Democrat Mark Kelly, who is challenging Republican Sen. Martha McSally, reported raising nearly $12.8 million dollars between April and June this year, according to a press release from Team Kelly.

Kelly ended the quarter with $24 million on hand.

“We continue to be humbled by the hundreds of thousands of people chipping in whatever they can, because they want to see Mark Kelly’s experience and independent approach representing Arizonans—defending health care protections for those with pre-existing conditions and fighting for our state in the U.S. Senate,” said Team Kelly campaign manager Jen Cox.

Team McSally has not yet reported numbers for second-quarter fundraising. Campaign fundraising reports are due tomorrow.

At the end of the first quarter in March, Kelly had raised a total of $31 million to McSally's $18.6 million. Kelly then had $19.7 million remaining in the bank, compared to McSally's $10.2 million, according to Open Secrets.

Kelly has consistently led McSally in polls in the race.

More to come.news

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Jason Cardiff didn’t want his new business to end up like his last one, an alleged pyramid scheme involving robocalling and selling unwitting customers bogus remedies to lose weight or quit smoking. One of his ventures, Prolongz, falsely claimed to offer men “increased ejaculation control.”

“I am not going to lose another company,” Cardiff told his lawyer in an April 5 email, just before detailing a fantasy list of people he wanted to place on the board of his new venture, VPL Medical Inc.

His wish list included Brian Travis Kennedy, a right-wing think tank leader and pundit with connections to the Trump administration, who Cardiff cryptically said could be the company’s “advisor to the White House.” That didn’t work out, Cardiff says.

He also wanted to make sure he had controlling stock of the company and the ability to buy out his business partner if he wanted, according to the email.

“As I (have) raised all the capital and done all the work once again,” Cardiff wrote in typo-laden prose, “I am not going to lose out on perhaps my biggest company to date. Further I have a group that wants to put in 10 mil this week.”

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans.

The builder of a privately funded border wall along the shores of the Rio Grande agreed to an engineering inspection of his controversial structure, which experts say is showing signs of erosion that threatens its stability just months after the $42 million project was finished.

Tommy Fisher, president of North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, had bragged he could build faster and smarter than the federal government, calling his wall design method a “Lamborghini,” compared with the government’s “horse and buggy.”

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Randy Crane instructed attorneys to work out details of the inspection and to come to an agreement about fixes for a part of the 3-mile fence that violates a treaty with Mexico by deflecting too much water during floods. Crane is overseeing a lawsuit brought by the federal government and the neighboring National Butterfly Center over the construction of the fence and its potential threat to the Rio Grande.

Stay up to date about WNYC and ProPublica’s investigations into the president’s business practices.

The Supreme Court issued its highly anticipated decisions yesterday in two cases concerning oversight, presidential immunity, and the balance of powers. Both cases address whether subpoenas seeking financial information about President Donald Trump’s business dealings, including his personal tax returns, can be enforced.

The court held in one case that subpoenas in a criminal investigation into Trump’s business dealings by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance can be enforced. The court’s decision in the second case, concerning congressional subpoenas to the president’s shadowy longtime accounting firm, was more complex. That case will go back down to lower courts with a four-pronged test created by Chief Justice John Roberts that aims to preserve Congress’ authority to conduct oversight while ensuring they don’t abuse those powers.

PHOENIX – Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs led a group of Republican lawmakers Thursday who demanded that schools reopen as usual in the fall, the latest salvo in a days-long campaign by the Trump administration on the issue.

“It would be more harmful to keep children locked out of schools and less harmful and less risky for children to go back to schools,” said Biggs, R-Gilbert, during a news conference at the Capitol. “That’s the bottom line. It is as simple as that.”

But while President Donald Trump and his supporters insist that keeping kids at home is “extremely harmful,” educators overwhelmingly say the harm would come from reopening without proper safeguards against COVID-19 in place.

Most are like Arizona Schools Superintendent Kathy Hoffman, who said in a statement Thursday that while she wants to get students back in the classroom, “we cannot ignore the severity of COVID-19 in our state and how that impacts adults and children alike in our school communities.”

Hoffman tweeted Tuesday, when the White House hosted a daylong panel on reopening schools, that the safety of whole communities could be at stake, not just students and teachers.

“Those valued members of our schools need more assurances that schools and communities have the resources they need to stop the virus from spreading widely throughout their community,” her tweet said. “I cannot provide those assurances to the adults and students who are medically vulnerable in our school community at this time.”

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Congressman Raul Grijalva wasn't impressed with today's sit-down between President Donald Trump and Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. Grijalva's statement:

I had high hopes for Mexico’s future when Lopez Obrador won the Mexican Presidency on a progressive platform that sought to tackle corruption, inequality, and push back on President Trump’s anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant agenda. Instead, AMLO has become nothing more than Trump’s collaborator and has willingly executed Trump’s agenda on the other side of the border. Now, he travels to Washington in the middle of a pandemic that neither Mexico or the United States has adequately addressed for a photo op with a President who came to power demonizing the Mexican people as criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. This is a slap in the face to Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and all of the migrants living just over the U.S. border on Mexican soil who are fighting for their lives as they await their chance at asylum in the United States.

PHOENIX – A White House panel of parents, teachers and school administrators said Tuesday that reopening schools this fall should be the nation’s top priority, for the wellbeing of students and parents and as a move to “stabilize our society.”

But while the panel pushed for schools reopening “quickly and beautifully in the fall,” as President Donald Trump put it, some teachers and parents in Arizona said they worry that schools here will not be able to find safe ways to do it.

“As a mom and as a teacher, I want my kids to be with their friends. I know that in-person is better for them,” said Dawn Penich-Thacker, communications director for Save Our Schools Arizona.

“But they (Arizona schools) can’t afford to keep my kids safe,” said Penich-Thacker, who worries that Arizona schools do not have the tools to make a safe return. “I see it from the inside that there are not enough resources.”

Gov. Doug Ducey last week ordered the start of in-person classes in Arizona pushed back to Aug. 17, one of several steps he took in the face of spiraling increases in the state’s COVID-19 cases. While the delay gives schools more time to prepare for schooling in the face of the coronavirus, it also means that schoolkids will have spent more than five months away from a classroom.

That’s five months of teachers and students adjusting to online education, five months of school systems scrambling for resources and five months of harried parents juggling jobs, housework and their kids’ educations.

It's safe to say that appointed U.S. Sen. Martha McSally has some work to do to win over the same female voters that President Donald Trump is driving into Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden's camp.

A few weeks before McSally lost her 2018 Senate bid to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, an NBC/Marist polls showed women favored Sinema by a 13 percentage point margin. That gap isn't looking any better this year, as McSally—who was appointed the Senate by Gov. Doug Ducey to complete the late John McCain's term after her 2018 loss—faces Democrat Mark Kelly. An early June New York Times/Sienna College poll showed women favored Kelly by a staggering 22 percentage points.

Salon today surfaced a 2007 paper that McSally wrote during her time pursuing a graduate degree in which she suggested that women in the military get pregnant—or, as she put, embrace the "foolishness of a lifetime commitment (motherhood)"—as a way to shirk their military responsibilities.

Arizona Republican senator and former Air Force combat pilot Martha McSally once published an academic paper in which she said military servicewomen should be counseled against the "foolishness of entering into a lifetime commitment (motherhood)" to avoid deployment, and called for the Pentagon to repeal the policy that allows women to use pregnancy as an excuse to "skirt" their commitment.

The article, titled "Women in Combat: Is the Current Policy Obsolete?" appeared in a 2007 edition of the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy. At the time, McSally, the first female combat pilot in U.S. history — and the first-ever losing Senate candidate to immediately receive a Senate seat — was pursuing a second graduate degree at Air War College.

She later expanded on the article in a lecture at the Duke University School of Law, which hosts a full video on its website.

The Salon article further notes: