Get Out the Vote: Three state officials from Georgia and Arizona —  all of them Republicans — testified before the House January 6^th Committee yesterday about how Donald Trump and his lawyers pressured them to illegally change the 2020 vote so Trump could  retain the presidency.

  Rusty Bowers, the Arizona speaker of the house, said Trump’s lawyer John Eastman told him, “Just do it and let the courts sort it out.” 

  Also appearing were two Georgia election workers, a mother and daughter, singled out by Donald Trump to be accused of election fraud.

  Bowers said he had told the people pressuring him that he would not violate his oath of office to reverse the election. He said Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, said to him, “Aren’t we all Republicans here? I would think we would get a better reception.”

  No one presented credible evidence of election fraud. Bowers told the committee that Giuliani said to him, “We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”

  Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger testified about a 67 minute phone call with Trump during which the president ranted on about all kinds of fictional election fraud. That was the famous call in which Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” 

  Trump also threatened Raffensberger with prosecution for failure to report election fraud. On the recorded phone conversation he says, “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense.”

  Both Raffensberger and Bowers said they were confronted with thousands of threats for refusing to do Trump’s bidding. Bowers said one time a man came armed with a gun and “we have various groups come by and they have had video panel trucks with videos of me proclaiming me to be a pedophile and a pervert and a corrupt politician and blaring loudspeakers in my neighborhood and leaving literature.”

  Wandrea Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, were the pair of election workers singled out by Trump and Giuliani. Many of the threats they received centered on race, one of them saying they should “be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920,” a reference to lynching.

  Freeman said, “I’ve lost my name and I’ve lost my reputation. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”

Church and State: In a further loosening of the separation between church and state in the country, The Supreme Court shot down Maine’s ban on residents using tuition assistance to send their kids to religious schools.

  The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal justices dissenting.

  Maine gives tuition assistance to families that live in areas without schools. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that states that choose to subsidize private schools may not discriminate against religious ones.

  It’s the latest in a string of decisions that have favored religion and religious organizations. Among those decisions were allowing the Trump administration to let employers with religious objections to deny contraception coverage to female workers, and that a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia could defy city rules by refusing to work with same-sex couples who apply to take in foster children.

  In her dissent to yesterday’s decision, Justice Sonia Sotomayor bemoaned a further dismantling of “the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”

The War Zone: The State Department confirms that a second American fighting for Ukraine has been killed. Stephen Zabielski, 52, was reported to have been killed by a land mine on May 15^th. He leaves a wife and five stepchildren.

   On the battle front, Russia is taking control of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk Province village by village. The province’s governor on Telegram described Russia’s “creeping tactics” in agricultural land south of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, the last major cities in Luhansk yet to fall into Russian hands.

The Richter Scale: An earthquake of  5.9-magnitude earthquake struck southeastern Afghanistan overnight, killing at least 920 people and injuring more than 600 others.  With such a high count so soon after the event, it’s likely to be higher.

   The quake hit early Wednesday about 28 miles southwest of the city of Khost, with a depth of about six miles, according to the US Geological Survey.

 The Spin Rack:  The head of the Texas State Police yesterday in a public hearing described the police response to the shooting last month at Robb Elementary School as “an abject failure” that ran counter to decades of training. — A bi-partisan gun bill intended to keep the weapons out of the hands of dangerous people passed the Senate by a vote of 64-34. The bill gives authorities up to 10 business days to review the juvenile and mental health records of gun buyers younger than 21, and gives the states millions of dollars to implement so-called red-flag laws. — A California jury found that disgraced comedian Bill Cosby sexually assaulted a teenager in 1975 and ordered him to pay her $500,000. Cosby has already spent time in prison for sexual offenses. —Rob Gronkowski, a four-time Super Bowl champion as a tight end for 11 seasons with the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, announced his retirement. It’s the second time. He retired from New England in 2018 but returned in 2020 to catch passes from Tom Brady for two seasons with the Buccaneers.

Coverup: In the country where there’s lots of skin at the beach, a French court has upheld the ban on “burkinis,” the full body bathing suits worn by Muslim women, at public pools in the City of Grenoble. The ruling concluded that  permitting the “burkini” would undermine “the equal treatment of users, so that the neutrality of the public service is compromised.”

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