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.

The Day Hell Froze Over In Texas, Con't

Remember that in the end, Republicans will take advantage of everyone they can find, then tell the victims those people are the bad guys while counting the money they took while people watch and applaud.

 

 

While many Texans last week were worried about sky-high electric bills from February’s winter storms, the state’s sole utility commissioner was privately reassuring out-of-state investors who profited from the crisis that he was working to keep their windfall safe.

Texas Monthly has obtained a recording of a 48-minute call on March 9 in which Texas Public Utility Commission chairman Arthur D’Andrea discussed the fallout from the February power crisis with investors. During that call, which was hosted by Bank of America Securities and closed to the public and news media, D’Andrea took pains to ease investors’ concerns that electricity trades, transacted at the highest prices the market allows, might be reversed, potentially costing trading firms and publicly traded generating companies millions of dollars.

“I apologize for the uncertainty,” D’Andrea said, promising to put “the weight of the commission” behind efforts to keep billions of dollars from being returned to utilities that were forced—thanks to decisions by the PUC—to buy power at sky-high prices, even after the worst of the blackout had passed.

Billed as “Learning the Texas Two Step: A Chat with the PUCT,” the call originally was scheduled for early February but was postponed until after the winter storm. The conversation shows a coziness between a top Texas regulator and some of the biggest players in the electricity market at a time when the PUC’s oversight is under fire from lawmakers. At one point, during a discussion about whether natural gas, which also saw huge price spikes during the crisis, would be “repriced,” D’Andrea said no, adding that most legislators understand that gas is priced by global markets and is out of their purview. “But I’ll let you know if I hear anything crazy on it,” D’Andrea said.

PUC spokesman Andrew Barlow said the call was part of regularly scheduled discussions between commissioners “with constituent groups across the spectrum who are interested in myriad issues.” He stressed that D’Andrea did not reveal confidential information or make comments that he hasn’t said publicly or in recent testimony before the Legislature.

Much of D’Andrea’s discussion focused on the issue of repricing some of the most expensive electricity trades during the crisis. Wholesale power prices rose 10,000 percent during the third week of February, hitting the state-imposed maximum of $9,000 per megawatt-hour and staying at those levels for days.

The PUC mandated that the $9,000 prices stay in effect for 32 hours after the market had returned to normal, a move that has angered many municipal utilities and retail electricity providers. Those providers are now struggling with huge bills that they say are unjustified and could push them into bankruptcy, while potentially eventually driving up bills for millions of residential and commercial consumers in Texas. The independent market monitor for ERCOT, the grid operator overseen by the PUC, has called the prices artificially inflated and recommended that billions be returned to purchasers. Some lawmakers have also called for contracts sold during that extended period to be repriced, and lawmakers are debating a bill this week that would force D’Andrea to issue refunds.

 

Understand that the job of Texas power grid regulators isn't to provide Texans with reliable power at a reasonable cost, it's to make Wall Street energy investors as much profit as possible. Once you understand that, everything makes sense.

Oh, and Arthur D'Andrea has resigned.

On Tuesday night, PUC chairman Arthur D’Andrea, who was appointed chairman by Governor Greg Abbott less than two weeks ago, has resigned. In a statement, Abbott said, “Tonight, I asked for and accepted the resignation of PUC Commissioner Arthur D’Andrea. I will be naming a replacement in the coming days who will have the responsibility of charting a new and fresh course for the agency. Texans deserve to have trust and confidence in the Public Utility Commission, and this action is one of many steps that will be taken to achieve that goal.”

 

Trust and confidence in being ripped off.

 

It's what Republican-led governments do.

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

White supremacist terrorist insurrectionists continue to target Democrats for violence, including President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

D.C. police say a man they arrested outside of the Vice President’s residence on Wednesday afternoon had a rifle and a large capacity clip.

D.C. police responded to the scene in the 3400 block of Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest around 12:12 p.m.

U.S. Secret Service agents told FOX 5 that they’d also detained a man at that address.

Police charged Paul Murray, 31, of San Antonio, with carrying a dangerous weapon, carrying a rifle or shotgun outside of a business, possession of unregistered ammunition and possession of a large capacity ammunition feeding device.

A rifle and ammunition were recovered from his vehicle.

Investigators have not indicated what the man was doing outside Number One Observatory Circle. However, a D.C. police source tells FOX 5 the man told uniformed Secret Service members that he wanted to talk to the president.

According to internal police bulletins obtained by FOX 5, Murray was said to be experiencing paranoid delusions and thought the government was after him. He purchased an AR-15 and told his mother he was in D.C. to "take care of his problem."

Authorities say Murray was an Army drone operator who started service in 2010 and was medically discharged in 2014. Documents say he recently complained to police that he wasn’t getting support from Veteran's Affairs and was not taking prescribed medication.

 

Luckily, nobody was hurt. But you notice two things: one, it's another white supremacist with a military background going to "take care" of Kamala Harris and/or Joe Biden, and two, being white, he was detained without incident.

 

And no, you can't dismiss him as a "lone wolf" like he will be. Not when there's potentially thousands more like him out there, waiting.

 

The Secret Service, DC Police, and the FBI have to stop every single one of them, too. 

The bad guys only have to get lucky once.