“On April 15, 2013, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev planted and detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The blasts hurled nails and metal debris into the assembled crowd, killing three while maiming and wounding hundreds. Three days later, the brothers murdered a campus police officer, carjacked a graduate student, and fired on police who had located them in the stolen vehicle. Dzhokhar attempted to flee in the vehicle but inadvertently killed Tamerlan by running him over. Dzhokhar was soon arrested and indicted. A jury found Dzhokhar guilty of 30 federal crimes and recommended the death penalty for 6 of them. The District Court accordingly sentenced Dzhokhar to death. The Court of Appeals vacated the death sentence. We now reverse” writes Justice Clarence Thomas in the 6-3 majority opinion.

Breaking: Zelensky, after saying he would not abandon Ukraine, has fled the country

— George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) March 4, 2022

On Friday, Russian State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had fled to Poland, a claim not supported by any other source, yet Georgie here seems quite eager to tweet it without any qualification or attribution. Remember this is a guy who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and who was hired by the 2016 Trump Campaign as a “foreign policy advisor” because he was a member of the Model United Nations club in college.

Ten days after packing up and getting the hell out of Washington, DC during the Capitol riot, Roger Stone lobbied the Trump Administration to issue preemptive pardons for GOP members of Congress Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz over the involvement in trying to block the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 win – with the last one also seeming to suggest that Stone was privy to Gaetz being under federal investigation for sex trafficking – the Washington Post reports in a long piece on Stone’s activities in the post-2020 election period, with footage from a Danish documentary crew whom had been following Stone around at the time.

“I believe the president is for it,” Stone told the filmmakers about the pardon plan on January 15th, 2021, but said “lily-livered, weak-kneed” staff in the White House counsel’s office opposed it. Another former Trump Administration official said the Donald had at least considered pardoning the four – as well as Gaetz’s pal Joel Greenberg, who last year pleaded guilty to sex trafficking an underage girl among other charges related to public corruption. Gaetz last year made a $20,000 payment to a lobbying firm owned by Stone, possibly for his efforts.

US officials tell CNN agencies are sharing battlefield intel with Ukrainian leadership at a “frenetic” pace, even as difficulties with getting the info to them in a timely manner pile up. The main issues are a lack of drones able to fly within Ukrainian airspace to get a read on Russian and Belarusian troop movements as well as a need to launder the data as to avoid revealing sources and methods. This stands in contrast to how operations were conducted against Middle Eastern targets in past years. “We are not providing the type of real-time targeting that you see our military having gotten in conflicts like in Iraq where instant to instant, we have UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles or drones), the unblinking eye as they say, watching the situation and giving that targeting data,” Rep. Adam Smith, the Dem chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said on MSNBC Thursday. “We’re not doing that because that steps over the line to making us participate in the war.”

Meanwhile even disgraced former General Michael Flynn is trying to gently disown his love of his former master Vladimir Putin in an op-ed in Western Journal “It was a horrible mistake that Russian President Vladimir Putin made. He overestimated his popularity. While it is true that in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk he has about 51 percent support, in my assessment, he expected that level of support across the entire country of Ukraine. Clearly, that support never materialized,” writes Flynn, who clearly would have been writing a different piece had more success materialized for Russia on the battlefield. A week ago Flynn was much more both-sides-y, writing that Biden had ignored “Putin’s legitimate security concerns, and legitimate ethnic problems in the Ukraine.”

The sanctions and repercussions for the Russian people put in place because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reached new heights and stretched across species:  The International Cat Federation announced that Russian cats have been banned from participating in cat shows around the world, NBC News reports.

Asked about the ban, the Russian cats replied, “Meh” before dramatically coughing up a hairball.

RT, the Kremlin-backed broadcast network that reliably and predictably supported Moscow’s declarations, has ceased operations and laid off most of its staff, saying it’s ceasing productions “as a result of unforeseen business interruption events,” CNN reports.

“Why should we pay to broadcast RT when we have Fox ‘News’?” a Kremlin official probably said at some point.

Republican South Carolina Senator and fainting couch enthusiast Lindsey Graham called for a “Brutus” or a “more successful Colonel Stauffenberg” to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin.  And now, Lindsey’s food taster is very nervous.

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6th domestic terror attack on Congress has subpoenaed Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump, Jr.’s finance and a fundraising director for Donald Trump’s campaign, the Washington Post reports.

The subpoena became necessary after Guilfoyle freaked out during a voluntary interview with committee lawyers because Democratic members of the committee joined the session.  Guilfoyle stormed out of the room, saying the Democrats’ presence violated the terms of her interview.

The finance chair for the 2020 Trump campaign, Guilfoyle once promised at a fundraiser to give a lap dance to the person who donated the most to the campaign.

“By the way, the people who have been warning about Ukraine for the past six, five, ten years, those people have been trying to prevent a Russian invasion, which obviously they failed to do,” failing Republican Senate candidate JD Vance proclaims.  “I don’t know why we’re listening to these people in the first place even if we do take their Ukraine obsession at face value.”

Vance is currently running fourth or fifth in the eight person race for the Republican nomination for the Ohio Senate seat.

[UPDATE 9:40 p.m.:  MSNBC reports that the local government leader says the plant is secure and no radiation leakage has been detected.]

The Associated Press reports that the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia, the largest in Europe with six reactors, was on fire Thursday after it was shelled by Russian artillery, the Associated Press reports.

Along with a nearby hydroelectric power station, Zaporizhzhia accounts for a quarter of the power generation in Ukraine.  Each of the nuclear plant’s reactors product 950 megawatts, with maximum annual net output of 38,000 gigawatts per hour.

Officials told the Associated Press they measured elevated radiation levels at the plant, and they need to extinguish the fires on site before inspecting the facility.

National Zero’s profile is live on Truth Social, the lame, boring “free speech” Twitter clone founded by former President Donald Trump and helmed by dumbass Devin Nunes is finally live after 11 days of waiting. There is no way (yet) to get to it through a web browser (but we believe it is coming sooner or later as there are real URLs for posts). Now the real question is: How best to be banned permanently from the network? What kind of blaze of glory to we self-ignite? Valhalla awaits!

Saying “it was not a close call,” the Wisconsin Supreme Court chose a new redistricting map created by Democratic Governor Tony Evers, rejected highly gerrymandered versions presented by the Republican-led legislature and outside groups, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

While the decision is a victory in the effort to defeat Republican efforts to skew district maps to their favor, the map drawn by Evers still gives the GOP an upper hand in legislative seats while doing little to disturb the existing district lines.

“The Governor’s proposed senate and assembly maps produce less overall change than other submissions,” Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote for the majority. “It was not a close call.”

A Texas state judge blocked Wednesday night the enforcement of a directive from Republican Governor Greg Abbott calling for the investigation of parents and doctors providing medical treatment for transgender children seeking gender-affirming care, the Guardian reports.

District Judge Amy Clark Meachum order a halt to enforcement action after reviewing a motion brought by the Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the parents of a transgender 16-year-old child who were questioned by Department of Family and Protective Services officials.  One of the parents of the child is also an employee of FPS.

During the hearing, lawyers for the state told Meachum that the law doesn’t require the department to investigate every transgender child in the state; instead, it provides for an unequal enforcement where the department will only investigate cases in which it believes “abuse” has occurred, but according to Abbott’s directive, any parent or doctor providing gender-affirming care is presumed guilty of child abuse.

A former producer for the Fox propaganda network who now works for Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev’s Tsargrad TV network has been charged by federal prosecutors for violating sanctions against Russia for its 2014 invasion of Crimea. Reuters reports.

John Hanick was detained in London in February and the United States is seeking his extradition so he can be prosecuted.  The 71-year-old moved to Moscow in 2013 to work for Malofeyev’s conservative, Russian Orthodox network, and he has since tried to transfer funds paid by Malofeyev to a US bank, a violation of the sanctions.

Although he denies the accusation, Malofeyev is accused of personally funding pro-Moscow separatist terrorist groups in Eastern Ukraine seeking the secession of areas in Crimea. 

Reversing course, the International Paralympic Committee kicked the Russian and Belarusian teams from the competition, which is scheduled to start Friday, after tensions between teams escalated in the Olympic Village, the Associated Press reports.

Athletes showing support for Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia a week ago, and for Ukrainian athletes pushed for the exclusion of the Russian and Belarusian teams, a move the IPC was hesitant to take earlier in the week, instead demanding the two teams compete under a neutral flag.

“We did not think that entire delegations, or even teams within delegations, will withdraw, will boycott, will not participate,” IPC president Andrew Parsons said, but athletes and entire teams from other countries threatened to pull out of the games if the Russian and Belarusian teams weren’t excluded.  Several hundred athletes signed petitions giving the IPC an ultimatum:  us or them.

Russian Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky was reportedly shot dead by a Ukrainian sniper on Wednesday in what Bellingcat Executive Director Christo Grozev called a “major demotivator” for the soldiers under his command if confirmed. Sukhovetsky was the deputy commander of the 41st Combined Arms Army of the Central Military District, per Ukrainian media.

Losses continue to grow for Russian oligarchs who support President Vladimir Putin.  The Amore Vero, a mere 281-foot yacht owned by Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russian oil company Rosneft, was seized by French customs authorities Thursday at the French Mediterranean port of La Ciotat, CNN reports.  “Thank you to the French customs officers who are enforcing the European Union’s sanctions against those close to the Russian government,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said in a tweet.

Failing to break the Republican’s speed record in getting Justice Amy Coney Barrett from nomination to sworn in (31 days), Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin announced that the confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will begin March 21st, Reuters reports.

“I look forward to Judge Jackson’s appearance before the Committee and to respectful and dignified hearings,” Durbin said in a public letter to his Senate colleagues.

Claiming that she was moved to shout out because the mother of one of the 13 Marines killed by a bomb during the US evacuation of Kabul, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (Q-Oceania) neglects to mention that her melodramatic outburst was obviously planned to garner social media clicks because she got a copy of the speech hours before the State of the Union and knew the comment about veterans by Biden was in there.

A member of the far-right Oath Keepers nationalist group who worked as a security guard for right wing personalities during January 6th events has pleaded guilty in federal court to seditious conspiracy charges and is cooperating with investigators, CNN reports.

Joshua James, the one-time leader of the Alabama chapter of the Oath Keepers, is the first person to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy charges relating to the January 6th attack.  He faces up to nine years in prison and up to a $300,000 fine.

According to his plea agreement, James served as a private bodyguard for Trump friend Roger Stone, driving Stone around Washington, DC in a golf cart on January 5th.  James was also part of a November 2020 meeting that included Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, who told the participants that group would “oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power.”