New York Times: “After a week marked by mounting accusations of partisan skulduggery, mismanagement and even potential illegality, at least one Republican supporter of the new count said it could not end soon enough. ‘It makes us look like idiots,’ State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from suburban Phoenix who supported the audit, said on Friday. ‘Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.'”

“So now even our Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit, is a junky. This is emblematic of what is happening to our Country. The whole world is laughing at us as we go to hell on our Borders, our fake Presidential Election, and everywhere else!” – Sunday post on Trump’s blog.

Have you seen this person? The #FBI is seeking information on him in connection with the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. Help the FBI identify him by sending us a tip at https://t.co/iL7sD5efWD. Remember to reference photo 339. pic.twitter.com/VKFCZa4DcZ

— FBI (@FBI) May 10, 2021

“Virginia (like New Jersey) holds its quadrennial gubernatorial election in the year after the presidential election. This is often referred to as a ‘correction election’ – because the party that lost the preceding year’s presidential election tends to have good odds of winning, and the margins might be tea leaves for the following year’s midterms. In 2009, for example, Republicans won both the Virginia and New Jersey governorships (Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie respectively), and in the next year’s midterms, the GOP won back control of the House and gained seven seats in the Senate. This year, instead of having a traditional primary run by the state, the Virginia GOP decided to have a drive-through ‘unassembled convention’ in dozens of locations. This tactic is what the party used in 2020 to shove out former Rep. Denver Riggleman for, among other things, officiating a gay wedding. Riggleman’s district goes from the North Carolina border to the D.C. exurbs, meaning that more moderate voters from up north would have had to spend close to seven hours round-trip driving to a church in Lynchburg, where, coincidentally, Riggleman’s opponent attends.”

“This time, the Virginia GOP opted for a convention to push out another candidate: Virginia State Senator Amanda Chase, who probably had a good shot at winning a normal primary. Chase is the Trumpiest of the three candidates with a reasonable shot. She’s like the Blazin’ wing sauce at Buffalo Wild Wings, you have to sign a waiver before you try it – which would make marketing executive Pete Snyder and former Carlyle Group CEO Glenn Youngkin the Wild and Mango Habanero. All are Trumpy and spicy, but to the electorate outside of die-hard Republicans, they might as well all be the same. Keep in mind, this is the same party that previously nominated Corey Stewart and Ken Cuccinelli for statewide office. The days of Medium Ed Gillespie and Mild Bob McDonnell are over. The price of entry to Virginia Republican politics these days is a high-Scoville MAGA heat-unit rating” – The Bulwark.

AP: “On the floor of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where Sir Charles Barkley once dunked basketballs and Hulk Hogan wrestled King Kong Bundy, 46 tables are arrayed in neat rows, each with a Lazy Susan in the middle. Seated at the tables are several dozen people, mostly Republicans, who spend hours watching ballots spin by, photographing them or inspecting them closely. They are counting them and checking to see if there is any sign they were flown in surreptitiously from South Korea. A few weeks ago they were holding them up to ultraviolet lights, looking for a watermark rumored to be a sign of fraud.”

“This is Arizona’s extraordinary, partisan audit of the 2020 election results in the state’s most populous county – ground zero for former President Donald Trump and a legion of his supporters who have refused to accept his loss in Arizona or in other battleground states. Theses ballots have been counted before and certified by the Republican governor. Much of the country has moved on. And yet, in this aging arena, Republicans are searching for evidence to support claims they already believe. The effort has alarmed voting rights advocates, election administrators and civil rights lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice, who this past week demanded confirmation that federal security and anti-intimidation laws are being followed. Senate President Karen Fann responded Friday by telling the department it had nothing to worry about. ‘They lost, and they can’t get over it,’ said Grant Woods, a former Republican Arizona attorney general who became a Democrat during Trump’s presidency. ‘And they don’t want to get over it because they want to continue to sow doubt about the election.'”

Donald Trump never suffered a great catastrophic fall as many of his enemies hoped he would. Having grown up with the Hollywood Action movie model many Americans wished for a clear-cut ending where the bad guy goes away to prison, and millions rejoice in him being banished to where he can never hurt this country again. Unfortunately, reality is very rarely as neat and tidy as a film script, and several years were wasted while American politicians and media pundits hoped that Trump might finally give up his irate and bumbling behavior, and start behaving like a mature and responsible adult, who respected Presidential and Constitutional norms.

“Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream. At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors. Briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air. Guests were asked to leave their cellphones outside before assembling in a windowless room. A member of Ramsland’s team purporting to be a ‘white-hat hacker’ identified himself only by a code name.”

“Ramsland, a failed congressional candidate with a Harvard MBA, pitched a claim that seemed rooted in evidence: Voting-machine audit logs – lines of codes and time stamps that document the machines’ activities – contained indications of vote manipulation. In the retrofitted hangar that served as his company’s offices at the edge of a municipal airstrip outside Dallas, Ramsland attempted to persuade failed Republican candidates to challenge their election results and force the release of additional data that might prove manipulation. ‘We had to find the right candidate,’ said Laura Pressley, a former Ramsland ally whose own claim that audit logs showed fraud had been rejected in court two years earlier. ‘We had to find one who knew they won'” writes the Washington Post in a long piece on Russell Ramsland, the asshole who compiled an affidavit for Team Kraken to use in court in November that was purported to be evidence of mass election fraud in Michigan. Problem was that the data he used and was submitted to the court was actually from Minnesota, so this should be an entertaining read.

The pastor of a church in Salem, Oregon where 72 parishioners, the pastor and the pastor’s wife all contracted coronavirus after they refused to adhere to social distancing and masking guidelines said they will continue to practice their faith despite a new outbreak in the state, ABC News reports.

“In the last several days, it is apparent that voices in our community and region want the church of Jesus Christ to be quiet and to be closed,” Scott Erickson of the Peoples Church in Salem told those in attendance at the Mother’s Day service that was also streamed online.  “Not us, not here, not now. That’s not what we’re doing.”

The Peoples Church was one of ten churches that filed a lawsuit to stop Oregon Governor Kate Brown’s May 2020 public regulations limiting public gatherings, including church services, to stem the spread of the coronavirus.  The limits were shifted to recommendations in December after the state saw cases drop.

“We’ll press on and honor what Jesus said in his word. He said, ‘I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.’ I believe his word is true,” Erickson said.

The hacking attack on the company that operates the Colonial pipeline, resulting in the pipeline being shut down and limiting the the supplied of processed fossil fuels to the East Coast, was likely done by a Russian criminal group, NBC News reports.

The criminal group, known as DarkSide, committed the ransomeware attack on Colonial, shutting down its IT system and shutting the pipeline, which supplies nearly half of refined petroleum products to East Coast terminals.

“It’s an all hands on deck effort right now,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on “Face the Nation” on CBS Sunday. “We are working closely with the company, state and local officials, to make sure that they get back up to normal operations as quickly as possible and there aren’t disruptions in supply.”

Officers in Leicester, Massachusetts shot a killed a man who drove his SUV into their police station and repeatedly tried to ram through the front door of the building, CNN reports.

The man was able to penetrate the double steel doors at the front of the building when officers were able to get to the location.  He exited his vehicle and aimed a rifle at officers, who responded with shots and killed him.

Worcester County District Attorney Joseph Early Jr. said at a news conference that the man, who was said to be in his 20s, had a traffic violation and an upcoming court date.

Louisville police investigators determined that the officers who broke into Breonna Taylor’s apartment shouldn’t have fired a single shot during the incident that left the unarmed Taylor dead, ABC News reports.

Sgt. Andrew Meyer of the police department’s Professional Standards Unit determined that the three officers involved–Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison–violated department rules of engagement by firing when no clear target was visible and when there was a high likelihood of hitting innocent bystanders.

Meyer determined that the officers were justified in returning fire against Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who responded to people breaking into the apartment by firing a shot that hit one of the officers, but that the officers violated policy by not having a clear sight-line or view of Walker.  Meyer also determined that the number of shots was excessive. 

“Seven people are dead after a man opened fire inside a birthday party at a mobile home in Colorado Springs overnight, according to police. The killings happened just after midnight Sunday morning at the Canterbury Mobile Home Park on Preakness Way, on the east side of the city. Officers, dispatched on report of a shooting, arrived at a trailer to find six dead adults and a man with serious injuries” reports the Colorado Springs Gazette.

“That man later died at the hospital, Colorado Springs police said in a Sunday news release. The suspect, the boyfriend of a female victim, drove to a trailer, where a birthday party was being held, with friends, family and children in attendance. He walked inside and began shooting party attendees before taking his own life, police said, adding that the children present ‘are now with relatives.’ In a Sunday statement Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers called the mass shooting a ‘senseless act of violence’ and asked for the public’s patience as the police department investigates. ‘Today we find ourselves mourning the loss of lives and praying solemnly for those who were injured and those who lost family members,’ Suthers said. ‘We think too of the emergency personnel who responded to a horrific scene and we keep them in our prayers today.'”

BuzzFeed: “Facebook is scrambling to prevent Starbucks from leaving its platform after the world’s largest coffee company said it was dismayed by hateful comments left on its posts about racial and social justice issues. In internal discussions seen by BuzzFeed News, Facebook employees who manage the social network’s relationship with Starbucks wrote that the company has become so frustrated by the hate and intolerance on the platform that it may remove its Facebook page. Were Starbucks to do so, it would be one of the largest companies ever to sever ties with Facebook.”

“‘Starbucks is in the process of evaluating their organic presence on FB, and whether they should continue to have a presence on the platform at all,’ a Facebook employee wrote to their colleagues earlier this week. ‘Anytime they post (organically) in regards to social issues or their mission & values work (e.g. BLM, LGBTQ, sustainability/climate change, etc.) they are overwhelmed by negative/insensitive, hate speech related comments on their posts.'”

“The employee went on to note that Starbucks’s community management team has struggled to moderate hateful responses and is unable to disable comments on their page. They also relayed a series of questions from Starbucks management, which sought to understand how Facebook’s algorithms moderated or amplified comments on posts. Starbucks’s reevaluation of its Facebook presence comes amid a wider reckoning of the hate and misinformation that continues to proliferate on the platform. Last week in the United Kingdom, the Premier League and its 20 associated soccer teams boycotted Facebook and its photo-sharing app, Instagram, for four days in an attempt to bring awareness to the constant racist abuse that players face on those platforms. Last year, Starbucks was one of hundreds of companies to stop advertising on Facebook as part of the ‘Stop Hate for Profit’ campaign, which sought to pressure the world’s largest social network into taking a harder stance on racist and hateful content.”

There is no question that racist and misogynistic behavior has become an inherent element of Trumpism. Recent examinations of behaviors of young men associated with the alt-right have found substantial overlap between those who express overtly racist and misogynistic opinions. Former Cambridge Analytica researcher Chris Wylie, who was involved in the creation of the social media targeting algorithms that allowed the Trump campaign to leverage social media so effectively in the 2016 Presidential race, has disclosed that Breitbart editor Steve Bannon intentionally targeted messaging towards incels (involuntarily celibate young men) because they were easy to manipulate and prone to conspiratorial thinking. Unfortunately, racist and conspiratorial ideation has substantial side effects that create a real problem for the future fundraising prospects of the Republican Party.

“Just south of Oil City, where Louisiana representative Danny McCormick is from, is the predominantly Black city of Shreveport. Residents there breathe some of the most toxic air in the country. Oil refineries owned by UOP and Calumet contribute to the town’s toxic emissions, according to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory,” reports The Guardian. “McCormick, a Republican, introduced a bill at the Louisiana capitol last week that would protect oil companies and not residents in his district who have to breathe in that air. The bill would establish Louisiana as a “fossil fuel sanctuary state” and ban local and state employees from enforcing federal laws and regulations that negatively impact petrochemical companies.”

Daily Beast: “Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan expressed disappointment on Sunday that his fellow Republicans have decided the future of the party lies with ex-president Donald Trump and will ‘swear fealty to the Dear Leader’ out of fear of retaliation. With House Republicans moving to push Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) out of leadership because she won’t acquiesce to Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ that the 2020 election was ‘stolen,’ Hogan said on Meet the Press that Trump is responsible for Republicans losing control of both chambers of Congress and the White House. ‘Why do you think they don’t want to pin it on him?’ Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked, prompting Hogan to respond: ‘I think they’re concerned about retaliation from the president. They’re concerned about being attacked within the party. It just bothers me that you have to swear fealty to the ‘Dear Leader’ or get kicked out of the party. It doesn’t make any sense.'”

Rep. Jim Banks (Q – Indiana) also manages to contradict himself on his stance on the federalization of elections within about five seconds, by first saying he wrote a bill “strengthen voter identification laws at the federal level” before saying “I’m more concerned about HR1, the radical Democrat – their bill to nationalize and federalize elections”. What a shitbag.

“Derby winner Medina Spirit has tested positive for corticosteroid Betamethasone. Only horse in race to fail test, I’m told. Tests after Derby take a week. Bettors who bet on Medina Spirit keep their money. Owner, trainer, jockey must return winnings” reports sports gambling expert Darren Rovell.

The 10-ton piece of a Chinese rocket finally crashed to Earth Saturday night around 10:30 p.m. ET in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives, the Washington Post reports.

The rocket had been in what was politely called a uncontrolled low orbit, with scientists uncertain when or where it would crash.  There was no reported damage.

#USSPACECOM can confirm Chinese #LongMarch5B re-entered over the Arabian Peninsula at approximately 10:15 pm EDT on May 8. It is unknown if the debris impacted land or water. https://t.co/4Ol9Sa2iJo

— U.S. Space Command (@US_SpaceCom) May 9, 2021