“As vice president, Joe Biden was among those repeatedly pushing President Barack Obama to negotiate with Republicans on everything from health care to fiscal crises – even if it led to delays, watered-down policies or nothing at all. But these days, Biden and his team, many of whom worked in the Obama administration, are taking a different approach: Talking to Republicans, yes, but doing so with more skepticism and firmer deadlines, according to six current and former Biden advisers and lawmakers. ‘The lesson that this team learned, beginning with President Biden, from that experience is that there is a cost to waiting too long,’ said Jay Carney, who worked for Biden before becoming Obama White House press secretary, and is now an executive at Amazon. ‘I think everyone is much more realistic about whether bipartisan cooperation is possible.'”

“Biden, the aides and lawmakers say, believes action is more important than bipartisanship, and is convinced Americans will support him in his efforts. He recognizes that his window for this approach may close by the midterm elections. That’s why, the aides and lawmakers say, he may be willing to give up the reputation, cultivated over decades, as a dealmaking lawmaker if he can be a transformative president who pushes through a once-in-a-generation investment in infrastructure and social programs. The president will talk with Republicans about his new pair of proposed spending plans – a combined $4 trillion in spending designed to ignite economic recovery following the coronavirus pandemic – but he is prepared to back a congressional maneuver that would allow Senate Democrats to pass legislation without GOP support, perhaps within weeks, aides and lawmakers familiar with his thinking say. ‘There are certainly some in the president’s inner circle who were part of the Obama team who say, ‘Look, we can’t just have this go on forever,’’ said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a longtime Biden friend who has occasionally encouraged Biden to take a bipartisan approach. ‘There has to be an outcome'” – Politico.

In newly unsealed documents, a man arrested for his role in the January 6th domestic terror attack at the Capitol told friends that the attack was “all planned out” and a second siege was planned for January 17th, according to reporting from The Daily Beast.

John Douglas Wright of Canton, Ohio messaged friends throughout his participation in the January 6th attack, telling them to look for him in the crowd:  “I’M IN THE RED HOODIE.”  He also hinted that members of the crowd would be following members of Congress home on a return trip:  “I THINK WE NEED TO MAKE HOME VISITS.”

When a friend suggested heading off people fleeing the scene through tunnels under the Capitol, Wright responded that the attack was “all planned out.”  He told another friend, “IT’S FUCKING WARTIME. NO MORE PROTESTING.”

L.A. Records No New Covid Deaths for First Time in Over a Year as Life Gets More Normal https://t.co/ZjDsJaNqjO pic.twitter.com/8P9Y7sFQCL

— Gizmodo (@Gizmodo) May 3, 2021

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ridiculed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for promoting a federal aid package to help restaurants impacted by the coronavirus pandemic–which was part of the relief package Republicans voted against, the Washington Post reports.

McCarthy’s not the only member of the GOP to take liberties with patting themselves on the back for aid none of them voted on.  It seems to have been a Republican talking point as representatives Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina and Elise Stefanik of New York have all credited themselves with delivering aid to their districts even though they all voted against the American Rescue Plan.

“Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called the American Rescue Plan ‘socialist,’ claimed it would turn the U.S. into Venezuela, and convinced every Member of his caucus to vote against it,” Pelosi’s office said in a statement, referring to the larger legislation. “He even warned the American people ‘help is not on the way.’ Now he’s touting the American Rescue Plan’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund to brag about bringing home the bacon.”

Washington Post: “Republican campaigns invested millions of dollars encouraging their supporters to cast ballots by mail. State legislators passed laws making it easier. Over the ensuing decades, GOP voters in Florida became so comfortable with casting ballots by mail that in 2020, nearly 35 percent of those who turned out did so, according to state data compiled by University of Florida professor Dan Smith. Virtually every narrow Republican victor of the past generation – and there have been many, including two of the state’s current top officeholders, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott – owes their victory, at least in part, to mail voting. Now, some Florida Republicans are reacting with alarm after the GOP-dominated state legislature, with DeSantis’s support, passed a far-reaching bill Thursday night that puts new restrictions on the use of mail ballots.”

“Not only are GOP lawmakers reversing statutes that their own predecessors put in place, but they are also curtailing a practice that millions of state Republicans use, despite former president Donald Trump’s relentless and baseless claims that it invites fraud. Even as Democrats and voting rights advocates accuse the proponents of Senate Bill 90 of attempting to suppress the votes of people of color, these Republicans say their own political fortunes are in peril, too. The potential fallout in the key swing state illustrates how the Republican Party is hurting itself in its rush to echo Trump’s false allegations, they said. ‘Donald Trump attempted to ruin a perfectly safe and trusted method of voting,’ said one Republican consultant in the state who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. ‘The main law that we pass when we pass election bills in Florida is the law of unintended consequences,’ he said. Now, he added, the GOP must live with the result.”

https://youtu.be/z5TM5RwnSHo

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced Monday that four families will be brought to the United States to reunite with the children separated from them at the border during the previous administration, NPR reports.

While the number of reunions is small, it marks a significant achievement for the administration, which had more than 500 children still in federal guardianship after they were separated from their families at the border as part of a harsh Trump policy that’s been widely decried by human rights and legal activists.

“They are children who were three years old at the time of separation. They are teenagers who have had to live without their parents during their most formative years,” Mayorkas said. “They are mothers who fled extremely dangerous situations in their home countries, who remained in dangerous environments in Mexico, holding out hope to reunite with their children.”

“Proud Boys Canada, a far-right group that Ottawa named as a terrorist entity earlier this year, has dissolved itself, saying it has done nothing wrong, according to a statement by the organization on Sunday. In February, Canada said the group posed an active security threat and played a ‘pivotal role’ in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol in January by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. U.S. authorities have charged several members of the Proud Boys in connection with the Jan. 6 assault” Reuters reports.

“‘The truth is, we were never terrorists or a white supremacy group,’ the statement posted by the administrator of the official Proud Boys channel on Telegram said. ‘We are electricians, carpenters, financial advisors, mechanics, etc. More than that, we are fathers, brothers, uncles and sons,’ it added. Founded in 2016, the Proud Boys began as an organization protesting political correctness and perceived constraints on masculinity in the United States and Canada, and grew into a group that embraced street fighting. The group’s founder, Gavin McInnes, is a Canadian who lives in the United States.”

The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) May 3, 2021

The New Yorker: “Since 2017, [Leslie] Kean has covered the UFO beat for the Times, sharing a byline with Ralph Blumenthal on a handful of stories. These have steered clear of such genre mainstays as crop circles and Nazca Lines, but their most recent article, published last July, veered into fringe territory. In it, they referred to ‘a series of unclassified slides,’ of somewhat uncertain lineage but apparently shown at congressional briefings, that mentioned ‘off-world’ vehicles and ‘crash retrievals.’ Kean told me in an uncharacteristically hesitant but nonetheless matter-of-fact way that she had begun to come around to the idea that UFO fragments had been hoarded somewhere. In 2019, Luis Elizondo had suggested to Tucker Carlson that such detritus existed. Kean cited Jacques Vallée, perhaps the most famous living ufologist, and the basis for François Truffaut’s character in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ who has been working with Garry Nolan, a Stanford immunologist, to analyze purported crash material for scientific publication.”

“In the story, Kean and Blumenthal wrote that Harry Reid ‘believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts.’ The day after its publication, the Times had to append a correction: Senator Reid did not believe that crash debris had been allocated to private military contractors for study; he believed that U.F.O.s may have crashed, and that, if so, we should be studying the fallout. When I asked Reid about the confusion, he told me that he admired Kean but that he had never seen proof of any remnants – something Kean had never actually claimed. He left no doubt in our conversation as to his personal assessment. ‘I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials,’ he said. ‘And I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that. I don’t know what all the numbers were, what kind of classification it was, but they would not give that to me.’ He told me that the Pentagon had not provided a reason. I asked if that was why he’d requested sap status for aatip. He said, ‘Yeah, that’s why I wanted them to take a look at it. But they wouldn’t give me the clearance.'”

“Former President Donald Trump and his cronies should beware. The search warrants executed against Trump’s former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, mark a leap forward in the Department of Justice’s look into the past four years of potential illegalities. It signals turbulent waters ahead for Giuliani and his former client alike. These warrants are not easy to get. You need to convince a judge there is probable cause of wrongdoing. The warrant must also pass tough review at the highest levels of the DOJ. That these warrants survived this double scrutiny is itself a sign of serious trouble for the former New York mayor. It is particularly unusual for prosecutors to execute a warrant against a lawyer (the most recent notable example is someone else who served as Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen). That’s further indication of the depths of Giuliani’s jeopardy.”

“From what is public so far, including an acknowledgment from Giuliani himself, federal investigators are looking into whether he violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act by acting as an unregistered foreign agent for his Ukrainian “sources.” The evidence I helped present as counsel in the first Trump impeachment showed Giuliani was advancing the agenda of those in Ukraine trying to oust U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch – a staunch corruption fighter who was eventually pushed out. In recent years, FARA has been more strongly enforced in the aftermath of the cases against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. The Giuliani investigation is accelerating now that Trump and his DOJ allies are out of office. It would be unusual to conduct raids of this kind if prosecutors were not considering charging Giuliani under FARA. Does his potential exposure stop there? In the past week, I have often been asked whether FARA could really be all the government was looking at. The truth is, making predictions about what else Giuliani could be charged with is difficult to do at this stage. Even the prosecutors themselves may still be contending with that question” – USA Today.

Daily Beast: “Three people have been arrested in a French Burger King after a brawl broke out between 15 Uber Eats drivers, local news outlets report. A policeman was wounded during the fight, which happened at the Burger King branch in Neuilly-sur-Marne, a suburban neighborhood on the east side of Paris. Local reports said some of the men involved in the fight were armed with machetes, however the alleged weapons were not found.”

India’s largest private association of industrialists and manufacturing leaders is urging government authorities to institute tighter public health regulations to fight the spread of the coronavirus even though they may impact the economy of the nation, Reuters reports.

Uday Kotak, the billionaire managing director of Kotak Mahindra Bank and the current president of the Conference of Indian Industry–the Indian equivalent of the influential US National Association of Manufacturers–said at a CII meeting the government needs “maximal response measure at the highest level is called for to cut the transmission links.”

India is experiencing more than 300,000 new cases of coronavirus daily for the last ten days.  It’s number of cumulative cases is second only to the United States although it has roughly four times the populations than the US.  India was largely spared the impact of the pandemic during the first waves. 

Politico: “You don’t need to be a lawyer to know that when federal agents knock on your door with a search warrant and seize your electronic devices, you’re in big trouble. Ever since that happened to former Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday, he has tried to downplay the peril he is in, saying whatever evidence is on his phones proves that ‘the president and I… are innocent.’ But it sure looks like he has a long legal battle ahead of him, and his best defense will likely put him at odds with his former boss. If Trump doesn’t voluntarily protect his one-time counsel, Giuliani may have no choice but to point the finger at his former client. (Their relationship was tested in January when Trump reportedly refused to pay Giuliani for his unsuccessful work trying to overturn the November election results.) The saga of one-time Trump legal fixer Michael Cohen, who turned on his boss after he pleaded guilty for election finance violations and fraud, is instructive here. Despite Cohen’s assertion that Trump knew of the violations, the president was protected from prosecution while he was in office under Department of Justice guidelines.”

“Now that Trump is a civilian, those guidelines do not protect him, and he has to be concerned about his own liability going forward. There can be no question that the execution of a search warrant at Giuliani’s residence is a serious step that indicates the criminal investigation against him is far along. Federal prosecutors can’t obtain a search warrant based on a hunch or mere suspicion. They had to present substantial evidence to a federal judge that there is good reason to believe that a federal crime was committed and evidence of that federal crime was located in Giuliani’s apartment and his devices. It’s significant a judge was persuaded they met that standard.”

A white South Carolina restaurant owner who essentially enslaved a Black man with intellectual disabilities, making him work more than 100 hours per week without pay, owes the man more than half a million dollars, reports the Washington Post.

The owner of J&J Cafeteria in Conway, South Carolina, Bobby Paul Edwards was sentenced to ten years in prison last year on forced labor charges.  During the criminal trial, a district court ordered Edwards to pay his victim, 43-year-old John Christopher Smith, $273,000 in back pay, but an appeals court ruled that the lower court improperly excluded punitive pay to double the amount unpaid, as allowed by law.

Smith reportedly started to work at the restaurant when he was 12-years-old, when relatives of Edwards owned the restaurant.  Smith saw his full-time job as an issue of pride and independence.  However, when Edwards took over ownership of the restaurant in 2009, working conditions declined sharply.

“It was no surprise to see President Biden’s ratings fall far short of Trump’s in the viewership department after he finally gave an address to a joint session of Congress. The differential was staggering: For Trump’s 2017 address to a Joint session, 48 million people tuned in. For Biden’s address, just 27 million tuned in. For a guy who received more votes than any other presidential candidate in U.S. history, it would seem on the surface that this would be seen internally as bad news for Team Biden. But this seems to be exactly what they want: a stealth presidency. One that is tightly scripted in taking the protagonist off the stage while maintaining all of the power he has as a ‘Leader of the Free World’ whose party also happens to have control of the House and Senate.”

“Biden’s TV ratings are low. And it’s just the way his handlers want it. He and his vice president rarely talk to reporters, rarely hold press conferences, rarely tweet anything controversial. From a visibility perspective, it is the polar opposite of the bombastic, unfiltered Trump years. While words matter, deeds matter much, much more. And if this stealth presidency gets its way, Biden will do more to transform this country into a far-left utopia than any other Democratic president in history.”

So goes Joe Concha’s latest column in The Hill, published Sunday. He’s supposed to be a “media critic” as in he breaks down news coverage of national affairs and its implications on politics (Personally I’ve always thought journalism about journalism is a little circlejerky, but then again here I am doing it myself, lol). The column is ostensibly about TV ratings, and I guess in theory it still is, but his “tail wagging the dog” bullshit is so hackneyed, his victimhood so fucking insufferable, his whining about the unfairness of everything to conservatives so grating, that it’s hard to say that the piece is really necessarily “about” anything. He should try Xanax.

The Republican Party’s recent break with some large American businesses over attitudes towards voter suppression laws in former Confederate states is emblematic of the Republican Party’s adherence to reactionary ideologies, and their failure to comprehend changes in the American business climate. Although modern day Republicans claim that they are becoming a “party of the working class”, their ideology is one that discounts workers they claim to represent as disposable commodities, and

A boat carrying more than two dozen people capsized Sunday morning off the coast of San Diego resulting in at least two dead and 23 hospitalized, CNN reports.

The San Diego Fire Rescue Department tweeted that they retrieved 25 people from the water.  Two people were reportedly dead and 23 were taken to area hospitals.  According to a fire department spokesperson, three of those hospitalized were in “very urgent status.”

According to the fire department, SDFD firefighters and lifeguards along with Federal Fire, US Coast Guard and other local agencies responded to the call, with air support coming from aircraft of the US Border Patrol.