While business news pundits are predicting a wave of “revenge spending” from Americans who have been cooped up during the pandemic, it’s also likely that many Americans will become much more careful when it comes to handling their finances. While many Americans are eager to return to “normal” pre-pandemic lifestyles, a substantial number of Americans are reporting feelings of “reopening anxiety“, which often includes simply not being interested in spending as much time going out in public or hanging out with family and friends. Also, while many Americans did suffer economic  hardship as a result of pandemic shutdowns, others were lucky enough to keep working the entire time, and between a substantial reduction in elective spending, and multiple rounds of stimulus checks, they’re more flush than they’ve been in years.

On Friday, Gun Violence Awareness Day, an activist federal judge in California revoked the state’s ban on sales of assault rifles, comparing the AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife and saying the ban was an illegal suppression of residents’ Second Amendment rights, CNN reports.

U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego said in his ruling that the state law deprives Californians of owning guns commonly found in other states, saying, “Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Firearms deemed as ‘assault weapons’ are fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.”

Benitez, a George W. Bush appointee to the federal district court, went to to incorrectly blame the media for the image of assault rifles, saying “One is to be forgiven if one is persuaded by news media and others that the nation is awash with murderous AR-15 assault rifles. The facts, however, do not support this hyperbole, and facts matter.”

https://youtu.be/9bUZg0VE_dE

The Oregonian has uncovered video of Republican state representative Mike Nearman coaching a group of constituents on ways to enter the state capitol building in Salem without authorization, days before a mob of right-wing protestors did just that in December.

(The Globe & Intelligencer essay is a day early this week, as I’ll be away from home on Sunday, 1/6)

For former President Donald Trump, perpetuating the “big lie”, including his wild-eyed fantasies of being restored to office, is part of a deep-seated psychological need to maintain his ego.  Numerous psychopathologists have insisted that Trump demonstrates symptoms of anti-social personality disorder. Individuals with that disorder have an overwhelming desire to be either feared, or adored. By maintaining his grip on power within the Republican Party, and continuing to string along his supporters with fantasies of returning to office, Trump is perpetuating the on-going fear and worship that his ego craves. Trump supporters also feel an overwhelming need for this on-going fantasy, and Trump reinforces that need and the involvement of his followers by portraying himself as a defender of their interests.

“In Donald J. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times. In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. None of the emails show Mr. Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so. An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Mr. Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate.”

“But the communications between Mr. Meadows and Mr. Rosen, which have not previously been reported, show the increasingly urgent efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government. Mr. Trump chose Mr. Meadows, an ultraconservative congressman from North Carolina, to serve as his fourth and final chief of staff last March. A founder of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Mr. Meadows was among Mr. Trump’s most loyal and vocal defenders on Capitol Hill, and had been a fierce critic of the Russia investigation. Mr. Meadows’s involvement in the former president’s attack on the election results was broadly known at the time” – New York Times.

Michigan Live: “Conservative activists striving to prove the 2020 presidential election was ‘stolen’ still believe an obscure Northern Michigan community holds the key to unraveling an international conspiracy. An election night error in Antrim County – which temporarily showed Donald Trump losing the historically Republican county – continues to fuel unproven allegation of voter fraud eight months later. This weekend, promoters of fraud claims and QAnon conspiracy theories are holding a summit in Antrim County to share ‘evidence’ amid a national push for forensic audits of voting machines and ballots across the United States.”

“MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is the scheduled keynote speaker for Saturday’s event at Friske’s Farm Market in Ellsworth. Lindell, who faces a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit over his claims of rigged election machines, recently predicted Trump will be reinstated as president in August. There is no legal mechanism to reverse President Joe Biden’s victory. John Pirich, a retired attorney who represented Trump in a 2016 election lawsuit, said there’s zero chance Trump will be reinstated. The Michigan Bureau of Elections conducted statewide audits already and released a report in April. Michigan’s certified results show Biden won the state by 154,000 votes, a difference of 3 percentage points. ‘It’s just spinning a fairy tale out of an event that is over with and done with,’ Pirich said. The campaign is doomed to fail but appears to have a political function: keeping Trump supporters fired up in the lead up to 2022 elections.”

Screenshot of letter from evil conspiracy freak Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene to Biden Administration on Coronavirus, Fauci, and Wuhan lab, spotted by Paul Bedard of Washington Secrets.

“Newly released emails sent to and from Arizona state senators reveal that President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani reached out personally to urge GOP officials there to move forward with a partisan recount of the 2020 election, despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud or other issues. Hundreds of pages of emails related to the GOP-ordered audit underway in Maricopa County were obtained by the nonprofit legal watchdog group American Oversight through a records request under the Freedom of Information Act. The group published them Friday, along with a scathing statement that decried the audit as a ‘sham partisan crusade.'”

“In one email dated Dec. 2, Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann (R) told two constituents that she had spoken with Giuliani ‘at least 6 times over the past two weeks.’ In another exchange dated Dec. 28, a constituent threatened that Fann would be recalled by ‘the new patriot movement of the United States’ for not standing up for Trump. Fann assured him that the state Senate was ‘doing everything legally possible to get the forensic audit done’ and that they planned to sue the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. (The Republican-led board in November had voted unanimously to certify the county’s election results, with the board chairman declaring there was no evidence of fraud or misconduct ‘and that is with a big zero.’) ‘I have been in numerous conversations with Rudy Guiliani [sic] over the past weeks trying to get this done,’ Fann wrote in the Dec. 28 message. ‘I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud'” – The Washington Post.

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — “The Federal Bureau of Investigation Friday was investigating after a man reportedly attempted to break into the cockpit on a flight from Los Angeles International Airport. According to authorities, Delta Flight 386 was on its way to Nashville. Video from the flight shows flight attendants and passengers wrestling with the man, tackling him and restraining him.”

CNN: “Finance ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) nations have put their support behind the Biden administration’s ambitious plan to overhaul the global tax system, backing a minimum tax of at least 15% on corporate earnings. ‘G7 finance ministers… after years of discussions, have reached a historic agreement to reform the global tax system to make it fit for the global digital age and, crucially, to make sure that it’s fair so that the right companies pay the right tax in the right places,’ UK finance minister Rishi Sunak said in a video posted on Twitter Saturday.”

“The agreement was made during a G7 meeting of finance ministers in London, attended by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, where she sought backing for the administration’s efforts to rewrite international tax rules and discourage American companies from booking earnings abroad. Last month, the US Treasury proposed a global minimum tax of at least 15%, aiming to tackle an unwieldy international system rife with loopholes. Establishing a minimum rate could help discourage companies from shifting their profits to countries where they would pay less tax.”

“Gov. Mike Parson’s administration is facing a new lawsuit in the fight over Medicaid expansion in Missouri,” reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  Two St. Louis-area residents, in a suit filed Friday, are asking a Cole County judge to include their litigation with a previously filed lawsuit set to get underway on June 18. The duo include Luke Barber, 26, who is an autistic grocery store worker from St. Louis County earning $16,000 annually, which qualifies him for the government health insurance program.

• If you’re a Republican who’s been saying the January 6th domestic terrorist attack was the work of Black Lives Matters and antifa, why would you *not* want to have a bipartisan independent Congressional investigation to expose the left-wing plot?
• Tomorrow, June 5th, marks the 40th anniversary of the first official federal research paper on what would be called HIV/AIDS.  It documented five cases of an unknown virus.  They were not the first cases of HIV in the US, which is thought to have been identified as a 15-year-old in St. Louis… who died in 1969, twelve years before that paper was published.
• You just knew this Israeli election was going to be a mess, but I never dreamed the Likud Party would call in Cyber Ninjas to do a recount of the Yizre’el Subdistrict.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume XXII”

We have a President who wants to ban guns but doesn’t know a thing about them. 🙄

— NRA (@NRA) June 5, 2021

Former White House Counsel Don McGahn, having delayed his appearance by two years with court appeals, finally testified before the House Judiciary Committee, telling the members about Donald Trump’s attempts to obstruct the investigation into the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, the Russian interference in the 2016 election, and efforts to stymie the Mueller investigation.

According to the Washington Post, McGahn’s testimony confirmed a number of accounts detailed events already outlined in the Mueller report, for which Trump was not indicted due to a predetermination made by then-Attorney General Bill Barr.

McGahn “testified at length to an extremely dangerous period in our nation’s history — in which President Trump, increasingly unhinged and fearful of his own liability, attempted to obstruct the Mueller investigation at every turn.” McGahn, Nadler said in a statement, was “clearly distressed” by Trump’s repeated refusal to heed his legal advice and “shed new light on several troubling events.”

Politico: “President Joe Biden rejected a slightly higher infrastructure offer from Senate Republicans on Friday, the White House announced in a statement, the latest in infrastructure talks that have dragged on for weeks. In a phone call with the president Friday, Republican’s lead infrastructure negotiator Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia outlined a new plan with about $50 billion more in spending than the group’s last offer of $257 billion. It was Biden and Capito’s second meeting this week, and they agreed to speak again on Monday.”

An international chemical warfare watchdog told the UN Security Council that it suspects regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his countryman at least 17 times since the beginning of the Syria civil war, the Associate Press reports.

Fernando Arias, of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, told Security Council member that it found traces of chemical weapons in containers in September 2020.  In 2013 and 2014, Western nations oversaw the destruction of more than 600 tons of chemical weapons.  However, Assad used easily-manufactured and available chlorine gas in two attacks on Syrian villages in 2014 and 2015.

In 2017, Assad used the more potent sarin gas in a least three attacks on Syrian villages, killing scores of people in each.  While Donald Trump claimed credit for stopping Syrian chemical weapons use in June 2017, the use of chlorine gas carried on through May 2019.

https://youtu.be/dcjZ-66uyAw

Right wing provocateur and advocate for legal sexual relationships with children Milo Yiannopoulos claims that God has given him a sign that being an “ex-gay” is his rightful path.  Milo, y’see, now says that dogs no longer bark at him.

“The Biden administration’s decision to sanction three high-profile Bulgarian power brokers landed like a bombshell in the Balkan country and has major political implications. The sanctions were the first major action Biden has taken to fight global corruption, which he has said will be a major foreign policy priority. They were also the largest-ever single action taken under the Global Magnitsky Act. Bulgaria is considered the European Union’s most corrupt member state, and former prime minister Boyko Borissov – who has dominated the Bulgarian politics for the past decade – faced protests last year over his alleged mafia ties” – Axios.

“As a Texan and a former Bush supporter, I now realize I was wrong to support a Bush. I won’t be voting for this one.”

– The current top comment on The Gateway Pundit article “Exclusive Interview with Texas AG Ken Paxton on His Stellar Record Defending Election Integrity from Democrats – And What He Thinks of George P. Bush’s Record“, posted Friday afternoon. It’s far from the only one badmouthing Bush.

Law.com: “A Minneapolis-based Barnes & Thornburg partner representing My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell is ‘no longer with the firm,’ the firm said Friday, a day after the partner put his name on a new federal lawsuit accusing voting machine vendors Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic of using the courts to stifle Lindell’s claims of election fraud. The Am Law 100 firm said the partner didn’t receive ‘firm authorization’ for the suit and the firm is immediately withdrawing as local counsel. Alec Beck, who has been a labor and employment partner at the 100 firm since 2019, is working alongside a lead counsel from Houston trial law firm Daniels & Tredennick in the defamation and abuse of process suit filed Thursday in Minnesota federal court.”

“‘Late last night, firm management became aware of the filing of the complaint, which was done without receiving firm authorization pursuant to internal firm approval procedures,’ a Barnes & Thornburg spokesperson said Friday.’While the firm cannot comment substantively on pending matters, the firm is immediately taking the requisite steps to withdraw as local counsel in this matter and end the client relationship. The attorney representing the client in this matter is no longer with the firm.’ Dominion sued Lindell for $1.3 billion in February over their false statements about Dominion rigging the 2020 election against President Donald Trump, including that the company was founded in Venezuela and rigged elections in the past. Thursday’s suit follows a separate $1.6 billion defamation suit that My Pillow filed against Dominion in April. In that matter, the company is represented by four attorneys from Minneapolis firm Parker Daniels Kibort. In the new 82-page complaint, Lindell accused Dominion and Smartmatic of conspiring to ‘weaponize the court system and the litigation process in an attempt to silence Lindell’s and others’ political speech about election fraud and the role of electronic voting machines in it.'”