuing to say she was not only sexually abused but raped.

  Trump in a $5 million judgement had been found to have sexually abused Carroll and the judge has said there’s little difference in what Trump did between abuse and rape. Carroll is still pursuing her own defamation suit concerning remarks Trump has made in denying her sexual assault accusation.

  And in Florida, the federal judge handling the Trump secret documents case ordered prosecutors to explain their use of two separate grand juries to develop their case.

THE WAR ROOM: Two missile strikes last night killed seven people and injured 81 in the small Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.  Thirty-eight of the wounded were emergency workers who rushed to the scene after the first missile hit.  

THE FINISH LINE: With the summer track season in full swing, the Saratoga racetrack in upstate New York sustained its 6^th and 7^th horse deaths of the summer meet.

  On Saturday, the undefeated filly Maple Leaf Mel was within a short distance from a $500,000 victory when she fell and was put down near the finish line. And on Sunday, the filly Ever Summer was also “euthanized” on the track.

  The horsey set says they love horses and the horses love racing.

THE OBIT PAGE: William Friedkin, who won a Best Director Oscar for his 1971 film “The French Connection,” and in only his 30s was considered one of the best directors in Hollywood, has died at age 87.

  Friedkin also directed the “Exorcist,” 1973, and the 1970 release, “The Boys in the Band,” a groundbreaking film about a group of gay men, a subject Hollywood pretty much didn’t touch until then.

  Based on a true story, “The French Connection,” was about the loose cannon New York police Detective James “Popeye” Doyle tracking down the French mastermind of a heroin pipeline into the US. It featured what was one of the most inventive and thrilling chase scenes ever in the movies. 

  “My main influence was dramatic radio when I was a kid,” Friedkin said in a 2001 interview. “I remember listening to it in the dark. Everything was left to the imagination. It was just sound. I think of the sounds first and then the images.”

THE SPIN RACK: A violent storm system swept across the Eastern US last night, killing at least two people, grounding thousands of flights, and leaving more than a million homes and businesses without power. — Former Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison for his role in the death of motorist George Floyd. He had been found guilty of aiding and abetting manslaughter. In his defense Thao testified that he merely acted as a “human traffic cone”, holding back bystanders while then Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly 10 minutes.

BELOW THE FOLD:  Former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, who has become an advocate for natural-born women in women’s sports, told comedian Bill Maher on a podcast that UPenn’s transexual swimmer Lia Thomas is so well-endowed in the male sense of the word that Gaines had to “refrain from looking” at Thomas in the locker room they shared during a meet.

  After switching gender teams, Thomas went from 65th ranked among men to 1st in the female 500-yard freestyle.

  Gaines says Thomas is a man in every sense. Repeatedly pressed by Maher to describe what she saw in the locker room, Gaines said, “6-foot-4 male. Use your imagination.” 

-30-