Word on Twitter is that Mike Lindell’s new social media network was supposed to go live 25 minutes ago and this is what we get. I haven’t been this disappointed since Parler’s relaunched version was inferior to the original one. Also wondering why I expected it to actually work.

“According to court documents filed late last week, Lindell’s company, MyPillow, has hired veteran First Amendment attorney Nathan Lewin to represent the company as its Trump-aligned founder faces a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems over a series of baseless allegations about the company and the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Lewin joins his friend and fellow legal heavyweight, celebrity lawyer and Trump impeachment-defense veteran Alan Dershowitz, who, while not an attorney of record in the case, recently announced that he is informally advising Lindell and his legal team on the defense. Taken together, the moves show how Lindell, whose pro-Trump claims have pushed him to the political fringes and made him a lightning rod, has nonetheless attracted the support of a high-powered legal team of mainstream attorneys willing to fight his case on constitutional grounds” the Daily Beast reports.

“‘I’ve been on conference calls repeatedly with [Lindell’s] legal team, sometimes Lindell is on, sometimes he’s not,’ Dershowitz said in a phone interview last week. ‘My role is to come up with ideas as they pertain to the First Amendment. I give them cases, and I suggest First Amendment theories – my role is limited to advising on the First Amendment issues at hand.’ He added that he has been advising Team Lindell not only on a motion to dismiss the Dominion lawsuit but also on the potential litigation that Lindell has for weeks said that he and his attorneys are working on filing soon against Dominion and voting tech company Smartmatic. Dershowitz said he personally recommended Lewin to Team Lindell, and gave a brief preview of what could likely come from the Lindell side as litigation progresses. ‘Our position is that Dominion is the government, for purposes of the First Amendment,’ he said. ‘The government delegated to them the most important governmental function, mainly counting votes in a presidential election. And they are therefore subject to criticism in the exact same ways that the government would be subject to criticism in that situation. And criticism of how the government conducted a presidential election is the highest bar protecting the First Amendment right to criticize such action.'”

Minnesota Daily: “A new bill proposed in the Minnesota Legislature would make anyone convicted of a crime at a protest ineligible for student loans and many other forms of state financial aid. The bill, authored by Sen. David Osmek (R- Mound), states that ‘A person convicted of a criminal offense related to the person’s illegal conduct at a protest, demonstration, rally, civil unrest, or march is ineligible for any type of state loan, grant, or assistance, including but not limited to college student loans and grants…’ Other forms of state financial aid, including food stamps, rent assistance and unemployment benefits, are also in the bill.”

“NASA successfully flew its four-pound helicopter from the surface of Mars early Monday, the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet, a feat NASA officials compared to the Wright brothers first flight in 1903. At about 3:30 a.m., the twin, carbon-fiber rotor blades began spinning furiously, and the chopper, called Ingenuity, lifted off the surface of the Red Planet, reaching an altitude of about 10-feet, where it hovered, turned and landed softly in an autonomous flight that lasted just 30 seconds. Inside the flight operations center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, engineers broke into applause when confirmation of the flight arrived in a data burst that took about three hours to travel the 178 million miles from Mars to Earth.”

“The atmosphere in the room turned almost giddy when a still photo shot from the helicopter captured its shadow on the ground, followed by video of the aircraft’s flight, captured by the nearby Mars rover. Scientists say the successful test could eventually help the space agency more quickly roam across Mars as it looks for signs of ancient life. To make the brief flight, Ingenuity’s technology had to overcome Mars’s super-thin atmosphere – just 1 percent the density of Earth’s – which makes it more difficult for the helicopters’ blades, spinning at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, to gain the purchase they need to pull the vehicle into the air. It was a triumphant add-on to the main part of NASA’s latest Mars mission – the Perseverance rover, a car-sized vehicle that is set to explore a crater that once held water and could yield clues to the history of the planet and whether life ever existed there.” – Washington Post.

“An ally of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said on Monday she was braced for bad news on the health of the hunger-striking opposition politician when his lawyers get to see him again, after they were kept away over the weekend. Navalny, a prominent opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, started refusing food on March 31 in protest at what he said was the refusal of prison authorities to provide him with adequate medical care for acute leg and back pain.”

“‘We don’t know what happened to him over the weekend because the lawyers aren’t allowed to visit him then. I hope we will get some news today but I’m very afraid to receive bad news,’ his ally Lyubov Sobol told Ekho Moskvy radio station. ‘I think there is no hope we will receive good news about his health today. I think his state is really very close to critical, close to being very grave. Twenty days on hunger strike – that is an awful lot'” – Reuters.

The number of new coronavirus cases is hitting a new high, surpassing the single day totals and seven-day running average of new cases seen during the previous peak in January, worldometers reports.

Worldwide the world hit 845,000 new cases Saturday and 832,000 Sunday, pushing the seven-day running average to 760,000, the highest it’s ever been.   For the entire week, there were 5.2 million confirmed new cases, a new weekly record and a 12% increase from the previous week

The surge comes as variants are sweeping the world:  the b.1.1.7 variant, commonly referred to as the UK strain, is the predominant strain in new US cases, and a new variant, called the Indian strain which the BBC reports is believed to be more infectious than others and highly resistant to existing vaccines.

Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey, a native of southcentral Texas, has a 12-point lead over incumbent Republican governor Greg Abbott according to a recent poll  by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler, Insider reports.

Abbott is enjoying all-time high disapproval rates among voters after Texas suffered deadly power outages in February that left scores dead and with a push to set aside coronavirus precautions by putting the onus of enforcement on individual businesses.

Abbott is running for a third term as governor in November 2021.  McConaughey has said he is taking running for governor as a “true consideration.”

“At approximately 3 pm on Sunday, April 18, the Burnsville police Department were involved With an officer involved shooting near the Interstate 35W and County Road 13 in the death of a carjacking No officers were physically injured and officers involved have been placed on standard administrative leave. At this time, the initial indicates suspect fired numerous shots at officers who returned fire. The suspect, believed to be a White male in his 20s, was taken to Hennepin County Medical Center where he was later pronounced dead” – Burnsville, Minnesota PD press release.

The video of the incident is about as non-controversial as it comes, really textbook fatal takedown of an armed maniac thinking he’s playing Grand Theft Auto in real life.

Police in Austin, Texas continue searching for Stephen Nicholas Broderick, a 41-year-old man who killed three people Sunday morning in what police describe as “a domestic situation that is isolated,” CNN reports.  It was the second triple-killing on Sunday, following an incident early Sunday morning at a Kenosha, Wisconsin bar.

Broderick killed two women and one man.  A child present at the time of the murders was not harmed.  He fled the scene and has not been seen since.

Kenosha County Police arrested an unnamed suspect on suspicion of first degree murder after three people died and at least three people were wounded by a shooter, who was kicked out of the bar earlier and returned with a gun.

An AP report mostly about how Trump’s refusal to say whether he’s going to run for president again is fucking up the 2024 plans of Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and other reprobates includes the following single sentence about the Fat Orange Bastard’s comeback “Trump is making plans to soon increase his visibility, with aides discussing options to hold rallies as soon as late spring or summer” followed by deadbeat dad Jason Miller saying “There’s a pretty strong demand out there to get President Trump on the road”. The rest of the article is more or less the same boring whatever about an election over 42 months from now.

Otter Globe and Intelligencer: “New evidence that Russian Intelligence operative Konstantin Kilimnick provided polling data from the Trump campaign to Russian intelligence agencies has caused new legal jeopardy for Paul Manafort and Donald J. Trump. A post at the website JustSecurity pointed out that prior reports on the 2016 Presidential election clearly stated that Paul Manafort’s former aide Rick Gates passed campaign polling data on to Kilimnick during the 2016 Presidential campaign. Confirmation that polling data was provided by Manafort to Russian Intelligence Agencies “closes the loop” in a criminal profile that describes how the Trump campaign sought the aid of Russian Intelligence agencies to influence the 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns, and all that prosecutors need to do is take advantage of a quirk in Paul Manafort’s legal status and acceptance of a pardon from Donald J. Trump to solicit the testimony necessary to establish grounds for conviction on campaign finance and conspiracy charges. It’s possible that Manafort may also end up becoming the first person in the United States to ever be convicted of violating the Logan Act, for conspiring to influence the outcome of a Presidential election, and assisting in electing a President who had grossly violated the Emoluments clause by behaving in a manner that would make him beholden to foreign intelligence agencies.”

“Mad Maxine should be arrested for inciting violence on 16,204 counts.

Once for every day she has been has been in office.”

– The current top comment on the Gateway Pundit article “Trump Got Banned from Twitter Over False Claims of Inciting Violence – Maxine Waters Incites Violence Captured on Video and Keeps Her Account“, posted Sunday afternoon.

Axios: “Super Typhoon Surigae surged in intensity from a Category 1 storm on Friday to a beastly Category 5 monster on Saturday, with maximum sustained winds estimated at 190 mph with higher gusts. This storm – known as Typhoon Bising in the Philippines – is just the latest of many tropical cyclones to undergo a process known as rapid intensification, a feat that studies show is becoming more common due to climate change. It weakened slightly, to the equivalent of a strong Category 4 storm, on Sunday. The storm set a record for the strongest tropical cyclone during the month of April anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.”

“The storm will recurve out to sea just northeast of the Philippines, sparing the disaster-prone country from its worst impacts, but it will bring heavy rains, high seas and gusty winds to some areas. It may also help shake up weather patterns far downstream, including across North America, over the next few weeks. The storm maxed out at the top end of the scale according to techniques that meteorologists use to estimate storm intensity via satellites, scoring an 8 out of 8 on one particular metric, which is unusual. Since aircraft do not fly into West Pacific typhoons the way they do in the Atlantic, we may never know how strong Super Typhoon Surigae was, and it’s possible the 190 mph intensity was an underestimate.”

In a sure sign of desperation over the DOJ investigation of the former guy’s January 6th insurrection attempt at the US Capitol building, TheHill and FOX legal shill Jonathan Turley has published an editorial trying to present a desperate false equivalency between Trump inciting the crowd to violence during his January 6th speech, and Maxine Waters’ statements calling for protesters in Brooklyn Center Minnesota to “stay in the street” and “get confrontational” with police. Turley claims that Waters’ statements could undermine her participation in a lawsuit brought by House Members against the former guy.

In his op-ed Turley states: “Waters insists that Trump telling his supporters to go to the Capitol to make their voice heard and “fight” for their votes was actual criminal incitement. Conversely, Waters was speaking after multiple nights of rioting and looting, telling protesters to stay on the streets and get even more confrontational. Waters has now guaranteed that she could be called as a witness by Trump in his own defense against her own lawsuit.”

Turley’s statements is speculation and projection. The relevant legal standard in this matter comes from the case Brandenburg v. Ohio. In that case the Supreme Court decided that even language calling for violence is protected by the First Amendment, unless it can be shown that language led directly to violent action. The case involved a number of Klan members and basically said that if a group of Klan members are sitting around talking about white supremacy, but they don’t go out and commit acts of violence, then their language is protected speech, but if that group of Klan members gets all worked up and goes out and commits a lynching, then the speech is considered criminal incitement. By that standard Trump’s speech on January 6th was an act of criminal incitement. The “moment of incitement” occurred during the speech when the first wave of insurrectionists left the site of the speech to go to the Capitol building and begin damaging security barricades and attacking Capitol Police Officers. We know that Trump’s words constituted acts of incitement as numerous protesters who have been taken into custody have testified in court that they were there at the behest of President Trump.

Why is Maxine Waters traveling to a different state trying to incite a riot? What good can come from this? https://t.co/nXzV0trmN3

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) April 18, 2021

New York Times: “Months after the inauguration of President Biden, One America News Network, a right-wing cable news channel available in some 35 million households, has continued to broadcast segments questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election. ‘There’s still serious doubts about who’s actually president,’ the OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp said in a March 28 report. That segment was one in a spate of similar reports from a channel that has become a kind of Trump TV for the post-Trump age, an outlet whose reporting has aligned with the former president’s grievances at a time when he is barred from major social media platforms.”

“Some of OAN’s coverage has not had the full support of the staff. In interviews with 18 current and former OAN newsroom employees, 16 said the channel had broadcast reports that they considered misleading, inaccurate or untrue. To go by much of OAN’s reporting, it is almost as if a transfer of power had never taken place. The channel did not broadcast live coverage of Mr. Biden’s swearing-in ceremony and Inaugural Address. Into April, news articles on the OAN website consistently referred to Trump as ‘President Trump’ and to President Biden as just ‘Joe Biden’ or ‘Biden.’ That practice is not followed by other news organizations, including the OAN competitor Newsmax, a conservative cable channel and news site. OAN has also promoted the debunked theory that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were left-wing agitators. Toward the end of a March 4 news segment that described the attack as the work of ‘antifa’ and ‘anti-Trump extremists’ – and referred to the president as ‘Beijing Biden’ – Mr. Sharp said, ‘History will show it was the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who called for this violence.’ Investigations have found no evidence that people who identify with antifa, a loose collective of antifascist activists, were involved in the Capitol riot. Charles Herring, the president of Herring Networks, the company that owns OAN, defended the reports casting doubt on the election. ‘Based on our investigations, voter irregularities clearly took place in the November 2020 election,’ he said. ‘The real question is to what extent.'”

Context: On Monday Cornyn tweeted “The president is not doing cable news interviews. Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional. The public comments are largely scripted. Biden has opted for fewer sit down interviews with mainstream outlets and reporters… Invites the question: is he really in charge?”

“A majority of Americans want to end lifetime appointments for U.S. Supreme Court justices, according to an Ipsos poll for Reuters, though less than half are in favor of other efforts to reform the judiciary. The national opinion poll, conducted on Thursday and Friday, found that 63% of adults supported term or age limits for Supreme Court justices. Another 22% said they opposed any limits and the rest did not express an opinion. The poll also found that only 38% would support expanding the size of the court by adding four more justices. Another 42% said they would oppose doing so and the rest were unsure. Liberal activists and some legal scholars have been pushing for judicial reforms as Republican leaders in Congress built a 6-to-3 conservative Supreme Court majority over the past several years, in part by blocking a Democratic nominee and allowing Republican former President Donald Trump to install three picks during his single term. Some Democratic lawmakers on Thursday introduced legislation to expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices, a move that they believe would restore public confidence in the judicial branch. But the party’s leadership appeared cool to the idea of pursuing that course. President Joe Biden has formed a bi-partisan committee to look at the merits of adding justices as well as other potential reforms to the court.”

“While Congress has the power to change the number of justices who sit on the court, legal scholars believe it would likely require a constitutional amendment to end their lifetime appointments. The poll found that only 49% of Americans have a ‘great deal’ or a ‘fair amount’ of confidence in decisions made by Supreme Court justices. In comparison, 43% of respondents expressed a similar amount of trust in decisions made by the White House and 32% said the same of decisions made by Congress” – Reuters.

Politico: “Nebraska’s been lucky so far. It’s largely ducked the ugly intraparty feuding that’s consumed the GOP in Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere in the post-Trump era. Donald Trump won big in Nebraska, one of the nation’s most rock-ribbed Republican states. But so did Sen. Ben Sasse, one of his fiercest critics, who pulled more votes statewide than the former president in November. The state party rebuked Sasse following his vote to impeach Trump, but it stopped short of taking the next step – censuring him. Other Republicans with moderately conservative profiles have fared well, too. Rep. Don Bacon, who supported Trump but criticized his rhetoric, out-performed Trump in his Omaha-based congressional district in November.”

“But if the state stands out as a petri dish of divergent strains of conservatism, the Republican primary for governor in 2022 is poised to test the limits of their peaceful co-existence. The question in Nebraska – as it is in other heavily Republican swaths of the country – isn’t if a Republican must be supportive of Trump to win an open statewide office. They almost certainly must be. It’s whether just supporting Trump is good enough – or if, in the reddest of states in the new GOP, only the Trumpiest candidate can win. In Nebraska, that means whether any institutionalist Republican – even a pro-Trump one – can beat Charles Herbster, the wealthy rancher and friend of Trump who not only supported him, but went so far as to attend the Jan. 6 rally in Washington that preceded the riot at the Capitol. In a field that may include one former governor and several other mainstream Republicans, said Ryan Horn, a Republican media strategist based in Omaha, ‘The problem is you get four or five people running and they all divide up the vote, and the chest-thumper has a floor of 20 or 25 percent, maybe, saying, ‘They’re all a bunch of pussy communists,’ and then Trump endorses him.’ He said, ‘You’re going to get a really good case study of just how much can a Donald Trump endorsement standing alone in a Republican state do for somebody.'”