Crooked Media - What A Day: Down the Babbitt hole

It has somehow been six months since the January 6 insurrection, but thanks to the GOP’s continued obedience to Donald Trump, the national Days Without A Big-Lie-Fueled Attack On Democracy counter remains stalled at zero. 
 

• Between admitting to tax crimes at a rally in Sarasota, FL, on Saturday, Trump signaled his desire for the next phase of the GOP’s ongoing insurrection: Martyrization of the rioters themselves. Trump demanded that the insurrectionists facing charges be released (“How come so many people are still in jail over Jan. 6?”), and suggested that a Capitol Police officer face retribution for shooting a rioter who breached the last barrier between the mob and members of Congress: “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?”
   
• Trump is hardly the first to try to paper over his own role in the deaths of his credulous supporters, but his amplification of an insane far-right rallying cry sets it up for wider acceptance in the mainstream GOP. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who has demanded the name of the officer who “executed” Babbitt in several House hearings, marked the Tuesday anniversary of the insurrection by celebrating Trump’s embrace of his historical revisionism and calling for the officer to face charges.
   
• Trump’s new distortion of the attack came alongside the latest evidence that his chokehold on the Republican Party hasn’t diminished. Ohio GOP Senate candidate JD Vance spent his weekend groveling for forgiveness for his tweets from 2016 (since deleted) in which he criticized Trump and announced his intent to vote for a third-party candidate: “I'd ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016...I regret them. I regret being wrong about the guy.” (Coincidentally, this is also a direct quote from every liberal who hyped Hillbilly Elegy.)

Behind every Peter Thiel surrogate desperately scrambling into ass-kissing position, there are several-hundred GOP candidates who got there first.
 

• As Trump threatens to campaign against Republicans who don’t embrace the Big Lie, GOP candidates across the country have made it a centerpiece of their early campaigns. Of the nearly 700 Republicans who have filed initial paperwork to run for either the House or Senate, at least a third have parroted Trump’s election lies. Roughly 500 of the 600 state lawmakers who publicly questioned President Biden’s victory face reelection this year or next. (At least 16 of them were at the January 6 rally.) Could the next attempt to steal an election end differently if Congress and legislatures are packed with confirmed election-deniers? You might call it a concern!
   
• We’re not even done cleaning up after the last attempt. Six months after the attack on the Capitol, federal investigators are still searching for hundreds of participants—including, somehow, the person who planted pipe bombs outside of the DNC and RNC. Ongoing threats to members of Congress have prompted the Capitol Police to open new field offices in San Francisco, CA, Tampa, FL, and “additional regions in the near future,” an unprecedented step for the agency.

Americans are in the surreal position of marking the six month anniversary of an insurrection that shows no signs of ending. Republicans have spent half a year trying to cover up a violent attack while recklessly advancing the very lies that incited it, and that story should be far louder than whatever false narrative about the rioters they try to tell next. 

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In more time-honored methods of democracy subversion, Republicans have begun strategizing about how aggressively to carve up blue cities in red states through redistricting to maximize their gains in the midterms. Kentucky’s legislature could conceivably redraw the district represented by Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) into three red districts, for example, and Tennessee Republicans might be inclined to drive Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) from office by carving up his district in Nashville. Some GOP strategists and House Republicans are warning against that kind of blatant partisan gerrymandering, because voters should get to choose their representatives because similar GOP-drawn maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania were invalidated by state courts and ultimately lost Republicans several House seats. Anyway, it’s another beautiful day for Democrats to resolve to end the filibuster, pass election reforms, and moot those discussions.

• A Russia-linked ransomware group appears to be behind a huge attack on the global software supply chain, which has already affected more than 1000 businesses. President Biden said over the weekend that intelligence agencies weren’t yet certain whether Russian hackers were responsible.
   
• The remainder of the partially collapsed Surfside condo has been demolished, but Tropical Storm Elsa now threatens to disrupt the search and rescue efforts. The confirmed death toll has risen to 36, with 109 people unaccounted for.
   
• Nikole Hannah-Jones has declined UNC’s belated and begrudging offer of tenure, and will instead join the faculty of Howard University along with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Her full statement is worth a read.
   
• The Pentagon has canceled its $10 billion JEDI Cloud contract with Microsoft, which Amazon argued had only been awarded to Microsoft because of Trump’s personal vendetta against Jeff Bezos.
   
• Today in Absolute Bullshit, Sha'Carri Richardson has been left off of the Olympic track team, and will miss the Tokyo Olympics entirely.
   
• Eric Adams won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary after the board of elections counted absentee ballots, and is poised to become the city’s next deeply weird mayor.
   
• Here’s Rep. Chip Roy’s (R-TX) summary of the GOP bipartisanship strategy: “Eighteen more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done. That’s what we want.” And, uh, here’s Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell admitting to Kentucky voters that they’re “going to get a lot more money” because Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan on their own. 
   
• The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino published a new investigation into Britney Spears’s conservatorship, a must-read if there ever was one. Spears’s court-appointed attorney Samuel Ingham III filed paperwork on Tuesday to resign from her conservatorship case, and her long-time manager Larry Rudolph has also resigned, citing her wish to retire. 
   
• Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been laying the groundwork to pull a Trump if he loses next year’s election, saying he’ll be happy to participate in a peaceful transfer of power As LoNg As ThErE’S nO FrAuD.
   
• Fox will launch its own weather channel, for the discerning viewer who wishes to know when his home might be washed away in an ocean inferno, but refuses to know why.

Online abortion providers are preparing for the possibility of a post-Roe America, having already stepped up as alternatives to in-person abortion access during the pandemic. Aid Access, one of the largest online providers, said it receives requests from nearly 30,000 women per year, and that its requests jumped 27 percent during the first month of last year’s coronavirus lockdowns. People seeking abortions in states with draconian restrictions have also turned to international pharmacies that can ship pills from abroad, and small underground groups within the U.S., many of which say they’ll continue providing services even if statewide abortion bans go into effect. Even if the Supreme Court leaves Roe v. Wade “intact,” the latest wave of GOP anti-abortion legislation seems likely to continue driving more people to online means of abortion.

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The Biden administration has announced an initiative to bring deported veterans back to the U.S.

The DNC will launch the Campaign Pipeline Project to place young, diverse organizers on the ground in nine states ahead of the midterms. 

An Israeli study found that the Pfizer vaccine was 94 percent effective at preventing serious illness from the Delta variant, though it was only around 64 percent effective at preventing any infection (including asymptomatic). 

The Navajo Nation reported zero coronavirus deaths on Tuesday for the second consecutive day.