BREAKING NEWS from the incompetent, GOP-backed sham audit in Maricopa County, AZ: Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. It’s been a long 10 and a half months, but it’s finally time to crack open that bottle of champagne. We did it, Joe.
 

• The Cyber Ninjas’ draft report—which was delayed by a month after the whole team came down with COVID—concluded that not only did Biden receive more votes than Donald Trump in Arizona’s largest county, he actually received 99 more votes than in the official count, while Trump received 261 fewer. The fact that the Cyber Ninjas accidentally undermined the Big Lie doesn’t make their “audit” less of a fraudulent clusterfuck, or do anything to “confirm” Biden’s victory; election officials have already done that in actual audits. It is, however, extremely funny.
   
• Even funnier: The guy who’s not allowed on Twitter didn’t get the memo in time. After Maricopa County officials had already tweeted out the report’s conclusions on Thursday night, Trump released a statement crowing that “everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!” He has since deleted it from his website (lol), and put out a new statement saying that the review “has uncovered significant and undeniable evidence of FRAUD!”
   
• And that’s the thing: The Arizona circus ultimately gave Trump and Republicans the main thing they wanted. While the Cyber Ninjas didn’t straight up manufacture evidence that Trump had won after all, they did offer up a bunch of bullshit reasons to distrust the results they found and election results in general, which was always the point. The report includes recommendations for reforms to help allay such doubts and concerns about voter fraud, which Arizona Republicans are now likely to use as a pretext for voter-suppression measures. 

After all, these Big Lie efforts were never really about demonstrating that Donald Trump won the last election (reminder: he didn’t). They’re about helping him steal the next one.
 

• Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, articulated that ongoing emergency in a Friday statement: “Today's report doesn't make this 'fraudit' legitimate. Not only has it been riddled with irregularities and cost Arizona taxpayers millions, it has also already done the damage of creating more distrust in our elections. None of these fraudits are about preserving the integrity of our elections. This is about a continued coordinated attack on our democracy, all to justify future attacks on the right to vote.”
   
• The coordinated attack continues: On Thursday night, the Texas secretary of state’s office (which presently lacks a secretary of state) announced a “comprehensive forensic audit” of the 2020 election results in four of the state’s largest counties. That announcement came a whole eight-and-a-half hours after Trump issued an open letter to Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) demanding that he back legislation for such an audit in a state where Trump....won. Who can possibly say whether these events were connected!

Every aspect of the Maricopa County fiasco has been hilariously pathetic and genuinely dangerous at the same time, and the final report is no different. Republicans won’t stop using the Big Lie to undermine elections just because the lie has been (repeatedly, thoroughly, embarrassingly) exposed—Democrats need to actively stop them with federal election safeguards, and time is running out.

On this week's Hysteria, Erin and Alyssa talk to Congresswoman Cori Bush about Keeping Renters Safe Act, a new legislation she and Elizabeth Warren recently introduced and about how Bush's experience as a nurse has informed her career as a congresswoman. Then Dr. Heather Irobunda joins to talk about the pervasive misinformation around the COVID vaccine, uteruses and fertility.

New episodes of Hysteria drop every Thursday. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Democrats are scrambling to draft a carbon tax as an alternate source of revenue for the reconciliation bill, purely because Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-NO LABELS) has done a big ol’ thumbs-down curtsy to tax hikes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. “We know that a changing climate costs Arizonans. And right now, we have the opportunity to pass smart policies to address it—looking forward to that,” Sinema said in an interview published on Thursday, while continuing to object to both those policies’ collective price tag and the wildly popular tax plan that would fund them. A tax on carbon emissions would be a powerful incentive to shift away from fossil fuels, but it’s a tougher sell politically, and measures to prevent it from hurting the middle class could also prevent it from raising much revenue for the rest of the package. Pros and cons of the carbon tax aside, it would not be awesome if Sinema and her corporate overlords were able to block common-sense tax hikes that the entire party—and a large majority of Americans—agree on.

• CDC Director Rochelle Walensky overruled the agency’s advisory committee to endorse Pfizer booster shots for people whose jobs put them at higher risk of a breakthrough infection (doctors, teachers, and so forth), in line with the FDA’s authorization. 
   
• President Biden will not be inclined to invoke executive privilege to shield Trump-era records from the January 6 committee, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said. 
   
• The House has passed the Women's Health Protection Act, Democrats’ legislation aimed at protecting abortion rights nationwide, but the bill doesn’t look likely to pass in the Senate.
   
• In uglier votes, on Thursday the House voted down an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have limited the transfer of military equipment to local police departments, with 22 Democrats siding with Republicans. 
   
• Chris Cuomo’s former boss at ABC News, Shelley Ross, has accused him of sexually harassing her in 2005 and called on him to reckon with it in his reporting.
   
• A gunman at a Kroger in Tennessee killed one person on Thursday and wounded 14 others.
   
• Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), age 88, announced that he will run for an eighth term in 2002. It is everybody’s solemn patriotic duty to ensure that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-AGE 88) never hears about this.
   
• Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) reportedly plans to run for mayor of Los Angeles in 2022.
   
• The CIA has removed its station chief in Vienna after she discussed the possibility that “Havana Syndrome” cases might be psychosomatic.
   
• Two hosts of The View tested positive for COVID in the middle of the show (???), moments before Vice President Kamala Harris was supposed to join them in the studio.
   
• A wild Jeb in his natural habitat.

Online anti-vaxxers are now encouraging each other to stay away from emergency rooms and pull their loved ones out of ICUs, where they aren’t necessarily model patients anyway. As mistrust of medical professionals metastasizes in anti-vax Facebook groups, hospitals have been dealing with the fallout: Upticks in violence and threats against health-care workers have been reported in Massachusetts, Texas, Georgia, and Idaho. A medical center in Branson, MO, recently added panic buttons to employee badges. Over the last few weeks, an increasing number of ivermectin proponents have begun urging each other to stay out of the hospital altogether and self-medicate with horse paste—and, when that doesn’t work, to gargle with iodine (do not do this) and nebulize hydrogen peroxide (or this). Others are just attacking doctors who refuse to prescribe it. “With the delta variant, and the stress of it has been so great that we are now no longer even looking at the virus and saying, ‘That is our common enemy,’ which is really how it should be. Instead, they’re starting to target people, the messengers—nurses and doctors,” Harvard Medical School physician Aditi Nerurkar said.

In 2021 mental health is finally a thing, especially as people are not feeling like their normal selves. Let’s support one another and talk openly. Whether or not therapy is your thing, knowing it’s available and affordable is important, for you or perhaps a loved one.  

Millions of people are trying and loving online therapy. It doesn’t have to be sitting around just talking about your feelings.

So, what is therapy, exactly? It’s whatever you want it to be.

You can privately talk to someone if your stress is too much to manage, you’re battling a temper, having relationship issues, anxiety, depression, etc… Whatever you need, there’s no more shame in these normal human struggles. We take care of our bodies, why not our minds, too? Without a healthy mind, being truly happy and at peace is HARD.

BetterHelp is customized online therapy that offers video, phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist, so you don’t have to see anyone on camera if you don’t want to. It’s much more affordable than in-person therapy and you can start communicating with your therapist in under 48 hours.

It’s always a good time to invest in yourself, because you are your greatest asset. See if online therapy is for you by heading to BetterHelp.com/crooked for 10% off your first month.

A daily pill to treat coronavirus could become available in the next several months. 

The distribution of federal rental assistance has begun to speed up, with states and cities getting money for nearly 1.4 million payments out the door in August.

Hospitals that have implemented vaccine mandates so far have not seen mass resignations.

The Senate has confirmed Florence Pan as the first Asian-American woman to serve as a federal district court judge in Washington, DC.