“Just now at his news conference, @LeaderMcConnell came out against the John Lewis voting rights bill.”  —Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News

“The former Grafton pharmacist who pleaded guilty in federal court on charges that he tried to spoil dozens of vials of COVID-19 vaccine, was sentenced to three years in prison on Tuesday. Prosecutors in January charged Steven Brandenburg with two counts of attempting to tamper with consumer products. He was facing up to 20 years in prison and $500,000 in fines” WTMJ reports.

“Police arrested Brandenburg back in December as part of an investigation into how 57 vials of the Moderna vaccine were left for hours outside a refrigerator. According to officials, Brandenburg took the vials out of a freezer and left them out for more than 12 hours in hopes of making them ineffective, believing the Moderna vaccine was not safe according to court filings. He said the vaccine ‘was unsafe for people and altered their DNA,’ a criminal complaint said.”

Negrohead.  Negroes Liberty Settlement.  Negro Bend.  Negro Hollow.  Negrohead Bluff.

Those are the current names of geographic locations in the state of Texas, and while Republicans controlling the Texas legislature generally oppose removing statues honoring secessionists and the state’s slave heritage claiming it’s “cancel culture,” they wish to have the names of these locations changed because they contain a term found offensive by most, the Washington Post reports.

The state legislature has taken up a bill requesting that a little known federal agency, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, change the names of more than two dozen locations that contain words such as “negro”–or other more offensive terms for various races–from its registry.  The USBGN is the agency responsible for determining the official names of cities, town, mountains, lakes and other geographic features in the United States.

Right Wing Watch: “Far-right activists are criticizing Donald Trump after the former president referred to Bitcoin as a ‘scam.’ Speaking to Stuart Varney on Fox Business Monday, Trump criticized Bitcoin because he believes it competes against the U.S. dollar. ‘Bitcoin just seems like a scam,’ he said, ‘I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar. I want the dollar to be the currency of the world; that’s what I’ve always said.’ Trump’s comments drew scorn from far-right activists such as conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer and Ali Alexander, the leader of the so-called Stop the Steal movement. They each questioned the former president’s anti-Bitcoin stance and claimed that the real ‘scam’ was Trump’s longstanding support for the COVID-19 vaccine.”

“‘Since we are on the topic of scams, I’d say COVID vaccines are also a scam,’ Loomer wrote on Telegram Monday. ‘The reality is Trump’s base is pro-cryptocurrency and anti-COVID vaccine.’ Alexander agreed with Loomer, adding that ‘Trump is so passionately pro his experimental vaccine and anti-Bitcoin yet his base is the opposite on both issues.’ ‘He has terrible advisors and needs to re-examine these issues of freedom,’ Alexander wrote to his nearly 20,000 subscribers on Telegram. ‘Like dude… get over it. We the People choose freedom.’ Trump has made similarly dismissive comments about Bitcoin in past, claiming that cryptocurrencies are ‘highly volatile’ and useful for those engaging in illicit activity. ‘Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity,’ the former president wrote on his since deleted Twitter account in 2019. According to a report from blockchain data firm Chainalysis, illicit activity made up just 0.34 percent of all cryptocurrency transaction volume last year.”

Republicans’ irrational comparisons of public health guidelines and Nazis who murdered millions continue.

Wisconsin Republican assemblyman Shae Sortwell equated a voluntary policy of the Central Wisconsin Children’s Museum, asking people who are unvaccinated to wear masks while in the building, to Nazism, posting “The Gestapo wants to see your papers, please,” according to Wisconsin Public Radio.

The museum posted on Facebook that its policy asks patrons over the age of five who have not been vaccinated to wear masks in the indoor portion of the museum.  People who have proof of vaccination do not have to wear masks, but may if they choose to.  The museum stressed that the no guests would be turned away based on their vaccination status.  The goal, the museum states, is to protect grandparents who bring their children to the museum from catching the coronavirus. 

“The Senate voted 66-33 on Tuesday to confirm Julien Xavier Neals to be U.S. District Judge for the District of New Jersey. Neals is President Biden’s first judicial nominee to be confirmed, as Democrats begin a push to ‘restore the balance’ of the courts after the GOP-led Senate confirmed a record number of conservative judges under former President Trump” – Axios.

ABC News:  “An amorous cicada was blamed for causing a car crash in Ohio.  The insect flew through an open window, striking the driver in the face on Monday night, Cincinnati police said.  The motorist drove off Riverside Drive and crashed into a utility pole, damaging the vehicle.

“The motorist sustained minor injuries, but police tweeted photos showing the car was heavily damaged.  Cicadas are swarming across the Cincinnati area. They’re part of Brood X, which emerge from the ground every 17 years to mate.  Police advised motorists to keep their windows closed for the time being.”

There was no report on the condition of the cicada.

Transporting illegal guns.  Smuggling cocaine in a pineapple.  Planning drug deals.  Paying for contract killings.  Criminals around the world were using a messaging app they thought was secure and encrypted to openly discuss their activities.

Unfortunately for them, the app was designed and controlled by the FBI, and the information was being monitored by law enforcement agents around the world, according to the Washington Post.

Led by the FBI, Australian police and a host of European law enforcement agencies, the three-year effort led to the arrest of more than 800 people who used the AN0M app, which had been promoted as a totally encrypted platform impossible to crack.  It was included in custom cell phones that were sold on the black market and quickly became popular among criminals. 

CBS News: “Israel’s longest-serving prime minister could be thrown out of office on Sunday. After years of inconclusive election results, an alliance of right-wing, left-wing, centrist and Arab lawmakers claim to have just enough votes in Israel’s parliament to form a new government and unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As CBS News’s Charlie D’Agagta reports, the stage is set for the most volatile political upheaval Israel has seen in over a decade. Netanyahu has labeled the new coalition poised to unseat him ‘the greatest election fraud in the history of democracy.'”

“The coalition hoping to topple Netanyahu is led by the premier’s former ally, Naftali Bennett, who has forged an uneasy alliance across the political spectrum – including, for the first time, with an Arab Islamist party. The crisis comes just weeks after Israel’s military waged an intense fight against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, and as Netanyahu continues to battle corruption charges that he’s dismissed as a political conspiracy. Netanyahu’s foes have already accused him of stoking unrest. Bennett, the man poised to be Israel’s next prime minister, has told Netanyahu to ‘let it go,’ and not leave scorched earth behind him as he departs the post he’s held for the last 12 years – his second term. Nadav Argaman, the head of Israel’s national security service Shin Bet, took the unusual step of issuing a public statement warning of a serious rise in hate speech – especially on social media platforms – amid the politically charged atmosphere in Israel, which he said could lead to physical violence. But the prime minister appeared determined to fight to the bitter end. For days he’s been trying to rally his supporters against the coalition to sway their razor-thin majority.”

Republican Karen Fann, the president of the Arizona state senate, told constituents that the current so-called audit of Maricopa County would give people more confidence in the outcome of the election, while telling others that Donald Trump personally thanked her for undertaking the effort, ABC News reports.

Fann’s emails were released as a result of a state Freedom of Information request and they were sent by Fann from late-November to late-May.  Arizona Senate Republicans pushed for the audit, being conducted by a company that has no experience in election recounts or audits.  A previous hand recount and two audits found no widespread irregularities or evidence of fraud in the election.

The majority of emails accused Fann of not fighting more aggressively for Trump as the election results were finalized prior to certification, with many claiming they would vote Fann and other members of the GOP out of office if they did not expose the “fraud” the writers asserted existed. 

Literally. AFP reports French President Emmanuel Macron was slapped in the face when talking to voters in southeast France.

Daily Beast: “QAnon’s anonymous leader has been silent for more than six months. Now QAnon is in upheaval over what’s next. When pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell took the stage at a QAnon convention in Dallas late last month, she was wearing a biker vest with a ‘Q’ patch sewn on the back. And yet, when Powell began speaking, she did the unexpected: she trashed some of QAnon’s most cherished ideas. According to the worldview held by many QAnon believers, Powell will actually lead the military tribunals at the heart of QAnon lore, imprisoning pedophile-cannibal Democrats in Guantanamo Bay and restoring Donald Trump to power. But at the conference, Powell broke some hard news to the QAnon faithful. ‘There are no military tribunals that’s magically going to solve this problem for us,’ Powell said, to scattered applause.”

“Powell even went against one of QAnon’s central pillars – the idea that believers should ‘trust the plan,’ putting their faith in the idea that Trump and the military are carrying out a secret agenda to depose Democrats and bring back the Trump administration. ‘I don’t have any evidence that there’s some grand underlying plan, pursuant to which all this is going to be made right,’ Powell said. ‘I don’t want to give anybody false hope that this is happening.’ The crowd didn’t mind Powell’s off-message remark too much; that night, a picture of Powell riding a kraken sold at an auction at the conference for thousands of dollars. And Powell didn’t do much else to dissuade QAnon supporters of their bizarre beliefs. She claimed the election was stolen and raised the prospect that Trump would retake the presidency later this year. But she did break it to the disappointed crowd that Trump wouldn’t get his second term extended to account for Joe Biden’s time in office. And Powell’s attempt to debunk the military tribunals and ‘plan’ aspects of QAnon orthodoxy marks a new phase in QAnon’s tumultuous post-Trump era.”

“Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is running for governor of Arkansas, and Donald Trump is benefitting. In mid-March, Sanders hosted a campaign event at Mar-a-Lago. State filings released for the first three months of 2021 show that her campaign paid the Palm Beach, FL club, which Trump owns outright, $10,700 on March 12 for ‘event catering.’ The $10,700 investment was more than half of what the Sanders campaign spent on event catering for the entire quarter. In addition to the food, Sanders received a surprise visit from the former president, an appearance she touted on Twitter. Less than a month later, the Sanders campaign returned to Mar-a-Lago to hold another fundraiser. Trump swung by that one, too. The campaign has not yet disclosed how much it spent on the second event” – Forbes.

Bill Palmer’s kind of like the closest thing the left has to an Alex Jones. “Closest” meaning he’s still light years less insane, paranoid, and fantasy-prone. I stopped reading Palmer’s site regularly probably in early 2019, when I realized that when every other article’s header image shows Trump behind bars when that was never close to happening in real life at the time, the site wasn’t worth reading anymore. The guy’s simply way too “optimistic” that justice will be served.

That said, I hope his Sunday analysis on Twitter of where Senator Joe Manchin is at is correct. “Manchin and Murkowski both need voting rights legislation to pass in order to get reelected in their red states (Murkowski will be primaried from the right). It’s why voting rights legislation will ultimately pass. But neither wants to be seen as rigging their own reelection” Palmer writes in a long thread, saying essentially Manchin is too much of a mediocrity to pull this “balancing act” off successfully ahead of the next time he has to face voters in 2024 without also pissing off everyone who isn’t a MAGA West Virginian. It’s a rosy take, but it’s based on the almost certainly incorrect assumption that Manchin is going to get reelected. Barring drastic, sudden changes to the demographics of the West Virginia electorate, he isn’t getting reelected.

“Two weeks before the GOP had its first chance to pick up a seat in Congress since Joe Biden became president, the Republican Party of New Mexico hosted a three-day event dubbed ‘Operation Freedom.’ State Sen. Mark Moores, who was running for the open seat, addressed a crowd of a few hundred party leaders, activists and donors in a hotel conference center.”

“Afterwards, he left the hotel and drove nearly 300 miles back to Albuquerque, where he was actually competing for votes. New Mexico Republicans had opted to hold their marquee event in Amarillo, Texas. When the votes came in, Moores had lost to Democratic State Rep. Melanie Stansbury by 24 percentage points – even more than the margin by which Joe Biden had won the district. Nationally, it was seen as a referendum on Biden’s first months in office.”

“But in New Mexico, the story is longer and more complex. For some frustrated New Mexico Republicans, the Amarillo episode and Moores’ loss last Tuesday highlight deeper problems with the state party’s leadership and direction over the last few years – including a turn towards Trumpism that has galvanized some of the party’s base but has seemingly turned off swing voters in the state’s traditionally purple electorate. As recently as 2016, Republican Gov. Susana Martinez had just won re-election, Republicans had won the state House and Republican Richard Berry was in his second term as Albuquerque mayor. In the years since, the Republican party’s position in Bernalillo County – the anchor of the first congressional district, where the special election was held – has gradually eroded, taking the party’s chances statewide with it. Today, Democrats hold the governor’s mansion and a near-supermajority in the state House” – Politico.

CNN, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Reddit, New York Magazine, Gizmodo, Kotaku, the entire government of the United Kingdom and others are down. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports the issue is with Amazon Web Services and Fastly, a cloud content delivery service.

National Zero obviously remains unaffected. It’s only when that CloudFlare piece of shit (which we don’t use, but is upstream with our host) goes down do we crash too.

UPDATE 6:41 AM EDT 6/8/2021: The New York Times, CNN, Vanity Fair, and Disqus are back up and running. We’ll see if anyone gets fired from AWS for this bullshit.

Screenshot of Disqus.com at 5:55 am EDT, June 8th, 2021.

“U.S. Capitol Police leaders learned that Trump supporters were discussing ways to infiltrate tunnels around the complex and target Democratic members of Congress on Jan. 6 but failed to act on the threats, according to a new Senate report summing up what it says were profound intelligence and security failures that contributed to one of the worst incidents of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. The report also says that officers complained about a lack of leadership within the department as they tried to repel the attack – and that top leaders were virtually silent as they begged for help. Through tips from the public and other sources, Capitol Police ‘knew about social media posts calling for violence at the Capitol on January 6, including a plot to breach the Capitol, the online sharing of maps of the Capitol Complex’s tunnel systems, and other specific threats of violence,’ the report said, but the police force’s intelligence division ‘did not convey the full scope of known information to USCP leadership, rank-and-file officers, or law enforcement partners'” – NBC News.

AP: “Authorities in Australia and New Zealand said Tuesday they’ve dealt a huge blow to organized crime after hundreds of criminals were tricked into using a messaging app that was being secretly run by the FBI. Police said criminal gangs thought the encrypted app called ANOM was safe from snooping when, in fact, authorities for months had been monitoring millions of messages about drug smuggling, money laundering and even planned killings. The app was part of a worldwide sting called operation Trojan Shield, which was led by the FBI and involved the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the European Union police agency Europol and law enforcement agencies in more than a dozen countries. European and U.S. authorities planned their own announcements later Tuesday. Authorities in Australia said the app was installed on stripped-back mobile phones and its popularity grew organically in criminal circles after it was vouched for by some high-profile underworld figures, described as ‘criminal influencers.'”

“Australian authorities said they arrested 224 people and seized more than four tons of drugs and $35 million in an ongoing operation that dates back three years. New Zealand police said they had arrested 35 people and seized drugs and assets worth millions of dollars. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters it was a watershed moment that would keep the nation’s communities safer. ‘Today, the Australian government, as part of a global operation, has struck a heavy blow against organized crime,’ Morrison said. ‘Not just in this country, but one that will echo around organized crime around the world.'”