memeorandum: Retired Marine rescues horses from raging California wildfire (Alexandria Sage/Reuters)

1:50 PM ET, July 30, 2018

Top Items:

Rudy Giuliani just obliterated the goal posts on Trump-Russia collusion — President Trump's defense in the Russia investigation has been a study in goal-post moving — constantly watering down previous denials and raising the standard for what would constitute actual wrongdoing.

Discussion: Mother Jones, Daily Wire, Shareblue Media and The Week

Josh Marshall / Talking Points Memo:

Rudy's Big Admission? — Rudy Giuliani made two TV appearances this morning, one on Fox and one on CNN. Both are pretty convoluted and a bit hard to follow. So they've led to various interpretations. But there's what I believe is one pretty big admission that is at least …

Discussion: Political Wire and Daily Kos

Jonathan Swan / Axios:

Rudy on Mueller probe: “They don't have a goddamn thing” — Rudy Giuliani told me that President Trump is fed up with Robert Mueller and wants him to “put up or shut up.” — What he's saying: “Why don't you write a report and show us what you have, because they don't have a goddamn thing.

Discussion: The Atlantic, Washington Monthly, Politico, Mediaite, POLITICUSUSA, The Week, CNN, CBS News, ABC News and Wall Street Journal

David Jackson / USA Today:

Rudy Giuliani says Donald Trump team preparing report to counter Robert Mueller — WASHINGTON - Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's lawyer, says his team is preparing a “counter-report” designed to rebut any accusations that special counsel Robert Mueller makes in his expected report about the Russia investigation.

Maegan Vazquez / CNN:

Giuliani says he's not sure collusion is a crime despite Mueller investigation — Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said Monday that he's not sure collusion with Russia would be considered a crime. — But legal experts have repeatedly said that anyone found collaborating …

Discussion: Boing Boing, Axios, Daily Wire, Hot Air, Contemptor, The Week, Splinter, KTLA and Talking Points Memo

Avery Anapol / The Hill:

Giuliani: ‘Collusion is not a crime’ — 's lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Monday dismissed the investigation into suspected collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, saying that collusion is “not a crime.” — “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime,” Giuliani said on “Fox & Friends.”

Discussion: JONATHAN TURLEY, IJR, POLITICUSUSA and HuffPost

Adam Edelman / NBC News:
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani says collusion with Russia is not a crime

Discussion: CNN and Mother Jones

Martin Pengelly / The Guardian:
Trump lawyer Giuliani: ‘scumbag’ Cohen is a traitor like Iago and Brutus

Discussion: New Republic, Washington Post, The Week and POLITICUSUSA

Tucker Higgins / CNBC: Trump repeatedly denied collusion. Now his lawyer Rudy Giuliani says: ‘Collusion is not a crime’

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar / Associated Press:

Study: ‘Medicare for all’ projected to cost $32.6 trillion — WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Bernie Sanders' “Medicare for all” plan would increase government health care spending by $32.6 trillion over 10 years, according to a study by a university-based libertarian policy center. — That's trillion with a “T.”

Discussion: Jacobin, twitchy.com and NTK Network

Charles Blahous / Mercatus Center:

The Costs of a National Single-Payer Healthcare System — KEY MATERIALS — The leading current Senate bill to establish single-payer health insurance in the United States is that of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). It's called the Medicare for All Act, or M4A.

Discussion: National Review, Fox News, IJR, Daily Wire, Washington Free Beacon and The Daily Caller

Matt Bruenig / People's Policy Project: Mercatus Study Finds Medicare for All Saves $2 Trillion

Axios: Bernie's “Medicare for All” predicted to cost nearly $33 trillion

Steven Perlberg / BuzzFeed News:

Why Dean Baquet Skipped The New York Times' Meeting With Trump — When President Trump broke an off-the-record agreement after he met with New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, some wondered why Dean Baquet, the executive editor in charge of the journalism Trump has openly criticized …

Discussion: Vox, New Yorker, The Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, The Week, Splinter, WRAL-TV and Contemptor, more at Mediagazer »

Nate Cohn / New York Times:

99 Days to Go, and the Midterm Elections Battleground Is Not What Was Expected — The most competitive districts are only somewhat better educated and somewhat more suburban than the country as a whole. — The battleground in the fight for control of the House is starting to come into focus …

Discussion: New Republic, Splinter and Washington Post

Margaret Renkl / New York Times:

How to Talk to a Racist — White liberals, you're doing it all wrong. — NASHVILLE — There are still white Southerners who honestly believe that American culture worked better for everyone, white and black alike, under segregation. There are still white Southerners who question how bad slavery really was.

Tyler Hammel / Daily Progress:

Cockburn calls out Riggleman's Bigfoot posts … Bigfoot has become a hot topic in Virginia's 5th Congressional District race. — Leslie Cockburn, the Democratic nominee, tweeted screenshots from an Instagram account of Denver Riggleman, the Republican nominee, depicting images of Bigfoot naked but censored.

Discussion: Task & Purpose, Hit & Run, RedState, New York Post, Vox, Talking Points Memo, Splinter, The Daily Caller, Hollywood Life and Mediaite

Ron Charles / Washington Post:
What is Bigfoot erotica? A Virginia congressional candidate accused her opponent of being into it.

Discussion: Observer, Daily Wire, HuffPost and Boing Boing

Politico:

‘Eye-popping’ payouts for CEOs follow Trump's tax cuts — The insider sales feed the narrative that corporate tax cuts enrich executives in the short term while yielding less clear long-term benefits for workers. — Some of the biggest winners from President Donald Trump's new tax law …

Discussion: U.S. Securities …, Lawyers, Guns & Money, Shareblue Media, Daily Kos, The Democrats and Splinter

Slate:

The Abortions We Don't Talk About — When Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court's crucial swing vote on many matters, announced his plan to retire last month, it was suddenly clear that Roe v. Wade, the decision guaranteeing a woman's right to abortion, could be substantially eroded or even overturned.

Wall Street Journal:

At Law Firms, Rainmakers Accused of Harassment Can Switch Jobs With Ease — Opaque hiring practices in legal industry often make prior sexual-harassment complaints easy to leave behind — The flowers arrived at Mayer Brown days after a prized new hire started at the law firm's New York office.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg / New York Times:

G.O.P. Faces Another Midterm Threat as Trump Plays the Shutdown Card — WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans, already facing a difficult election landscape, confronted a prospect on Sunday they had worked feverishly to avoid: a threat by President Trump to shut down the government over funding for a border wall.

Jonathan Chait / New York Magazine:

Why Are So Many Leftists Skeptical of the Russia Investigation? — As you move from the right to the left of the ideological spectrum, skepticism of the Russia scandal gives way to suspicions that it covers up something serious. But somewhere on the left, right around the fault line …

Discussion: BloombergQuint

Robert Epstein / USA Today:

What's going on with Donald Trump? Psychologist explains the president's lies, reversals — Trump's lies and reversals are not due to mental illness but because he reacts to people and situations in the moment, with no thought of future or past. — CONNECT

Discussion: Raw Story

Katie Glueck / McClatchy Washington Bureau:

This Republican could hold onto his blue-district seat even if Dems sweep — HOMESTEAD, FLA. — Carlos Curbelo was fuming. — It was a sticky Friday afternoon in early July, and the Republican congressman had spent the last hour traipsing through a University of Florida research center …

Jason Horowitz / New York Times:

How Alan Friedman, Italy's Professional American, Put Paul Manafort in Jail — FLORENCE, Italy — Alan Friedman is Italy's professional American. A former journalist with a baritone voice and perfect, if heavily accented, Italian, he has for decades provided the American perspective to Italians.

Dan Berman / CNN:

Ginsburg suggests she has at least five more years on the Supreme Court — New York (CNN)Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she hopes to stay on the Supreme Court until the age of 90. — “I'm now 85,” Ginsburg said on Sunday. “My senior colleague, Justice John Paul Stevens …

David McCabe / Axios:

Scoop: 20 ways Democrats could crack down on Big Tech — In a policy paper obtained by Axios, Sen. Mark Warner's office laid out 20 different paths to address problems posed by Big Tech platforms — ranging from putting a price on individual users' data to funding media literacy programs.

Discussion: Breitbart, CNBC, The Verge and The Week

Bloomberg:

MH370 Was ‘Manipulated’ Off Course to Its End, Report Says — Difficult to attribute sudden turns to system failure: report — Plane missing since March 2014 is aviation's biggest mystery — Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, missing since 2014, was probably steered off course deliberately …

Discussion: Daily Wire, The Daily Caller and BloombergQuint

Washington Post:

Trump says head of Europe's lone fully populist government is ‘doing a fantastic job’ — President Trump welcomed new Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte at the White House on Monday, eager to showcase the ascension in Europe of a like-minded populist with a get-tough approach to immigration.

Alex Isenstadt / Politico:

Bannon to Kochs: ‘Shut up and get with the program’ — 'And here's the program: Ground game to support Trump's presidency,' Bannon said in an interview. — Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon tore into the powerful Koch political network Sunday, accusing it of undermining …

Discussion: National Review, Washington Post, HuffPost, CANNONFIRE and Associated Press

Tyler Cowen / Bloomberg:

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire — Even if you don't think it's likely, it's always best to be prepared. — So what would the decline of America look like? I don't ask the question because I think it's happening (yet?), but because even the most inveterate optimist …

David Siders / Politico:

‘The map is different now’: Trump blows the 2020 race wide open — The next presidential campaign is going to be fought on unfamiliar battlegrounds. — For years, presidential campaigns followed relatively predictable lines of trench warfare, with the outcome decided in a handful of battleground states.

Discussion: Political Wire

Ezra Klein / Vox:

White threat in a browning America — How demographic change is fracturing our politics. — In 2008, Barack Obama held up change as a beacon, attaching to it another word, a word that channeled everything his young and diverse coalition saw in his rise and their newfound political power: hope.

Kelly Weill / The Daily Beast:

GOP Candidate Corey Stewart's Spokesperson Called Majority-Black Cities ‘Shitholes’ … Corey Stewart, the Republican candidate for Senate in Virginia, has been shunned by his own party over his ties with neo-Confederate groups and his refusal to condemn white supremacist violence.

Discussion: Shakesville, Raw Story, HuffPost and Talking Points Memo

Seton Motley / RedState:

The Tech World Is Still Screwing Conservatives - And It's Beginning to Hurt Their Business — That the Tech World and its many mega-companies loathe anything and anyone to the Right of Karl Marx - is not breaking news. — That the Tech World and its many mega-companies are incessantly blocking …

Discussion: WND and The Daily Caller

abc7news.com:

Former Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums dies — Former Bay Area Congressman and former Mayor of Oakland Ron Dellums has died. — Dellums died last night of an illness. — He was widely known for his social activism. — Dellums served in Congress from 1971 until the late 1990s.

CBS Los Angeles:

More Drama, A Bloody Nose And Another Brawl At Donald Trump's Walk Of Fame Star — HOLLYWOOD (CBSLA) — President Donald Trump brings out those feelings in people — they love him or they hate him. — And his fans and his ... well, not fans have been clashing more and more at places like the former …

Discussion: The Daily Caller