Adam Serwer, The Atlantic: “Even a lifelong conservative Republican like Cheney becomes The Enemy if she is willing to uphold essential democratic rights – such as the opposition’s right to govern if it wins the most electoral votes – above the whims of King Trump. Cheney’s brave stand looks likely to cost her the leadership position she holds, and has left her isolated within the caucus, one of the few Republicans who have chosen their vow to the Constitution over their loyalty to the party. Yet the party’s rejection of the rule of law is also an extension of a political logic that Cheney herself has cultivated for years. During the Obama administration, Cheney was a Fox News regular who, as was the fashion at the time, insisted that the president was secretly sympathetic to jihadists. She enthusiastically defended the use of torture, dismissed the constitutional right to due process as an inconvenience, and amplified the Obama-era campaign to portray American Muslims as a national-security threat. Until the insurrection, she was a loyal Trumpist who frequently denounced the Democratic Party. ‘They’ve become the party of anti-Semitism; they’ve become the party of infanticide; they’ve become the party of socialism,’ she said in 2019. Her critics now, such as Scalise and the buffoonish Matt Gaetz, formerly gushed over her ability to bring, as the Times put it in 2019, ‘an edge to Republican messaging that was lacking.'”

“That ‘edge’ was Cheney’s specialty from the moment she emerged as a rising star in the GOP. In 2010, Cheney launched a McCarthyite crusade against seven unnamed attorneys in the Obama-era Justice Department who had previously represented terrorism suspects held in the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The Bush administration’s assertions of imperial power in the War on Terror violated the Constitution many times over – the conservative majority on the Supreme Court agreed – and the lawyers who represented detainees were defending the fundamental constitutional right to counsel. They were affirming the integrity of the American legal system; Cheney smeared them as terrorist sympathizers, as The Enemy. ‘While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fundraising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,’ Cheney lamented in her Washington Post op-ed. But her colleagues are merely following her example. ‘Americans have a right to know the identity of the Al-Qaeda Seven,’ a 2010 ad from Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, intoned ominously, as if it were referring to the actual 9/11 hijackers and not the attorneys who had represented them in court. ‘Whose values do they share?’ The Enemy has no rights, and anyone who imagines otherwise, let alone seeks to uphold them, is also The Enemy. This is the logic of the War on Terror, and also the logic of the party of Trump. As Bush famously put it, ‘You are either with us or with the terrorists.’ You are Real Americans or The Enemy. And if you are The Enemy, you have no rights.”

“In the civil war between Donald Trump and the GOP’s waning establishment, no Republican has crossed the former president and come out ahead. Yet as Rep. Liz Cheney’s likely ouster from House leadership lays bare, Trump has reserved a special fury for the scions of the GOP’s leading families in his attempt to exercise full dominion over the Republican Party. Whether it’s the Cheneys, the Bushes or the lesser bloodlines – such as the Romneys or the Murkowskis – Trump has been relentless in his efforts to force them to bend the knee. Even Cindy McCain, the widow of the late Sen. John McCain – who herself has never run for office – has been knocked down, censured by Trump allies who run the state Republican Party in Arizona.”

“It’s the clearest sign that the modern Republican Party hasn’t just broken with its traditionalist past. It’s shredding every vestige of it. ‘It’s a tragedy,’ said Arne Carlson, a former two-term Republican governor of Minnesota. ‘The problem with the revolution is they continue to get more and more extreme. Whereas Liz Cheney was on the right, she now finds herself being pushed into the middle and, ultimately, off the cliff.’ As a prominent link between the old GOP and the new party of Trump, Liz Cheney is more than just another name on Trump’s enemies list. If his supporters in the House ultimately oust the Wyoming Republican from her leadership post, as expected, it will mark the repudiation of decades of Cheney family influence on the Republican party, dating back to her father’s time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, in GOP House leadership and as vice president. Trump’s erasure of the institutions of the pre-Trump GOP was, of course, the promise of his presidency – his anti-establishment fervor a feature of Trumpism, not a bug'” – Politico.

New York Times: “A former U.S. Army Airborne infantryman was convicted by a federal jury on Thursday of threatening to organize a violent confrontation with right-wing protesters at the Florida State Capitol in January, days after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol in Washington, prosecutors said. The former infantryman, Daniel Alan Baker, 33, who once described himself as a ‘hard-core leftist,’ was arrested by F.B.I. agents on Jan. 15 after he had issued a ‘call to arms’ asking like-minded people to violently confront demonstrators in Tallahassee, Fla., the Justice Department said. According to an F.B.I. affidavit, Mr. Baker was arrested the day after he uploaded a poster-style image as a comment on a Florida television station’s news article asking residents to protect the Capitol from ‘armed racist mobs with every caliber available’ on Jan. 20, the day of President Biden’s inauguration. The poster added, ‘This is an armed coup and can only be stopped by an armed community!'”

“Mr. Baker also created a Facebook event called ‘Defend Tallahassee’ on Jan. 12 in which he warned that ‘armed racist mobs’ were planning to storm state capitols on Inauguration Day and vowed to ‘drive them out of Tallahassee with every caliber available,’ the affidavit states. No major protests or violence occurred at the Florida Capitol on Jan. 20. Mr. Baker was convicted after a two-day trial on two counts of transmitting a communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or injure another person, according to the Justice Department. He will face a maximum sentence of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release on each count when he is sentenced on Aug. 16. ‘The free exercise of speech is central to our democracy,’ Jason R. Coody, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Florida, said in a statement. ‘However, the defendant’s threats of armed violence to inhibit expression of political views different than his own are both unlawful and dangerous.'”

https://youtu.be/iGJQRnM4k2Q

“More deaths have been attributed to the COVID vaccine in the last four months than to all previous vaccines combined,” Tucker Carlson claims.

This is a lie.  There have been no–zero–deaths attributed to any of the coronavirus vaccines.  None.  Nada.  Nichts.  The VAERS system–the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System–Carlson refers to is an open-source reporting system that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states, explicitly, that does not contain verified data.  It lists all adverse reactions, including people who died coincidentally to receiving any vaccine, not because of it.  As the site itself says:

Respond here with suggestions. Just don’t put “Mike Hunt” as the name, I already used that.

Fox 5: “A 4-year-old Brooklyn boy accidentally managed to buy $2,618.85 worth of Spongebob popsicles on Amazon – 918 of them. Noah Bryant is a huge fan of Spongebob Squarepants and decided to act on that love by purchasing a frozen treat on Amazon. Little did he know, 51 cases of Spongebob popsicles would make their way to his aunt’s house. While it is an adorably funny mistake, Jennifer, Noah’s mom, had to foot the bill.”

“Jennifer is a social work student at New York University and on top of raising her three kids and going to school, paying for her son’s popsicles just wasn’t doable. Fortunately, a fellow student and friend, Katie Schloss, set up a GoFundMe to help Jennifer, and the account managed to get $7,300 in just three days – surpassing the original $2,618.85 target. “Thank you so much for your mind-blowing generosity and support,” Jennifer wrote in an updated note on the GoFundMe account. ‘As a parent to a child living with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), all additional donations will go towards Noah’s education and additional supports. We cannot thank you enough. Truly.'”

Politico: “Donald Trump has called Elise Stefanik ‘a new Republican star,’ a ‘smart communicator’ and – perhaps his highest praise – ‘tough.’ But the MAGA faithful aren’t so sure. Within minutes of Trump’s endorsement of the New York congresswoman for GOP conference chair on Wednesday, top MAGA voices erupted in anger – a rare break with the former president. The invective aimed at Stefanik, who was perceived to be insufficiently conservative and a relative newcomer to the Trump cause, continued to zoom through the MAGA-sphere on Thursday. The Columbia Bugle – an anonymously-run Twitter account with nearly 179,000 followers, including high-profile Trump movement influencers – described Stefanik as ‘a slightly less annoying America Last Republican.’ Lou Dobbs, the former Fox Business show host who was one of Trump’s fiercest cable television supporters, dismissed her as a ‘RINO.'”

“Popular MAGA news and opinion sites were less sparing, with Revolver calling her a ‘neocon establishment twit’, and Big League Politics, founded by Breitbart alumni, slamming her for only getting on the Trump defense train in 2019 and characterizing her as a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’ ‘[Stefanik] is the identity of a swamp creature, and she has probably the most liberal voting record of anybody who represents a strong Republican district,’ said Ryan James Girdusky, a conservative political consultant and the author of the National Populist newsletter. While Stefanik is seen within the party as a rising star and prolific fundraiser – particularly after aggressively defending Trump during his impeachment trials – Trump’s populist base views her quite differently. If they don’t eventually come on board, that could mean a limited tenure for Stefanik as a member of the leadership team. Several MAGA news sites cited Stefanik’s voting record, where she backed the then-president’s position only 78 percent of the time, making Cheney’s record of 93 percent look slavishly loyal in comparison. Stefanik compiled that record despite representing a comfortably Republican district that Trump won easily in 2020.”

Brazilian police raided a low-income neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro at sunrise, starting an hours-long gun battle with one of the most powerful criminal gangs in the country, resulting in 25 people dead, the Washington Post reports.

Dozens of heavily armed police officers, with the assistance of bulletproof helicopters and armored vehicles, raided the Jacarezinho favela to take down Comando Vermelho, or the Red Command, a criminal network that deals in guns and drugs.  Of the 25 killed, only one was reported to be a police officer.

“Really grim moment in Brazil,” said Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarapé Institute, a Rio-based think tank that tracks trends in violence. “These shootings are obviously routine in Rio de Janeiro, but this is unprecedented, in that it’s the operation that has generated the largest number of deaths, ever.”

At 4:53pm on May 6th of 2021, FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub tweeted: “GOP commissioners kill @FEC case against former Pres. Trump for knowingly and willfully accepting a $130k contribution to spike the Stormy Daniels story just before Election Day 2016”

Attached to the tweet was a link to a statement of facts outlining a situation where Republican appointees on the Federal Election Commission decided against pursuing an investigation of the Trump campaign right before election day 2016, claiming that criminal charges against Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen vindicated the inquiry and therefore, no additional action was taken. 

“Brian Kolfage, whose work with Stephen Bannon to raise money for a U.S.-Mexico border wall resulted in a federal fraud indictment last year, faces new tax fraud charges,” reports Bloomberg News. “Kolfage, a disabled Air Force veteran, was indicted in Pensacola, Florida, this week for filing a false tax return and fraud. Federal prosecutors said that Kolfage received hundreds of thousands of dollars from different organizations, including We Build the Wall Inc., which he deposited in his personal bank account.”

People.com reports that actor Steven Seagal, the guy who popularized the snapped neck instant kill move, a staple of decades of action movies, presented a gift of a sword to Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro – from the government of the Russian Federation.

What the actual fuck is this? Steven Seagal, the guy whose film credits almost always can be joined by the word “is” – as in “Steven Seagal is On Deadly Ground”, “is Hard to Kill”, “is Out for Justice”, “is Above the Law”, “is Under Siege” etc, in Don LaFontaine’s trailer voiceovers – is now acting as an emissary between two of America’s sworn enemies? The Steven Seagal I thought I knew would get both Maduro and Putin in a room and decapitate both of them with an elaborate piano wire and ceiling fan trap. “These two heads of state have been removed from office. Permanently” he would say before the credits rolled. This real-life has-been probably complained about the quality of the hors d’oeuvres in Venezuela before he took a call from Viktor Orban’s assistant about a ribbon cutting at a new political detention center in Budapest next week. Fuck Steven Seagal.

We’ll always still have that time together when a mercenary played by late legendary actor R. Lee Ermey tried to sneak up on Seagal on that oil refinery platform in On Deadly Ground. Still one of the top ten best action movie kills of all time. Back when filmmakers knew that sheer implausibility of action movie combat could be remedied by making it incredibly entertaining.

The bill defines "governmental entity" and states that "A person who violates this act may be ordered to pay a civil fine of not more than $1,000.00 for each violation." The violation falls on the person, not the govt. entity as the bill is written. It's a deeply flawed bill…

— Julie Brixie (@juliebrixie) May 6, 2021

According to a screenshot, the proposed bill Dem Michigan lawmaker Julie Brixie refers to states that it would “prohibit producing, issuing or providing an incentive for COVID-19 vaccination passports” defining a vaccine passport as “written or electronic documentation for the purposes of certifying that an individual has received a vaccination for or is immune against COVID-19.”

In the four months since the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol, federal law enforcement agents have arrested more than 440 people in connection with the insurrection, with the most coming from Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida, NBC News reports.

The FBI continues pursuing those who took part in the attack, concentrating its early efforts on those who committed the most egregious offenses during the hours-long siege and occupation of the Capitol complex.  It maintains a webpage showing hundreds of photographs and videos of the people highest on its list, searchable by specific identifiers.

The one aspect of the events of January 6th that is still unanswered, however, is the identity of the individual who left pipe bombs at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.  The FBI has a $100,000 reward for information on this individual.

“Attorney for Capitol defendant Anthony Antonio said his client had ‘Foxitus’ and ‘Foxmania’ from watching six months of Fox News and started ‘believing what was being fed to him” by Fox News and the president'” reports BuzzFeed’s Ryan J Reilly.

“New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Thursday that her office has filed a lawsuit against bumbling right-wing conspiracy theorists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman over robocalls the pair allegedly made to suppress the Black vote ahead of the 2020 presidential election. ‘Hi, this is Tamika Taylor from Project 1599, the civil rights organization founded by Jack Burman and Jacob Wohl,” the automated recordings told the targeted voters. “Mail-in voting sounds great, but did you know that if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts? The CDC is even pushing to use records for mail-in voting to track people for mandatory vaccines. Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man, stay home safe and beware of vote by mail.’

“James says 5,500 New Yorkers were affected; she’s asking for Wohl and Burkman to pay $500 for each violation and forfeit all profits. If successful, they will be on the hook for $2.75 million, in addition to the felony charges they face in other states for the alleged scheme. Wohl and Burkman have a history of failed schemes, including an attempt to pin false sexual assault allegations on now-U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, former special counsel Robert Mueller, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.” –The Daily Beast

“A federal judge in Maryland this week followed through on a previous warning to sanction a lawyer best known for representing Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in a series of failed defamation lawsuits against media companies, saying the lawyer’s latest case against CNN was ‘frivolous’ in nature. U.S. District Judge Richard Bennet, an appointee of George W. Bush, ruled that attorney Steve Biss had ‘unreasonably and vexatiously’ attempted to continue litigating a lawsuit against the news network after the case had already been dismissed with prejudice for failing to state a claim in March. Despite that ruling, Biss filed an amended complaint that the court went on to describe as ‘nothing more than a repetition of the original complaint with no new material factual allegations.'”

“The original complaint – filed on behalf of Nunes’s senior aide Derek Harvey against CNN, former Rudy Giuliani business associate Lev Parnas, and Parnas’s attorney Joseph Bondy – stemmed from a November 2020 CNN report that said Parnas was prepared to provide Congress with testimony in connection with Donald Trump’s first impeachment proceeding. CNN reported that Parnas would testify, in effect, that Nunes met with former Ukrainian prosecutor Victor Shokin ‘to discuss digging up dirt of Joe Biden.’ Harvey and Biss initially argued that CNN made 20 defamatory statements, but later filed an amended complaint that narrowed that number down to five. However, Judge Bennet concluded that even the trimmed down complaint contained the same ‘manifest deficiencies’ regarding the statements in question which lacked ‘defamatory meaning’ and failed to ‘plausibly allege material falsity’ and ‘actual malice.’ ‘This Court determined Harvey and his counsel engaged in bad faith conduct in filing the last-minute Amended Complaint in this case, joining a ‘chorus’ of courts sanctioning one of the Plaintiff’s attorneys, Steven Biss,’ the ruling stated. Judge Bennet concluded that CNN’s request for $21,437 in attorney’s fees was reasonable under the circumstances” – Law and Crime.

The South Carolina legislature voted today to reinstate firing squads as a method of execution for condemned prisoners, requiring those sentenced to die to choose between the firing squad or electrocution if the drugs for lethal injection aren’t available.

Reported by the Associated Press, the South Carolina House passed the legislation by a 66-43 vote, making the state the fourth to allow execution by firing squad.  Of the 27 states that still have the death penalty for capital crimes, only nine states continue to use the electric chair.  All others use lethal injection.

The use of lethal injections has come under scrutiny as accounts of prisoners writhing in pain or awakening during the execution process have become public.  Many companies will not use their drugs to be used in executions, and some nations refuse to ship drugs made within their borders to be sent to sites or agencies that perform executions.

New York Times: “The Federal Election Commission voted unanimously on Thursday to recommend that Congress ban political campaigns from guiding donors by default into recurring contributions through prechecked boxes, a month after a New York Times investigation showed that former President Donald J. Trump’s political operation had steered huge numbers of unwitting supporters into repeated donations through that tactic. The bipartisan commission, which serves as the nation’s top election watchdog agency, is divided evenly between three Democratic-aligned commissioners and three Republicans, a composition that often leads to stalemate.”

“But commissioners of both parties, including three Republicans appointed by Mr. Trump, came together on Thursday to ask Congress to strengthen campaign finance law to protect online donors. ‘It’s important that donors be able to exercise their choices freely,’ Ellen L. Weintraub, a longtime Democratic commissioner on the F.E.C., said in an interview. ‘If their money is being taken from them because of some reverse checkoff option they didn’t notice, then they are not giving their money freely.’ ‘It’s almost like theft,’ Ms. Weintraub added. ‘I don’t want to see donors tricked.'”

“Josh Duggar’s computer was equipped with a dark web browser that could have let him anonymously search for child porn, a court heard ahead of his release today on bail. The ‘Tor’ browser would have allowed the reality star, 33, to bypass anti porn software dubbed ‘Covenant Eyes’ which his wife Anna installed to monitor what her husband downloaded. This comes as Duggar – who is not allowed to return home to his wife and children – prepares to be released into the custody of ‘close family friends’ who have vouched for him. The 19 Kids and Counting star will stay with clean-cut Christian couple Maria Reber and her husband Lacount, who told the court they do not know Josh well but are good friends with his father. They assured the judge there was no WiFi at their home, only a dial-up connection” The Daily Mail reports.

“Duggar, 33, is accused of having hundreds of sick images on his computer as well as a two-minute video depicting children aged from five to 10 with a man. He has pleaded not guilty to receiving and possessing hundreds of images of child pornography after he was arrested and charged in Arkansas last week. The court heard on Wednesday how his computer had a program dubbed Covenant Eyes installed to monitor questionable online usage and then send reports back to his wife Anna. But Homeland Security special agent Gerald Faulkner testified that that there was a TOR browser that allowed for anonymous browsing on the dark web. Granting bail, the judge said Wednesday: ‘It’s not the average defendant who can operate in the black web and partition their computer and bypass sophisticated monitoring devices.'”

“Investigators seized Duggar’s computer and cellphone during a 2019 raid on his now-closed car dealership, Wholesale Motorcars. When the raid was carried out and before Duggar knew what authorities were investigating, Duggar had allegedly asked agents: ‘What is this about? Has someone been downloading child pornography?’ Duggar was asked about having child porn in his possession and he allegedly responded: ‘I’d rather not answer that question.’ Duggar is alleged to have downloaded the child sexual abuse material online back in 2019 on May 14, 15 and 16.”