What is Netflix suspending service in Russia going to do other than to give Russians free time to use more productively than watch crappy Netflix?

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) March 7, 2022

TikTok has announced that it’s suspending operations in Russia due to that country’s new “fake news” law that punishes companies publishing false information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine–and when the Kremlin says “fake news,” it means the truth, just as conservatives in the US use the term.

According to NBC News, TikTok will prevent new posts from being uploaded from Russia and will limit access to content for account holders from Russia.

“Our in-app messaging service will not be affected,” the company said in a statement. “We will continue to evaluate the evolving circumstances in Russia to determine when we might fully resume our services with safety as our top priority.”

A much-touted April charity event organized by former porn model and Einstein visa recipient Melania Trump has been canceled because the Florida company contracted to get donations isn’t licensed to do so, the New York Times reports.

Called “Tulips and Topiaries,” the event had VIP tickets going for as much as $50,000, with attendees being treated to a display of tulips and other greenery at an undisclosed location in the West Palm Beach area.  The money raised would go to scholarships for children leaving foster care.

One problem:  Florida officials say the company contracted by Trump to organize the event and fundraiser is not licensed to collect charitable funds; in recent days, Whip Enterprises registered, but after it had started soliciting donations in January.

A website for the event runs a banner headline saying “We didn’t cancel!” puts the date for the event in December 2022.  In a statement to the Times, the former clothing designer said she did not organize the event and was only a participant.

A tornado with a strength of at least EF-3 tore through Madison and Lucas Counties in Iowa on Saturday afternoon, killing at least seven people, the Des Moines Register reports. Three more people were reported to be seriously injured. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has declared a state of emergency for Madison, where at least 25 to 30 homes were destroyed by the tornado.

James Longman of ABC News documents the groups of young people marching around Moscow in silent protest and security units dressed in riot gear hover around them.

Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, a lying piece of shit, appears to have put a false address on his voter registration in North Carolina in 2020, the New Yorker reports. Just before he resigned his seat in Congress to take the White House job in March 2020, Meadows sold his home in Sapphire, North Carolina to live instead in his condo in the Virginia suburbs outside DC.

Meadows did not buy another property in his home state, but updated his voter registration on September 19th, 2020 to say he physically resided in a trailer in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, listing his move-in date as the next day – which he does not now and never did own the property on which the trailer home is located. The only possible connection Meadows has to the property is that he and/or his family members might have stayed there around the same time as a nearby Trump campaign rally in the fall of 2020. We’re now at the point where the hypocrisy is boring.

Confronted by Cuck Todd with a list of shit Trump pulled while in office with watering down sanctions on Russia and attempting withhold military aid to Ukraine to coerce Zelensky into announcing a fake investigation into Hunter Biden, Nimrata Haley says “You said it in every one of those things. You kept saying ‘he tried’. All I know is what he did. And I was personally there as” and blah blah blah “Iran deal” and “sanctioned Putin” and “He did stronger things against Russia than Republican or Democrat presidents before him” (which is complete bullshit because the Cold War). Nimrata then goes into the same “Russian oil” song and dance.

After this very brief moment of not being a complete scrotum with a Republican guest, Fuck Todd does not press the issue, instead asking her some pointless softball about her presidential ambitions before ending the segment. “I have said that if President Trump runs I will not run”. So glad we got an answer on that which has already been established numerous times before.

https://youtu.be/qmXbiv4tKJ8
A livestream from a participant in the “People’s Convoy” attempting to move from their staging ground in Hagerstown, Maryland – about 70 miles northwest of Washington, DC – have already been bogged down by protestors blocking the road and other drivers “brake-checking” them, per CB radio traffic. Meanwhile the Telegram feed for the People’s Convoy is filled with sniping between armchair MAGA quarterbacks who are complaining the truckers aren’t being aggressive enough and the participants and their allies explaining it’s not that simple.

Former Guy is chomping at the bit to avenge Ukraine and wants Biden to stage a false flag attack on Russia with American Air Force planes disguised as Chinese jets, the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reports. On Saturday night, Trump told donors gathered in New Orleans “we” should take American F-22 fighters, “put the Chinese flag on them and bomb the shit out” out of Russia. “And then we say, China did it, we didn’t do, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.” Per Dawsey, the Orange God Emperor also falsely claimed he’s “already won two presidential elections… And now I feel obligated that we have to really look strongly at doing it again… We are looking at it very very strongly. We have to do it. We have to do it.”

Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff claimed on Sunday that over 11,000 Russian troops have been killed i the ten days since the invasion, Reuters reports. The figure is unconfirmed and unlikely to be confirmable independently, however other evidence shows that whatever the true number is, Russian infantry forces have not made great progress in the war overall, with the military relying on artillery and airstrikes to wreak suffering on Ukrainian civilians. More updates follow:

The trucker convoy known as The People’s Convoy–because they’re absolutely nothing Soviet about that–will effectively peter out long before its goal of being the Mack Daddy of Trucker Protests.  With around two dozen tractor trailers participating, the group has decided to forgo driving into downtown Washington, DC and instead will circle the DC Beltway a few times.  So in fact, the truckers will not only NOT disrupt the Swamp in Washington, they won’t even get into DC because the Washington Beltway is located in Virginia and Maryland.

As this woman says, the truckers are just too smart for Nancy Pelosi’s plan to frame them to send them to jail.  Okay.

Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Federov has made a plea to online gaming companies to cut off the accounts based in Russia and Belarus, giving special attention to Playstation and XBox, commentator Ron Filipkowski reports.

Saying he hoped cutting off access to video games and esports platforms would motive Russians and Belarusians to protest the unjust invasion of Ukraine, Federov also called for all esports tournaments to be held in Russia and Belarus to be canceled, as well as having all Russian and Belarusian teams and players excluded from tournaments.

When the Republican Party rejects the grifters in the MAGA Swamp, we will win for the entire country.

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) March 5, 2022

Ripped foam marketer and Trump election expert Mike Lindell:  “I’m gonna tell you, right now, we’ve been doing, I’ve been workin’ on it five months, and we’re doing a crlass [sic] action–[indecipherable] I’m announcing it here–I announced it on my program; y’all watch FrankSpeech.com?  Keep watchin’!–Um, ah, a, um.  But it’s a class action lawsuit against all machines, and that they’re all defective devices, okay?  I have lawyers worked on this for five months.  We’re getting county commissioners, county clerks, they’re all the plaintiffs, we’ve already gotten about th-three hundred on board, and we’re gonna get rid of these machines once and for all for any election in history.”

My pocket calculator from 1976 would like a word, sir.

Republican Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Steve Daines of Montana posted photos of Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelenskyy participating in a conference call with the US Congress although they were asked not to do such things for security reasons, NBC News reports.

The Senators and Representatives who participated in the call were asked not to post contemporaneous photos or information about the call because it could clue in Russia to Zelenskyy’s location.  Both Rubio and Daines chose to ignore the request and posted information to Twitter as the call was happening.  More than 280 members of Congress participated in the call.

“There were over 160 members of Congress on a widely reported Zoom call. There was no identifying information of any kind,” said a spokesperson for Rubio, defending his breach of security.

Putin's alleged war crimes: What is ICC investigating?https://t.co/uYTbor9sLb

— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 5, 2022

The Orange God Emperor knew full well he wasn’t going to march to the Capitol from the Ellipse with his fans to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election result on January 6th, 2021 according to the official White House private schedule obtained by the House Select Committee investigating the insurrection, the Guardian reports. Sources quoted by the Guardian suggest Trump deliberately lying as such bolsters the case for a criminal conspiracy as was alleged this week by the committee in a court filing in the case against MAGA lawyer John Eastman.

“Trump telling the crowd that he would join them at the Capitol was incendiary in that they thought that their field marshal would be there. It is further evidence that Trump knew he was inciting an already highly volatile situation,” said former Department of Defense special counsel Ryan Goodman. The revelation also would appear to boost Congressman Eric Swalwell’s civil suit alleging Fat Donald knowingly incited the riot. Tellingly, the time stamp on the schedule shows it was printed at 11:22 AM, just under a half hour before Trump started speaking at 11:50 AM, further indicating Trump knew there was no way he was walking to the Capitol.

Civilian evacuations have been halted around the port city of Mariupol as Russian forces ignored a ceasefire and continued their attack. “The Russian side is not holding to the ceasefire and has continued firing on Mariupol itself and on its surrounding area,” said Zelensky Deputy Chief of Staff Kyrylo Tymoshenko. “Talks with the Russian Federation are ongoing regarding setting up a ceasefire and ensuring a safe humanitarian corridor.” More live updates follow:

• The Russian invasion of Ukraine was so poorly executed you’d’ve thought a Trump led it.
• The way he told students to take off their masks, you just know Ron DeSantis was the guy in the 1980s saying, “Nah, I don’t have to wear a condom.  AIDS is a myth and only infects the gays.”
• Volodymr Zelensky will be revered in Ukraine the way George Washington is here.  
• If Russia should succeed in encircling Kyiv, the US and our allies must proceed with an air convoy of planes providing medical supplies and food to the people in the city, a la the Berlin Airlift.  Nothing offensive and nothing military–those can be smuggled in overland–but the show of air strength will not fall flat on the Russian military.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume LIX”