Crooked Media - What A Day: Cancel vultures

Republicans want you to know that the ongoing purge of Donald Trump’s enemies has nothing to do with Donald Trump and everything to do with focusing on the future instead of the past. They also want you to know that the future of the party is Donald Trump.

• House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R) has officially canceled Liz Cheney—the number three Republican in Congress—over her strenuous objections to Republicans canceling election outcomes they don’t like. In a Monday letter, McCarthy told House Republicans they would vote to recall Cheney on Wednesday, citing her insistence on “relitigating the past”—that is, rebutting Trump’s repeated false claims that he won the 2020 election. McCarthy then congratulated Republicans and their culture of canceling truth tellers for “embrac[ing] free thought and debate.”  
   
• By sheer coincidence, the only thing McCarthy and other leading Republicans see on the horizon as they cast their gaze forward is Donald Trump, noted foe of litigating the past. Take it from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who endorsed the Cheney purge on the grounds (and this is hardly an exaggeration) that the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump. “She’s made a determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump,” he said. “I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”
   
• It’s hardly a vote of confidence to say your own party, which lost the popular vote in seven of eight consecutive presidential elections, has no future without a toxically unpopular guy who lost the popular vote twice. But leaders of the party of “free thought and debate” had a simple solution to that dilemma: Hide the truth from elected Republicans. According to Cheney, GOP campaign officials have repeatedly omitted data confirming Trump’s horrible district-level poll numbers from party briefings.

It’s hard to say for certain why Republicans are lying to protect Trump at all costs, but the fact that the party’s racing toward authoritarianism might help explain why they can’t quit their leading authoritarian.  

• In Arizona, Republicans running a sham “audit” of Maricopa County votes shelved an absolutely insane plan to go door to door questioning voters about their ballots, but only after the U.S. Department of Justice reminded them that intimidating voters is illegal. In Washington, DC, last week, Republicans on the Federal Election Commission summarily tanked an investigation of the hush-money payments Trump ordered ahead of the 2016 election, without explanation. 
   
• You might think all this skullduggery would be enough to persuade the last remaining Democrats to do what has to be done: Zap the filibuster and pass democracy protections for all Americans. But Arizona’s own Kyrsten Sinema has other ideas! On the day Mitch McConnell boasted that “100 percent” of Republican “focus” is on stopping the Biden administration, Sinema once again praised the filibuster as a tool to "bring senators together" and "encourage comity and compromise," two things the filibuster does the opposite of. 

If Republicans are rewarded for organizing around the Big Lie with control of the House, it isn’t hard to imagine what they’ll do with their new power—up to and including refusing to certify President Biden’s re-election. The good news is once we accept that, we should have no problem redoubling our efforts to prevent it from happening. But it’d be nice if Democrats like Sinema didn’t insist on making that goal harder.

This week What A Day host Gideon Resnick will be joined by a rotating roster of guest hosts including Hysteria’s Erin Ryan, America Dissected’s Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, and journalist Tre'vell Anderson!

Each episode will be a jam packed 20 minute episode breaking down the biggest news of the day and the important stories you may have missed. 

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Friday’s monthly employment report from the Department of Labor estimated that the economy added 266,000 jobs in April. That would be a strong number in normal economic times, but it came as a huge letdown given the consensus among economists that the Biden administration’s successful vaccination program and plummeting coronavirus cases would create an immediate boom of over a million jobs a month. Republicans have seized on the data (which will be revised in subsequent reports) to rail against and even cut short pandemic unemployment benefits. While we know when pandemic unemployment benefits will end, we know much less about how other factors will affect the economy in the medium term: Safety concerns after a traumatic year-plus of pandemic, difficulty finding childcare, hiccups in school reopening. One thing that seems clear, though, is that the demand required to sustain an economic boom is there, visible in shortages of everything from microchips to lumber to labor itself.

• Colonial Pipeline, one of the largest fuel pipelines in the country, fell victim to a ransomware attack Friday and has been shut down ever since. President Biden said there’s evidence that the perpetrators may be located in Russia, but has no reason to believe that the Kremlin ordered the attack.
   
• Fall school reopenings in Texas resulted in “at least 43,000 additional COVID-19 cases and 800 additional fatalities” within two months, according to a new study. 
   
• Former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and former acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen will testify for the first time Wednesday about their roles in the January 6 insurrection before the House oversight committee. 
   
• Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumental (D-CT) want U.S. airlines to provide cash refunds for tickets canceled during the pandemic or honor vouchers for future flights indefinitely, after the industry received $50 billion in bailout funds to avoid pandemic-related layoffs and bankruptcies. 
   
• Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced she won't seek re-election just weeks after Biden attended a fundraising event for her campaign, raising speculation that she may be up for a job in his administration.  
   
• Oh, good, another uptick in fission at Chernobyl!
   
• Bo Obama, the first Obama family White House dog, died over the weekend. President Obama mourned the loss of “a true friend and loyal companion.”
   
• A different recent president also had some thoughts about animals this weekend, stating, “So now even our Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit, is a junky.” Medina Spirit’s owner completed the nonsense ouroboros by accusing those who suspect he doped his horse of doing cancel culture. 
   
• Wyoming wants to sue states to force them to buy coal.

Whether or not the federal government believes Russia offered bounties to Taliban fighters to kill U.S. and coalition soldiers turns out to be more complicated than the Twitter fight over it. (Can you imagine?) The intelligence community’s assessment of “low-to-moderate confidence” that Russia had offered bounties stems from a disagreement between signals-intelligence and human-intelligence analysts, but the human-intelligence experts at CIA were more adamant than we knew that the intelligence was solid: Affiliates of the captured fighters who tipped interrogators off to the bounties were known to have worked closely with a unit of Russian military intelligence that runs assassination operations. “The involvement of this G.R.U. unit is consistent with Russia encouraging attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan given its leading role in such lethal and destabilizing operations abroad,” the National Security Council told the New York Times.

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The FDA has authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to inoculate children aged 12-15 from COVID-19.  
 

Bees seem to detect coronavirus pretty accurately and quickly with minimal training, which could help countries that can’t afford or create their own PCR tests to monitor their outbreaks.

Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) has posthumously pardoned 34 victims of lynching in Maryland.

Filibuster reformers remain optimistic that Democrats will do the right thing, once more Democratic voters understand why reform is so important.