On March 13, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 7521, the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act." The bill, which would attempt to ban the social media app TikTok unless its Chinese owners, ByteDance, sell it to non-Chinese owners, faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but President Joe Biden says he'll sign it if it passes.

Included in the March 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act were three programs with less-euphonious acronyms: FPUC, PEUC, and PUA. These programs extended (by 13 weeks), expanded (to self-employed workers), and added a $600-per-week federal kicker to, state-level unemployment benefits. As July comes to a close, more than 25 million Americans are about to lose that federal kicker.

George Washington, America's first president, devoted part of his 1796 farewell address to warning against "[t]he alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension." He feared perpetual war for power between political parties both as "a frightful despotism" in and of itself, and as prelude to some future tyrant seeking "his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty."Was Washington right? Sort of.

"Full-time minimum wage workers cannot afford a two-bedroom rental anywhere in the US," Alicia Adamczyk writes at CNBC, "and cannot afford a one-bedroom rental in 95% of US counties." Adamczyk gets her figures from the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual "Out of Reach" report.

Here are a few numbers NLIHC isn’t as eager to talk about:

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says he has an economic plan for America to "Build Back Better." US president Donald Trump complains that Biden "plagiarized" significant elements of that plan from, you guessed it, Donald Trump.

If there's been one bright spot in America's COVID-19 experience, it's the near-complete shutdown of an expensive and obsolete government-education system cribbed from mid-19th-century Prussia.

In July 1864, Confederate forces led by General Jubal Early attacked Fort Stevens and Fort DeRussy on the outskirts of Washington DC. Union forces drove them away after two days of skirmishes, but the battle threw a scare into the capital city and constituted a high point in the Confederacy's Shenandoah Valley campaigns.

More than a century and a half later, the Confederates are back in Washington, meeting stiff resistance on Capitol Hill but garnering support from the White House.

"American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan," claims the New York Times.

On June 22 and 23, Russian and American diplomats met in Vienna to discuss New START, the nuclear arms-reduction treaty, which expires next year. The treaty provides for an optional five-year extension. Alternatively, the parties could negotiate a new agreement, as has happened several times in the past.

NBC News reports that US president Donald Trump is "furious" over "underwhelming" attendance at his June 20 campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Only 6,200 of 19,000 seats ended up cradling Trump supporters' butts. An optimistically pre-arranged overflow area went unused.

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