1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Nc3 Nc6 4.Bb5 Bc5 5.O-O O-O 6.Nxe5 Re8 7.Nf3 Nxe4 8.d4 Nxc3 9.bxc3 Be7 10.d5 Nb8 11.Re1 a6 12.Bd3 d6 13.Ng5 Bxg5 14.Bxg5 Rxe1+ 15.Qxe1 f6 16.Qe4 g6 17.Bh6 Bf5 18.Qe3 Bxd3 19.Qe6+ Kh8 20.Qf7 1-0>

1.e4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bc4 Nc6 4.d3 Na5 5.Nge2 Nxc4 6.dxc4 d6 7.Qd3 Be7 8.O-O O-O 9.Bg5 Be6 10.b3 Ne8 11.Bxe7 Qxe7 12.Nd5 Qd7 13.Ng3 Rd8 14.Rad1 g6 15.Qe3 b6 16.f4 Bxd5 17.exd5 f6 18.b4 Qe7 19.c5 f5 20.cxd6 cxd6 21.c4 Nf6 22.fxe5 dxe5 23.Nxf5 gxf5 24.Rxf5 Nd7 25.d6 Qe6 26.Rg5+ Kh8 27.c5 bxc5 28.bxc5 Rc8 29.Rc1 Qf6 30.h4 Qf4 31.Qxf4 Rxf4 32.g3 Rd4 33.Kg2 Rxd6 34.cxd6 Rxc1 35.Rg4 Rc2+ 36.Kf3 Rxa2 37.Rc4 Ra6 0-1>

The so-called <Little Caezarz>:

<....Users have presented clear evidence that perfidious is involved in deleting posts and punishing users on a whim. Obviously select managers communicate off-screen and cover for one another. perfidious may not have final say but he has strong influence on the scalper. perfidious has a passel of henchman [sic] in his circle and he wants to control this website....>

<For decades, many far-right Christian fundamentalists angrily complained that conservative GOP-appointed U.S. Supreme Court justices were not conservative enough. Although Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor were Ronald Reagan appointees, they weren't considered ideologues and sometimes sided with liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when it came to abortion and gay rights.

But following Donald Trump's presidency, the High Court has a 6-3 GOP supermajority that many legal scholars have attacked as radical and anti-democracy.

In a scathing in-depth article published on the 4th of July 2024, The American Prospect's Ryan Cooper lays out a "non-exhaustive list of holes" that the Roberts Court has "blasted" into the U.S. Constitution.

"First Amendment protections for freedom of worship, speech, and the press are under an all-out assault from right-wing state legislatures," Cooper observes. "The 'Ten Commandments' — not the actual ones, incidentally — are being set up on government property across several states. Bigoted restraints on the speech rights of teachers and professors have swept the country."

Cooper continues, "Mississippi is persecuting reporters for uncovering flagrant welfare fraud on the part of the state Republican regime. The Court is doing nothing about any of this."

Cooper argues that the Founding Fathers would have had "slack-jawed horror" over the view that the Second Amendment allows one to have "as many fully automatic weapons" as they like.

"The Fourth Amendment's protection of unreasonable searches and seizures has been steadily eroded by the Court," Cooper laments. "Any savvy law enforcement officer can easily search your property or read your private communications. The Fifth Amendment's requirement that no one be deprived of 'life, liberty, or property' without due process of law does not apply to growing categories of citizens…. The right guaranteed in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to fair jury trials for accused criminals is a dead letter."

Cooper continues, "More than 95 percent of criminal cases end in a plea bargain. The Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment is a dead letter too, especially if you happen to be homeless."

According to Cooper, the 15th Amendment's "prohibition against disenfranchising people based on race is gone."

Cooper writes, "Not only will the Court happily allow GOP states to gerrymander their Black citizens into permanent electoral irrelevance…. the Court also prohibits Congress from doing anything about it."

The journalist slams the High Court's 6-3 immunity ruling in Trump v. the United States as "the worst Supreme Court decision since Plessy v. Ferguson or perhaps even Dred Scott v. Stanford."

"The intention, obviously, is to pave the way for a Trump dictatorship, like some Enabling Act passed before Hitler actually took power," Cooper warns. "But it's in keeping with the thrust of Roberts' jurisprudence since the moment he was confirmed.">

<The Virginia State Board of Elections has certified the apparent narrow defeat of Republican Rep. Bob Good, one of America’s most conservative congressmen, to a challenger endorsed by former President Donald Trump in the state’s June 18 primaries.

The board’s unanimous vote on Tuesday to certify the results does not end the matter, though. Good, who chairs the hard-right House Freedom Caucus in Congress, has said he will seek a recount now that the state has declared his opponent, state Sen. John McGuire, the winner of the primary in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District.

The margin of victory certified by the electoral board was roughly 375 votes out of nearly 63,000 ballots cast, or 0.6 percentage point. That falls within the 1% margin allowing a recount to be requested. But because the margin is larger than 0.5 percentage points, Good will be required to pay for the cost of a recount himself.

Last week the AP declared the race too close to call, citing the likelihood of a recount.

Good has said he will pursue both a recount and legal challenges to block a McGuire victory. On social media he called for a “do over” in the city of Lynchburg, the largest city in the district and a Good stronghold, citing alleged irregularities there.

Good and others have claimed that the city botched the vote count by accepting ballots from a drop box after Election Night.

Following outrage, Virginia Democrats vote to repeal changes to veteran tuition program The Lynchburg registrar has said due to a procedural error that seven ballots were retrieved from a drop box on the Friday after the election rather than on Election Night. The registrar said, though, that they believe the ballots were dropped off on Election Day and that no one witnessed any of the seven ballots being dropped off after Election Day.

Good’s campaign, in a social-media post, also raised skepticism about three fire alarms that went off at polling places in three different district precincts on Election Day. “AI estimates the probability being 0.0000000318% chance,” the campaign said of the likelihood.

Virginia elections commissioner Susan Beals said at Tuesday’s meeting that the fire alarms were triggered by maintenance activities at schools that were hosting polling places. She praised the work of elections officers to secure ballots and said workers “ensured that no voters were turned away.”

She said that occasional issues always crop up in elections administration, “but these are not systemic problems that call into question the results of our elections.”

At Tuesday’s meeting an election lawyer representing the McGuire campaign, Daniel Bruce, said there is no reason to doubt the results despite efforts to undermine confidence. Bruce noted the complaints about the Lynchburg drop box and said that “at most we’re talking about seven votes.”

“We are confident in the integrity of the election and the legitimacy of the results,” Bruce said.

No one from the Good campaign spoke at Tuesday’s meeting. Good’s campaign manager, Diana Shores, said in an email that Good remains committed to seeking a recount.

Now that the results have been certified, Good’s campaign has a 10-day window in which to file a recount petition with one of the circuit courts in the 5th District.

Shores said the campaign does not yet have information it can share on where it will file its petition.

Both Good and McGuire are among Republicans who have raised concerns about election integrity in the wake of Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in his 2020 reelection defeat. Good was among more than 100 GOP House members who voted in January 2021 to object to the Electoral College count from states that Trump disputed.

In an Election Eve telephone rally with Trump, McGuire urged supporters to deliver him a margin of victory “too big to rig.”

If Good loses, he would be the first House incumbent nationally to lose a primary challenge this year, with the exception of one race in which two incumbents faced off due to redistricting.

The Good-McGuire race highlighted the frictions in the party and was seen as a test of Trump’s hold on the GOP electorate. Trump labeled Good a backstabber because Good endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the Republican candidate for president.

Either Republican would be favored in November over the Democratic nominee, Gloria Witt, in a district that tilts conservative.>

<One of the surprising themes of the Supreme Court’s term that effectively ended this past Monday was how the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit—the federal appeals court in New Orleans that hears cases from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas—won even as it lost. Of the 11 appeals the justices heard from that court (itself an eye-popping total), the Fifth Circuit was reversed in eight of them—the most reversals, for the second year in a row, of any court in the country from which the Supreme Court took appeals. And many of those reversals were in some of the term’s most ideologically charged cases, such as lawsuits seeking to block access to mifepristone on a nationwide basis, to invalidate the way Congress funds the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (and a host of other agencies), and to bar the Biden administration from even talking with social-media companies about public-health-related mis- and disinformation.

But for as bad a term as the Fifth Circuit would appear to have had, it still succeeded in shoving American law far to the right. First, even when the Fifth Circuit lost, it usually picked up at least one vote (and as many as three) from the justices, validating the non-frivolousness, even if not the correctness, of its extremist reasoning. Second, the losses have the effect of making the most radical Supreme Court in our lifetime appear to be more moderate than it in fact is—with the Court’s defenders seizing upon some of the reversals of the Fifth Circuit as proof that, despite a rash of controversial, ideologically divided rulings in other cases on everything from January 6 to environmental law to homelessness, the Court really is “surprising” in its moderation. Third, and most important, the Supreme Court still affirmed three of the Fifth Circuit’s outlier rulings—all in cases in which the three more liberal justices dissented. The Fifth Circuit lost a lot—and somehow it still won.

In virtually all of the cases in which the Fifth Circuit was reversed by the Supreme Court, it lost for reasons that point to how extreme its decisions were in the first place. In two of the eight cases, the justices held that the Fifth Circuit was wrong to allow the case to go forward in the first place—holding that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to challenge the underlying government actions, because they couldn’t show that they were directly harmed by them. One of those majority opinions was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the other by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. What’s more, that made this term the third in a row in which cross-ideological majorities of the Supreme Court rejected standing that the Fifth Circuit had sustained. Standing may seem like a technical, procedural doctrine, but the net result of a court finding standing where none exists is to allow courts to review government policies that should not be up to the courts. In other words, in these cases, the Fifth Circuit is trying to arrogate to itself new constitutional power, and the Supreme Court could not help but reject at least this blatant abuse of authority.

In three of the other reversals, cross-ideological majorities expressly repudiated the Fifth Circuit for taking an overly formalistic approach to constitutional interpretation. In one case, Justice Clarence Thomas led a 7–2 majority in holding that the Fifth Circuit had botched founding-era understandings when it concluded that Congress lacked the power to appropriate funds to government agencies simply by capping how much they could spend. In a second case, Chief Justice John Roberts held for an 8–1 majority that the Fifth Circuit had taken too wooden an approach to constitutional history and tradition in looking for founding-era analogues for the current federal ban on gun possession by those subject to domestic-violence-related restraining orders. The Fifth Circuit’s impossibly rigid originalism was too much for even this group of justices.

And in a third, Kavanaugh and Barrett signed on to a majority opinion by Justice Elena Kagan that repeatedly chastised the Fifth Circuit for flubbing basic (and settled) principles of First Amendment law when it upheld a Texas statute that limited when social-media companies could engage in content moderation. In a ruling that sought to clarify how well-established First Amendment principles apply in such cases, Kagan noted that the need for such clarification “is especially stark for the Fifth Circuit,” so that court could be kept “from repeating its errors.”

The upshot is that it’s not just the liberal justices who are taking issue with the conservative judges on the Fifth Circuit; it’s the conservatives too, on the grounds that the Fifth Circuit isn’t even doing originalism right....>

<....Yet for all of its losing, the Fifth Circuit is still winning. Consider the three cases in which the justices affirmed the court’s rulings. In Garland v. Cargill, the Court resolved a disagreement among circuit courts in the Fifth Circuit’s favor, holding that the federal government could not prohibit bump stocks because, even though they enable automatic rifles to fire up to 1,000 rounds a minute, they are not tantamount to (already prohibited) machine guns. For a 6–3 majority that split the justices down ideological lines, Thomas, relying on diagrams from a radical pro-gun lobbyist group, said small mechanical differences in how machine guns and bump stocks work were sufficient to distinguish them. In Campos-Chavez v. Garland, the Court resolved a circuit split over how much notice immigrants are entitled to receive about deportation hearings. For a 5–4 majority (with Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the liberal justices in dissent), Justice Samuel Alito said, essentially, “Not much.” And most important, in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, a 6–3 ideologically divided Court held that the right to a jury trial in civil cases under the Seventh Amendment, long a moribund constitutional constraint, prohibits the SEC from conducting certain kinds of civil-enforcement proceedings within the agency, rather than in the courts.

Jarkesy may be a technical ruling, but it will significantly curtail the federal government’s ability to seek civil fines without going through the burden of civil litigation—by embracing a novel constitutional argument that only the Fifth Circuit had previously endorsed. If anything, the win in Jarkesy was even bigger, because the justices simply refused to address the other two novel constitutional arguments the Fifth Circuit had embraced in its ruling—that Congress couldn’t delegate enforcement power to the SEC in the first place, and that an agency’s previously independent judges had to be subject to direct political control. That means those holdings remain the law in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas (in conflict with the law in other parts of the country), creating inconsistencies that the Supreme Court will soon have to resolve.

In other words, even as it got pummeled in the majority of cases that the Supreme Court heard, the Fifth Circuit still succeeded in shifting American law meaningfully further to the right—on guns, deportation proceedings, and administrative law. These are not fringe, unimportant areas of American law. And even in the other cases in which it lost, it at least got the Supreme Court to weigh in—including in cases in which two, three, or even four justices ended up endorsing what the court of appeals had done. Those votes can still matter over time, because dissenting opinions can insert those arguments into the mainstream and give them added credibility going forward....>

<....What is so striking—and so galling—about this pattern is the bottom line it underscores: Judicial review is becoming less about consistent application of neutral principles and more about which outcomes judges prefer. The Fifth Circuit’s track record does not reflect a consistent view of the Constitution, or of who the right plaintiffs are, or of the right way to interpret statutes; the best explanation for the Fifth Circuit’s output is about who’s winning and who’s losing—whether the court is politically sympathetic to the claim being brought by the plaintiffs or not. Take the standing example: The Fifth Circuit continues to strictly limit standing when the plaintiffs are, for example, conventional civil-rights plaintiffs. The shift is not about changing the doctrine; it’s about manipulating the doctrine if, and only if, the right plaintiffs are challenging the right governmental conduct. That’s why these cases all tend to involve a combination of outlier state laws in Texas or suits by right-wing litigants trying to overturn actions by a Democratic U.S. president. Left-leaning plaintiffs never fare as well in the New Orleans appeals court—even when they’re asking for similar relief, or making similar arguments about why they have standing.

It’s also no accident that the Supreme Court chose to take up these cases at all. With very narrow exceptions, the Court does not have to hear any particular appeal—Congress has given it broad discretion to exercise its appellate jurisdiction or not as it sees fit. In some of these cases, the Fifth Circuit is forcing the Supreme Court’s hand—by producing a ruling so flagrantly wrong that to allow it to stand would be ludicrous. But in some cases, the granting of certiorari in itself betrays the Supreme Court’s political sympathies. In reasoning its extremist rulings as it does, the Fifth Circuit communicates with the conservative bloc on the Court. And just as Kagan sends her warnings to the lower court via her opinions, the six conservative justices send their own signals of encouragement.

The full picture reveals just how radical the Fifth Circuit has become—too radical for even the most right-wing Supreme Court in generations. But inasmuch as headlines declare that the Supreme Court is pushing back against that radicalism, beneath the surface, the Fifth Circuit is still moving the needle when it’s losing—away from the rule of law, and toward the rule of right-wing political preferences.>

<Donald Trump denounced a sweeping policy agenda crafted by some of his closest White House advisers that proposes a massive overhaul of the federal government and stacking agencies with loyalists to the former president.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” the presumptive Republican nominee said Friday in a post on his Truth Social platform, in the wake of controversial comments from a prominent conservative spearheading the project.

“I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump added. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.” Project 2025 is an effort proposing a sweeping shake-up of government and a slew of conservative policies if Trump defeats President Joe Biden in November’s election and returns to power. The blueprint for a potential second term would see a conservative government potentially shutter some agencies, remove thousands of civil servants and bring in officials deemed more loyal to Trump.

Despite Trump’s pushback, the project is staffed by some of the most prominent members of his former administration. The effort is being led by Paul Dans, a former chief of staff at the US Office of Personnel Management under Trump and now the director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at the Heritage Foundation, one of the conservative think tanks behind the effort.

Others who contributed to the project’s “Mandate for Leadership” which lays out policy proposals for Trump include Ben Carson, the former Housing and Urban Development secretary; Chris Miller, a former acting Defense secretary; Stephen Moore, a conservative economist, who was unsuccessfully nominated by Trump to the Federal Reserve board; former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro; and Russ Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa called Project 2025 an “extreme policy and personnel playbook for Trump’s second term that should scare the hell out of the American people.”

“Project 2025 staff and leadership routinely tout their connections to Trump’s team, and are the same people leading the RNC policy platform and Trump’s debate prep, campaign, and inner circle,” Moussa said in a statement.

A statement posted on Project 2025’s X account said the initiative “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”

“We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy & personnel recommendations for the next conservative president,” the statement added. “But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement.”

Democrats in recent days have seized on comments from Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, even with their own party in turmoil over the future of Biden’s reelection campaign.

Roberts said the country was “in the process of the second American Revolution” — one he said would “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The Heritage president made the comments on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. Bannon is serving a four-month sentence in federal prison for contempt of Congress, following Navarro, who reported to a federal prison to begin serving his own sentence earlier this year.

The former president has a wide circle of advisers, both formal and informal, as those around him jockey for influence and lobby for policies he could implement in a second term.

Trump senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles have regularly cautioned against attributing policies being discussed by others to the former president unless he publicly endorses those plans.

In a memo LaCivita and Wiles circulated in December 2023, they said some proposals from allies were being used “to prevent a second Trump administration.”

“Let us be very specific here: unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official,” they wrote.

LaCivita on Friday wrote, “Poke the Bear you are going to be bit,” sharing a news article about Trump’s disdain for Project 2025.

The aim of Project 2025 is to prepare Republicans for retaking the White House by laying the groundwork for new policies, training personnel and ensuring that staffers are able to move quickly to implement the new president’s priorities.

<House Democratic leadership is bringing out the big guns against a Republican bill set to be voted on next week that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections, Axios has learned.

House Republicans have made non-citizen voting in federal elections — for which there is no evidence of a widespread phenomenon — a marquee issue going into the 2024 campaign.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), largely ignoring House Democrats' drama this week, has posted on X about non-citizen voting multiple times since Wednesday.

The House is set to vote next week on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, which would require "documentary proof of United States citizenship" to vote in federal elections.

That could include a passport, a photo ID card that proves a voter was born in the U.S. or another form of photo ID along with supporting documentation such as a birth certificate, the bill says.

The legislation would require non-citizens to be removed from voter registration rolls, require election officials to ask voter registration applicants for proof of citizenship and open them up to legal consequences if they do not.

In a whip question — a roundup of the coming week's votes with instructions for how leadership wants rank-and-file members to vote — House Minority Whip Katherine Clark's (D-Mass.) office told House Democrats they are "urged to VOTE NO" on the bill.

That means that Democratic leadership will send its whip team to cajole colleagues into not supporting the legislation.

The bill, Clark's office said, would "prevent Americans from registering to vote with their drivers' license alone" and would make a passport the "only acceptable standalone form of identification."

They added that the bill would create an "extreme burden for countless Americans" and "further intimidate election officials and overburden states' abilities to enroll new voters."

Johnson's office released a 22-page report making the case for the SAVE Act, which points to a "loophole" in current federal law that only requires voters to attest to their citizenship status, rather than being asked.

The report points to examples of non-citizens being removed from voter rolls in a handful of states: 70 in Massachusetts, 137 in Ohio and 1,481 in Virginia.

"Noncitizen voting is a threat to election integrity. Congress must pass the SAVE Act to close the loopholes that have allowed noncitizen voting, to enhance election security, to reduce the risk of foreign election interference, and to restore Americans' confidence in U.S. elections," it says.

House Republicans aiming to block non-citizen voting in Washington, D.C. previously held a vote in May, in which 52 Democrats broke away from their leadership and voted yes.

Democratic leadership similarly whipped against that bill, but the National Republican Congressional Committee countered by warning it would go after any Democrat who voted for it.

That bill stalled in the Senate, and the SAVE Act is likely to as well if it passes the House.

The GOP fixation on the topic echoes former President Trump's unfounded claims of widespread immigrant voting in past elections, as well as his equally baseless claims about the 2024 election.

It is also a response to ordinances and proposals in a handful of liberal localities around the country allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections – but not federal ones.>

That last round was played with Steve Nurcombe, in a line of the Pirc which I had used three days before to win from him as well. That said, though it was mentioned as being worth a try by Keene and Botterill in their monograph on the opening, by the late 1980s it was considered dubious. Believe I won quickly, which left your game with William McGrath.

Far as I recall, you opened 1.d4 and wound up in an Exchange Slav, from which you got little. Then things took a turn and you stood worse, but managed to save the draw.

In the aftermath, I was in shock at winning this event; after all, you were clearly stronger than I at that time.

On the 1980 event:

In the third round, I played another Pirc, this against John Curdo. He got the better game and was winning the ending, but let slip and I swindled a draw.

Peter Brosseau had a chance to win the title outright in the last round, but lost to Gerald Agnew.

Actually I have no memories of the 1981 set-to, except that three of us made 4-0: McGrath, Nick Troisi and me. Believe Bill won on tiebreak. Cannot even tell you whom I beat on the way.

As to the game itself, it was another Pirc; my opponent outplayed me and was clearly winning. The only, slim chance I had was to launch a passed a-pawn up the board, which should really have amounted to nothing with minimal care on White's part, but the little bugger was disregarded and became a monster.

An aside on the 1984 event: while losing to Curdo in the last round, I have no recollection who else was in the gaggle of players who scored 3-1 and would thus have booked the title.