|
House impeachment managers began laying out their case that then-President Donald Trump incited the January 6 attack on the Capitol, as Georgia prosecutors launched a criminal investigation into Trump’s election interference, and the sheer force of Marco Rubio’s cognitive dissonance opened up a portal to another dimension. (He’s a coward in that one, too, it turns out.)
- Lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) opened Wednesday’s proceedings with an effortless rejection of Trump’s defense that his incitement is protected speech under the First Amendment, offering a simple analogy: “This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater. It’s more like a case where the town fire chief, who’s paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater but to actually set the theater on fire.” (After which half of the crowd said “let’s just keep watching Tenet,” for some reason.) Raskin also highlighted the mob’s racist motivations, quoting one of the Black Capitol Police officers who endured racist abuse from the overwhelmingly white crowd during the riot.
- House managers then began reconstructing the timeline of Trump’s false claims that the election was rigged, and demonstrating how those months of repeated lies and vilification of election officials turned his specific rhetoric on January 6 into “a call to arms.” Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-USVI) argued that Trump deliberately encouraged violence, citing the time that Trump supporters tried to run a Biden/Harris campaign bus off the road in Texas, to Trump’s public delight. Plaskett also provided the trial’s first new piece of evidence, asserting that the permit for the January 6 rally didn’t authorize a march to the Capitol until Trump and his team got involved in the planning. Not to jump to crazy conclusions here but...it sounds like...Trump may have intended for this to happen?
- Later in the day, the prosecution introduced previously unseen security footage of the mob storming the Capitol, after first warning senators and staff that it would include “very graphic, violent footage.” Clips included then-Vice President Mike Pence’s evacuation from the Senate chamber, Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman encountering Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) in the hallway and telling him to run in the other direction, insurrectionists chanting for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, terrifying police body camera footage, and senators’ own evacuations from the Senate floor, just 58 steps away from the violent mob. All of it underscored how narrowly senators from both parties escaped personal harm, and how close the attack came to becoming something much, much worse.
|
|
|
Meanwhile, Georgia has begun to live up to its famous state motto, “Don’t mess with Georgia.”
- Prosecutors in Fulton County have opened a criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the state’s election results, including his recorded phone call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R-GA), in which Trump nailed the character of “mob boss who just woke up from dental surgery.” On Wednesday, Fani Willis, the newly elected Democratic district attorney in Fulton County, sent letters to multiple state officials requesting that they preserve any documents related to Trump’s pressure campaign. Raffensperger’s office opened its own administrative inquiry into The Phone Call earlier this week.
- While Trump’s Twitter ban has mercifully prevented him from tweeting through it, it is very fun to know that he was incandescent with rage while his defense lawyer Bruce Castor was up there rambling about senators’ moral fortitude and catlike reflexes on Tuesday. Even more fun to know: Twitter has announced that Trump’s posting exile is permanent, even if senators/state prosecutors/God drop the ball and Trump winds up running for president again in 2024. Somewhat less fun: Trump’s most loyal allies remain undeterred. Insurrection co-inciter and impartial juror Sen. Josh Hawley (R-SILENCED) seemingly ignored Wednesday’s impeachment evidence from his perch in the visitor’s gallery, sitting with his feet up on the chair in front of him like a high school shithead in a D.A.R.E. assembly.
House managers have put a spotlight on the bizarre reality that they aren’t just prosecutors in this trial, and senators aren’t just jurors—nearly everyone in the room was also a firsthand witness to the terror Donald Trump inflicted upon them. Even more bizarre, some of those jurors were also accomplices, and stand ready to discount the raw, haunting evidence of their own close brushes with death. It’s unclear how a party makes it back to reality from there.
|
|
|
Last week the New York Times released a new documentary on Hulu called Framing Britney Spears, which takes a look at Britney Spears' ongoing conservatorship battle with her father, Jamie Spears. On today's Keep It stream, Ira, Aida, and Louis react to the documentary and discuss the media forces that put Britney in her current situation. Watch, subscribe, and #FreeBritney → youtube.com/crookedmedia
|
|
|
President Biden now has access to disgraced former President Trump’s hidden phone calls with Vladimir Putin. Trump had at least a dozen long-winded calls and meetings with Putin during his term, and went to great lengths to keep those conversations secret, dumping call records into the NSC’s top-secret codeword system and confiscating his interpreter’s notes of his in-person meetings. While the Putin calls weren’t recorded, aides were typically on the line and taking notes, resulting in loose transcripts called “memcons.” All of Trump’s memcons were transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration, and since Trump no longer enjoys executive privilege, Biden can now access them to see whether Trump revealed any sensitive information, made any secret deals, or discussed the location of the pee tape—all key national security matters.
|
|
- A new CDC report found that double-masking can block exposure to viral particles by more than 95 percent, and that proper mask fit makes a big difference, which makes sense. Knot those ear loops! Tuck in those sides! Fill your cheeks with walnuts! Whatever it takes!
- Hey look, President Biden’s coronavirus relief plan united the country.
- Biden has ordered new sanctions against military leaders in Myanmar, demanding that the military relinquish the power it seized in a coup and release the elected politicians it detained.
- The pandemic didn’t have as dire an impact on state and local governments as expected, though many are dealing with higher-than-expected costs to fight coronavirus.
- Amazon hired a Koch-backed anti-union consultant to thwart the employees organizing at its Bessemer, AL, warehouse, at a rate of $3,200 per day.
- Nearly 140,000 Republicans have left the party since January 6 across the 25 states with available data. Voter rolls tend to shift around after presidential elections, but that’s an unusually large downward spike.
- Germany has continued to prosecute people who were involved in Holocaust atrocities as recently as this week, even though defendants are now over 90 years old. Many see those prosecutions as sending an important message amid the rise of a new fascist far right.
- Bruce Springsteen was arrested on a DWI charge last year. More like (sorry) “Blunder Road” (really sorry).
- The brand formerly known as Aunt Jemima is now the Pearl Milling Company. There are only two kinds of brand names in the world, “very racist,” and “so aggressively boring it sounds like a shell company for arms deals in the Middle East.”
|
|
|
After fueling various genocides around the world and fraying American democracy to the breaking point, Facebook plans to start reducing the amount of political content in users’ feeds. Facebook will experiment with algorithm changes on a fraction of its users in Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia starting this week, before rolling out the less-political feed in the U.S. (Content from official government agencies and services won’t be affected.) It’s unclear how Facebook’s algorithm will define political content, how significantly it will change people’s feeds, or whether it will make a material difference. Three years ago, Facebook said it would dial down the content posted by news publishers to get people to focus on interacting with friends and family, and three years later Facebook users were plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, so, you know. Worth a shot, but it seems like the horse may have left the barn and stormed the Capitol.
|
|
|
Lord Jones, the brand behind the world’s finest hemp-derived CBD products, is considered the gold standard in CBD. For years they’ve been changing people’s lives with their premium CBD topicals and confections, ranging from delicious hemp-derived CBD gumdrops to an entire CBD skincare collection. Make self-care a priority in 2021 with Lord Jones CBD products, designed to deliver a calm sense of well-being year-round.
|
|
|
Saudi Arabia has released prominent women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, under pressure from the Biden administration to end its human rights violations.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) have introduced two bills aimed at helping Black farmers and addressing systemic racism at the Agriculture Department.
The Biden administration has asked the Supreme Court to uphold the Affordable Care Act, officially reversing the Trump administration’s position.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has proposed allocating $500 million to overhaul outdated state unemployment systems.
|
|
|
|
|
