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Today’s edition of quick hits.
* An unsettling indictment: “U.S. prosecutors unveiled criminal charges on Monday against two alleged leaders of a white supremacist gang, accusing them of soliciting attacks on Black, Jewish, LGBTQ people and immigrants in hopes of inciting a race war. The group, dubbed ‘The Terrorgram Collective,’ used the social media site Telegram to celebrate white supremacist attacks around the world and solicit racially motivated violence, according to an indictment unsealed in federal court in Sacramento, California.”
* At the DOD: “Passage of a six-month temporary spending bill would have widespread and devastating effects on the Defense Department, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said in a letter to key members of Congress on Sunday.”
* Democrats described this report as “nakedly partisan,” and they have a point: “The Republican leadership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sunday released a sprawling report on the U.S. exit from Afghanistan three years ago, blasting President Joe Biden and his administration as the callous and ‘dogmatic’ orchestrator of a foreign policy failure so extreme that it ranked ‘far worse’ than even America’s catastrophic withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.”
* In Kentucky: “The search for the suspect accused of launching a mass shooting on a Kentucky highway over the weekend continues Monday as it’s revealed he had texted someone just 30 minutes prior that he intended to ‘kill a lot of people.’”
* Ninth Circuit: “A federal appeals court on Friday partly reinstated firearm bans in California and Hawaii, finding that California could, for example, prohibit guns in parks, playgrounds and bars but not in banks or hospitals. The 3-0 ruling, by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, said that the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of gun rights was ‘seemingly arbitrary’ and ‘hard to explain’ at the moment. The court’s findings applied only to laws in those two states.”
* A trial worth watching: “On a busy Texas highway days before the 2020 election, former Democratic lawmaker Wendy Davis used her phone to record the scene unfolding around their Biden-Harris campaign bus: A convoy of President Donald Trump supporters weaving close while her fellow passengers called 911 for help. In a federal court in Austin on Monday, a jury watched the video filmed by Davis — who ran for governor in 2014 — on the first day of a civil trial that seeks to hold some of those Trump supporters responsible for what Davis and others on the bus say was an intimidating threat of political violence.”
* I don’t care that Alito received concert tickets, but I do care who gave him the tickets: “On his most recent financial disclosure form, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. reported a single gift: $900 concert tickets from a German princess known for her links to conservative activists.”
* And speaking of SCOTUS: “Justice Elena Kagan on Monday outlined how the Supreme Court’s new ethics code could be improved if it had an enforcement mechanism, rejecting claims that the idea she has proposed would be ineffective.”
See you tomorrow.