New York Times: “The Department of Homeland Security will undergo an internal review to root out white supremacy and extremism in its ranks as part of a larger effort to combat extremist ideology in the federal government, officials said on Monday. The task of identifying extremists throughout the United States, and specifically in government agencies, has come to the top of President Biden’s agenda since Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.”

“Many of the rioters were found to be members of extremist groups. ‘We recognize that domestic violent extremism and the ideology, the extremist ideologies that spew it, are prevalent,’ said Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary. ‘We have a responsibility, given what we do, to ensure that that pernicious influence does not exist in our department.’ The review comes shortly after the Pentagon completed a 60-day ‘stand down’ to address extremism after a number of veterans were found to have taken part in the Capitol riot. The Biden administration is assessing whether other agencies will have similar inquiries as part of a broader review started this year to assess how the federal government combats domestic extremist threats.”

Leila Center, a co-founder of the Centner Academy private school in Miami sent a letter to faculty and staff that they wouldn’t be able to be in contact with students if they’d had the Covid19 vaccine, because of bogus claims she’d read on the Internet about the Covid19 interfering with womens’ menstrual cycles.

The New York Times reports Centner’s letter claimed that “reports have surfaced recently of non-vaccinated people being negatively impacted by interacting with people who have been vaccinated…Even among our own population, we have at least three women with menstrual cycles impacted after having spent time with a vaccinated person,” Mrs. Centner reportedly got her information from what is considered the most credible source of information to Trump supporters: random posts from other MAGA asshats on Facebook.

The founder of the Promise Keepers, a conservative evangelical organization dedicated to demanding the following of christian principles as they define them, told the Steve Bannon podcast that he’s planning an event to counter the LGBTQ agenda in the United States.

The event, planned for July in Dallas at AT&T Stadium–home of the Dallas Cowboys–will bring together 80,000 christian men, according to Ken Harrison, who founded the Promise Keepers in 1990.

Maxine Waters is so last week in the white nationalist rage circlejerk, because Former Secretary of State and now chief climate envoy John Kerry something something Iran who the fuck knows or cares what the hell happened. I tried reading one of the tweets from Rick Scott and my eyes just glazed over. It’s some convoluted horseshit about uranium or something, I think.

Dan Pfeiffer: “As we think about 2022, we should focus a little more on Biden’s disapproval rating. In the aforementioned ABC/Washington Post poll, only 42 percent of respondents disapprove of Biden’s job performance. Based on recent history, this number is impressively low. At this point in his Presidency, Trump’s disapproval was 53 percent. Biden’s number is only three points higher than Bill Clinton’s at the 100-day mark in a radically less polarized era. Biden hasn’t gotten Republican voters to like him, but he has prevented them from hating him – a truly remarkable achievement.”

“And one that bodes well for 2022 if it continues. Republicans need high turnout in the midterms, which might be difficult to achieve without Trump on the ballot if they can’t turn Biden into a scary and hated figure. In the future, I think we should focus less on the overall approval number and look at the gap between approval and disapproval. Politicians that can be loved by their own party while being hated by fewer people in the other party might end up having the most political success. I recognize this seems like a patently obvious observation, but it is rarely considered in poll analysis. Ultimately, analysts and strategists need to figure out which messages, policies, and candidate attributes drive turnout among their voters and depress it for the other side. Those answers will be impossible to find if we continue to simplistically obsess about Presidential approval ratings.”

Wyoming Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney said Donald Trump is not the head of the GOP, saying that the role belongs to two people who actually won elections in November 2020, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

“I think our elected leaders are the ones who are in charge,” Cheney said in response to a question from a reporter about the role Mr. Trump should play in the party going forward, according to CBS News. “And I think as we look at ’22 and ’24, we’re very much going to be focused on substance and on the issues.”

While some Republicans fear the influence Trump has on the radical base of the GOP, others are pulling back from the fading influence Trump has on the center, more mainstream power centers of the Party.  Cheney herself saw the waning influence of Trump at the end of his term after she voted to impeach him:  Trump’s bluster called for her to be removed from leadership positions with the Republican House caucus, but its members refused to vote her out of her position as caucus chair, the third most powerful position in the GOP House caucus.

The Supreme Court announced that it would not hear a challenge filed by Republican states’ attorneys general to a lower court ruling blocking Donald Trump’s “public charge” rule preventing immigrants from obtaining a green card if they are likely to receive public services, Roll Call reports.

Trump expanded the criteria for rejecting green card applicants from simply relying on cash payments to other programs like Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) or housing assistance.  The Trump policy gave significant authority to government agencies to bar immigrants based on the likelihood of needing any public assistance, making it nearly impossible for most migrants to qualify for a green card.

While the Court declined to hear the appeal to a 9th U.S. Circuit Court ruling deeming Trump’s action illegal, it did leave open the opportunity for the GOP attorneys general to appeal based on other grounds.

“Population shifts mean five states that voted for Joe Biden will lose seats in the House when congressional districts are redrawn later this year, new Census numbers released Monday show, but will gain seats in two other states. Only two Trump-voting states will lose a seat. Why it matters: Apportionment and redistricting – the process of redistributing political power among and within the states- comes as Democrats hold slim majorities in both congressional chambers and Republicans have a strong grip on the process of re-drawing district lines.”

“California – the nation’s most populous state – is losing a seat for the first time in history. Other states losing one: Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The shifting – but still very red – state of Texas will pick up two of the reapportioned seats. Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon will also gain one seat each” – Axios.

Detroit News: “An attorney representing six Michigan Republicans who sought to overturn the state’s election says claims made in the effort by conservative lawyer Sidney Powell were ‘opinion’ in the eyes of the law. Attorney Stefanie Lambert Junttila laid out that argument in a filing Friday night as a group of Republican lawyers faces a push for sanctions in Michigan’s Eastern District federal court. ‘Indeed, based on case law, Ms. Powell’s statements are not legally considered ‘fact,’ Junttila wrote. ‘Rather, by placing her statements in the broad and specific context of political debate, there are legally considered ‘opinion.” Earlier this month, Michigan AG Dana Nessel asked a federal judge to consider Powell’s response to a $1.3 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems in deciding whether to sanction her for her lawsuit challenging Michigan’s election results.”

“Nessel’s office has sought $11,071 in attorneys’ fees to be awarded to the state as part of the sanctions push. In defending herself against the Dominion suit, Powell said ‘no reasonable person’ could conclude her statements about Dominion were ‘truly statements of fact.’ Powell also said it was the court’s responsibility, not hers, to investigate the truth of the statements. The statements, Nessel wrote previously, ‘go to the heart’ of the argument for sanctions against Powell, who was among the attorneys who represented Michigan Republicans who asked a judge to require that former President Donald Trump be named the state’s winner. The Republican’s case, which is known as King v. Whitmer, relied on conspiracy theories and discredited claims of wrongdoing. Trump lost Michigan to Democrat Joe Biden by 3 percentage points or 154,000 votes. Powell ‘all but admits that she and her co-counsel here have engaged in sanctionable conduct before this court,’ Nessel wrote earlier this month. ‘…That approach to litigation is sanctionable under any standard.'”

“MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell – who claimed not to be enlisting the help of Amazon or “big tech” – is running his social media site ‘Frank’ with the help of Amazon” reports Salon’s Zachary Petrizzo with a screenshot of FrankSpeech’s XML source code, clearly showing that the app employs AWS S3 data buckets (probably for image storage). Petrizzo adds: “Mr. Lindell’s assistant reached for comment on this matter by Salon said: ‘Mr. Lindell is no longer going to comment on your stories.'”

More than a year after Louisville Police officers carried out a midnight raid on the apartment of Breonna Taylor that left her dead from a police shooting, the US Department of Justice announced that it would begin an investigation into the practices of the Louisville Metro Police Department, CNN reports.

Such federal reviews are undertaken when the DoJ finds evidence of widespread unlawful activity or abusive policing procedures.  It announced that it was conducting a similar investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department in the wake of the Derek Chauvin trial and the murder of George Floyd.

Taylor was in her home when police forcibly entered the apartment to execute a search warrant related to suspected criminal activity by an ex-boyfriend.  Not knowing that it was the police breaking down the apartment door, Taylor’s then-boyfriend fired one shot from a handgun that hit one of the two police officers entering the apartment, wounding him in the leg.  Police returned fire, striking and killing Taylor, who was unarmed.

Washington Examiner: “House Republicans, eager to elevate border security to a top 2022 campaign issue, said Monday they would revive the now-stalled construction of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that was championed by Trump and nixed by President Joe Biden”

No other president has done more damage in their first 100 days than Joseph R. Biden.

— Lance Gooden (@Lancegooden) April 26, 2021

“President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. spoke today with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, committing that the United States and India will work closely together in the fight against COVID-19. The President pledged America’s steadfast support for the people of India who have been impacted by the recent surge in COVID-19 cases. In response, the United States is providing a range of emergency assistance, including oxygen-related supplies, vaccine materials, and therapeutics. Prime Minister Modi expressed appreciation for the strong cooperation between both countries. The two leaders resolved that the United States and India will continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the effort to protect our citizens and the health of our communities” – White House press release on Biden call with India Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

https://youtu.be/fYT2Ic2qwIw

Former Pennsylvania Senator, CNN contributor (and man whose head is so far up his ass it reappeared through his mouth) Rick Santorum told a gathering of the conservative Young Americans Foundation that the American culture was borne of nothingness, dismissing the contributions of Native Americans and centuries of immigrants from around the world.

“We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture,” Santorum pontificated.

Texas Signal: “When you think of redistricting in Texas gerrymandering also inevitably comes to mind. This isn’t without cause. Since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Texas has gained notoriety for its blatant gerrymandering when drawing district lines cycle after cycle leading to long and expensive legal battles to undo some of the most egregious line manipulation. Both racial and partisan gerrymandering have been used in the past by the Texas Legislature to draw its electoral maps. But the state of Texas has also used another, lesser known, method to draw unfair maps: prison gerrymandering. Prison gerrymandering, as defined by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is the practice by which state and local governments count incarcerated persons as residents of their facilities when electoral districts are drawn as opposed to counting them as residents of their last recorded addresses. Texas is no stranger to this practice. It is a well known fact that Texas incarcerates more people than any other state and has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country but the state has also used its prisoner population to bolster the representative power of rural communities at the expense of urban and more racially diverse communities, and this is where some of the most egregious harms of prison gerrymandering manifest.”

“Recent data from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows that, as of February of this year, 112,000 people were incarcerated in state prisons. About 40% of these people are from one of the state’s five largest counties. In contrast, prison facilities in the state are frequently in rural regions of the state, with a particularly high concentration of them found in East Texas. This means that during the decennial redistricting process, incarcerated individuals are counted as residents of the counties where their prison is located. Elected officials who represent jurisdictions with larger incarcerated populations have the benefit of counting those individuals as constituents despite the fact that some incarcerated individuals do not have the right to vote and those that do are from other parts of the state and are likely able and registered to vote in their home communities but not the county of their facility.”

“US to begin sharing up to 60 million AstraZeneca Coronavirus vaccine doses with world after federal safety review” reports AP White House Correspondent Jonathan Lemire.

Domino’s is resurrecting its late 80s-early 90s mascot “The Noid” to promote its planned rollout of driverless autonomous delivery vehicles. Read more at The Detroit News.

“Among its deadly properties, Covid-19 appears perfectly engineered to destroy the houses of sand built by populist leaders. Back in January, Narendra Modi poured scorn on experts and scientists who warned his country faced a ‘tsunami’ of infection. Now the Indian Prime Minister is being harshly criticized for premature triumphalism amid a terrible surge that has people dying in the streets. Modi is only the latest populist crusader to come unstuck. Former US President Donald Trump’s denialism appears to have cost tens of thousands of lives. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro fueled a disaster by rejecting Covid-19 countermeasures in favor of crank cures. UK PM Boris Johnson paid a heavy personal and political price for ignoring the threat of the pandemic early on, though he has since become more cautious. Covid-19 doesn’t have political preferences. Even some leaders praised for their scientific approach have seen their standing consumed by the virus. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s final months in power for instance are being tarnished by a wave of infections worsened by Europe’s slow vaccine rollout.”

“But the pandemic is guaranteed to expose leaders who undermine truth, create alternative realities, ostracize experts and scientists and refuse to take precautions to keep the public safe. Earlier this month for instance, Modi boasted of huge rally crowds ahead of elections in West Bengal. His hubris in the face of the virus recalls Trump’s refusal to give up rallies last year at which he boasted the virus was being driven out – even as his crowds contributed to a building wave of lethal infections that winter. Having their negligence exposed may not deter the truth-twisting populist leaders inspired by Trump (who is already spoiling for a comeback). Populism will find fertile soil in the economic and social detritus left in the pandemic’s wake. But when leaders prioritize their political image over public health, millions of people suffer” – CNN.