RFK Jr. Lashes Out Over Trump and Biden Debate Rules

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., antivax disinformation king and literally brainwormed independent presidential candidate, accused Biden and Trump of colluding with one another to exclude him from the presidential debate stage.

“They are trying to exclude me from their debate because they are afraid I would win,” Kennedy wrote on X (formerly Twitter). Kennedy is currently polling at roughly 10 percent.

Kennedy’s accusation follows a direct challenge Wednesday morning from Biden to Trump for two debates, after which both candidates quickly agreed on the first date and venue: CNN’s Atlanta headquarters on June 27.

The first presidential debate requires candidates to appear on enough state ballots to potentially obtain the required 270 delegates needed to win the general election, as does the September debate to be hosted by ABC News. Kennedy does not meet that threshold. Similarly, Kennedy also fails to meet the threshold to appear on later debates hosted by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which also require ballot access and a minimum 15 percent in polling. Biden and Trump both stated they would not participate in CPD-hosted debates this year.

Adding insult to brain injury, Kennedy won’t be able to even attend the Biden-Trump debate at CNN, as it will occur without an audience—likely to impede disruptions by anti-genocide protesters, which have plagued all of Biden’s public appearances since last year.

While this news may come as a tough pill to swallow for the historically anti-medicinal Kennedy, we can rest easy knowing even if he can’t debate Biden and Trump, nothing can stop him from debating reality.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Aaron Rodgers that he was considering making the New York Jets quarterback his running mate, Rodgers was surprised.

Rodgers immediately told the independent presidential candidate, “Are you serious? I’m a fucking football player,” the quarterback recalled in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, noting that he would “love to be a part of bringing [America] back to what she used to be.”

“Oh yeah, I thought about it,” Rodgers said when Carlson asked if he was interested. “I definitely thought about it because I love Bobby, and I just wanted to hear what he had to say about it.”

Kennedy would later announce Silicon Valley investor and lawyer Nicole Shanahan as his vice presidential pick. Still, Rodgers has vocally supported Kennedy, and it’s not hard to see why. The football player has expressed similar views to the candidate on the Covid-19 vaccine and the virus itself.

In his interview with Carlson, Rodgers compared Joe Biden negatively to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Kennedy has also spoken favorably of Putin, particularly regarding Russia’s war with Ukraine, and called Biden a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump.

Kennedy has not had good press as of late. Disgraced actor Kevin Spacey has come out in support of the candidate, and Kennedy has had to contend with the revelation that he once had a parasite in his brain. The rest of the extended Kennedy family refuse to offer their support. Many of his old colleagues in the environmental movement have also spoken out against his candidacy, cutting into a base of support that includes admirers of his family and wealthy “new age hippies.” All of this overwhelmingly indicates that Kennedy is little more than a spoiler candidate, but whether this is better for Trump or Biden remains to be seen.

More than half of all Black women across the United States have little to no access to abortions, according to a joint report released Wednesday by two reproductive rights organizations.

Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, more than 6.7 million Black women, or 57 percent of Black women between the ages of 15 and 49, have had their abortion access taken away. They live across 26 states—predominantly in the South—that have banned or are likely to ban the medical procedure, according to data collected by the National Partnership for Women & Families, or NPWF, and the National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda.

But abortion access is about more than a single reproductive choice. More than 58 percent of the Black women who live in these states are already mothers, and research shows that mothers who are left with no other option than to raise another child face increased economic insecurity that challenges the development of their existing children.

NPWF president Jocelyn Frye told NBC News that Black women in those states are “overwhelmingly” concerned about the ramifications that the bans will have.

“In addition to abortion bans, they’re also concerned about things like economic opportunity and cost of living, racial justice, which are directly tied to the abortion bans,” Frye told the outlet.

Restricted abortion access also exacerbates the Black maternal health crisis. Black women are three times more likely to die during childbirth than any other race due to a lack of access to high-quality maternal health care, fueled by systemic racism and discrimination.

“Part of the history around these issues is that too often the experiences of women of color, specifically Black women, but Latinas, Native women, AAPI women, were ignored,” Regina Davis Moss, president of the National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, told NBC. “The assumption was that what works for white women works for everybody.”

“I want us to move away from a ‘they’ mentality and move towards a ‘we,’ because that’s how we’re going to solve these issues,” Davis Moss said.

If you’ve ever wanted to share a cup of steaming Rudy with your favorite second cousin, now you can. Rudy Giuliani—once dubbed “America’s Mayor” and now bankrupt and embroiled in lawsuits—has gone the way of seemingly all right-wing grifters: hocking a personally branded line of coffee.

“I’ve moved at a fast pace, and have had many different roles in life,” a quote attributed to the perennially sued former mayor reads. “But the one constant thing has been a good cup of coffee, which is now proven to have health benefits,” the quote reads—because it wouldn’t be a proper conservative grift without fantastically vague claims of “health benefits.”

Offering three varieties of beans to avoid debtors’ prison—“bold,” decaf, and “morning”—the two-pound bags, all named “Rudy,” with Giuliani’s face prominently displayed, sell for $29.99 a pop. According to Whoxy, a domain-registrar lookup tool, Giuliani’s coffee site was registered March 26, just two days before he told a judge he can’t sell his $3.5 million condo because he needs it for his main grift: podcasting.

Strapped for cash and hoping to percolate some excitement for his desperate new venture, Giuliani is offering the first 100 orders the opportunity to snag an A.I.-designed bag signed by the Mussolini of Manhattan himself.

Conservative figures—not including tax, shipping, or cost of the product and branding—estimate Giuliani would need to sell 4,934,978.33 bags of “Rudy” to square up with the $148 million judgment against him stemming from baseless claims he made against two Georgia poll workers in 2020. That doesn’t include any of his other legal fees or pending civil cases against him. For those, he’ll need a hope and a prayer. Or he’ll start selling Rudy-themed Bibles.

In a press conference Wednesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was caught off-guard by a reporter’s question about police funds being cut in a proposed Republican budget.

“We’ve heard a lot this week about Democrats supporting ‘defund the police.’ The Republican Study Committee budget cuts the main federal grant program that local departments use to hire officers. How is that not proposing to defund the police?” the reporter asked during an event set up for “Police Week.”

Johnson replied that he hadn’t looked into it, but replied that “there’s lots of nuances.” Despite admitting he hadn’t examined the budget closely, he went on to claim that funding for law enforcement increased in other areas.

“That’s a central theme of what we believe. It’s part of our worldview, it’s part of our party platform, and it will always be consistent,”Johnson said, asserting that Democrats were guilty of pushing “defund the police” policies in the past, resulting in higher crime rates today.

It’s telling that Johnson wasn’t able to refute the reporter. The Republican Study Committee’s proposed budget does cut the Community Oriented Policing Services program, which has provided over $20 billion to more than 13,000 different police departments since its creation in the 1990s, something Democrats have not hesitated to point out.

It’s not the first time that the GOP has proposed cutting federal spending on law enforcement; it did the same thing in its debt limit budget bill last year. And ever since the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol seeking to overturn the 2020 election results, Republicans have attacked Capitol police as well as federal law enforcement for prosecuting those responsible for the riots that day. Republicans have even missed a deadline to install a plaque in Congress honoring those who defended the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 riots, which was supposed to be installed by March 2023.

Democrats still have a tough job ahead to convince voters that they are the better choices when it comes to crime and law enforcement, as, despite lower crime rates, polls show that most Americans rate crime as a very serious issue, and police unions have endorsed Trump.