https://twitter.com/DrAlGrossAK/status/1508462175601405958

Last night’s drama at the Academy Awards was supposed to be about the potential for a largely deaf cast winning the first Oscar for a production from a streaming service.  Instead, it’s about The Slap Seen ‘Round the World.

First things first:  both Chris Rock and Will Smith were wrong.  There’s enough blame to go around for that debacle.  Rock should not have made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s medical condition (without clearing it with her first).  Was it distasteful?  Yeah.  Was it insulting?  In context, no, and no reasonable person can believe Rock intended to insult JPS.

But Smith’s actions were far more egregious.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  Video shows him laughing at the joke prior as Jada rolls her eyes before he got indignant and marched onto the stage.

What happens next was simply unnecessary escalation.  Had Smith approached Rock and put his finger in his face or even poke him in the chest while issuing the verbal warning to leave his wife alone, Smith today would be hailed a hero and a family man.  His point would’ve been made, and the world would not have seen him as an unhinged violent man.

A lengthy report in the Washington Post about Ted Cruz’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his connections to fascist MAGA lawyer John Eastman – whom Cruz once clerked with for former US Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig – includes the usual assclownery associated with Cruz, such as canceling an interview with the Post just before it was about to begin and instead only answering some of the written questions through one of his spokespeople.

The best however is a statement from Luttig himself, whom Cruz once said is “like a father to me,” telling the Post: “Once Ted Cruz promised to object, January 6 was all but foreordained, because Cruz was the most influential figure in the Congress willing to force a vote on Trump’s claim that the election was stolen. He was also the most knowledgeable of the intricacies of both the Electoral Count Act and the Constitution, and the ways to exploit the two,” making it clear that if Cruz is still now or ever was like a son to him, then he’s pretty fucking disappointed.

Data from the CDC compiled by ABC News finds that from April 19th, 2021 – a date determined as when the COVID-19 vaccines became widely available to all US adults and March 1st, 2022 – the death toll from the virus were 38% higher in the MAGA states than in the American ones. While this was the painfully obvious over the last ten and change months as the Delta, then Omicron variants somehow managed to overcome the immunity boosts provided by horse paste and piss drinking, it’s still nice to see a quantification of the differences between the states overall.

Independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta – whose editor in chief, Dmitry Muratov, split the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with Philippines journalist Maria Ressa – announced Monday it’s suspending operations following the second warning from the Kremlin over its coverage of the Ukraine war, the Moscow Times’s Felix Light reports. The shutdown comes just a day after Novaya Gazeta journalists – along with those from a handful of other independent Russian outlets – ran an extraordinary interview with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

A Russian soldiers surrendered himself and a tank to Ukrainian authorities for $10,000 and a chance at Ukrainian citizenship, the Daily Mail reported on Sunday while not specifying exactly when the surrender occurred. The soldier, known only as “Misha”, turned himself and the T-72B3 battle tank after his crewmates deserted and his commander threatened to shoot him.

“For a few weeks in the National Police have identified the phones used by Russians. On these phones, we regularly send SMS about how to surrender and hand over the equipment. A few days ago, Misha called us. We handed over the information about him to the GUR MO [Ukrainian military intelligence]. He didn’t see the point of war. Misha said that there was almost no food left, military management is chaotic and practically absent. Demoralization is colossal. The Russians are giving up!” Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Victor Andrusiv said Misha had called Ukraine’s national police on his personal phone and negotiated his surrender, which occurred in an open farm field at an unspecified place and time. Misha will spend the remainder of the war as a prisoner in “comfortable conditions with a TV, phone, kitchen and shower,” said Andrusiv.

Tanks are on the lowest tier of the Ukraine’s surrender rewards program at $10,000. Combat helicopters and fighter jets fetch a higher price at $500,000 and $1,000,000 each, respectively.

Members of the House January 6th Select Committee are considering making a formal “friendly” request to batshit fascist hell witch Ginni Thomas to sit for an interview, CNN reports.

The DC-area Clustertruck known as the “People’s Convoy”, accomplishing nothing but literally driving around in circles for three weeks – barely affectig traffic on the already congested highways in the area – are packing up and leaving their base in Hagerstown, MD, the Daily Beast reports.

Co-organizer Mike Landis announced Sunday his core group would head back to California and come back at some unspecified time. His other co-organizer Brian Brase already left Hagerstown over the weekend, unsure of when he’d come back to continue “the fight against tyranny.”

Actor Will Smith jumped up on stage at the Oscars and apparently slapped Chris Rock after Rock made a remark about Smith’s wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith.  According to people who viewed the broadcast in other countries—where the audio was not silenced–Smith hits Rock, and Rock states, “Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me.”  Smith then yells at Rock from his table, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fuckin’ mouth!”  Rock says, “It was a GI Jane joke!” and Smith again shouts his demand.  It didn’t seem staged, but you never know.

Two weeks ago tonight the news broke that actor William Hurt had died of whatever it was, cancer or something. To many of us millennial-aged he’s a bit player in the Marvel movies, being the representative of the US government always trying to rein in those wacky Avengers. Otherwise his filmography is largely an abstraction, with movies like Broadcast News and Kiss of The Spider Woman (which isn’t a Marvel movie and has nothing to do with Spider-Man) that we guess were well received at the time but aren’t exactly on the level of Rocky, Indiana Jones, Scarface, Aliens, The Terminator, Predator, so on and so forth. You know, actual classics from the 80s.

Former First Lady (if Donald had his way) Ivanka Trump wants everyone to know that she actually can feel feelings and she’s using these feeling to send meals to refugees from Ukraine, which has been invaded by her dad’s friend, Vlad.

The Chinese government ordered a large part of Shanghai to shut down for a week in a two-phase lockdown as a surge of coronavirus cases sweeps through the city of 26 million, the Associated Press reports.

The financial district and neighborhoods around it will shut down from Monday through Friday, after which the large downtown area west of the Huangpu River will start its own five-day quarantine.

The city is also undertaking a massive testing and tracking program, with more than 3,500 new positive cases detected Sunday, although because the Chinese criteria for categorizing a positive case involves active symptoms, the number of people infected is likely far greater.

The Azores island chain in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean has been hit by more than 14,000 minor earthquakes measuring as high as 3.3 on the Richter scale, leading scientists to fear an upcoming volcanic eruption or earthquake is pending, Reuters reports.

Scientists have been scouring the islands with instruments to measure for elevated levels of sulphur and carbon dioxide, a potential sign of imminent volcanic activity.  An autonomous district of Portugal, the archipelago of nine volcanic islands is home to about 231,000 people.

“One of the possible scenarios on the table is that we see something similar to what happened in La Palma,” volcanologist Fatima Viveiros, a native of the Azorean island of Sao Jorge said, referring to the eruption on Spanish island that devastated a portion of the island.

The Associated Press and NPR’s Frontline has launched a project tracking war crimes allegedly committed by Russian troops in Ukraine, including dozens of reports of attacks on hospitals and medical personnel.

In the month since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, various outlets have reported the intentional shelling and bombing of locations that could constitute war crimes in any tribunal that would be convened after the war.  Although not included in the initial list, like attacks on nuclear facilities, the list will grow as AP reporters confirm and document reports.

“For reports that have not been witnessed by AP journalists, a team of AP reporters is working to verify the events. Reporters use a variety of tools to geolocate images posted on social media, compare them to earlier photographs or satellite imagery, and confirm their veracity,” the site notes.  “Journalists seek out corroborating social media posts and published witness accounts, and they try to interview additional witnesses to the events. AP reporters also look for official confirmation of attacks from an array of sources, including the Ukrainian and Russian military and governments, as well as international organizations such at the United Nations. Only after an event is independently verified by the AP do we include it in War Crimes Watch Ukraine.”

“We had a massive crowd last night in Georgia, but as usual, the Fake News Media absolutely refuses to show it. People are estimating 25,000 to 35,000 people, but our record so far is Texas with 87,000 people with 50,000 being turned away. This is really fun!” says Trump.

There were obviously a number of empty seats at the rally last night.

In an interview with some MAGA media dipshit who asked if life in Washington was anything like the show “House of Cards”, Madison Cawthorn says “So I hears a former President that we had in the 90s was asked the question about this, and he gave an answer that I thought was so true when he said ‘The only thing that’s not accurate about that show is that you could never get never get a piece of legislation about education to pass that quickly’… Aside from that, I mean, the sexual perversion that goes on in Washington… Being kind of a young guy in Washington where the average age is 60 or 70 – and I look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life, I’ve always paid attention to politics, guys that, you know, then all of a sudden you get invited to… ‘Oh hey, we’re gonna have kind of a sexual get together at one of our homes. You should come there.’ ‘Wha- What did you just ask me to?’ And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy – or the fact that some of the people that are leading on the movement try and remove addiction in our country and then you watch them doing, you know, a key bump of cocaine right in front of you and it’s like this is- this is wild.”

What was the “gaffe” when Biden said Putin “cannot remain in power” in his speech in Poland on Saturday? It’s not like Biden said “Putin has 48 hours to turn himself in or we’re going to launch an airstrike on the Kremlin” or “Putin will be met with fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen before.” He just said the asshole’s time should be up one way or another and asked the Russian people to rise up against him. “You the Russian people are not our enemy. I refuse to believe that you welcome the killing of innocent children and grandparents. Or that you accept hospitals, schools, maternity wards – for God’s sake – being pummeled with Russian missiles and bombs,” Biden said, imploring ordinary Russians to take action against the brutal regime that rules over them, not announcing a Navy SEAL Team 6 mission to eliminate their President.

On Sunday in Jerusalem, Secretary of State Tony Blinken clarified, saying “We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else for that matter,” adding “It’s up to the Russian people,” but again was that really a clarification or a reaffirmation of Biden’s words?

Anyway, would it really be such a bad thing if a rogue Russian military officer took a suitcase bomb did what Lindsey Graham asked earlier this month in a much more specific “gaffe”?

The Trump turnout on a Saturday in Georgia was anemic. That does not bode well for his slate of candidates. Not all the people there were from Georgia or even able to vote. And Perdue and the other candidates had to foot the bill. Oof.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) March 27, 2022

“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion. But when people start to question the truth – Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? – I found that unsustainable,” Chris Wallace tells the New York Times in his first interview since quitting earlier this year.

The Biden Administration wants to implement a minimum twenty percent tax on people who have a household net worth of $100 million as well as a new tax on unrealized gains from assets like stocks, bonds and cash, the New York Times reports.

In a proposal to go to Congress Monday, Biden will call for the new tax structure as a way of closing the budget gap and as a solution to the issue of wealthy families being able to avoid paying taxes by tying up their wealth in securities that do not produce income but increase their net wealth and borrowing ability.

The tax would only impact one-one hundredth of one percent of households, and more than half of the revenue from it would come from households with more than one billion in assets, which number about 700 individuals in the United States.