Crooked Media - What A Day: Eenie, meanie, whiney Mo

 -Mike Pence, learning Congress called on him to invoke the 25th amendment

The House January 6 Committee held its fifth televised hearing Thursday, or, as others might put it, networks simultaneously aired the fifth episode of the prestige drama Big Electoral Lies. 

• The proceedings were focused on disgraced former President Donald Trump’s efforts to use the Justice Department to subvert the 2020 election results, and boy, were these efforts strenuous. Former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen; former Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue; and former Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel all testified to rejecting requests from Trump and his team to investigate baseless claims of voter fraud in the runup to January 6.
   
• Rosen said he received calls from Trump “virtually every day” once he became acting AG in December 2020, and was given instructions from the former President like “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.” All this in spite of the fact that, according to Rosen’s own testimony, no instance of fraud they found “came close” to affecting the outcome in different states. Trump also asked Rosen to seize voting machines, a plan that was complicated by the fact that the DOJ has no legal authority to do that.
   
• Though he wasn’t in attendance, the true star of Thursday’s broadcast was the DOJ’s top environmental lawyer under Trump, Jeffery Clark. Clark put power-grid law aside for a moment in late 2020 to draft a letter to state officials in Georgia that claimed without basis that the DOJ had “identified significant concerns” in the state’s election results. If it had been sent, that letter could have created a pretext to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. When Rosen refused to send the letter, Trump walked right up to the line of installing Clark as the new new acting AG, and only backed down when Clark, Donoghue, and Engel told him they’d all resign and his Justice Department would collapse.

Side-note: All of this was illegal. 

• That’s probably why federal law enforcement executed a search warrant at Jeffery Clark’s house in Virginia on Wednesday. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office offered no comment on the nature of the law-enforcement action, but we can assume it wasn’t to drop off a fruit salad or cookies. Clark maybe should’ve listened to Donoghue when he said, “You’re an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill.”
   
• We also learned more about the pardons-for-loyalty play that at least six Republican lawmakers in the House tried to run. Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Scott Perry (R-PA) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) all asked for pardons from the President, in case they faced legal repercussions for their efforts to subvert democracy. The email request from Brooks hilariously asked that Trump pardon: “Every Congressman and Senator who voted to reject the electoral vote submission of Arizona and Pennsylvania.” Which makes it seem like maybe, just maybe, there was an awareness among these people that they were doing the wrong thing.

This week on Mother Country Radicals, central figure Bernardine Dohrn is named one of America's most wanted by the FBI. Learn how this historic title affected her status among the Weather Underground and what it was like for the group to live underground as counter-culture outlaws. Listen to Mother Country Radicals wherever you get your podcasts. 

The Supreme Court's six Republican justices struck down a New York gun-control law which made it difficult to get a concealed-carry permit, opting not to employ a time-honored legal strategy called “reading the room.” Previously, New York residents needed to prove they had “proper cause” to carry a handgun in public. Reactions from the left were swift and negative. President Biden said, “This ruling contradicts both common sense and the constitution and should deeply trouble us all.” New York's governor Kathy Hochul described the ruling as “not just reckless, [but] reprehensible.” They're on to something! The ruling essentially creates an individual right to concealed carry, opening the door for nearly all law-abiding Americans to carry concealed and loaded handguns in public places, as other “proper cause” laws in states like California, Maryland, and New Jersey will likely fall in turn. Justice Clarence Thomas, one-half of DC’s most notable insurrection power couple, wrote in the Court's opinion that New York law violated the Second Amendment, which QUOTE “protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” Never mind that a modern handgun would’ve been impossible to fathom for the framers, who thought of guns as large unwieldy tubes, and would not wrap their heads around light bulbs for another 100 years. 

• Leaders of the European Union voted to grant candidate status to Ukraine, delivering a symbolic victory to the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Membership in the E.U. could still be years or even decades away.
   
• Survivors of the earthquake in Afghanistan that killed an estimated 1,440 people seem to be mostly on their own as they bury the dead and dig for fellow survivors by hand. The Taliban government and the international community face an uphill battle to provide much-needed aid.
   
• The Supreme Court also ruled 5-4 in favor of a death-row inmate who wants to die by firing squad. That inmate, Michael Nance, can now file a civil-rights lawsuit against the state of Georgia, which wants to execute him by a method that’s more modern though not necessarily more humane: lethal injection. That this counts as "good news" out of the Supreme Court probably doesn’t bode well for... society. 
   
• Former President Trump’s COVID response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, testified to a House select committee about efforts by Trump White officials to modify and downplay her weekly reports to state and local health officials, giving us all PTSD flashbacks… here, PTSD stands for ‘President Trump’s Solar Drug’ and refers to shining ultraviolet light in your veins. 
   
• The Uvalde, TX, police chief accused of bungling the response to the shooting at Robb Elementary has been placed on leave.  
   
• Newly elected Rep. Mayra Flores (R-TX), known henceforth as Lone Star MTG, allegedly spread Capitol riot conspiracy theories and QAnon hashtags on her old Twitter account LaRepublicana86. Those posts, like this person’s mind, have been fully scrubbed clean. 
   
• Florida-based infectious-disease expert Publix supermarkets won’t provide COVID vaccines to kids under 5, despite the CDC’s recommendation that all kids older than 6 months get the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech shot. 
   
• Amazon has single-handedly crushed the seance industry by announcing a feature for its smart-assistant Alexa that allows it to speak in the voice of your deceased relative. 
   
• Trumpet the bloodhound won Best in Show at the Westminster Dog Show on Wednesday, using his innate bloodhound abilities to look majorly depressed after winning a big contest.

Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe made a declaration that no one wants to hear from their head-of-state, telling Parliament yesterday that the country’s economy “has completely collapsed.” This admission underscores the severity of the island nation’s financial crisis. Sri Lanka currently owes $51 billion and is spiraling toward bankruptcy, while its inability to import necessities like gas, milk, and toilet paper have led to shortages. Those shortages, plus inflationary pressure that have sent the cost of food rising, have had a huge impact on most Sri Lankans. The U.N. World Food Program since nearly nine in 10 families are currently skipping meals or rationing their food. Things are not going well financially across the globe right now, but the situation in Sri Lanka is far worse thanks to years of government mismanagement and corruption… which led the country's last P.M. Mahinda Rajapaska to resign last month. Sri Lanka’s only move now is to secure a rescue package from the International Monetary Fund, which might be motivating Wickremesinghe to speak so transparently about how bad things have gotten. 

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The Biden administration has proposed new rules that would prohibit discrimination against transgender students under Title IX, at a time when trans kids across America are being targeted by GOP lawmakers. Biden also proposed rolling back elements of Trump-era policy that narrowed the scope of campus sexual-misconduct investigations… this was one of former Education Secretary and MLM Queenpin Betsy DeVos’s signature “achievements.”  

The Biden administration also agreed to cancel $6 billion in student debt for borrowers who attended one of more than 150 shady, and mostly for-profit colleges. Sorry again, Betsy!

The bipartisan gun-safety bill passed a test vote yesterday in the Senate, after 15 Republicans joined all the Democrats in doing the absolute bare minimum and allowing the bill to overcome a GOP filibuster. 

The FDA said, “You damn dirty vapes”... and young people went from saying “All my apes gone” to “All my vapes gone”... and anyway, Juul was ordered to stop selling e-cigs in the US. (Ed note: I did both an old ape reference and a new ape reference so no one would feel excluded. If neither one landed for you, it’s not my problem.)