Last Call For Meathead Matt's #MeToo Moment, Con't

Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz is desperately trying to change the subject from his almost certain upcoming federal indictment on child sexual abuse and sex trafficking charges for "dating" an underage girl, and the Sword of Damocles dangling above his head just lost a few hairs holding it up.

 

The former Florida tax official whose criminal case led to a sex trafficking investigation of Rep. Matt Gaetz has agreed to plead guilty to six of the charges against him and to cooperate with federal investigators, court filings show.

In a copy of the plea agreement submitted in federal court in Orlando on Friday, Joel Greenberg said he will plead guilty to charges of identity theft, stalking, wire fraud, conspiracy to bribe a public official and sex trafficking of a minor — a fraction of the 33 charges that prosecutors had already slapped him with.

The filing also said he agrees “to cooperate fully with the United States in the investigation and prosecution of other persons, and to testify, subject to prosecution for perjury or making a false statement, fully and truthfully before any federal court proceeding or federal grand jury in connection with the charges in this case.”

If he cooperates fully, the government will seek a reduced sentence. A judge will hold a hearing on the proposed deal on Monday.

It's uncertain what the agreement means for the investigation into Gaetz, who has not been charged with any crime and who's repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Federal investigators are looking into whether Gaetz and Greenberg used the internet to search for women they could pay for sex. They are also investigating whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a minor and paid for her to travel with him, The New York Times reported.

According to the court filing, Greenberg spent over $70,000 in 150 transactions between 2016 and 2018 to pay women for sex.

One of those women was under 18 “for part of the time” Greenberg paid her for sex acts “with him and others.”

 

The clock is almost up for Gaetz. If Greenberg turns states' evidence on him and tosses him under the bus, and then levitates the bus 40 feet into the air just to drop it on him a few more times like I suspect is going to happen over the next several weeks, then this is going to get ugly fast. Gaetz doesn't have Daddy Trump or Bill Barr to protect him anymore, either. If he's indicted, he will be jettisoned by the rest of the GOP as soon as they can safely memory hole their relationships with him.

 

And Gaetz may be far from the only GOP lawmaker that this case ensnares.  Just sayin'.

Vaccination Nation, Congress Edition

Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill are all vaccinated and proud of it. Even all but a handful of GOP Senators are too. But less than half of House Republicans are vaccinated, and that's a major problem.

Democratic lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have a 100% vaccination rate against Covid-19, a CNN survey of Capitol Hill found this week, significantly outpacing Republicans in the House and Senate and illustrating the partisan divide over the pandemic. 

For Republicans, at least 44.8% of House members are vaccinated and at least 92% of senators are, CNN found. 

In a follow-up to a March House-wide survey and interviews with members, CNN confirmed that 312 of the 431 members of the House -- just over 72% of the 431-member body -- have now received a Covid-19 vaccination. Of that, all 219 House Democrats have reported being vaccinated. Among the Republican conference, 95 of the 212 members -- 44.8% -- have said they are vaccinated. 

One hundred and twelve Republican offices did not respond to multiple CNN inquires. 

Although the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 do not need to wear masks or practice social distancing indoors or outdoors except under special circumstances, the House mask requirement will remain in place until all members and floor staff are fully vaccinated. 

"No," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said when asked if the rule mandating masks unless a member is speaking on the House floor would be modified. She then asked, "Are they all vaccinated?"

 

Now guess which House Republican is the proudest and loudest about not being vaccinated.

 

Go on, guess. 

 

One House Republican, Rep. Tom Massie of Kentucky, said he is not vaccinated.

"The Pfizer and Moderna trials showed no benefit from the vaccine for those previously infected, so I will not be taking the vaccine," Massie said in a statement to CNN.

Both clinical trial and real-life data finds the mRNA vaccines are more than 95% effective at preventing severe Covid-19 illness, hospitalizations and death.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, of course it's my own Congressmoron, Thomas Massie. What a spectacularly performative dumbass.

 

Three other Republicans -- Reps. Greg Steube and Kat Cammack of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia -- said they did not want to share the information.

"I'm not going to talk about it. I don't think anybody should have to share their personal, private medical information with anybody," Steube told CNN.

Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania told CNN, "I have the antibodies" when asked if he had been vaccinated. But experts don't know how long antibodies last in a person who has recovered from Covid-19, and research suggests that coronavirus vaccines will provide better protection, especially when it comes to some of the worrying variants. One study found that people in South Africa who received the Pfizer vaccine after B.1.351 became the dominant circulating virus were still very strongly protected from infection, and that protection lasted for at least six months.

 

Even Insurrection Barbie is like "None of your beeswax!" But Rep. Massie?

Performative ignorance of the highest degree, and yet he'll easily be re-elected for as long as he wants.

Prince Of Darkness, Con't

So yes, the whole "Erik Prince brought in a British spy to train Project Veritas operatives to run Trump loyalty sting operations" thing was absolutely 100% true, and yes, they tried to infiltrate Democratic campaigns and unions as well. But their big targets were the FBI and the Trump White House itself.

A network of conservative activists, aided by a British former spy, mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government, according to documents and people involved in the operations.

The campaign included a planned sting operation against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and secret surveillance operations against F.B.I. employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks.

The operations against the F.B.I., run by the conservative group Project Veritas, were conducted from a large home in the Georgetown section of Washington that rented for $10,000 per month. Female undercover operatives arranged dates with the F.B.I. employees with the aim of secretly recording them making disparaging comments about Mr. Trump.

The campaign shows the obsession that some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy “deep state” trying to blunt his agenda — and the lengths that some were willing to go to try to purge the government of those believed to be disloyal to the president.

Central to the effort, according to interviews, was Richard Seddon, a former undercover British spy who was recruited in 2016 by the security contractor Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets. He ran field operations for Project Veritas until mid-2018.

Last year, The New York Times reported that Mr. Seddon ran an expansive effort to gain access to the unions and campaigns and led a hiring effort that nearly tripled the number of the group’s operatives, according to interviews and deposition testimony. He trained operatives at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming.

The efforts to target American officials show how a campaign once focused on exposing outside organizations slowly morphed into an operation to ferret out Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies in the government’s ranks.

Whether any of Mr. Trump’s White House advisers had direct knowledge of the campaign is unclear, but one of the participants in the operation against Mr. McMaster, Barbara Ledeen, said she was brought on by someone “with access to McMaster’s calendar.”

 

McMaster was targeted after a dinner with Oracle founder Larry Page and his wife, who ratted the former National Security Adviser's opinion of Trump out to the White House directly through Don McGahn.

To recap, Trump hired Erik Prince to train James O'Keefe and his merry band of grifters to be seekrit ageunts™ and they tried to run honeypot ops on Trump own national security team and the FBI.

This is who they always were, folks.

StupidiNews!

• New CDC guidance states that fully vaccinated Americans no longer have to wear masks, even indoors, and can go about most activities safely.
• Nine people were shot in Rhode Island in a drive-by shootout, three in critical condition, as gunmen in a vehicle attacked a Providence home Thursday night.
• Israeli army forces fired artillery shells into Gaza Friday as Hamas rocket attacks continue, the UN Security Council is expected to meet on Sunday after the US objected to an earlier meeting.
• A Trump spokesman says he will resume "regular" political rallies next month, with venues still to be determined.
• Washington state Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell is taking issue with NASA's choice of SpaceX for its Artemis Program, Jeff Bezos-owned competitor Blue Origin was passed over.
  

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

If Joe Manchin's top secret plan for getting things passed in the Senate is suggesting reasonable things that Republican senators public take flaming dumps on, then I guess it's working like a charm.

 

It didn’t take long for a supposedly bipartisan compromise on voting rights legislation that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is floating to get dumped on by a key Republican.

At a Thursday Senate Judiciary Committee meeting to vote on one of President Biden’s key Justice Department nominees, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) didn’t call out Manchin by name. But he referenced a proposal Manchin has recently floated — first to a local news outlet, and then more explicitly in an interview Wednesday with ABC News — for addressing voting rights.

Manchin is currently the lone Senate Democrat not publicly supporting the For The People Act, Democrats’ sprawling democracy overhaul legislation that would beat back many of the restrictive state-level voting policies advancing across the county. The For the People Act — also known as S1 — stands no chance of becoming law for as long as Manchin and other centrist Democrats oppose blowing up the filibuster to ram it through.

Manchin says he would not support major elections legislation done on a purely partisan basis. Instead, Manchin has suggested that lawmakers focus on a restoring the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. The Supreme Court invalidated the formula that determined which states — based on their history of discriminating against minority votes — must get federal approval for changes to their election practices.

Manchin is now pitching a fix to the Voting Rights Act that would subject all 50 states to the so-called preclearance process. That goes farther than the VRA restoration legislation that has been previously introduced, which is moving separately from s1 so Democrats can create the kind of legislative record that will make the law more resistant to legal attack. Manchin nonetheless has described the approach as something to be done with bipartisan support.

On Thursday, Cornyn signaled that such an idea would not get much buy-in from the Republican Party.

He characterized it in suspicious terms. The idea of a 50-state preclearance system has only been outlined by Manchin in vague terms, which to Cornyn, meant that there is an “effort afoot” to do through the “back door” what S1 was trying to do through the “front door:” a supposed federal “takeover” of the U.S. election system.

 

Subjecting all 50 states to VRA pre-clearance would remove the bias that the Roberts Court cited in 2013 when they ripped that entire section of the act out. Mitch McConnell has been blocking a fix to the VRA ever since, and he knows that if federal elections were free from GOP interference at the state level, that the GOP would never win again.

 

If Manchin's fixes are being tossed out as non-starters, then when does Manchin finally say "screw it" and kill the filibuster?

 

Answer: who knows?

 

But our entire democracy depends on his whims, and I'm rapidly getting sick of it.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Former Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn has reached a deal with the Justice Department on testifying about his former boss, to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee in a closed door session.

Former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn will testify before the House Judiciary Committee behind closed doors about then-President Donald Trump's attempts to obstruct the Russia investigation, the House and the Justice Department announced in a court filing Wednesday night. 

The interview will happen "as soon as possible," and a transcript will be released in the days after, the court filing said. 

The committee members who interview McGahn can ask him about the incidents documented in the Mueller report of Trump's attempts to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and block the Russia investigation, and about the Mueller investigation's accuracy. 

The Justice Department can assert executive privilege or McGahn can decline to answer on other topics, which would essentially block House Democrats from learning details McGahn might know about other major scandals during Trump's presidency.
McGahn served as the top lawyer on Trump's 2016 campaign and served as White House counsel until fall 2018. 

The agreement is a major concession from the executive branch after the Trump administration sought to broadly block former and current officials from testifying to Congress, and McGahn's recalcitrance ended up in court as the most potentially consequential case over testimony. Yet the agreement comes after much of the political jeopardy Trump faced as president passed -- leaving House Democrats with far less momentum in their investigations of Trump related to obstruction. 

"When the former President vowed to fight 'all of the subpoenas' aimed at his Administration, he began a dangerous campaign of unprecedented obstruction. We begin to bring that era of obstruction to an end today," Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. 

The agreement will put an end to the two-year standoff in court over McGahn's congressional testimony, which Democrats sought after Mueller documented multiple instances of Trump's obstructive acts. The Mueller investigation relied on McGahn as one of its most significant witnesses against Trump.

 

Could McGahn;s testimony be the key to a criminal referral of Trump to the DoJ?  Possibly, but I remain extremely skeptical of any federal charges for Trump, as I have said.

It's the right thing to do, but the price will be extraordinary.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

It's been true for years now, and it remains true today: the largest terrorism threat to the United States remains white supremacist domestic terrorists bent on destroying democracy in America and establishing a white ethno-state through military insurrection. The Biden Administration is not mincing words when it comes to the scope of the threat, either.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas told senators on Wednesday that the greatest domestic threat facing the United States came from what they both called “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.”

“Specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race,” Mr. Garland told the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The cabinet secretaries’ comments reflected a dramatic shift in tone from the Trump administration, which deliberately downplayed the threat from white supremacists and similar groups, in part to elevate the profile of what former President Donald J. Trump described as violent threats from radical left-wing groups.

Last year, a former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence branch filed a whistle-blower complaint in which he accused the department of blocking a report about the threat of violent extremism and described white supremacists as having been “exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent targeted attacks in recent years.”

Mr. Mayorkas told senators on Wednesday, “The department is taking a new approach to addressing domestic violent extremism, both internally and externally.”

As Mr. Garland and Mr. Mayorkas testified before the Appropriations Committee, former members of the Trump administration told the House Oversight Committee that Mr. Trump’s false claims to have won the 2020 election had fueled the domestic terrorism threat, a point many Republican lawmakers have rejected. Earlier on Wednesday, House Republicans ousted Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from her leadership position for publicly pushing back on Mr. Trump’s claims, in the latest sign of Mr. Trump’s continued hold on the party.

While the Justice and Homeland Security Departments have long been involved in countering violent extremism inside the country, Biden administration officials have said the Jan. 6 pro-Trump riot at the Capitol showed an urgent need to focus more on domestic extremism.

 

Republicans are trying to do anything they can to change the subject from their own assistance to these Trumpist terrorists to blaming Black Lives Matter, because Republicans agree with the goals of these terrorists. Attorney General Merrick Garland was more than ready for the GOP.

Senate Republicans did not share that focus on Wednesday and instead grilled Mr. Garland and Mr. Mayorkas on border security issues.

The top Republican on the committee, Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, said that Democrats were politicizing the issue by describing violent domestic extremists as coming from the far right.

He equated the Capitol riot to the protests against police violence last summer, and asked Mr. Garland why the Justice Department seemed to be prioritizing pursuing the perpetrators of the Jan. 6 attack over those who looted shops and attacked law enforcement during racial justice protests.

Mr. Garland said that “if there has to be a hard hierarchy of things that we prioritize,” the Jan. 6 attack would be at the top because it most threated democracy.

“I have not seen a more dangerous threat to democracy than the invasion of the Capitol,” Mr. Garland said, calling it “an attempt to interfere with the fundamental element of our democracy, a peaceful transfer of power.”

“That does not mean that we don’t focus on other threats and that we don’t focus on other crimes,” he said.

 

I'm betting about now Mitch McConnell is maybe reconsidering his decision to block Garland's path to the Supreme Court. He'd still have a 5-4 conservative majority now, but Garland is way out of Mitch's league as AG.

We'll see how this goes. I still don't see any federal indictments for Trump officials in the future, the chance of deadly violence is just too high, not to mention making a martyr out of someone. I know it needs to happen, but the price is something we have to be willing to pay, and I don't think we're ready to even have that discussion yet.

I don't know. We'll see. Merrick Garland knows a lot of things that I do not, and that's a good thing.

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

The Trump party just collected apostate Rep. Liz Cheney's head, removing her from the House GOP leadership in an unceremonious voice vote this morning.

In an extraordinary bow to former President Trump, House Republicans voted Wednesday to purge GOP Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney from her leadership post, punishing the conservative Wyoming Republican for daring to refute Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

The decision was made by voice vote, meaning there will be no tally of the lawmakers who voted to dump Cheney, or of those who wanted her to stay on. Sources inside the closed-door vote said it was an overwhelming vote against Cheney. Some guessed the split was three to one.

That represents a remarkable shift from a similar challenge to her leadership status in February, when she won handily. And it marked the first time in recent memory that a congressional GOP leader was toppled by rank-and-file Republicans in the middle of their term through a formal vote.

Trump was not on Wednesday’s ballot, but he was the elephant in the room as Cheney’s colleagues voted to condemn her for what has become an unpardonable sin in today’s Republican Party: calling out the former president for his repeated falsehoods about his election defeat.

“You can't have a conference chair who recites Democrat talking points,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), former head of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and a close Trump ally, said after the vote.

Yet not all conservatives agreed.

Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), another Freedom Caucus member, was a rare conservative supporting Cheney. A sharp critic of "cancel culture," Buck warned after the vote that Republicans likely alienated voters who agree with Cheney's criticisms of Trump — or at least her right to air them from a position of leadership.

"Liz didn't agree with President Trump's narrative and she was cancelled," Buck said. "We have to deal with this narrative at some point. There are major issues — the border, spending — there are major issues. But to suggest that the American people in 2022 won't consider the fact that we were unwilling to stand up to a narrative that the election was stolen, I think will be taken into consideration with their vote."

It's all about Trump now.

Anyone who doesn't bow down to him will be removed. 

 

Anyone remaining in the party is okay with that.

Keep that fact in mind.

The Big Lie: Tarnished Brass Edition

Over a hundred retired US military generals and admirals signed on to The Big Lie this week, and the Pentagon and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin now have to confront the fact that our armed forces have long been a breeding ground for white supremacist insurrectionists with the training and knowledge to do real violence, and that the rot obviously goes way up the chain of command.

 

A day after 124 retired generals and admirals released a letter spreading the lie that President Joe Biden stole the election, current and former military officers are speaking out, calling the missive a dangerous new sign of the military being dragged into the trenches of partisan warfare.

The open letter on Monday from a group calling itself Flag Officers 4 America advanced the false conspiracy theory that the presidential vote was rigged in Biden's favor and warned that the nation is "in deep peril" from "a full-blown assault on our Constitutional rights."

“Under a Democrat Congress and the Current Administration,” they wrote, “our Country has taken a hard left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyrannical government which must be countered now by electing congressional and presidential candidates who will always act to defend our Constitutional Republic.”

The broadside also raises questions about “the mental and physical condition of the Commander in Chief" and sounds the alarm about a host of hot-button issues, such as the border wall. It goes on to accuse congressional leaders of "using the U.S. military as political pawns with thousands of troops deployed around the U.S. Capitol Building."

The group's website claims that "we are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776."

As news of the letter spread, it set off a round of recriminations among current and former military members. One serving Navy officer, who did not want to be identified publicly, called it "disturbing and reckless."

Jim Golby, an expert in civil-military relations, called it a "shameful effort to use their rank and the military's reputation for such a gross and blatant partisan attack," while a retired Air Force colonel who teaches cadets at the Air Force Academy, Marybeth Ulrich, labeled it "anti-democratic."

"I think it hurts the military and by extension it hurts the country," said retired Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, describing it as replete with "right-wing Republican talking points."

The talking points in the letter fall generally in line with die-hard loyalists in Trump's orbit, who question the results of the election despite the fact that the courts and Trump's own Justice Department said there was no reason to declare him the winner.

Several experts said it reminded them of the current crisis in civil-military relations in France, where dozens of retired generals were recently sanctioned after warning in an open letter in a right-wing magazine of civil war for the "protection of our civilisational values."

That letter was followed up by an anonymous one from current officers calling French politicians cowards for not dealing with the Muslim population, sparking calls for a purge of the ranks. The controversy has undermined public confidence in the French military and recalled the bitter feuds between the brass and elected officials during the early years of the Cold War.

The American letter was striking for several reasons. It is not unusual for retired officers to take sides in electoral politics and endorse candidates. But its fiery, even angry, language and conspiracy-mongering struck multiple long-time observers as particularly out of bounds and dangerous. Coming outside the campaign season was also seen as rare if not unprecedented.

This is a not-so-subtle reminder that if there are scores of flag officers willing to embrace the Big Lie, there are thousands of members of the Armed Forces who feel the same, and the letter all but calls President Biden unfit for command. The implication that current and former military personnel should ignore his commands and consider "righting this wrong" of his election are absolutely frightening.

The Pentagon ignores this at our peril. The potential for real, devastating violence is the highest it's been in generations.

It's far from over.

It's A Gas, Gas, Gas

I have to admit that Americans are very good at self-fulfilling prophecies of stupidity, I've been writing about that for going on 13 years now.

 

A growing number of gas stations along the East Coast are without fuel as nervous drivers aggressively fill up their tanks following a ransomware attack that shut down the Colonial Pipeline, a critical artery for gasoline. The panic-buying threatens to exacerbate the supply shock. 

As of 4 pm ET Tuesday, 8.5% of gas stations in North Carolina and 7.7% in Virginia didn't have gasoline, according to outage figures reported by GasBuddy, an app that tracks fuel prices and demand. The Virginia figure was flat from 11 am ET, while North Carolina was up from 5.8% previously. 

Rising outages are also being reported at gas stations in Georgia (5.8%), Florida (2.8%) and South Carolina (3.5%), according to GasBuddy, which collects user reports and shares the information with the government during emergencies. 

"Panicked buying" is "running stations in the region dry," Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told CNN Business. 

He warned that the "irrational behavior" could prolong supply issues "for weeks." 

Tiffany Wright of AAA Carolinas criticized what she described as "irresponsible behavior at the pump." 

"People are taking their entire family fleet of vehicles to the gas station and filing up when they don't need to," Wright told CNN's Dianne Gallagher. "We are our own worst enemy in this situation because we are over-consuming at the pump." 

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm pleaded with Americans not to hoard gas as the pipeline attempts to resume operations. 

"Let me emphasize that much as there was no cause for say, hoarding toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic, there should be no cause for hoarding gasoline," Granholm said during Tuesday's White House press briefing, "especially in light of the fact that the pipeline should be substantially operational by the end of this week and over the weekend." 

Demand for information on gasoline availability is so intense that GasBuddy itself experienced outages. De Haan told CNN the platform is experiencing "slowdowns" because of "extreme traffic," so users may experience "periodic timeouts" on its website and app.

US gasoline demand jumped 20% on Monday compared with the prior week, according to GasBuddy. 

In just five states served by Colonial Pipeline — Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia -- demand was up by a collective 40.1%, GasBuddy said. 

"I got scared that I could not go to work or take my daughters to school," Florida resident Linderly Bedoya told CNN on Tuesday. "All the gas stations in my area were without gas and when I finally found one I had to stay an hour in line and I had to fill up with the premium unleaded."

 

So if you're a Republican governor, and you want to hurt this administration, what do you do?  You declare a state of emergency, which immediately makes demand and shortages even worse.

 

Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared a state of emergency due to the Colonial Pipeline shutdown on Saturday, May 7.

According to the executive order, on May 7, Colonial Pipeline, a major US fuel pipeline operator, was the target of a cyberattack that disabled certain computer systems responsible for sustaining pipeline operations.

As a result of the incident, Colonial Pipeline was forced to temporarily halt pipeline operations in order to contain the attack.

Colonial Pipeline is responsible for transporting a "substantial percentage" of fuel on the East Coast of the United States, including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products, the executive order stated.

The closure of the pipeline poses a severe threat to the State of Florida and Gov. DeSantis said this requires immediate resources be taken to protect the continued delivery of fuel products to the state, the executive order read.

The executive order is to expire in 30 days from Tuesday, May 11, unless Gov. DeSantis extends it.

 

So now Florida is free from all commercial driving regulations for as long as DeSantis wants it, and shortages will sure make energy companies and GOP donors a shitload of money, while he sits back and blames Biden.

Bonus: He gets political cover for doing this from Virginia's Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, who also declared a state of emergency making everything worse.

You can bet that DeSantis will be playing news footage of long gas lines whenever he needs to do so, and I have to admit, he's crafty as well as evil.

Remember when I said the real threat was Trump, only without the baggage?

Yeah.

StupidiNews!

• Colombian activist Lucas Villa was declared brain dead Monday night, almost a week after he was shot eight times at a peaceful protest by unknown gunmen.
• Arizona GOP Gov. Doug Ducey has signed into law the state's voter suppression bill, purging 140,000 voters from the rolls and making voter registration more difficult.
• Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis says she will seek the death penalty for the Atlanta suspect accused of shooting eight people at various spas, charging the suspect with anti-Asian hate crimes.
• President Biden is expected to nominate former Chicago Mayor and Obama WH Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as America's Ambassador to Japan.
• The country's largest planned wind turbine power farm has finally cleared regulatory hurdles and has received final approval to be built off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.
  

Last Call For Israeli A Problem, Con't

As Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's legal prospects grow dimmer by the day in his corruption trial, he's walked away from the day-to-day management of Israel is order to save his own skin, and the neglect and dereliction means the worst possible instincts are being used to try to control the latest situation in Gaza with brutal force that threatens to create a much bigger problem for the entire Middle East.

 

Airstrikes left neighborhoods in Gaza trembling, killing at least two dozen people, and rockets rained on cities in Israel, including Tel Aviv, as some of the worst fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in years showed no signs of abating on Tuesday.

The immediate trigger was a police raid on an Islamic holy site in Jerusalem the day before, but by Tuesday the conflict had grown far broader, with civilians on both sides of the border paying a heavy cost.

In Gaza, at least 26 Palestinians, including nine children, were killed in at least 130 Israeli strikes on Monday and Tuesday, and 122 others were wounded, according to health officials.

In Israel, two people were killed in strikes on the seaside city of Ashkelon on Tuesday, and at least 56 Israelis have received hospital treatment, according to medical officials. As multiple salvos of rockets streaked out of Gaza in rapid succession, one hit a school in the city, just 13 miles up the coast from Gaza. And a giant fire raged on the outskirts of Ashkelon where an oil facility was hit.

The school was empty at the time because the Israeli authorities had ordered all schools within a 25-mile radius of Gaza closed in anticipation of rockets.

Several more slammed into the port city of Ashdod, a little farther up the coast, where at least one hit a house. The emergency services reported several people wounded slightly.

Shortly after 9 p.m., militants fired another barrage toward Tel Aviv, Israel’s second-largest city, with one rocket hitting an empty bus south of the city, wounding at least three people, including a 5-year-old girl. One person was killed by the barrage, the authorities said, and 11 people were injured, according to early media reports.

Palestinian militants said the barrage was revenge for an airstrike that toppled a tower that houses the offices of several Hamas officials.

In a late-night address to Israelis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Hamas and Islamic Jihad have paid, and will pay, a very heavy price for their aggression.” But he warned, that “this campaign will take time.”

The Israeli military, prepared for the latest eruption of cross-border fighting with militant groups in Gaza, designated a code name for its operation just hours after the deadly violence began: Guardians of the Walls, a reference to the ancient ramparts of the Old City of Jerusalem. The militant groups had their own code name for their campaign: Sword of Jerusalem.

By early Tuesday morning, barely 12 hours after Hamas, the Islamist militant group that holds sway in Gaza, had launched a surprise volley of rockets toward Jerusalem, Israel had carried out at least 130 retaliatory airstrikes in the Palestinian coastal territory, according to an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus. Militant groups had fired nearly 500 rockets into Israel by the afternoon, according to military officials.

Things are rapidly spiraling out of control in Gaza, and while I don't think Netanyahu wants a third Intifada, he's going to take advantage of it if it comes to stay in power with a breathtakingly horrid crackdown where thousands may die. 

Like Trump, Netanyahu has set the stage for being rid of these troublesome Palestinians, and it looks like Israel's hardliners in the military are going to push this as far as they can.

I'm hoping President Biden can step in and calm things down, but I'm not holding out hope.

The Big Lie, Con't

Conspiracy theorists in Arizona, seeing the recount nonsense crumbling to dust before their eyes, are now petitioning the state's Supreme Court to throw out all 2020 election results and to remove the entirely of the state's elected officials immediately, where they would be replaced by a list of "ordinary Arizona citizens" that just happens to consist of the plaintiffs.

A group of Arizona citizens, including one Republican Congressional candidate, is asking the state’s Supreme Court to invalidate all election results since 2018 and remove all elected officials from their offices immediately.

And who should replace the ousted election officials? Well, the citizens who filed the lawsuit, of course.

The legal petition claims all officials elected in Arizona since 2018 are “inadvertent usurpers” because the elections they won were conducted by vote-counting equipment that was not properly certified.

The plaintiffs claim the evidence to back up this staggering claim will be provided in the lawsuit’s appendix, which unfortunately they had not submitted at the time of writing.

The plaintiffs claim that the court has the authority to void the terms of the named officials—which include Gov. Doug Ducey and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs—and install themselves as appropriate replacements.

“When in the past citizens have been appointed by the Governor to finish out a Senate term due to unusual circumstances, the Governor has typically chosen pedigreed, well-known politicians, but this is not necessary. Any Arizona resident meeting the minimum qualifications is entitled to and has the right be appointed to a seat in unusual situations,” the lawsuit claims.

The legal filing is the latest harebrained effort by pro-Trump and QAnon supporters in Arizona to get the results of November’s election overturned. There is currently an audit of 2.1 million votes being conducted in Maricopa County. The GOP-sanctioned recount is being conducted by a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, which has no experience conducting audits.

So far the group has used UV lights to look for watermarks that conspiracy theorists claim were placed on certain ballots by former President Donald Trump to prove election fraud. And last week they began examining the ballots for bamboo fibers, based on a false claim that 40,000 ballots were flown in from Asia to tip the election in President Joe Biden’s favor.

The new lawsuit was filed with the Arizona Supreme Court on Friday, and the plaintiffs in the case sought to have their names redacted. “Petitioners have chosen to redact their names and personal information and utilize initials due a reasonable concern for their safety,” the plaintiffs write in the lawsuit.

But the group does give some indication of who they are by calling themselves “We the People,” a widely used phrase in the QAnon community.

One of the people involved in the “We the People” group is Daniel Wood, a former Marine who was a Republican candidate for Congress in last November’s elections.

Wood, who was beaten by Democratic rival Rep. Raul Grijalva, is mentioned at the bottom of a press release about the lawsuit which was published by the right-wing website the Gateway Pundit.

Also listed on the press release is Josh Barnett, a businessman who says he is a Republican candidate for Congress in 2022.

“As average citizens of Arizona, from all walks of life, we have discovered that our past elections in 2018 thru 2020 are out of compliance per the U.S. Election Assistance Commission,” Wood and Barnett claim in the press release.

Wood and Barnett did not respond to a request for comment from VICE News.

 

This is absolute poppycock and the people behind this idiocy should be tossed into the clink for a few months, but it's going to be The Next Proof Thing™ of a massive conspiracy to not elect tinfoil crazies to run the state. They are literally asking a judge to hand the entire state over to some random assholes.

 

And eventually, these fools will turn to more violence. It's inevitable.

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Joe Biden's latest Associated Press poll shows him in pretty good shape at 63% favorability, with seven out of ten Americans approving of his pandemic response.

President Joe Biden is plunging into the next phase of his administration with the steady approval of a majority of Americans, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The survey shows Biden is buoyed in particular by the public’s broad backing for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

In the fourth month of his presidency, Biden’s overall approval rating sits at 63%. When it comes to the new Democratic president’s handling of the pandemic, 71% of Americans approve, including 47% of Republicans.

The AP-NORC poll also shows an uptick in Americans’ overall optimism about the state of the country. Fifty-four percent say the country is on the right track, higher than at any point in AP-NORC polls conducted since 2017; 44% think the nation is on the wrong track.

Those positive marks have fueled the Biden White House’s confidence coming out of the president’s first 100 days in office, a stretch in which he secured passage of a sweeping $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package and surged COVID-19 vaccines across the country. The U.S., which has suffered the most virus deaths of any nation, is now viewed enviably by much of the rest of the world for its speedy vaccination program and robust supplies of the shots.

“We are turning a corner,” said Jeff Zients, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator.

The improvements have also impacted Americans’ concerns about the virus. The AP-NORC poll shows the public’s worries about the pandemic are at their lowest level since February 2020, when the virus was first reaching the U.S. About half of Americans say they are at least somewhat worried that they or a relative could be infected with the virus, down from about 7 in 10 just a month earlier.

As has been the case throughout the pandemic, there is a wide partisan gap in Americans’ views of pandemic risks. Among Democrats, 69% say they remain at least somewhat worried about being infected with the virus, compared with just 33% of Republicans.

Despite the overall positive assessments of Americans, Biden’s advisers are well aware that the next phase of his presidency is potentially trickier. Vaccination rates have slowed, and the administration is grappling with how to persuade those who are reluctant to get the shots about their safety and efficacy.

Biden’s legislative agenda for the rest of this year also faces obstacles on Capitol Hill. Republicans are resisting his calls for passing a sweeping infrastructure package, and there’s insufficient support among Democrats for overhauling Senate rules in a way that would allow the party to tackle changes to immigration policy, gun laws and voting rights on its own.

 

The first 100 days of the Biden administration was the easy part. Putting out Trump's forest fires took months, but there were clear goals and people broadly supported them.

 

It gets much, much harder from here for Biden, and for us as a nation.

StupidiNews!

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• The Treasury Department is now accepting applications for local and state governments for up to $350 billion in COVID-19 relief funds.
• Amazon says it destroyed more than 2 million counterfeit products last year as the online sales giant grapples with foreign supply chains and sales scams.