The Shooting Gallery: Digging into the Uvalde, Texas school massacre, The NY Times reports that the chief of the school police who was the commander at the scene arrived without a police radio and proceeded to operate with a cellphone. It’s just another twist in a story that changes and unfolds every day.

  The Times says that as two local police supervisors were grazed by gunfire, Pete Arredondo reported that the shooter was armed with an AR-15, ordered a pullback, and called for more help.

  Standard police procedure since the 1999 killings at Columbine High School in Colorado has been to go in and confront and shoot the gunman immediately. Instead, officers at Robb elementary school in Uvalde stood by for an hour while people were still getting killed. A Border Patrol tactical team ultimately broke Arredondo’s orders and went in, killing the shooter. 

  Arredondo has refused to answer questions from reporters, saying the victim families need time to grieve.

  On the gun control front, Chris Jacobs, a first-term congressman serving suburban Buffalo, announced he will not run for re-election after being confronted with serious political backlash for endorsing a federal assault weapons ban and limits on high-capacity magazines. Speaking from his suburban Buffalo district Jacobs said, “We have a problem in our country in terms of both our major parties. If you stray from a party position, you are annihilated.” He said in his announcement. “For the Republicans, it became pretty apparent to me over the last week that that issue is gun control. Any gun control.”

Contempt: Former Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has been indicted and arrested on charges of contempt of Congress for ignoring  a subpoena to provide information to the House committee investigating the January 6^th insurrection.

  It’s the first time a White House official has been indicted in the investigation.

  Serious as it sounds, it’s only what’s known as a “process crime” punishable by up to a year in jail and a $100,000 fine.

  Navarro was outraged that the FBI had put him in handcuffs and ankle shackles.

  Appearing on his own behalf in federal court, Navarro told a federal magistrate that the subpoena he was served with was “illegal” and “unenforceable.” Claiming to be the victim of Democrats trying to destroy him and Trump, Navarro said, 

“There are bigger things at play than whether I go to prison, and that’s why I’m standing here.”

The War Zone: An air-launched Russian cruise missile today hit an agricultural area in the Odessa region on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. The war in Ukraine’s east grinds on along a 1,000 mile front with some of the fiercest fighting in the city of Sievierodonetsk where Ukraine claims to have pushed back Russian forces.

  Marriott hotels said it is suspending operations in Russia after finding that economic restrictions set by Western governments make it impossible for the company to operate or franchise hotels there. Marriott has been in Russia for 25 years.  

Security Risk: NY Times reporter Maggie Haberman writes that she discovered during book research that the day before the January 6^th insurrection, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff alerted the Secret Service that President Trump was going to publicly turn against Pence resulting in a security risk. Pence was under pressure to stop certification of the Electoral College vote for Joe Biden.

  The next day more than 2,000 people, some of them chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” stormed the Capitol.

Econ 101: The US economy added 390,000 jobs in May, a slight slowdown that is hard to interpret in a market in which jobs available outnumber the people who want them.

  Economists are also watching wage growth, which feeds the current inflation. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent in May, up 5.2 percent over the past year. It is slower than inflation but faster than many economists consider sustainable, The NY Times reports.

  As an indicator of what that means, stocks fell after the jobs report was released because investors are pessimistic about the effects of  hiring and wage increases on prospects for economic growth, inflation, and higher interest rates.

The Spin Rack: Twenty-one Americans have been infected with monkeypox, the CDC reports, as the number of cases outside Africa approaches 800. — A woman testified in Los Angeles in a civil suit against the disgraced Bill Cosby that she was 14 in 1975 when the comedian invited her into his dressing trailer and started kissing her. — A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people who dropped serious amounts of weight through bariatric surgery also dropped their risk of developing cancer. 

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