If you read about cooking online, you’ve no doubt seen several listicles that tout the many uses of a single, humble chicken. At this point, you know what a chicken can do for you, so another overly-prescriptive, chicken-based meal plan seems unnecessary. My agenda here is very simple: The next time you buy a whole…

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After two and a half seasons, Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) is returning for the second part of The Witcher’s third season. Season 3 of The Witcher had been broken into two parts: Part one included five episodes and aired on June 29, and part two will drop the season’s final three episodes on Thursday, July 27. Three…

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AP Photo/Chris Jackson

It’s not a huge surprise to see West Virginia Governor Jim Justice (R) endorse former President Donald Trump. But boy, can he spin a yarn while delivering that endorsement.

Justice, who is running for U.S. Senate in West Virginia, posted his endorsement for Trump on Twitter on Monday in the form of a somewhat rambling-slash-folksy phone call or voicemail that includes some weird lines like saying if President Joe Biden was his father, he wouldn’t let him keep his job and “allow him to embarrass himself.” (For reference, Justice is 72, Biden is famously 80. And Trump is 77.) Biden, according to Justice, is also “really challenged and sad.”

Other points he makes is how under Biden, “everything we touch turns to doo.”

Here’s the full text:

Surely to goodness, Americans understand, you know, loud and clear the leadership, whether you like him or didn’t like him, that came from President Trump and the successes that happened, you know, when he was our president versus what we have today. I mean, what we have today is just, I mean, you know what it is today. I mean, for God’s sakes, a’ living, and I mean, you know, if President Biden were my father, I would not allow… there was no way that I could allow him to embarrass himself and continue on this job. There’s no way. I mean, President Biden is really challenged and sad and, you know, others are pulling the strings in every way. But anything we touch almost is becoming toxic, whether it be Afghanistan, the border, all the different things, energy on and on and on. Inflation, just one thing right after another, whether it be crime or woke in schools or I mean, it is everything we touch turns to doo. And then there’s people that don’t like President Trump’s personality. Well, they don’t like my personality. But with all that being said, I think that President Trump will be the nominee and I think he’ll be our next president. And I’m very hopeful of that.

You can also listen to the endorsement for yourself, and you should imagine Justice saying all of this to his adorable dog Babydog, who is pictured above:

Black tea is a tasty, uplifting beverage, but it also has other uses around the house. If you’ve got hardwood flooring, you can put together a large batch of black tea to use for cleaning and disguising scratches. It’s one of many floor-cleaning hacks we’ve loved over the years—but it really withstands the test of…

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CNN analyst Ashley Allison pushed back when fellow analyst Scott Jennings attacked Vice President Kamala Harris and claimed the controversy over Florida’s new Black history curriculum teaching the “benefits” of slavery to enslaved people is a “made-up deal.”

The Florida Board of Education voted Wednesday to approve a curriculum on Black history that includes teaching that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” and requires teaching “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Vice President Kamala Harris torched the new curriculum in two speeches on consecutive days, and The Tampa Bay Times published numerous examples debunking the claims of the board’s working group, which is headed by the chair of the  National Black Republican Association.

On Sunday morning’s edition of CNN’s State of the Union, anchor Dana Bash played some video of the speech VP Harris gave, and analyst Karen Finney called it a “stellar moment.”

But when Jennings attacked VP Harris for speaking out against a “made-up deal” and cited the Black scholars who developed the curriculum, Allison pushed back:

SCOTT JENNINGS: Well, it’s amazing to me that how little Kamala Harris apparently has to do, that she can read something on Twitter one day and be on an airplane the next to make something literally out of nothing.

This is a completely made-up deal. I looked at the standards. I even looked at an analysis of the standards in every instance where the word slavery or slave was used.

I even read the statement of the African-American scholars that wrote the standards, not Ron DeSantis, but the scholars. Everybody involved in this says this is completely a fabricated issue. And yet look how quickly Kamala Harris jumped on it.

So, the fact that this is her best moment, a fabricated matter, is pretty ridiculous, in my opinion.

BASH: Let’s get Ashley in.

ASHLEY ALLISON: Well, I’m glad she said — went down, and I’m glad she spoke on the issue.

And just because Black people write it don’t mean — that doesn’t mean it’s going to be accurate. Like, we can disagree as Black people as well. I think what the bigger picture is, is that this is happening in Florida. This is happening in a Florida where you have a governor who has an anti-woke bill, who has a don’t say gay bill, who wants to ban DEI problems, who wants to do — wants to ban Rosa Parks. And now you have — children reading Rosa Parks or other academic books that talk about a diversity of issues. I think, at this panel, we can all agree that slaves did not benefit from slavery, even if the citation says, well, they might have gotten something — but they didn’t have a choice, so that’s not a benefit.

Slaves did not have the freedom to choose if — Ron DeSantis said maybe they could have become a blacksmith, not when they didn’t have the choice to become a blacksmith. And so that was what Kamala Harris is saying.

And I hope, in this moment, when we have such a contentious political environment, that we can all agree that slavery was not a good thing and slaves did not benefit, and then we could move on. But the problem is, the governor, who is the second in the polls for the Republican nomination, won’t do that.

Watch above via CNN’s State of the Union.

New York Times correspondent, best-selling author, and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman revealed that the much-derided anti-LGBTQ video attacking ex-President Donald Trump was produced by a Ron DeSantis staffer and “passed off” to a supporter for publication.

“To wrap up ‘Pride Month,’ let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it…” the DeSantis War Room tweeted on June 30, along with a video that would be derided near-universally as bizarre and rabidly homophobic — yet also oddly homoerotic.

The video appeared in the tweet to originate from another account, and merely retweeted and commented on by the official DeSantis campaign account:

To wrap up “Pride Month,” let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it…

https://t.co/FT7LdW4vls

— DeSantis War Room (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 30, 2023

The account owner later deleted the video.

But according to a deep dive on the DeSantis campaign “reboot” published by Haberman and Shane Goldmacher, the retweet was a subterfuge to conceal the fact that the video was produced in-house:

One recent move that drew intense blowback, including from Republicans, was the campaign’s sharing of a bizarre video on Twitter that attacked Mr. Trump as too friendly to L.G.B.T.Q. people and showed Mr. DeSantis with lasers coming out of his eyes. The video drew a range of denunciations, with some calling it homophobic and others homoerotic before it was deleted.

But it turns out to be more of a self-inflicted wound than was previously known: A DeSantis campaign aide had originally produced the video internally, passing it off to an outside supporter to post it first and making it appear as if it was generated independently, according to a person with knowledge of the incident.

The DeSantis campaign declined to comment on specific questions about its spending, the candidate’s travel and the video. The communications director, Andrew Romeo, said in a statement that Mr. DeSantis was “ready to prove the doubters wrong again and our campaign is prepared to execute on his vision for the Great American Comeback.”

The Haberman/Goldmacher article’s headline and subhed — “A ‘Leaner-Meaner’ DeSantis Campaign Faces a Reboot and a Reckoning
The campaign’s missteps and swelling costs have made donors and allies anxious. One person close to the Florida governor said he had experienced a “challenging learning curve.” — don’t paint DeSantis and his presidential bid in a favorable light.

Biden campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond hit back after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis attacked Vice President Kamala Harris over new Black history curriculum teaching the “benefits” of slavery to enslaved people.

The VP torched the new curriculum — which includes teaching that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” and requires teaching “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” —in two speeches on consecutive days, and DeSantis responded by accusing her of lying, and defending the new standards at a press conference.

On Saturday’s edition of CNN Newsroom With Jim Acosta, Acosta asked Richmond to respond, and the former White House senior adviser tor into DeSantis and the slavery teachings for several minutes:

ACOSTA: You just heard Florida Governor Ron DeSantis say a few moments ago, trying to explain what’s going on in Florida and to, I guess, go back at the Vice President that somehow people who were enslaved and working as blacksmiths might be able to use those skills after they weren’t slaves anymore. I’m trying to make some sense of this. What’s your response to what Florida Governor DeSantis had to say about this?

CEDRIC RICHMOND, CAMPAIGN CO-CHAIR, BIDEN-HARRIS 2024: Clearly, factually, he’s wrong. Slavery was an abomination. It was utterly evil, and it had zero redeeming qualities. But I think that it further illustrates how far this Republican Party and these candidates are going to the right and to cater and pander to extremists in order to get support.

And I think that Governor DeSantis, his campaign has been floundering. He’s been looking for attention, and I think that he is now embarking on going as far to the right as he possibly can just to see if he can be the extremist candidate.

ACOSTA: And Governor DeSantis went after the Vice President in a tweet as well, saying, quote, “Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children. Florida stands in their way and will continue to expose their agenda and their lies”. What’s your response to that?

RICHMOND: It’s the same. And I think that Governor DeSantis is going to continue to run to the extremists because he doesn’t have a record to stand on, and he will continue to push the culture wars, if not just flat out racism, in order to get a base and catch a foothold in the Republican primary. And I think that that is — I hope that Americans can see right past it.

And I don’t think that you can say that there were redeeming qualities to enslavement. I don’t think that you can bash the Vice President of the United States for defending such an atrocity.

ACOSTA: And in 2022, DeSantis signed into law what was dubbed the Stop Woke Act in Florida. That law seeks to prohibit the instruction about certain events that might cause some students to feel uncomfortable. I mean, as you know, DeSantis is certainly trying to stoke these issues for personal and political gain. You’re on team Biden. How do you counter this?

RICHMOND: I just think it’s unfortunate. And let’s just take a moment. I’m down in New Orleans with a home of Ruby Bridges and others, and you mean to tell me Ruby Bridges and the other three phenomenal young women that day who segregated schools can go through it at age four, but we can’t teach high school students about it now because it makes them uncomfortable.

And so I just think that it is such ridiculous line of thought, but I just want to be very clear in what he’s doing so Americans don’t get confused or follow a red herring.

This is racism at its best. This is the governor pandering to those far-right extremists, and it has no place in American government, has no place in American history. And it’s just really pathetic.

Watch above via CNN Newsroom With Jim Acosta.