Edith Olmsted

William B. Plowman/NBC via Getty ImagesFormer Democratic Rhode Island congressman Patrick J. Kennedy has joined other members of the family to endorse President Joe Biden instead of his own cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for president in 2024.During an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Kennedy, a mental health and addiction advocate, called Biden “the best president we’ve ever had on mental health.”“And frankly, he’s also put the most money to community mental health around the country. So there is no other choice than Joe Biden. If you care about this addiction crisis and this mental health crisis, Joe Biden is your candidate,” he said.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesAfter a disastrous weekend at the Libertarian National Convention, Donald Trump claimed he would’ve cinched the third-party nomination after being disqualified for not filing the correct paperwork.On Sunday, Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle ruled that because the former president did not actually submit nominating papers, he was not qualified to receive her party’s nomination.Trump, as usual, had an alternative version of events, posting on Truth Social Sunday his reasoning for not submitting the correct documents, while adding his thoughts on the “enthusiasm” of the crowd, who were in fact booing the former president for the most part.Read more at The Daily Beast.

AFP via Getty ImagesIsrael launched a deadly attack on Rafah on Sunday, in what the Palestinian Red Crescent Society claimed was a “humanitarian area” designated by Israel, according to the Associated Press. Medics said at least 22 people had been killed, and “numerous” others were tapped under the debris.The strike comes just two days after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its deadly military assault on the besieged enclave of Rafah, an area in the southern Gaza Strip where nearly one million Palestinian refugees have fled.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Israeli Ministry of Defense / Handout /Anadolu via Getty ImagesThe Israeli Defense Forces will launch an investigation into a video of an Israeli soldier threatening a “military coup” against Israel’s Defense Minister, and calling for Israel to seize control of Gaza.In the first half of the video a masked IDF soldier dressed in full army fatigues, carrying an automatic weapon, addressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The soldier argued that laying claim to Gaza is “the opportunity of a lifetime,” and that a group of 100,000 reservists “do not intend to hand over the keys to any Palestinian Authority,” including Hamas, Fatah, or “any Arab entity.” “We’ve lost everything. We lost our family life. We lost our livelihoods. And we have nowhere to go,” said the Israeli soldier, standing in rubble, the ruins of a building, presumably in Gaza. Israel has waged a massive military campaign in Gaza killing over 35,000 people, and displacing nearly one million more who are trapped in the region, unable to escape.Read more at The Daily Beast.

David Dee Delgado/Getty Images Vivek Ramaswamy was met with a wave of boos at the Libertarian National Convention on Friday for mentioning Donald Trump on the eve of the former president’s speech there. The failed Republican presidential candidate was speaking at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., when he got a distinctly negative reaction from the audience for mentioning Trump, whose planned speech on Saturday has led to calls for protest among libertarians. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesLouisiana’s governor signed a bill into law Friday that classifies two abortion-inducing drugs as “controlled dangerous substances.”Republican Governor Jeff Landry announced the new law in a post on X. “Requiring an abortion inducing drug to be obtained with a prescription and criminalizing the use of an abortion drug on an unsuspecting mother is nothing short of common sense,” he wrote. “This bill protects women across Louisiana and I was proud to sign this bill into law today.”He also thanked state Sen. Thomas Pressly, who is largely responsible for the bill, which nearly 270 Louisiana health-care professionals urged against.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesRobert F. Kennedy Jr. wants everyone to know he’s in on the jokes about his brain worm.At the Libertarian National Convention on Friday, the struggling presidential candidate included a punchline about the dead worm that doctors discovered in his brain, during one of his classic speeches about the COVID-19 pandemic.“Again and again, they’ve cited some pretext to suspend and volunteer, and violate our constitutional rights. There is always a reason why right now the rights are an inconvenience that we can’t afford. It was the red scare in the 1920s. It was John McCarthy in the 1950s. It was civil rights protests and Vietnam war protesters in the 1960s. It was the war on drugs in the 1970s. It was the war on terror after 2001. And most recently, it was the COVID pandemic,” he said.Read more at The Daily Beast.

ABC7 via YouTubeTrumpworld is once again splintering from reality. This time, the diversion relates to counting—specifically, how many people attended Donald Trump’s rally in the Bronx on Thursday.Trump, who has long obsessed over the size of crowds at his events, shared an article from Right Side Broadcasting Network to his Truth Social account that quoted the Trump campaign as saying 25,000 people attended the “electrifying” event. The New York Times reported that Trump’s team had acquired a permit for an event for 3,500 people. “The sheer numbers show the great enthusiasm that President Trump has gained among voters in even the bluest areas of the United States,” the Right-Side Broadcasting Network article crowed.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Anna Moneymaker/GettySen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who is reportedly a top contender for Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, has jumped on the bandwagon of flying the Christian nationalist “Appeal To Heaven” flag.Cotton proudly announced on social media that he had installed the flag outside his Senate office. “I stand with George Washington and Martha-Ann Alito over pearl-clutching libs at the New York Times and Democrats in Congress,” he wrote.While Cotton correctly identified the flag’s Revolutionary War origins, it was more recently co-opted by religious pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol. According to a New York Times report this week, it was seen last summer hanging outside conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s vacation house, a decidedly controversial piece of decor for a supposedly apolitical judge who ruled that Trump could not be removed from the 2024 ballot for fomenting an insurrection.Read more at The Daily Beast.

IDFFamilies of several kidnapped Israeli Defense Forces soldiers have released a video of their missing loved ones in an effort to put pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly rejected agreements for their release. The footage, which shows several women bound and bloodied, was originally released by Hamas, and was edited by the IDF before being given to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. “Every new testimony about what happened to the hostages echoes the same tragic truth – we must bring them all back home, now,” the group said in a press release Wednesday. Read more at The Daily Beast.