Crooked Media - What A Day: Eat, drink, and be Merrick

As federal investigators chase down links between the Capitol insurrectionists draped in Trump flags and the mysterious Trump-shaped shadows who may have provoked them, Republicans have continued to shout the Big Lie that incited it all with abandon, signaling that January 6 was just the beginning.
 

• Testifying at his confirmation hearing on Monday, attorney general-nominee Merrick Garland said that his top priority would be the broad investigation into the attack on the Capitol, wherever it might lead: “We begin with the people on the ground and we work our way up to those who are involved and further involved.” The Justice Department has reportedly already worked its way up to Roger Stone, examining his communications with members of the Oath Keepers who later stormed the Capitol. And if there’s one thing we know about Roger Stone, it’s that he is a lone wolf, constantly doing stuff without the knowledge or approval of any disgraced former presidents.
   
• Stone isn’t the only Trump-adjacent entity who allegedly fraternized with insurrectionists before the attack. Oath Keepers leader Jessica Watkins has claimed in a new court filing that she was given a VIP pass to the Stop the Steal rally, met with Secret Service agents, and was providing security for legislators and rally speakers on January 6. In response, the Secret Service denied that it had “employed private citizens” to provide security, but notably did not deny that any of its officials had met with Watkins. 
   
• The Justice Department and FBI are also investigating possible links between Alex Jones and the rioters—links that were lovingly nurtured by the top brass at Facebook. When Facebook was preparing to ban Alex Jones in April 2019, Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened to create a mile-wide loophole in the ban, which allowed Jones’s many followers to continue sharing his harmful lies. Zuckerberg’s unilateral rule change set off a chain of events that delayed the company from labeling right-wing extremist groups on the platform, including the Oath Keepers. Those groups were able to continue organizing and recruiting new members through the lead up to the 2020 election, which may have been a bad call, in hindsight!

With that in mind, regular old news networks might wanna stop giving Big Liars a huge national platform. 
 

• Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) refused to admit that Joe Biden legitimately won the election on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, spewing election lies with almost no pushback from host Jon Karl. Scalise is just the latest in a string of anti-democracy Republicans to appear on respectable Sunday shows and peddle pro-Trump disinformation to a national audience, fanning the big lie and lending it a veneer of legitimacy. Having seen that lie fuel terrifying political violence, news outlets might consider not booking people who have it tattooed on their foreheads.
   
• Republicans are clinging to Trump’s fake voter fraud like their party’s future depends on it, because it does: It’s the lie Republicans are using to justify the next wave of targeted voter suppression, and members of the far-right Supreme Court have indicated they’re standing by to help out. On Monday, the Court officially tossed out Trump’s final effort to overturn the election (it’s moot now, after all), but three justices—Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch—all voted to hear the two cases on Pennsylvania’s late-arriving absentee ballots anyway. That suggests that an authoritarian GOP fight to give state legislatures unchecked control over redistricting and election laws, thus flushing American democracy down the toilet, could still prevail in the future.

The Republicans who continue to cast doubt on the election results a month after President Biden’s inauguration illustrate why a full accounting of the January 6 attack needs to be a top priority: The attack hasn’t ended. The central lie that fueled that violence will animate the GOP’s assault on democracy indefinitely, and at the next hinge point, the assault could still succeed.

You know what’s wild? That here in the U.S. in 2021, people are still being elected, appointed, and hired as the first Black anything. 

The What A Day (pod) team put together a fantastic montage in Friday’s episode with Black men and women who just became the “firsts” in a variety of fields, and what that means to them. Find the montage in What A Day’s “Making Black History” episode, and there are more coming over the course of Black History month, so subscribe to the show to catch them all → 

Many Texans who were lucky enough to have power during last week’s outages have found themselves saddled with astronomical energy bills, thanks to the magic of deregulation. Texas’s unregulated energy market allows customers to pick their utility providers, and some, like the company Griddy, offer plans that allow users to pay wholesale prices for power. In good weather, that’s often cheaper than the fixed-rate plans. In last week’s weather, when demand spiked and wholesale prices soared, Griddy customers were hit with electricity bills of up to $17,000 (and the indignity of watching their savings plundered by an entity called “Griddy.”) Griddy has 29,000 members, but it’s unclear how many Texans on other wholesale plans were affected. Over the weekend, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) and GOP lawmakers put on their finest hot dog costumes to discuss the problem. The state has stopped companies from cutting off power to residents who haven’t paid their bills, but Abbott hasn’t announced any specific financial solutions; officials from both parties have suggested using federal and state relief funds to help cover the costs.

• The official U.S. coronavirus death toll has reached 500,000 President Biden marked the milestone with a candle lighting ceremony and a moment of silence on Monday evening.
   
• After a four-month delay, the Supreme Court has denied Trump’s effort to block the release of his tax returns to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. Vance’s office is expected to have access to the records within the next few days, but they’ll be subject to grand jury secrecy rules.
   
• The Biden administration has announced several changes to the Payroll Protection Program in an effort to get loans to minority-owned and very small businesses. Starting Wednesday, businesses with fewer than 20 employees will have a two-week application window all to themselves.
   
• Independent investigators found that Aurora, CO, police had no legal basis to stop and use a chokehold on Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man whom officers fatally restrained in August 2019. 
   
• Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators participated in Myanmar’s largest nationwide pro-democracy protests since the military coup there earlier this month.
   
• Dominion Voting Systems has sued MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell and his company for defamation, seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages. More like TheirPillow, amirite? 
   
• A new study by law professors at William & Mary found a dramatic spike in partisanship on federal appeals courts during the Trump era, both in partisan splits (full-court panels in which the judges appointed by GOP presidents diverged from those appointed by Democratic presidents), and partisan reversals (for example, a full-court panel dominated by Dem-appointed judges overruling a panel of three Trump judges). 
   
• The U.S. Agency for Global Media has reinstated five whistleblowers who were fired in August by then-CEO and Trump loyalist Michael Pack.
   
• United Airlines has grounded dozens of older Boeing 777 jets after one of the planes experienced major engine failure on Saturday, raining debris on a Denver suburb.
   
• Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen have launched a podcast but didn’t call it Born to Pod OR The Podacity of Hope so what're we doing here? 
   
• Daft Punk has broken up after 28 years. We are not up all night to the sun, we are not up all night to get some, we are not up all night for good fun, we are in bed at a normal time. 

The $15 minimum wage hike could be the first big test of whether Dems are, in fact, in array. After a week of negotiations with the Senate parliamentarian, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said he was confident that the wage hike could be raised through the reconciliation process, and that the parliamentarian will greenlight it this week. If and when that happens, Democrats will have an internal conflict to resolve: Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have both come out in opposition of a $15 wage increase. Democrats have begun weighing various backup plans to protect the wage hike from both the procedural hurdle and the Manchema obstacle, including a lower cap on the wage increase (Manchin’s an $11 guy), or a small-business tax-cut plan that could be paired with the wage increase to offset any burdens on businesses. 

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An Israeli study found the Pfizer vaccine to be 89 percent effective at preventing infections, indicating that the vaccine also stops asymptomatic transmission of the virus. 

A U.K. study found that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines reduced the risk of hospitalizations by 85 percent and 94 percent respectively, four weeks after a single dose. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has now raised over $5 million in relief for Texans. 

Virginia state lawmakers have given final approval to legislation that will abolish the death penalty in the state. Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) has said he’ll sign it into law.