Crooked Media - What A Day: Clar' and present danger

 -Mayor Eric Adams, justifying the detention of a mango stand owner

In terms of pure symbolic power, Ukraine has recently dealt its Russian invaders a series of crushing defeats. 

• Actually in some cases, it’s more than purely symbolic power. On Sunday, senior U.S. diplomatic officials in Ukraine, including Charge d’Affaires Kristina Kvien, returned to the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, almost three months after leaving the facility in anticipation of the Russian invasion. The visit was timed to commemorate Victory in Europe day, but is consistent with reports that the Biden administration is trying to accelerate the permanent reopening of the embassy and the resumption of the diplomatic mission there. 
   
• The activity at the U.S. embassy coincided with the actual reopening of the Canadian embassy in Kyiv, which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attended during a surprise visit to the city. Other surprise visitors to Ukraine included First Lady Jill Biden, and Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenskay, who has been in hiding since the invasion began. 
   
• Other inspiring images will have a more meaningful impact on the lives of Ukrainians. This Washington Post article details the incredibly rapid rebuilding of Bucha, which just weeks ago was the focus of international outrage, when the expulsion of Russian forces allowed the world to see how inhumane and destructive Russian occupation had been.

It's much harder to rack up symbolic victories, when you're the invading country, and your war is based on lies, and you're losing.

• Despite widespread speculation to the contrary, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not use Russia's May 9 Victory Day celebration as a pretext to turn his "special military operation" into an official war, which would have allowed him to marshal many more resources toward pulverizing and trying to overtake Ukraine. He did, however, use the occasion to rant about "cancel culture" and air other anti-Western grievances, which counts as a huge win in Republican circles.  
   
• The palpable imbalance seems to be having positive feedback effects, too. The latest polling from Finland finds an incredible 76 percent of Finns support joining NATO. In France, President Emmanuel Macron proposed the idea of creating a European political community, that would allow countries that don't want to, or can't, join the European Union (such as England and Ukraine) to nevertheless be part of a diplomatic alignment of democracies.  

A confluence of protectionist populism and Restoring Normalcy™ seems to have imperiled the solar industry just as the U.S. has reached the crossroads of the clean-energy transition, and faces the imperative to reduce inflation. The precipitating issue is a Commerce Department investigation into whether foreign solar manufacturers have skirted U.S. sanctions on Chinese-manufactured solar panels and cells, which are heavily subsidized by the Chinese government. That investigation could result in the U.S. assessing tariffs on those exporters retroactively, which has already driven up costs for importers, before the investigation has run its course. Senior officials, including Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, would reportedly like to step in to remove the logjam and restore solar industry capacity, but they’re hamstrung by the Biden administration’s dual commitments to refrain from Trump-era meddling in federal investigations and to support American manufacturers.

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged that Republicans might ban abortion nationwide if and when they retake full control of Washington, which is something Sinanchima might want to think about. 
   
• Democrats are teaming up with Republicans to crack down on pro-abortion protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes. 
   
• Here's another right-wing Supreme Court leak meant to lock in a ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
   
• The White House has reportedly asked Congress to leave COVID-19 funding out if its forthcoming Ukraine aid package, in response to Republican objections—meanwhile the supply of next-gen, Omicron specific COVID-19 vaccines will be severely restricted if Congress doesn’t pass more COVID-19 funding. 
   
• Republicans led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) have begun threatening to punish companies that help their employees who may soon have to travel out of state to have legal abortions. 
   
• The CIA has warned the Bolsonaro government in Brazil to stop telling lies meant to sow doubt about his coming election, the latest example of how Donald Trump severely damaged America’s moral authority to advocate for good things around the world. 
   
• In other right wing leaders, it looks like when the current president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, leaves office, he will be replaced by a ticket led by the grandson of Ferdinand Marcos and his own daughter, Sara Duterte. 
   
• A federal judge has yeeted Donald Trump’s sad-trombone lawsuit against Twitter for kicking him off the platform. Womp womp.
   
• Michigan Republicans have purged basically all of their election officials who rejected the Big Lie. 
   
• The prominent, Trump-affiliated, far-right social media figure Paul Joseph Watson was secretly recorded saying he wanted to “wipe Jews off the face of the Earth” and other, similarly charming things at a party recently. 
   
• QAnon adherents have begun rounding up migrant children near the southern border and interrogating them about their families in search of evidence to support their baseless sex-trafficking conspiracy theories. 
   
• Clarence Thomas rued that people are unwilling to “live with outcomes we don’t agree with,” but somehow he wasn’t referring to his insurrectionist wife Ginni. 
   
• Former Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), who lost his seat to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) is now a tony-nominated musical producer. 

From the fascinating-if-unsurprising annals: Partisan animus in the U.S. is frequently driven by misperceptions about how widespread extremism within the political opposition. From there it follows: partisan polarization as observed in the U.S. doesn’t derive entirely from the substantive objectives of political parties; there is also an element of “false polarization” in the mix, driven by these misperceptions, which in turn drive animus. Multiple mechanisms underlie this phenomenon, but media fixation on examples of partisan extremism is one major source of “false polarization,” not necessarily because it misleads people about the existence of extremism, but it persuades people that the most extreme views of the opposing party are more widespread than they are. The authors of this study only acknowledged the widespread literature on asymmetric polarization in passing, but the implication (and, well, the obvious read if you pay any attention) that false polarization is a greater problem on the right, where agitprop, lying, and the smearing of political opponents is much more common.

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Residents of Austin, TX, overwhelmingly adopted a ballot initiative prohibiting police enforcement of marijuana possession laws, and execution of no-knock warrants. 

The journalists of Ukraine have won a Pulitzer Prize, special citation award.

Rep. Tom Rice (R-SC) defended his vote to impeach Donald Trump during a Republican primary debate, exposing almost every other Republican running for re-election as a coward, nihilist, or insurrectionist sympathizer. 

Cool Webb space telescope images just dropped.