The Supreme Court rejected requests for stays in the Republican cases against both Pennsylvania and North Carolina’s 2022-2032 district maps on Monday, Dem elections lawyer Marc Elias reports.

The North Carolina ruling came in a 6-3 decision with Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas dissenting, so it may not be the end of the line for Team MAGA in North Carolina after a state court imposed a 6 safe R/6 safe D/2 toss-up map in February, but the Pennsylvania case appears dead as the Supremes bumped it to a lower court with no dissents noted. Thoughts and prayers.

The merry band of anti-vax truckers and their legion of passenger car driving minions made one complete circuit around the DC Beltway Monday before deciding that was enough and heading back to their encampment in Hagerstown, Maryland before rush hour, the Washington Post reports.

Made up of about 130 trucks and other larger vehicles and “hundreds” of passenger cars, the procession arrived at the Beltway around 12:40 p.m., long after the morning rush hour and before the evening traffic.  The convoy largely stayed in the right lane of the Beltway, driving 20 to 40 m.p.h., but allowing cars to reach on- and off-ramps when needed.

The organizer of the rally, Brian Brase, acknowledged that some members of the group want to detour to downtown Washington to disrupt traffic there, but he’s not listening to them.  “A lot of people want me to say certain things and put this convoy into a certain direction.  I’m not going to listen to all of them. I’m going to listen to the people,” Brase said without specifying which people he would listen to.

Respondents to the latest Quinnipiac University survey were asked “As you may know, the United States is a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Its collective defense treaty states that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all NATO countries. If Russian President Vladimir Putin goes beyond Ukraine and attacks a NATO country, would you support or oppose a military response from the United States?” to which 78% overall, and 88% of self-identified Republican and Dem voters, respectively, said yes indicating wide bipartisan support for the bloc.

When asked “Would you support a ban on Russian oil, if it meant higher gasoline prices in the United States?” 71% overall said yes – 66% of them Republicans and 82% of Dems in the affirmative, likely pointing to a “Fuck it, how much worse can it get?” type of sentiment.

Dipshit Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson wants the GOP to attempt to repeal Obamacare again after the endless failures to do so and the system’s overwhelming popularity were not enough to dissuade him, the Washington Post reports. “For example, if we’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare – I still think we need to fix our health-care system – we need to have the plan ahead of time so that once we get in office, we can implement it immediately, not knock around like we did last time and fail,” Johnson told some Breitbart asshole in a podcast interview on Monday.

Johnson says this as if they would take back the House, Senate, and reach not only a filibuster-proof majority but also a veto-proof majority that would be completely impossible under even the absolute best outcome for Republicans in the midterms. Basically he’s just jerking around for the base and acting as if no one outside the Breitbart-verse would catch wind of it and turn it into an attack ad in not only the campaign against him personally, but the Republican Party nationally. This and Rick Scott’s batshit insane “Rescue America” plan (which Johnson also said he supports on Monday) are the kind of help the Dems need to buck history and stay in control of not only the Senate but maybe even the House this November. Please keep them coming.

Russian drivers join car rally in support of Ukraine military op pic.twitter.com/DgmJrqqexb

— RT (@RT_com) March 7, 2022

According to the Kyiv Post, negotiators for Russia made some exceptionally preposterous demands in the latest talks to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine–demands that were met with a fast ni (or as Tucker Carlson would say, nyet) from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Russia demanded the Ukrainian government appoint Yuriy Boyko as a Prime Minister; Boyko was Vice Prime Minister during Russian lackey and former Paul Manafort client Victor Yanukovych’s term as president.

The Kremlin also demanded Ukraine recognize the breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine as the independent Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, as well as grant Crimea its independence.  Finally, Russia demands Ukraine refuse any future invitation to join NATO.

FM #Lavrov: The goal of Russia’s special military operation is to stop any war that could take place on Ukrainian territory or that could start from there. pic.twitter.com/tLf7798DIh

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) March 7, 2022

“On February 25, 2022, the defendant John D. Andries violated his conditions of release by being arrested for, inter alia, felony assault on a police officer. The government respectfully moves this Court revoke the defendant’s pretrial release based on these violations. Pretrial services advised they will defer to the government. According to the police report and a media report , at approximately 11:37 pm on February 25, 2022, at Action Lounge & Billiards in Leonardtown, Maryland, the defendant became intoxicated and reportedly pulled a female’s hair and made ‘patrons uncomfortable.’ The defendant was asked to leave the establishment. The defendant became belligerent and made threats to staff who removed him from the premises.”

“The defendant attempted to reenter the bar and was being held back by staff when police, who happened to be at the establishment for another incident, offered assistance to the staff in dealing with the defendant. Police attempted to calm the defendant and explain that if the staff wanted him removed, he needed to leave. The defendant continued to pull at the door handle to the bar in attempts to reenter. Police informed the defendant to either go home or be arrested. The defendant stated, ‘nope’ and then pushed one of the officers in the chest, whereupon he was placed in handcuffs. The defendant refused to cooperate with law enforcement, sat down while handcuffed, and had to be dragged and carried to a police vehicle. Once at the police vehicle, the defendant refused to sit properly and laid so that his upper body was in the vehicle seat, but his lower body remained outside the vehicle. Additional officers arrived to assist.”

“An officer advised the defendant that if he did not comply and sit in the vehicle, he would be tased. The defendant refused to sit in the vehicle, whereupon he was tased on his leg. Undeterred, the defendant still refused to sit in the vehicle and was tased a second time, but still did not enter the police vehicle. Officers determined they needed to call the jail’s transport van to bring the defendant to jail. While waiting for the van to arrive, the defendant repeatedly kicked an officer and had to be restrained until the transport van arrived. He then refused to enter the van and had to be carried and placed inside by police. A search incident to lawful arrest found the defendant was carrying a knife” says federal prosecutors’ motion to revoke pretrial release for Capitol riot defendant John D. Andries. Probably a safe bet to say the motion will be granted.

Just as the United States should have supplied weapons to Ukraine sooner, we should speed up the sale of weapons to Taiwan so they can safeguard their future against China.

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) March 7, 2022

Remember when McCarthy and the GOP defended Trump when he used US military aid to Ukraine in an extortion plot to get Ukraine’s president to help him with his political aspirations?  McCarthy’s pleas for weapons for Ukraine weren’t all that loud then.

The marginally less bad guys in Ukraine.

When the Russian government claimed their invasion of Ukraine was a mission to “de-Nazify” the country’s leadership it was greeted with almost universal derision because it is complete bullshit for a wide array of reasons, not the least of which that President Volodymyr Zelensky is the world’s only currently serving Jewish head of state besides Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet.

But like most right wing nationalist propaganda, it started with a small kernel of truth: The Azov Battalion, an extremist fascist paramilitary backed by the Ukrainian government. The Azovs have been fighting against the Pro-Russian separatists in the eastern breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk since the campaign started in 2014, and their record is extremely spotty there to say the least, with allegations of torture, war crimes, and looting by Azov members over the past decade. Over the years the group became somewhat of a magnet for global right wing terrorists looking for a fight to join – among them a former US Army soldier who was arrested for in 2019 for a bomb plot against an unnamed TV news station who expressed interest in joining the Azovs, and Brenton Tarrant, the Nazi terrorist who massacred 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019 who claimed he had trained with the group in Ukraine prior to the attack.

In a Monday interview with Bill Barr, NBC News host Savannah Guthrie points out the former attorney general’s massive disservice to the American people by his stating publicly praise for Trump, particularly during the post-election period, but privately claiming Trump is off-base.  The most massive disservice, however, is Barr stating that there was unease in the administration about Trump’s behavior only after he’s been out of office 13 months because Barr has a book he wants to sell.

From the Johns Hopkins Covid tracker.

The Biden Administration are weighing a ban on Russian oil imports with or without a cooperation agreement with NATO allies and ahead of ongoing movement in Congress to pass legislation doing so, Bloomberg reports. Such a ban would cut off a current staple of House GOP tweets and MAGA troll comments on The Hill, a cohort completely unable to decide which is worse, an increase to already high gas prices or “funding Putin’s violent assault on innocent civilians.”

South Korean Democratic Party chief Song Young-gil was brutally attacked with a hammer by a 70 year old politics YouTuber on a street in Seoul on Monday, just two days ahead of the country’s presidential election Korea JoongAng Daily reports. The unidentified assailant, who was arrested at the scene and appears to be a supporter of the ruling party’s candidate Lee Jae-myung (a guy who comes with a whole different set of problems), nevertheless had it out for Song over the nation’s close ties with the US. “I am against South Korea-U.S. military exercises,” and “I can’t pass on such a world to young people,” witnesses said the suspect screamed during the attack.

In a letter obtained by Axios with a salutation of “Dear Mr. Holt” crossed out a Sharpie and “LESTER” scribbled next to it, Former Guy angrily unloads on former Attorney General Bill Barr to NBC News’s Lester Holt. Why Trump addressed this letter to Holt and not Barr is unclear, but the fat bastard manages to contradict his own lies about pressuring Barr and the DOJ within a paragraph:

“On your question regarding the Department of Justice and the President of the United States As President of the United States, I am the Chief Executive, who is responsible for the Department heads, which includes the Attorney General. When I saw that the Department of Justice was not doing their job, I have every legal right to ask them to do so, in accordance with the law and the Constitution. That has nothing to do with my personal legal interests. ANTIFA, BLM, and 50 many others have gotten away with, literally, murder, where others have been, in many cases, persecuted. It is now a fact that my campaign was spied on. This is treason that has now been confirmed by John Durham. Barr was unwilling, or unable, to act in a timely fashion on this and other important matters. With respect to prosecuting political rivals, it was just the opposite.”

“Despite the many crimes committed by the Biden family, I did not push Barr to go after them. While the things done were legendarily corrupt,I thought it would be inappropriate for me to get personally involved. So far John Durham has found explosive evidence about how unfairly I was treated as President during the 2016 election and, unrelated except for the people doing it, the 2020 election. If people were corrupting the Elections of our Country, yes, I believe that that evidence should have been given to the public prior to the next Election, as opposed to after it. The public should know the facts before voting. As it turned out, they spied in 2016 and if possible, did far worse than that in 2020 – they RIGGED the Election…” and so on and so forth.

A Dem dark money group is launching a new effort to purge the legal profession of any hack lawyer who participated in the failed “Stop the Steal” effort at any level, Axios reports. “The 65 Project”, named after the number of lawsuits filed by Trump and allies in the aftermath of the 2020 election and advised by Media Matters founder David Brock, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Former Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Christine Durham, with former Clinton Administration official Melissa Moss at the helm will target 3 specific groups. At the top tier are incompetent Trump campaign lawyers Jenna Ellis and Sidney “Kraken” Powell, the second tier any lawyer who signed on to the fake Trump 2020 electors scam or was otherwise involved, and the third being any bar association member who was present in or around the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

Lawyers representing Russia at the International Court of Justice didn’t even bother to show up for a hearing Monday in the Hague, Netherlands, the AP reports. “Russia must be stopped and the court has a role to play in stopping it,” said Ukrainian representative Anton Korynevych to the judges. The fact that Russian seats are empty speaks loudly. They are not here in this court of law. They are on a battlefield waging aggressive war against my country.” Ukraine seeks an injunction in the court ordering Russian troops to withdraw, an order that is certain to be ignored, but further builds to overall war crimes case against the Putin regime. More live updates follow:

See the gymnast on the right?  That’s 20-year-old Russian gymnast Ivan Kuliak, and if you look at his chest, he’s wearing a white “Z,” the symbol written on Russian vehicles invading Ukraine while on the podium after finishing third in some competition.  For that, he’s facing disciplinary action from the International Gymnastics Federation.

Oh, the guy on the left?  He’s Ukrainian Illia Kovtun, who won the gold at the Apparatus World Cup in Doha.

The Russian Space Agency released a video depicting the International Space Station disassembling after the Russian cosmonauts depart.

In an NBC News interview with Lester Holt, former Attorney General (and bloated Sean Hannity) Bill Barr said that while Donald Trump, his former boss, shouldn’t be held legally responsible for the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol, he is morally culpable.

“I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word, in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill. I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress. And I think that that was wrong.”  Barr added, “I haven’t seen anything to say he was legally responsible for it in terms of incitement.”

Holt did not ask if Barr would’ve charged Barack Obama if the situation was different.