Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

I know this is starting to sound like a track on repeat forever, but January 6th was a coordinated white supremacist terrorist attack on the US Capitol and it was encouraged by Donald Trump and the GOP with the express intent of killing enough lawmakers in order to install Trump as leader.

 

A key member of the Oath Keepers militia told associates he had coordinated alliances with the Proud Boys and other paramilitary groups in advance of Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, according to new evidence filed by the Justice Department.

Spurred on by the president's incendiary rhetoric at that day's rally, Trump supporters, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, rioted at the Capitol and assaulted police officers later that day in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Kelly Meggs, the Florida leader of the Oath Keepers — who’s been charged along with nine others with conspiring to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election — said in private messages obtained by prosecutors that he’d been in touch repeatedly with Proud Boys leadership in particular. He said he had worked out a strategy to confront potential violence from antifa, a loosely organized collection of left-wing extremists.

“This week I organized an alliance between Oath Keepers, Florida 3%ers, and Proud Boys,” Meggs wrote in a Dec. 19 message to an associate via Facebook. “We have decided to work together and shut this shit down.”

In Dec. 22 and Dec. 25 messages, Meggs got more specific, describing tactical maneuvers they would conduct with the Proud Boys if they encountered antifa: “We’re going to march with them for awhile then fall to the back of the crowd and turn off. Then we will have the Proud Boys get in front of them the cops will get between antifa and Proud Boys. We will come in behind antifa and beat the hell out of them.”

The evidence is the first to suggest coordination among the various extremist groups as they prepared to descend on Washington. Oath Keepers attorneys have emphasized in court papers that evidence they were preparing for violence was limited to potential confrontation with antifa — not a plan to storm the Capitol.

But prosecutors say the planning, plus a growing body of evidence that the Oath Keepers executed a coordinated plan to enter the Capitol and rallied to the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, after first breaching the building, suggesting it was an element of their effort. In addition, prosecutors revealed messages of Oath Keepers celebrating the Capitol assault and promising to “reload” for further action.

Prosecutors unveiled an indictment last week against four Proud Boys leaders for similarly coordinating movements in advance of Jan. 6, with an emphasis on dividing into small groups ahead of their march on the Capitol. Along with the Oath Keepers cases, the Proud Boys charges are the gravest to arise from the Jan. 6 assault. Prosecutors have arrested more than 300 participants in the Capitol attack. Dozens unaffiliated with either militia have been charged with brutal assaults on police and breaching the building or causing property damage.

 

I'll keep saying that long after the convictions are in on terrorism and sedition charges, too.

 

The reason Republicans don't want these folks investigated is because the Republicans are aiding and abetting them.

 

The voters voting for these Republicans?

 

You're aiding and abetting them too.

 

If you don't want to be called what you are, which is a white supremacist, stop supporting the violent party of white supremacy.

 

 

The State of Statehood, Con't

Just a couple of years ago, DC statehood was a non-starter even among Democrats with 64% of the country and a vast majority of both parties against the notion. A lot has changed since July 2019 when that Gallup poll on statehood was taken, however. What hasn't changed are the terribly racist and stupid Republican excuses against DC statehood, knowing full well that it will give Democrats two more Senators.

Each time statehood comes before Congress, Republicans often cite the intent of the Founding Fathers in their opposition, along with a potpourri of other claims. Remember when Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) was concerned that D.C. statehood would impact his staffers’ ability to park their cars near the Capitol? Or when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said that Wyoming was “more deserving” than D.C. of statehood, despite its smaller population, because it was a “well-rounded working-class state.” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) echoed a version of this argument on Monday, asking D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser whether the District had mining, manufacturing, and agriculture, because “that’s how nation’s build wealth.”

“We do not have any mines, Congressman,” Bowser said, pointing out that D.C.’s diverse economy was not reliant on the federal government. She said in her opening statement that she was expecting a series of bad-faith arguments from statehood opponents.

The new argument du jour from Republicans came courtesy of Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), who said that D.C. ought not be a state because it didn’t have car dealerships, landfills, or airports. (The GOP witness, Zack Smith of the Heritage Foundation, said basically the same thing while putting it differently, contending that D.C. lacks the “amenities and resources found in many other states.”)

While the Constitution does not establish any prerequisites for states, Hice’s argument was especially befuddling because D.C. does have a number of car dealerships. When multiple speakers pointed that out, Hice responded that his claims were not arbitrary but instead “based in reality … I apologize for being wrong [about the existence of car dealerships in the District]. I have no idea where it is.”

But somehow, that didn’t put the car dealership question to rest. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) piggybacked off Hice to note that, while D.C. may have a car dealership, it’s a Tesla dealership. Again, the Constitution makes no mention of an electric car exception, but Norman too was wrong, because that isn’t D.C.’s only car dealership.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Republicans were “simply trying to gin up whatever argument they can think of,” saying that, while they accused Democrats of trying to pass statehood for partisan purposes, Republicans “are the ones trying to create a political and ideological test.”

Many Democrats, meanwhile, painted statehood as an issue of fairness and of racial equality. D.C. would be the only majority-minority state, as Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) mentioned. “D.C. statehood is a racial justice issue,” she said, noting that the measure could help diversify the halls of Congress.

While some of the specifics differed, the four-hour hearing mirrored ones and appeared unlikely to change any lawmaker’s mind on the issue. While the measure is likely to pass the House, it faces a larger challenge in the Senate. Advocates say it won’t make it to a vote unless the Senate abolishes the filibuster.

 

And that's the bottom line.

 

Not a single Republican will ever vote for a majority Black state to be created, with two US Senators and autonomy and a budget in the billions. It's the most tacit admission yet that Republicans are racist assholes who know they will never be able to convince Black folks to vote for them.

 

That terrifies Republicans more than anything else on this Earth.

Going Viral In A New York Minute

Hizzoner Bill de Blasio is ending remote work for NYC employees and sending tens of thousands back to to offices, desk, and cubicles in May.

 

For the last year, New York City has been running in the shadow of a deadly pandemic, with many city and private sector employees forced to work from home, stripping New York of its lifeblood and devastating its economy.

But with virus cases seeming to stabilize and vaccinations becoming more widespread, city officials intend to send a message that New York is close to returning to normal: On May 3, the city will compel its municipal office employees to begin to report to work in person.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to bring the nation’s largest municipal work force back to the office represents a significant turnabout for a city that served as the national epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, coming to symbolize the perils of living in densely packed global capitals.

The move is meant to broadcast that New York City will soon be open for business, and to encourage private companies to follow suit — lifting the hopes of landlords whose skyscrapers have largely sat empty as office workers stayed home.

“We’re going to make it safe, but we need our city workers back in their offices where they can do the most to help their fellow New Yorkers,” Mr. de Blasio said Tuesday. “And it’s also going to send a powerful message about this city moving forward.”

Yet the move by the city has sparked concern among some workers and union leaders who fear the return to the office is premature. New York City has among the highest coronavirus case rates in the nation. Many workers will have to commute an hour or more on mass transit. Others will have to juggle their children’s episodic in-person school schedules with their new in-person work requirements.

Across the globe, government and business leaders have grappled with the question of how and when to safely reopen, as the worst of the pandemic seems to have passed.

In the private sector, commercial real estate landlords like SL Green and RXR Realty have made a point of bringing their own employees to the office during the pandemic. In London, JPMorgan Chase is planning to bring back some workers starting March 29, and it is hoping to bring interns back in June.

In Texas, municipal workers in the city of Houston are working both in person and remotely at the discretion of their department director, though the mayor has encouraged the remote option. Masks are strongly advised, even though the state has lifted its overall mask mandate.

In Philadelphia, city office employees are still working from home when possible.

The new policy in New York, which will be rolled out in phases over several weeks, will affect about 80,000 employees who have been working remotely, including caseworkers, computer specialists and clerical associates. The rest of the city’s roughly 300,000-person work force, many of them uniformed personnel including police officers, firefighters and sanitation workers, have already been reporting to work sites.

 

It's a bad idea, as I've said before.

We'll see what happens, but all indications are we're going to see a spring COVID-19 spike and it's going to be pretty bad. Hopefully not as bad as December/January, but it's going to be bad, and tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, will die.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

Last Call For Welcome Back To Gunmerica

Spring has sprung, and along with it, AR-15 killings in mass shootings with Republicans screaming about thoughts and prayers and the rest of the world rightfully believing us to be insane people who need to be quarantined.

The suspect charged in the murders of 10 people at a Boulder, Colo., grocery store — the second mass shooting to shake the country in less than a week — is a 21-year-old man from a nearby Denver suburb who used an AR-15 type of assault rifle, law enforcement officials said.

The police in Arvada, Colo., said they had two encounters in 2018 with the suspect, identified on Tuesday as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa of Arvada — one on a report of third-degree assault, a misdemeanor, and one of criminal mischief. It is not clear if he was convicted of a crime.

A police affidavit made public on Tuesday said that last week he bought a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic pistol, though it is not clear if that weapon was involved in the shooting on Monday. The affidavit said he had both a rifle and a pistol at the store.

The suspect’s identity was known to the F.B.I. because he was linked to another individual under investigation by the bureau, according to law enforcement officials.

Among the victims of the massacre on Monday was Officer Eric Talley, 51, with the Boulder Police Department, who had responded to a “barrage” of 911 calls about the shooting, Chief Maris Herold said.

The authorities identified the nine additional victims as Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jody Waters, 65.

Chief Herold said at a news conference that police officers had run into the King Soopers grocery store within minutes of the shooting and had shot at the suspect. No other officers were injured during the response, she said. She said Mr. Alissa was taken to a hospital for treatment of a leg injury

On Tuesday he was taken to a jail in Boulder and was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder. Officials gave no indication of a motive.

Court records show he was born in Syria in 1999, as did a Facebook page that appeared to belong to the suspect, giving his name as Ahmad Al Issa; the page was taken down within an hour of his name being released by the authorities. Michael Dougherty, the Boulder County district attorney, said the suspect had “lived most of his life in the United States.”

The Facebook page said he went to Arvada West High School, where he was a wrestler, and listed wrestling and kickboxing as being among his interests. Many of the posts were about martial arts, and one, in 2019, said simply, “#NeedAGirlfriend.”

The shooting came just six days after another gunman’s deadly shooting spree at massage parlors in the Atlanta area.

 

This will keep happening as long as we tolerate it, and enough of us tolerate it that it will keep happening. 

Welcome back to Gunmerica.

Post-Messed-Up In General

While President Biden is appointing new members to the board that oversees the US Postal Service, Trump's agent of the agency's destruction is hard at work trying to lock a decade-long plan into place that will effectively end the era of mail in America for 90% of the country.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy will unveil the largest rollback of consumer mail services in a generation as part of his 10-year plan for the U.S. Postal Service, according to two people briefed on the proposal, including longer first-class delivery windows, reduced post office hours and higher postage prices.

The announcement set for Tuesday is part of DeJoy’s strategic vision for the agency, one that has left postal advocates wary of any changes that could further diminish operations. Mailing industry experts have warned that substantial service cuts could drive away business and worsen the Postal Service’s already battered balance sheet.

DeJoy is expected to emphasize the need for austerity to ensure more consistent delivery and rein in billions of dollars in financial losses, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. The agency is weighed down by $188.4 billion in liabilities, and DeJoy told a House panel last month that he expects the USPS to lose $160 billion over the next 10 years.

The plan, which he told the panel was eight months in the making, is meant to reset expectations for the Postal Service and its place in the express-shipping market. It’s couched in the notion that the historically high package volumes of the pandemic era will persist, and reorients the agency around consumers who don’t use the mail service for letters, advertisements or business transactions as much as they once did.

“Does it make a difference if it’s an extra day to get a letter?” DeJoy told the House Oversight and Reform Committee in February. “Because something has to change. We cannot keep doing the same thing we’re doing.”

DeJoy will roll out his plan as Democrats have renewed calls for his ouster and the removal of the agency’s governing board, which backs him and the proposals. More than 50 House Democrats last week asked President Biden to fire the board’s six sitting members for cause — citing “gross mismanagement,” “self-inflicted” nationwide mail delays and “rampant conflicts of interest” — and to allow a new slate of Biden nominees to consider DeJoy’s fitness for office.

Biden already has nominated two Democrats and a voting rights advocate to fill three of four vacancies (board Chairman Ron Bloom, a Democrat, is serving in a one-year holdover term) on the board of governors. If confirmed by the Senate, Democrats and Biden appointees would hold a 5-to-4 majority with the votes to remove DeJoy, if desired.

Biden cannot fire DeJoy; postal operations are purposefully insulated from the presidency and Congress to prevent politicians from tinkering with the mail system for political gain. The postmaster general answers only to the board of governors. Bloom told the House panel in February that the board “believes the postmaster general in very difficult circumstances is doing a good job.”

Most of DeJoy’s changes will not face regulatory road blocks. The postmaster general unilaterally controls operating hours at post offices, and the board of governors appears to back DeJoy’s changes to delivery times. Bloom will join DeJoy on a webinar Tuesday to announce the policies.

 

Remember two things: 

One, President Biden may not be able to get America out of this. He can only appoint governors and he'll need Senate confirmation to do it.

Two, you can personally thank Bernie Sanders for getting us into this mess. By making the perfect the enemy of the good, he blocked President Obama's appointments to the Postal Board of Governors in 2016, allowing Donald Trump to later appoint all the governors himself with Mitch McConnell's help.

We could have saved the Post Office. There's a coin-flip chance that it doesn't make it through the decade without the mail being permanently privatized.

The Big Gun Or The Good Package(s)?

President Biden and the White House are preparing to release their budget plans for two massive Marshall Plan/Public Works Authority-style infrastructure and family care bills that will of course get zero GOP support, and be the impetus for abolishing the filibuster.

White House officials are preparing to present President Biden with a roughly $3 trillion infrastructure and jobs package that includes numerous sweeping domestic policy priorities, according to three people familiar with internal discussions.

After completing the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package earlier this month, Biden administration officials are piecing together their next major legislative priority. While no final announcement has been made, the White House is expected to push a multitrillion jobs and infrastructure plan as the centerpiece of the president’s “Build Back Better” agenda.

That effort is expected to be broken into two parts — one focused on infrastructure, and the other focused on other domestic priorities, such as universal prekindergarten, national child care, and free community college tuition. Many details of the plan were first reported by the New York Times. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, stressed planning was preliminary and subject to change. Some aides stressed that the final price-tag of the package remained unclear.

The sprawling package, although still in the works, follows weeks of uncertainty about Biden’s second big legislative effort following the relief package. Crucial decisions will still have to be made about how the administration seeks to advance the measure. Congressional Republicans are unlikely to support trillions more in additional spending or the tax hikes that the White House is eyeing to fund these initiatives.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement that the administration had not decided on its next step. “President Biden and his team are considering a range of potential options for how to invest in working families and reform our tax code so it rewards work, not wealth," Psaki said. "Those conversations are ongoing, so any speculation about future economic proposals is premature and not a reflection of the White House’s thinking.”

The infrastructure part of the plan includes hundreds of billions of dollars for repairing the nation’s roads, bridges, waterways, and rails. It also includes funding for retrofitting buildings, safety improvements, schools infrastructure, and low-income and tribal groups, as well as $100 billion for schools and education infrastructure.

The infrastructure component of the proposal includes $400 billion in spending to combat climate change, including $60 billion for infrastructure related to green transit and $46 billion for climate-related research and development. The plan also would aim to make electric vehicle charging stations available across the country. The measure would also include $200 billion for housing infrastructure, including $100 billion to expand the supply of housing for low-income Americans.

The second component of the effort would include many of Biden’s other domestic priorities. Those include universal prekindergarten and free community college tuition. The package would also dramatically expand spending on child care. The measure would also extend for several years the expansion of the Child Tax Credit recently signed into law for just one year as part of the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan.

The legislation would also include extending subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, as well as free and reduced tuition at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

 

This is basically everything we've been badly needing for the last two decades, folks. This bill has zero, I repeat, zero chance of any GOP support, and I suspect that should the bill miraculously pass because the filibuster is gone, that the GOP red state attorneys general will sue the pants off the Biden administration to stop anything from happening, and then blame the Democrats. They may even win in the Supreme Court outright on much of the plan.

But then the GOP owns all of that failure. And with no filibuster, Biden can add to the courts.

This is where the real battle of my lifetime begins.

StupidiNews!

• At least ten people were killed in a mass shooting at a Boulder, Colorado grocery store on Monday, including one Boulder PD officer, a "person of interest" is in custody.
• An Arizona man is in Texas police custody after reportedly trying to run a convoy of National Guardsmen off the road, the convoy was carrying vaccine doses bound for Matador, Texas.
• The European Union, Canada, and Britain hit Chinese officials with sanctions over ongoing human rights abuses against over 1 million detained Muslim Uighurs, Beijing immediately retaliated. 
• The Saudi government is asking the Biden administration for help in protecting oil sites from terrorist attacks, recent missile and drone strikes have risen sharply in the last few months.
• At least one NYC councilmember wants to ban use of weaponized robotic drones from being used by the NYPD, currently the police have several unarmed recon and hostage situation drones.
  

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The January 6th seditionists may actually be charged with sedition.

Evidence the government obtained in the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol most likely meets the bar necessary to charge some of the suspects with sedition, Michael R. Sherwin, the federal prosecutor who had been leading the Justice Department’s inquiry, said in an interview that aired on Sunday.

The department has rarely brought charges of sedition, the crime of conspiring to overthrow the government.

But in an interview with “60 Minutes,” Mr. Sherwin said prosecutors had evidence that most likely proved such a charge.

“I personally believe the evidence is trending toward that, and probably meets those elements,” Mr. Sherwin said. “I believe the facts do support those charges. And I think that, as we go forward, more facts will support that.”

The last time federal prosecutors brought a sedition case was 2010, when they accused members of a Michigan militia of plotting to provoke an armed conflict with the government. They were ultimately acquitted, and the judge in the case said the Justice Department had not adequately proved that the defendants had entered a “concrete agreement to forcibly oppose the United States government.”

The statute on seditious conspiracy also says that people who conspire to “oppose by force the authority” of the government or use force “to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States” can be charged with sedition.

The government has charged some defendants in the Jan. 6 case with conspiring to derail the final certification of President Biden’s electoral victory.

Mr. Sherwin witnessed the crime as it unfolded. After he dressed in his running clothes and entered the crowd at the rally near the White House, he observed a “carnival environment” of people listening to speeches and selling T-shirts and snacks.

“I noticed there were some people in tactical gear. They were tacked up with Kevlar vests. They had the military helmets on,” he said in the “60 Minutes” interview. “Those individuals, I noticed, left the speeches early.”

“Where it was initially pro-Trump, it digressed to anti-government, anti-Congress, anti-institutional,” Mr. Sherwin said. “And then I eventually saw people climbing the scaffolding. The scaffolding was being set up for the inauguration. When I saw people climbing up the scaffolding, hanging from it, hanging flags, I was like, ‘This is going bad fast.’”

 

Boy, did it ever.

From the start, Mr. Sherwin oversaw the investigation as the acting U.S. attorney in Washington, a role that he ceded to a new interim leader in early March. He stepped down from leading the investigation on Friday and returned to Miami, where he had been a line prosecutor.

Mr. Sherwin told “60 Minutes” that the government had charged more than 400 people. Among them are hundreds accused of trespassing and more than 100 accused of assaulting officers, including Brian D. Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died after fighting with rioters.

Mr. Sicknick and two other officers were sprayed with an unidentified chemical agent that one of the assailants said was used to repel bears.

A medical examiner has not determined how Officer Sicknick died, Mr. Sherwin said, so two suspects were charged with assaulting an officer instead of murder. But that could change, he said.

“If evidence directly relates that chemical to his death,” Mr. Sherwin said, “in that scenario, correct, that’s a murder case.”

Mr. Sherwin said that only about 10 percent of the cases so far dealt with more complicated conspiracies planned and executed by far-right extremists — including members of the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and the Proud Boys — to organize, come to Washington and breach the Capitol.

 

I'll take 10% of the insurrectionists going to federal prison on sedition charges.

 

I really do hope some of them are Republican members of Congress, too.

 

The Anti-Social Network

Reportedly, Donald Trump is making his own social media platform to spew his hate on, so that nobody can ever stop him again.

Former President Donald Trump is coming back to social media -- but this time with his own network, a Trump spokesperson told Fox News on Sunday.

Jason Miller, a long-time adviser and spokesperson for Trump's 2020 campaign told Howard Kurtz on Fox's "MediaBuzz" that Trump will be "returning to social media in probably about two or three months." He added Trump's return will be with "his own platform" that will attract "tens of millions" of new users and "completely redefine the game."

"This is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media," Miller told Kurtz. "It's going to completely redefine the game, and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what President Trump does, but it will be his own platform."

Miller said during his appearance on Fox News that the former president has been approached by numerous companies and is in talks with teams about the new platform.

"This new platform is going to be big," Miller said on Sunday. "Everyone wants him and he's going to bring millions and millions -- tens of millions -- to this platform."

The announcement comes after Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter and other social platforms, such as Facebook, following his incitement of the US Capitol riots on January 6 -- where hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building, leaving five people dead.

 

In the immortal words of Bender Bending Rodriguez...

 

 

 

This is going to be a terrible idea, because we're mostly going to see the demand by the insurrectionist Trumpist right to take Trump's hate platform seriously as "news" and it will be relentlessly covered by our broken press.

Even worse, there's a very good chance that the GOP will use Trump's platform as a stalking horse to go after Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, with "very concerned" Beltway types arguing that the only way to rein in Trump's hate speech is to "reform" all of social media by removing federal liability protections, leaving Red State attorneys general to go after everyone but Trump's platform while decrying any efforts to stop Trump's hate speech as political targeting from Biden's "corrupt" Justice Department.

It doesn't take much to see this becoming the fast track back to the daily political relevance of Trump, and a daily way to constantly feed his violent cultists their steady diet of outrage and anger.

I know I've said for year that Trump wants his own TV network, but with FOX News and its competitors fighting over him, he doesn't need it. His own social media network would potentially be much more powerful for much less money, and it would control the political discourse of basically all cable news for free.

If Trump can get major political investors behind this project so that their servers can't be cut off by hosting services like Amazon or Google, this could be a nightmare cesspool of white supremacist hate with no bottom. That's the worst-case scenario, certainly.

Or, it could crash and burn like Trump's other projects because he lacks the expertise and the will to pay the people who actually can run something like this the money they'll want. Maybe it'll never get off the ground in the first place, and given Trump's history, the likelihood of failure to launch is relatively solid.

We'll see.

Open States Go Viral, Con't

A combination of red state governors declaring the COVID-19 pandemic over and blue state weariness in states like New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts is leading to another completely avoidable rise in new virus cases.

Even as the pace of vaccinations accelerates in the U.S., Covid-19 cases are increasing in 21 states and highly infectious variants are spreading as governors relax restrictions on businesses like restaurants, bars and gyms.

Public health officials warn that while roughly 2.5 million people nationwide are receiving shots every day, infection levels have plateaued this month and some states have failed to reduce the number of daily cases.

The 7-day moving average of new infections plateaued at 54,666 as of Friday after declining for weeks, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.

More than 541,000 people in the U.S. have died of the disease.

White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci warned during a briefing on Friday that the country should not declare victory until the level of infection is “much, much lower.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky has also urged states not to reopen too quickly and undermine progress the country is making against the pandemic.

“The concern is that throughout the country, there are a number of state, city, regions that are pulling back on some of the mitigation methods that we’ve been talking about: the withdrawal of mask mandates, the pulling back to essentially non-public health measures being implemented,” Fauci said at the briefing.

“So it is unfortunate but not surprising to me that you are seeing increases in number of cases per day in areas — cities, states, or regions — even though vaccines are being distributed at a pretty good clip of 2 to 3 million per day,” Fauci added. “That could be overcome if certain areas pull back prematurely on the mitigation and public health measures that we all talk about.”

Infections are rising in the following states: Alabama; Connecticut; Hawaii; Idaho; Illinois; Maine; Maryland; Massachusetts; Michigan; Minnesota; Missouri; Montana; New Hampshire; New Jersey; New York; North Dakota; Pennsylvania; Rhode Island; Virginia; Washington; and West Virginia.

The highly contagious variant first identified in the U.K. likely accounts for up to 30% of Covid infections in the U.S. Health officials say the variant could become dominant by the end of this month or in early April.

The variant is seen as the cause of Europe’s third coronavirus wave. Several countries including France and Italy have imposed new lockdown measures to mitigate virus spread as cases surge.

 

We're in danger of rounding the corner into another, even more virulent mutation of the virus, and everyone is acting like it's over.

 

It's not.

StupidiNews!

• New York Republican Rep. Tom Reed says he will take "full responsibility" for the allegations of 2017 sexual misconduct made by a lobbyist that surfaced last week in the Washington Post.
• A new judicial watchdog report finds that former Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Alan Dershowitz helped outside groups secure 27 pardons from Donald Trump earlier this year.
• Australian disaster officials are evacuating thousands from flooded Sydney suburbs as New South Wales is seeing the worst flooding in over 60 years.
• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made an unannounced trip to Afghanistan this weekend as the US is six weeks away from a deadline to remove all remaining 2,500 US troops by May 1.
• The FDA is telling Americans not to drink "alkalized" Real Water as reports of multiple liver failure cases in children are suspected of being linked to the 9.0 pH bottled water product.
  

It's About Suppression, Con't

Republicans are still screaming about HR 1, the For The People Act, now saying the quiet part out loud: if it passes into law, Republicans will be hurt in elections because it will be easier to vote, and more people voting means more Democratic votes, something Republicans will do anything to stop from happening.

In the aftermath of the GOP's assault on the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and amid a torrent of Republican measures aimed at restricting voting rights in the name of security, Democrats are pushing for a far-reaching solution to counter attempts at narrowing access to the ballot box.

H.R. 1, known as the For the People Act, seeks to abolish hurdles to voting, reform the role of money in politics and tighten federal ethics rules. Among the key tenets of the bill to overhaul the nation's election system: allowing for no-excuse mail voting, at least 15 days of early voting, automatic voter registration and restoring voting rights to felons who have completed their prison sentences.

Democrats' comprehensive bill passed the House -- for the second time -- nearly along party lines earlier this month and was introduced in the Senate this week. But it faces steep opposition from the GOP over its potential implications for future elections, including the 2022 midterms, with some Republicans openly fretting that broader access to voting will harm the party's chances.

For Republicans, H.R. 1 represents a Democratic "power grab" that could tilt elections in their favor for years to come, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., put it. One Arizona state lawmaker called it "anti-Republican."

"H.R. 1 is an attempt to use the Democrats' slim majority to unlevel the playing field and take away the rights of roughly half of the voters in the country," said Mark Weaver, a GOP consultant based in Ohio and an election law attorney.

Other Republicans condemn the bill as a naked federal overreach of states' rights, saying the legislation will usurp the decentralized electoral system in favor of a nationalized, one-size-fits-all approach.

And some Republican lawmakers, officials and strategists go even further, signaling the GOP's opposition to such extensive electoral reforms is based on the fear it will cause them to lose elections.

"If the Democrats pass H.R. 1, it's going to be absolutely devastating for Republicans in this country," said Jay Williams, a Republican strategist in Georgia, a state seeing one of the most aggressive campaigns to restrict voting. "They're just going to basically just shaft so many Republicans in places where they would actually have opportunities to pick up."

Straight-up Goebbels tactics here: accuse your political enemies of being guilty of what you are actually doing, and use the manufactured outrage to justify any and all measures to defeat them.

As I explained yesterday, Republicans want an America where everyone who isn't one of them is reduced to a second-class citizen at best, and removed from America by whatever means necessary at worst, and they are willing to employ terrorist violence until that comes to pass.

It's an astonishing admission that the GOP has no real solutions about how to fix America and no hope to win the "marketplace of political ideas"  other than "get rid of anyone who isn't a Republican".

They don't want elections. They don't want democracy. They want single-party fascist rule. Obtaining that starts with exactly what they are doing now: making elections so onerous that only the rich and idle have the opportunity to ever vote again.

It's about suppression.

Sunday Long Read: The Hubris Of COVID

Africa, Asia, and Oceania got COVID right. Europe, North America, and South America failed miserably, and worldwide millions died, including a half-million Americans, and when all is said and done, as we see in this week's Sunday Long Read from the New York Magazine's David Wallace-Wells, it's the West who must learn from the "undeveloped" world.

"I'm bashing my head as well,” says Devi Sridhar.

It is January 2021, and the Florida-born, Edinburgh-based professor of global public health is looking back on the pandemic year, marveling and despairing at opportunities lost. From early last winter, Sridhar has been among the most vocal critics of the shambolic U.K. response — urging categorically more pandemic vigilance, which she believed might have yielded a total triumph over the disease, a cause that has picked up the shorthand “Zero COVID.” “This is where I started,” Sridhar says. “An elimination approach to the virus. My mind never went, ‘Oh, we should treat this like flu.’ It started off with, like, ‘We treat it like SARS until I see evidence otherwise.’”

In 2003, SARS had been eliminated after only 8,000 infections; its biggest foothold outside Asia was in Canada, which reported just a few hundred suspected cases. With COVID, Sridhar says, “I was following the response in China. They went into lockdown. You saw New Zealand pivoting that way and then Australia after.” But not the U.K., where an erratic series of scientific advisories pushed the government first to embrace a target of herd immunity, then to backpedal, but not enough. Sridhar describes those advisories with retrospective horror, an inexplicable preemptive surrender by the public-health apparatus.

“Basically, going back to January, they’d be like, ‘China’s not going to control it; 80 percent of the population is going to get it; all efforts to contain it are going to fail; we have to learn to live with this virus; contact tracing and testing make no sense; this is going to be everywhere; right now we need to build up hospitals’ — which they didn’t even do. But they really didn’t think it was stoppable,” she says. “And then all of a sudden you started to see, in February, South Korea stopping it, Taiwan stopping it, and China stopping it. Then, in March, New Zealand. And then Australia. And then there’s this realization of, ‘Oh, wow. Actually, it is controllable.’”

At the beginning of March, South Korea was averaging more than 550 new daily confirmed cases, compared with just 53 in the U.K. At the end of the month, South Korea had 125; the U.K. was at 4,500 and climbing. “In the UK we have had nine weeks to listen, learn and prepare,” Sridhar wrote angrily in the Guardian, berating the British regime for failing to establish basic systems for supplies, testing, and contact tracing. “Countries such as Senegal were doing this in January,” she wrote. “We had a choice early on in the UK’s trajectory to go down the South Korean path,” but instead the country was at risk of sleepwalking from small failures into giant ones. “We must race to make up for the time lost during two months of passivity,” Sridhar concluded. Of course, the country didn’t, and now its death toll measures in the six figures. Sound familiar?

“I mean, the U.K. was consumed with Brexit,” Sridhar says now. “The U.S. had Trump. To them, this is something happening somewhere else across the world. And they just want to ignore it as long as they could.” As the pandemic progressed, both exhausted countries flipped from denial to capitulation, choosing to treat almost any caseload plateau as an opportunity to relax, no matter how high a level of ongoing spread it represented. “It was like, ‘We’re gonna have a great summer and holidays,’” she says, laughing ruefully. “Can you believe it? Last summer, I was up on panels with Tory politicians where they’re saying, ‘You’re safer flying to Greece or to Spain than being in the U.K. because they have lower rates than us.’ And they are 100 percent serious! It’s like it’s a basic human right, to have a holiday and go abroad, and we can’t possibly take it away. Everyone was saying elimination was impossible. You still hear it, right? ‘Impossible, it’s impossible.’ Which is kind of the choice that we’ve made here. Elimination is just too difficult.”

Sridhar is pointing her finger at British authorities, but in her diatribe you could comfortably substitute for the U.K. almost any nation in Europe. In its broad strokes, the picture has been the same in Belgium and France and Italy and the Czech Republic, too, in Portugal and Poland, Sweden and Switzerland and Spain, even Germany and the Netherlands, and dozens of other countries across the Continent. From the spring panic through the fall surge, pandemic policy differed nation to nation, but failure was general all across Europe. Aside from the three Nordic outliers of Finland, Norway, and Iceland, no European state has managed the coronavirus well by global standards — or by their own much higher ones.

For decades, the richest nations of the world had told themselves a story in which wealth and medical superiority offered, if not total immunity from disease, then certainly a guarantee against pandemics, regarded as a premodern residue of the underdeveloped world. That arrogance has made the coronavirus not just a staggering but an ironic plague. Invulnerability was a myth, of course, but what the pandemic revealed was much worse than just average levels of susceptibility and weakness. It was these countries that suffered most, died most, flailed most. Gave up most easily, too, acquiescing to so much more disease that they might have been fighting a different virus entirely. For nearly the entire year, the COVID epicenter was not in China, where the pathogen originated, or in corners of South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, where limited state capacity and medical infrastructure seemed, at the outset, especially concerning, but either in Europe or the United States — places that were rated just one year ago the best prepared in the world to combat infectious disease.

This fact, though not unknown, is probably the most salient and profound feature of what has been a tremendously uneven pandemic with the world’s longtime “winners” becoming by far its biggest losers. The gold-standard responses were those in East Asia and Oceania, by countries like South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia — countries that saw clearly the gravest infection threat the world had encountered in a century and endeavored to simply eradicate it within their borders. Mostly, they succeeded. When it mattered most, no nation in what was once grandly called “the West” even really bothered to try.

Western nations didn't want to be inconvenienced. Pandemics happened to those countries and not the Western world.

And then it did. 

We saw just how fragile the "greatest nation in world history" is over the last 12 months, especially.

America is in many ways, far worse than those countries. Biden at least seems to get that and is working to do something about our problems. The entire other major political party in this country is dedicated to making everything worse.

They killed a half-million and counting.

They could have done something about it. They chose to let hundreds of thousands die instead.

An Olympic-Sized Problem, Con't

Japan is still trying to salvage the 2020 -- I mean 2021 -- Summer Games in the age of austerity and COVID, and the country has made the decision to exclude international spectators, meaning those multi-billion dollar stadiums and facilities are going to go largely unfilled and will remain empty long after the Games are gone.

International spectators will not be allowed to enter Japan for this summer’s Olympic Games amid public concerns over coronavirus, organisers said on Saturday, setting the stage for a drastically scaled-back event.

Some 600,000 Olympic tickets purchased by overseas residents will be refunded, as will another 300,000 Paralympic tickets, Toshiro Muto, the chief executive of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee told a news conference.

He declined to say how much the refunds would cost.

The Olympic Games were postponed last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the outbreak has chilled public opinion toward the event, both organisers and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga have vowed to press ahead with the Games.

The decision on international spectators will “ensure safe and secure Games for all participants and the Japanese public,” Tokyo 2020 organisers said in a statement following five-way talks that included the head of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, and the Tokyo governor.

“People who are involved in the Olympics in some way may be allowed to enter the country, whereas regular visitors will not be able to,” Tokyo 2020’s Muto said.

He said costs for hotel cancellations would not be covered. Organisers may also consider cutting the number of staff members who will participate in the Games.

The Games are scheduled for July 23 to Aug. 8, and the Paralympics from Aug. 24 to Sept. 5.

Media polls have shown that a majority of the Japanese public are wary about letting in international spectators to watch the Games as the country grapples with the tail-end of a third wave of the pandemic. 

 

In other words, Japan still expects to be dealing with the COVID pandemic in July and August. The rest of us should take notice, and maybe confront the notion that the Olympics aren't long for this earth in general. 

Just saying.

Behind The Q-Ball

Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert continued her professional conspiracy theorist routine claiming the latest nutjob tinfoil hat goofiness, that enough Democrats would be resigning from Congress to give the GOP control over the House and Senate.

 

Congresswoman Lauren Boebert put a Q-flavored cherry atop an already controversial town hall last Monday night, when she claimed to have insider knowledge of a QAnon-linked conspiracy theory promoted by The Epoch Times that secret documents declassified in the final days of the Trump administration will expose wrongdoing by Trump’s enemies and lead to resignations and arrests, allowing Republicans to gain a majority in the U.S. House and Senate prior to the 2022 election.

Boebert, a Republican, claims her sources for this are close to Trump.

“And this is my opinion with that information that I have, I believe we will see resignations begin to take place. And I think we can take back the majority in the House and the Senate before 2022 when all of this is ended,” Boebert said at the Montrose event.

Her startling claim, first reported by Dennis Anderson of the Delta County Independent, came in response to the last question of the evening. An unidentified man wanted to know if there will ever be “perp walks” for Hillary Clinton and high-level officials like the former heads of the FBI and CIA.

 

The conspiracy can never fail, it can only be failed by improperly penitent cultists.  Steve M. understands the larger picture:

The thing is, Republicans don't want anything in between their wish list and the Democrats' wish list. They don't want half-measures. They don't want to compromise. They don't want to pull Democratic legislation a few inches to the right while leaving it mostly intact. They want it all or they want nothing.

 

And if they can't have it, they will actively destroy it and terrorize the rest of us until they win.

They love the QAnon mass-arrest fantasy in part because it allows them to imagine a world where they simply don't have to worry about the existence of an opposition party -- the Democratic Party, if their dreams come true, won't be reduced in numbers, it will be all but eliminated as a political force in America. (They've done this already at the legislative level in many states, but they can't seem to do it in Congress yet.)

They don't want to live in a world where the parties share power. They want one-party rule and nothing less.

 

When you get this, the whole Q thing makes sense. It's about control of everything, absolutely everything, and using fear and fascism to get it.

 

Last Call For Immigration Nation, Con't

 Here's everything you need to know about Republicans on immigration in the Biden era:

 

Lindsey Graham introduced a bipartisan immigration bill 43 days ago. But if it came up on the Senate floor today, he wouldn’t support it. 

“God, no,” the South Carolina Republican senator scoffed in an interview. “I’m not in support of legalizing one person until you’re in control of the border.”

 

That's it.

 

Lindsey Graham is scrapping his own bipartisan immigration bill from last month because he's mad at Joe Biden. 

Republicans are useless, and they keep getting elected by people who specifically don't want government to work.

 

 

Mitch Better Have My Money, Con't

"Moscow" Mitch McConnell is of little use to his Russian masters anymore, and should the filibuster get nuked, his utility drops to zero. No wonder then that the planned Russian aluminum plant here in Kentucky that was Mitch's gift from his owners has now run into sudden "funding issues" and is on permanent hold.

The Russian company backing an aluminum project in Kentucky said it’s suspending investments as it waits for U.S. partners to raise funds, dealing a new setback to the billion-dollar-plus mill that was supposed to be completed last year.

United Co. Rusal International PJSC announced the move on Unity Aluminum, formerly known as Braidy Industries, in a call on Wednesday. Rusal has so far poured $65 million into the venture, which local officials have been counting on to bring hundreds of high-paying jobs to the region.

The funding freeze is the latest in a series of twists, including a battle for control of the mill that led to the ousting last year of Braidy’s chief executive officer, and questions over the timing when the U.S. lifted sanctions on Rusal. The plan announced in 2017 was for a $1.3 billion rolling mill to meet growing demand for the metal from the automotive, packaging and aerospace markets.

“Unfortunately, our partner failed to contribute necessary equity from their side, so then it was a substantial change of the management and shareholder structure of Braidy Industries,” Oleg Mukhamedshin, Rusal’s deputy CEO, said on a call. “We put on hold any further investments of the project as per our agreement, and we still expect our partners to raise necessary financing after the Covid pandemic gets better.”

Mukhamedshin said Rusal’s “Plan B” is to convert the investment into a debt instrument with certain securities if Unity Aluminum isn’t successful in securing the necessary funding.

In 2019, Rusal announced its commitment to invest $200 million in the plant, which stirred up criticism as the decision came shortly after the U.S. Treasury Department lifted sanctions on Rusal and its parent company. A spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then majority leader, told the Washington Post that the lawmaker didn’t know at the time that Braidy had hopes of a deal with Rusal when he backed the effort to lift sanctions on the Russian company.

 

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic is improving dramatically under Biden, but suddenly that's the excuse to freeze funding for building the plant.  And without Mitch in charge of the Senate to stop votes harmful to Russian interests, new sanctions, and sweetheart trade deals helped by his corrupt wife Elaine Chao, McConnell's just another hick from the sticks.

That aluminum plant will never be built, and the people of Kentucky will pay the price.

I hope we pay that one forward.

NASA Gets The Full Nelson

Longtime NASA proponent and former Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson is reportedly being tapped to fill the space agency's head honcho position by the Biden administration.

President Biden has tapped former Democratic Senator Bill Nelson for NASA administrator, according to three people familiar with the decision. Nelson, a politically experienced ally of the administration, would command the space agency as it races to return humans to the Moon, bolsters climate research, and expands its reliance on a flourishing commercial space industry.

A former congressman and three-term US senator from Florida, Nelson would succeed former President Trump’s NASA chief, Jim Bridenstine, whose past experience in Congress proved key in rallying support for the Artemis program, an ambitious campaign to use the Moon as a stepping stone for future astronaut missions to Mars.

Senate and NASA staffers who were informally briefed this week on Biden’s decision were told that a formal announcement on Nelson’s nomination would come later this week, three sources said, speaking under anonymity to discuss private conversations before the announcement is made. Former astronaut Pam Melroy is being considered for Nelson’s deputy, one of the sources said.

Rumors that Biden was considering Nelson to lead NASA had been swirling openly among space industry circles for roughly a month, but it wasn’t until this week that the White House and NASA cemented the choice. The decision comes nearly two months after Biden took office and as the White House remains silent on rolling out any space policy agenda while it focuses instead on more pressing issues, like vaccinating Americans from the coronavirus. In the past, new presidents have spent several months mulling their NASA nomination.

Nelson represented Florida’s Space Coast as a state legislator in the 1970s and championed NASA through his time in Congress. In 1986, he became the second sitting member of Congress to fly to space, riding aboard Space Shuttle Columbia as a payload specialist. The centrist Democrat served three terms in the Senate until losing his bid for reelection in 2018 to former Florida Gov. Rick Scott.

As a member of the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees NASA, Nelson laid into then-nominee Bridenstine during his confirmation hearings, criticizing his record on climate change and stressing that a politician shouldn’t run NASA. “This committee has heard me say many times: NASA is not political,” Nelson said. “The leader of NASA should not be political.” Bridenstine was eventually confirmed on a party-line vote, and he used his political savvy to win bipartisan support for the Artemis program.

Biden’s choice to tap Nelson has prompted mixed reactions in the space industry, with both optimism and dismay over the former senator’s past space policy stances. Some had hoped Biden would pick a woman to lead NASA, which has only been led by men in the past. Other people considered for the role included Melroy and Ellen Stofan, the director of the National Air and Space Museum, two people familiar with internal personnel discussions said. Stofan accepted a different position earlier this month as the Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for Science and Research.

Sen. Marco Rubio, who was Nelson’s Republican colleague from Florida, was pleased to hear Biden’s decision for NASA administrator, saying in a statement “I cannot think of anyone better to lead NASA than Bill Nelson.”

“His nomination gives me confidence that the Biden Administration finally understands the importance of the Artemis program, and the necessity of winning the 21st century space race. I look forward to supporting Bill’s swift confirmation, and working with him in the years to come,” Sen. Rubio said.

 

Not even Rubio is going to try to clown show Bill Nelson. 

I expect this nomination will sail through.

 

Last Call For Some Killer Diplomacy

President Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a "killer" in this week's ABC News interview, and Moscow is having absolute fits over the subject.

President Vladimir V. Putin dryly wished President Biden “good health” on Thursday after the American leader assented to a description of his Russian counterpart as a “killer,” and long-running tensions morphed into a furious exchange of trans-Atlantic taunts.

The previous evening, Russia took the rare step of recalling its ambassador to Washington after Mr. Biden’s comments in a television interview, warning of the possibility of an “irreversible deterioration of relations.” On Thursday, seated in a gilded chair on the seventh anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Mr. Putin all but called Mr. Biden a killer himself.

“When I was a child, when we argued in the courtyard, we said the following: ‘If you call someone names, that’s really your name,’” Mr. Putin said, quoting a Russian schoolyard rhyme. “When we characterize other people, or even when we characterize other states, other people, it is always as though we are looking in the mirror.”

Despite Mr. Biden’s long-running criticism of Mr. Putin, some Russian analysts had voiced hope that the Kremlin could forge a productive working relationship with the new administration in Washington on areas of common interest. But Mr. Biden’s combative stance in an interview with ABC News that was broadcast on Wednesday seemed to puncture those hopes, even as many of Mr. Putin’s critics praised the American president’s comments.

In the interview, when asked whether he thought Mr. Putin was a “killer,” Mr. Biden responded: “Mmm hmm, I do.” He further pledged that Mr. Putin is “going to pay” for Russian interference in the 2020 election, which was detailed in an American intelligence report this week.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced sanctions against Russian officials after declassifying an intelligence finding that Russia’s domestic intelligence agency had orchestrated the poisoning of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny.

“He said everything right,” a top aide to Mr. Navalny, Leonid Volkov, posted on Twitter, referring to Mr. Biden’s comments.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters Thursday that Mr. Biden stood by his words. “He gave a direct answer to a direct question,” she said.

 

Yes, Putin said "I know you are, but what am I?"

 

Putin's pretty pissed. That alone makes Biden better than Trump by orders of magnitude. 

These sanctions are going to hurt, gang.

 

 

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

 To recap why I call Republicans the party of White Supremacy, Wisconsin Republicans, in control of the state legislature by dint of the most gerrymandered districts in America by some accounts, chose to overwhelmingly honor the death of Rush Limbaugh, but voted down Black History Month. Again.

Wisconsin Senate Republicans voted 18-12 Tuesday to pass a resolution honoring Rush Limbaugh, the divisive conservative commentator and radio host who died February 17. Two Republicans, Sen. Dale Kooyenga and Eric Wimberger, did not vote.

In the same Senate session, Republicans turned down Democratic efforts to include slavery and Black history in a bill requiring public schools to teach the Holocaust and other genocides; they also rejected another attempt at a Black History Month resolution after passing on a similar effort last month.

“The Republicans have issues with who we as a Black body choose to honor, but yet we have to sit in this body and honor somebody like Rush Limbaugh who was a homophobic, xenophobic racist,” Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee) said.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos in a press conference earlier in the afternoon said some Republicans had objected to some of the people included on a list honoring Black History last month. Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, he said had the wide support of the GOP caucus.

“We asked them to do [a Black History Month resolution] that was more generic, like the ones we had done in the past. They really didn’t want to,” Vos said. “So we never reached consensus.”

 

Teaching kids about slavery is too controversial. Rush Limbaugh, a man who was an unrepentant, Black-hating racist for decades, is fine.

This is who Republicans are.