“Attorney General Merrick B. Garland told lawmakers on Tuesday that the Justice Department needs more money for Biden administration priorities including combating domestic extremism, racial inequality, environmental degradation and gender violence.  In his first congressional hearing since his confirmation, Mr. Garland appeared before the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees the Justice Department to discuss his $35.2 billion budget request for the fiscal year that begins in October, a 11 percent increase from the previous year.

“The budget request reflects a commitment to ensure ‘the civil rights and the civil liberties’ of Americans, Mr. Garland said in his opening remarks.  The request also showed that Mr. Garland prioritized efforts to fight domestic terrorism and protect civil rights over the department’s focus during the Trump administration on street crime and gangs.  The budget request includes an additional $101 million to address the rising threat of domestic terrorism, including $45 million for the F.B.I. and $40 million that federal prosecutors can use to manage their increasing domestic terrorism caseloads.” –New York Times

CNN: “With its cultish devotion to Donald Trump, the majority of the Republican Party is choosing a wannabe-autocrat over the political system that made the United States the world’s most powerful nation and its dominant democracy. The ex-President is showing that he doesn’t have to be in the Oval Office to damage faith in US elections and to trash truth, as his movement based on lies and personal homage takes an increasingly firm grip of the Republican Party. The widespread mistrust he continues to foster in the fairness of the US political system among millions of voters poses grave risks to democracy itself. Trump, using his bond with the conservative grassroots, has effectively made fealty to his false claims of a fraudulent election last year the price of entry for any Republican candidate in any race. Under his influence, one of America’s two great political parties has effectively shed its belief in democracy – a dereliction that is massively significant for the country’s future.”

“As he seeks personal revenge, Trump is also mobilizing to try to destroy the political viability of any GOP office holders who tell the truth about the Capitol insurrection he inspired like Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. He is celebrating the boos that Sen. Mitt Romney, a former Republican presidential nominee, received from activists in Utah over the weekend, after voting to convict Trump over his abuses of power in two separate impeachment trials. The former President retains an extraordinary ability to dictate the beliefs of his followers and the orthodoxy of the GOP on a daily basis. ‘The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!’ Trump decreed in a statement Monday, literally reversing the facts about last November’s free and fair election that he lost. Cheney may well be sacrificing her own political career as one of the few GOP lawmakers with the guts to speak truth about Trump’s anti-democratic attacks. A new effort is underway among the ex-President’s acolytes in Congress to strip her of her No. 3 position in the House only three months after she comfortably retained it in a secret ballot election. Cheney’s ability to fight off a pro-Trump primary opponent in her home state of Wyoming is questionable. Her transgression is to simply keep pointing out the truth: that last year’s election wasn’t stolen by President Joe Biden.”

An angry white 57-year-old man drove his pickup truck into a group of picnickers at a Chicago park Saturday evening after complaining about their dogs, calling them “yuppies” and hurling an anti-Asian racial slur at one of them, the Washington Post reports.

On Monday, Timothy Nielsen was charged with four counts of attempted murder for the attack, which pinned a woman under his truck until rescue workers were able to free her.  The group, including a pregnant woman, scattered as the truck crashed into the people, seated in camping chairs.  One other person was struck by the pickup.  Nielsen is being held without bail.

A neighbor reported that on Saturday, Nielsen had stopped his truck in front of a his house to tell the neighbor that he was annoyed with “yuppies on the boulevard out with their dogs,” and to “watch what I’m going to do.”

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 operative whose 2016 dossier on Donald Trump became public just after the November 2016 presidential election, has reported continued collecting information on Trump through his term in office and beyond, the Telegraph reports.

Steele’s first dossier contained information on Trump’s alleged misconduct, conspiracy, infidelity and cooperation specifically relating to his conduct in his dealings with the Russian government.  It was also one of the source to prompt investigations into Trump associates like Carter Page.

The original dossier, written in the latter part of 2016, compiled unverified information going back to 2013, including the allegation that Trump paid prostitutes to urinate on a bed in the Presidential Suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow because the Obamas slept there during a stay.

Ready for the moment. pic.twitter.com/KyVis3xMy2

— Val Demings (@valdemings) May 4, 2021

CNN: “A Pennsylvania man has been sentenced to five years of probation after pleading guilty to casting a vote in the name of his deceased mother in an effort to reelect then-President Donald Trump, according to court records and Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer’s office. Bruce Bartman, 70, received the sentence Friday after entering a guilty plea to two counts of perjury and one count of unlawful voting. Bartman will also lose his right to vote for four years, pursuant to Pennsylvania statute, the district attorney’s office said in a news release.”

“Voter records show that Bartman used Pennsylvania’s online voter-registration portal to register both his late mother, Elizabeth Bartman, and his deceased mother-in-law, Elizabeth Weihman, who died in 2019 – illegally registering both as Republican voters, the district attorney’s office said. Bartman then requested, filled out and sent in the absentee ballot for his deceased mother for the 2020 general election. Bartman’s attorney told CNN that his client regrets the decision, and explained to the court that because of the coronavirus pandemic, he had been isolated at home and was misled by ‘propaganda and statements’ that were made about voter fraud. ‘This was his way of misguided political dissent,’ Stretton said. ‘He accepts the responsibility.'”

Before midnight on the East Coast on November 3, 2020 – 11:24pm exactly – was when I knew it was over for the Trump presidency. Those of you who read my one month later and were here on election night know how big of a deal I made of Fox News’s call of Arizona for Biden… and Trump too, given that he got Fox News to actually fucking fire the guy who did it.

But we already did that retrospective. Today’s is about the absolutely godawful four days the American right wing had after that night. To wake up one morning assured of your team’s place, that nothing can stop you, and then to wake up the next morning trying to make up bullshit excuses about some “ballot dump” showing up in the middle of the night is not where they wanted to be that day. The following days went much, much worse for them, leading up to the race being called.

https://youtu.be/f9D-KQEqmGE

“We’re not claiming that the coronavirus vaccines are dangerous,” Fox News host (and person I’m not saying is mentally deranged; I’m just asking questions) Tucker Carlson said, just before stating a series of unsubstantiated dangers about the coronavirus vaccines.

“But we are telling the truth,” Carlson lies, “which is, there are unsolved concerns about their long-term effects on some people, including their effects on female fertility.  That is not a conspiracy theory; that is true.”

Well… no.  It *is* a conspiracy theory, given that no legitimate study has shown any effect of any of the coronavirus vaccines on female fertility.  Carlson cites a St. Louis public health researcher who said she didn’t expect some unspecified symptom after getting the vaccine.  (Carlson’s careful not to cite specifically what the researcher’s symptom is.)  He then refers to a Twitter thread. 

“A man who tried to drive into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on Monday was shot by FBI agents after an hourslong standoff, officials said. Two law enforcement officials said the intruder tried to drive into the CIA facility without access at about 6 p.m. ET, and was stopped by armed guards who operate a series of gates. CIA security officers had been negotiating with man and after he repeatedly refused to move, a decision was made to try to push the car out of the way.”

“A short time later, he got out of his car and brandished a gun before being shot by FBI agents. One of the officials says the person claimed to have explosives, but law enforcement officials have not said whether he actually did. According to the two officials, the man is mentally disturbed and has who has tried repeatedly in the past to get into the CIA campus. The man, whose identity has not been released, was transported to an area hospital, the FBI said. The extent of his injuries was not known” – NBC News.

General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has expressed an openness to revising the way the military branches handle sexual harassment and assault complaints within their ranks, the Associated Press reports.

Milley has supported the current process of reporting sexual assault of harassment, which requires the person making the report to take it up the direct chain of command, which may include the accused or friends of the accused, to determine if the charge gets prosecuted.

In an interview with the Associated Press and CNN, Milley did not openly endorse a new system of filing complaints, but he did express a willingness to review new procedures, primarily because ongoing efforts to curb sexual harassment and abuse in the military have largely failed.

David Frum, The Atlantic: “China was mentioned only four times in Joe Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress, but it shadowed almost every line of the speech. ‘We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,’ Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China. ‘It informs his approach to most major topics and the president regularly raises it in meetings, whether he is discussing foreign policy or electric bus batteries,’ CNN’s Jeremy Diamond reported. ‘And aides say Biden believes it is a key test by which historians will judge his presidency.’ As Biden said to the nation from the well of the House of Representatives, the authoritarian President Xi Jinping is ‘deadly earnest’ about China ‘becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others – autocrats – think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.'”

“So this might be a useful moment to hear a contrary voice. In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower. The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics. Meanwhile, U.S. advantages are persistently underestimated. The claim that China will ‘overtake’ the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong – and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes. Above all, Beckley pleads with readers not to focus on the headline numbers of gross domestic product. China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then – and it will not make China a superpower now, or so Beckley contends. Beckley is a voracious reader of specialist Chinese military journals and economic reports. And, he argues, many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, ‘Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,’ and he adds that ‘Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.'”

Former Senator and astronaut Bill Nelson has taken the reins as the Director of NASA, becoming the 14th head of the space agency, Space.com reports.

Nelson takes over NASA as the US space program enjoys a public relations success with the landing of the Mars rover Perseverance and the first flight in alien skies of the helicopter Ingenuity.  The agency also faces questions about the direction of its mission as private companies take the lead in manned space flight.

“To have the president and vice president have this kind of confidence in an old buddy from the Senate is indeed one of the high honors that anyone could have,” Nelson said following being sworn in today. “I am honored by the President’s nomination and the Senate vote … I will try to merit that trust. Onward and upward!” Nelson added.

After facing criticism for initially refusing to increase the number of refugees allowed into the United States annually from Donald Trump’s ridiculously low amount, the Biden Administration announced today that it will raise the number to 62,500 from 15,000, USA Today reports.

“Today, I am revising the United States’ annual refugee admissions cap to 62,500 for this fiscal year,” Biden said in a statement. “This erases the historically low number set by the previous administration of 15,000, which did not reflect America’s values as a nation that welcomes and supports refugees.”

Even with the increase, the administration noted that it was unlikely to admit that many refugees this year, primarily due to the previous administration’s dismantling of the refugee screening system.

“The sad truth is that we will not achieve 62,500 admissions this year,” Biden said.  “We are working quickly to undo the damage of the last four years. It will take some time, but that work is already underway.”

Police in Germany and Paraguay arrested four people associated with running the largest-known online depository of child pornography, a website that had more than 400,000 users worldwide, NBC News reports.

Three people between the ages of 40 and 68 were arrested in Germany, with the fourth arrested in Paraguay who will be extradited to Germany.  One of those arrested in Germany, a 64-year-old from Hamburg, reportedly personally uploaded more than 3,500 images.

The people running the site instructed users on how to avoid detection and arrest.  “Furthermore, members of the platform received safety instructions from them for secure surfing on ‘Boystown’ in order to minimize the risk of discovery by law enforcement authorities,” the BKA, Germany’s national law enforcement agency, said.

“After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage. Over the last 27 years, we have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives. We continue to share a belief in that mission and will continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives. We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life” tweets Bill Gates.

CNN: “A legal adviser to Rudy Giuliani said he hopes former President Donald Trump will join in a court fight to attempt to block federal prosecutors from accessing seized material Giuliani believes is protected by attorney-client privilege. Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who is not formally representing Giuliani but acting in an advisory capacity, said the former New York City mayor will likely file a court challenge and wants his former clients to also seek to prevent prosecutors from examining the material. ‘Hope the people whose information is privileged, like Donald Trump, would join the lawsuit and say look you can’t see my stuff,’ Dershowitz told CNN. Dershowitz, a retired Harvard Law School professor, served on then-President Trump’s defense team in the first impeachment trial. His career has mostly been focused on individual civil liberties. Spokespeople for Trump did not respond to requests from CNN for comment. Robert Costello, an attorney for Giuliani, did not return a call for comment.”

A typically boring online meeting of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development was livened up by background noise blaring the audio of the 1999 Tim Allen-Sigourney Weaver space comedy Galaxy Quest as well as a playing of the Village People’s “In The Navy.”

After about 25 minutes of the unexplained noise in the background, subcommittee chair Marcy Kaptur called a recess.   “We’ve been informed that we have to take a brief recess now because we’re having technical issues,” Kaptur said. “And we’re going to be briefly recessing for a second here, let them address those and we’ll be back very quickly.  Sorry to do this, this hasn’t happened before, but it’s a new age.”  The hearing resumed five minutes later.

Former President George W. Bush said that if the Republican Party is only going to represent white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, then it stands no chance of winning future elections, CNN reports.

Interviewed on The Dispatch podcast, Bush said if the only thing the GOP stands for is “White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, then it’s not going to win anything.”  The critique comes as GOP members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Andy Biggs attempted to set up an Anglo-Saxon caucus, a move widely criticized on both sides of the aisle for its tone-deafness and racist overtones.

Bush noted that at one point, “the Republican Party stands for exclusivity — you know, it used to be country clubs,” but that the focus on white people will mean an inevitable decline in people joining or voting for the Party members. 

Here’s the New York Post’s Sohrab Amari just throwing up his hands and saying “fuck it” in a now-deleted Monday tweet. This is a guy who has already argued that the government should be weaponized against liberals in the culture war, so seeing him at least temporarily give up is kind of fun. Let’s hope this level of ennui catches on with other conservatives.