AP: “Conservative lawmakers in Utah have fired another salvo in their longtime campaign against online porn with a new requirement that all cellphones and tablets sold in the state automatically block pornography in a plan that critics call a significant intrusion on free speech. Supporters and critics alike are now waiting to find out if new Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, will sign or veto a proposal that the GOP-controlled Legislature passed this month. Cox hasn’t indicated publicly which way he’s leaning. His spokeswoman, Jennifer Napier-Pearce, said only in an email that Cox ‘will carefully consider this bill during the bill signing period.’ He has until March 25 to decide.”

“Supporters argue the restriction is a critical step to help parents keep explicit content away from kids – especially as more children have their own electronic devices and have been forced to spend more time online during the pandemic. Combating porn is a perennial issue for Utah lawmakers who have previously mandated warning labels on print and online pornography and declared porn a ‘public health crisis.’ Utah’s generally conservative culture means racy mainstream magazines and lingerie catalogs can be considered risqué. Leaders of the predominant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faith have also drawn attention to what they consider the harms of pornography. Even if Cox signs the measure, it wouldn’t go into effect unless five other states also enacted similar laws, a provision added after manufacturers and retailers voiced concerns that it would be difficult to implement the filters for a single state.”

President Joe Biden will hold the first formal press conference of his administration March 25th, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during Tuesday’s daily briefing, the Associated Press reports.

If all goes to schedule, the press conference will be held on the 54th day of Biden’s first term in office, the longest time from the inaugural a president has held a press conference in decades.  While the White House reimplemented daily briefings, conservative media pundits have griped that Biden has not held a press conference, although he’s routinely taken questions from the media at other events.

President Obama blamed President Bush for everything.

President Biden is blaming President Trump for everything.

Why don’t Democrats ever hold themselves accountable?

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) March 16, 2021

“Despite his dogged efforts, Ethan Collins will not be getting a job with the federal government. After three failed polygraph examinations while applying for a government gig, the Colorado resident finally admitted he actually hates the U.S. government and has an affinity for terrorism, revealing he had been planning for months to ‘take down’ several buildings. Then he disclosed his support for mass destruction – like the Nashville bombing and ISIS attacks, federal prosecutors said. ‘Collins considers himself as a patriot, not a terrorist, but at one point during the interview did state he felt he was a terrorist. Collins said he has spent a lot of time thinking about how easy it would be,’ according to an affidavit in support of a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday in Colorado. Court records indicate that Collins was arrested in Utah on Feb. 8 and charged with several crimes, including unlawful possession of a firearm and firearms silencers.”

“A federal judge there originally ordered Collins’ release, but Colorado federal prosecutors successfully filed a motion to keep him in custody. Prosecutors allege that in May 2020, Collins applied for a position with a ‘particular federal government agency’ that required a background check and a polygraph. After the three failed exams, Collins allegedly revealed his previous plans to ‘take down’ a handful of potential targets in the state, including the electrical power grid, the Federal Reserve, and several police stations in Denver. These fanciful plans, according to prosecutors, all began after Collins’ salary had been cut in half and his hours as a pilot reduced amid the lockdowns to mitigate the spread of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Already distrusting of the government and law enforcement, the lockdown only increased his anger toward both – and spurred his plan to first disrupt the power grid, prosecutors alleged” – Daily Beast.

Drugmaker Moderna has started clinical trials of its coronavirus vaccine on children under the age of twelve, with some as young as six months old, in the hopes of building an early immunity to the virus, NPR reports.

The company plans to have around 6,750 children from the United States and Canada in the trial, in which participants will receive doses from 25 micrograms to 100 micrograms, while others will receive a saline placebo.  The max dosage, 100 micrograms, is the approved dosage for an adult in the United States.

Participants will receive two injections 28 days apart, and the company will use telemedicine to monitor patients, with two calls scheduled after each inoculation.  Moderna has already started a trial on teens.  Pfizer, the other two-shot vaccine approved in the US, plans on studying the vaccine on children age 12 to 15, with more than 2,200 participants already enrolled.

Rick Hasen: “Are Democrats in Congress and their good government allies going to blow it again on voting rights? It sure looks like they could – by portraying the 791-page For the People Act, or HR 1, as the only hope to save American democracy from a new wave of Republican voter suppression. This mammoth bill has little chance of being enacted. But a more pinpointed law, including one restoring a key part of the Voting Rights Act, could make it out of the Senate to guarantee voting rights protections for all in the 2022 and 2024 elections.”

“The problem is that the bill contains a wish list of progressive proposals that make it unlikely to survive debate in the Senate. In addition to sensible provisions protecting voting rights, the bill also contains controversial rules on campaign financing, including the creation of a public financing program for congressional candidates, new ethics rules for the Supreme Court, and a requirement that most candidates for president and vice president publicly disclose their tax returns. A narrower bill targeted at protecting voting rights more directly would appear to have a better chance of passage, by assuring that there are more than 50 senators – including perhaps some moderate Republicans – to support the bill. Such a narrower bill still might require blowing up the filibuster for voting rights reform, but that target seems much more achievable with a pinpointed proposal.”

International adversaries, including Russia, tried to interfere in the 2020 election, with Russian efforts specifically aimed at undermining the campaign of President Joe Biden and boosting the chances of Donald Trump, CNN reports.

The report, an unclassified version from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concludes Russia’s efforts were targeted at “denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US.”

There were few, if any, efforts to hack into US election systems in 2020 as there were in 2016, the report states, and no systems were successfully penetrated.  There were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

Daily Beast: “A mishmash of abject nonsense about global elite cabals, deep state operatives, and pedophilic child-sex traffickers who consume babies’ fear for its rejuvenating power, QAnon’s belief system is so absurd that it would be laughable if it wasn’t so popular – and thus so dangerous. Shot over the past three years, Cullen Hoback’s excellent Q: Into the Storm (March 21 on HBO) is a complex story about free speech, social media, anti-establishment fury, white nationalist intolerance, crackpot fantasy, and anarchist villainy, all of which contributed to the rise of the infamous conspiracy theory, which during Donald Trump’s presidency took hold of factions of the GOP, and helped fuel the insurrectionist January 6 Capitol riots. Part on-the-ground journalistic exposé, part sociological study of corrosive internet culture, and part whodunit, the six-part affair shines a spotlight on one of the darkest corners of contemporary American life.”

“What it locates in that gloom, among other things, is the apparent identity of Q himself: Ron Watkins. Hoback’s docuseries focuses on a collection of out-there individuals, beginning – in the premiere’s opening scene – with Watkins, the administrator of 8chan, an everything-goes message board that was owned by his father Jim Watkins, and hosted on servers located (as Jim himself was) in Manila. Jim made money via a pig farm, local retail shops, and by hosting websites in places like the Philippines, where they weren’t beholden to other nations’ laws. One of those platforms was 8chan (now 8kun), which Jim purchased from Fredrick Brennan, a smart, talkative young disabled man who created the site when he was 19 years old before selling it to Jim, who promptly hired Fredrick as its maiden administrator and relocated him to Manila.”

“A federal judge in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday granted Donald Trump’s request for an extension to respond to a lawsuit filed by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and the NAACP after an ‘unknown individual identified only as ‘Ricky” signed for the summons and complaint sent via certified mail. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an appointee of Barack Obama, agreed to give the former president more time to respond to the congressman’s lawsuit after Thompson’s process server mailed the court documents to Mar-a-Lago where someone named Ricky – whom Trump claims he does not know – signed for them last month” Law and Crime reports.

“‘On February 16, 2021, Plaintiff Thompson’s Complaint was filed. Plaintiff attempted to serve Mr. Trump by certified mail on February 23, 2021. That parcel was signed for by an unknown individual identified only as ‘Ricky,’’ Trump’s attorney Jesse Binnall wrote in the motion for an extension of time. ‘While Mr. Trump contests whether that service was legally effective, the point is moot because the parties have decided to focus on the substantive disputes at hand and have agreed to an extension of time for Mr. Trump to respond to the complaint, up to and including April 26, 2021.’ You may remember Binnall for his representation of Michael Flynn and for his post-election litigation. Rep. Thompson consented to Trump’s request for the extension of time.”

AP: “An assistant principal at an elementary school is accused of accessing the school district’s internal system to cast fraudulent votes for her daughter who was elected homecoming queen at her high school, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said. On Monday, agents arrested Laura Rose Carroll, 50, and her 17-year-old daughter on multiple charges stemming from the October homecoming vote at Tate High School in Pensacola. The investigation began in November when the Escambia County School District reported unauthorized access into hundreds of student accounts, according to a news release from the agency.”

“Investigators found that in October, hundreds of votes for the school’s homecoming court were flagged as fraudulent, the news release said. There were 117 votes from the same IP address within a short period of time, the investigation found. That’s when investigators found evidence of unauthorized access to the system linked to Carroll’s cellphone and computers at her home. The were 246 votes cast for homecoming court from those devices. Carroll is an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School in Pensacola. Multiple Tate students told investigators the daughter described using her mother’s system access, or of watching her mother access records, for years, the report said. Investigators learned that since August 2019, Carroll’s account accessed 372 high school records and 339 of those were Tate students. Investigators said Carroll had district level access of the school board’s program.”

https://youtu.be/GtxnqIVr1Ss

You probably haven’t heard of Me, You, Madness.  There’s little reason you should, except that it’s the movie written, produced, directed by and starring Louise Linton, the Cruella DeVille-wannabe wife of former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

In the movie, Linton plays a bisexual serial killer who enthralls a man who tried to rob her house.  With an 18% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it likely won’t be played anywhere but the home theater of the Mnuchin manse. 

“The US Pentagon is in a communications crisis, scrambling to explain away how it is that one of its own agencies, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has publicly confirmed the testing of debris from Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs.) Through a recent official response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for results on the study of recovered debris from UFOs, over 150 pages of technical documents were received by this author on possible ways to use strange, futuristic materials. This material, inspired by UFO debris analysis, has the potential to control the speed of light, remember its original shape when deformed, and can promote the invisibility of objects” reports Anthony Braglia of UFO Explorations in a pretty batshit yet soberly reported story about his interactions with Department of Defense and how they’re not quite on the same page with each other on how much they want to disclose about this.

Just four weeks before his father-in-law left office, Jared Kushner took a two day trip to Israel to be present when a portion of a garden near the newly-relocated US embassy in Jerusalem was named in his honor.

According to the HillReporter, the December trip cost US taxpayers more than $24,000 in hotel costs alone, without calculating air travel and other expenses.  During the trip, Florida Man Kushner may have had other meetings that are raising questions:  one week after returning from his trip to Israel, Kushner’s family real estate company announced a $100 million bond offering on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. Mr. and Mrs. Ivanka Trump are known for running up the government tab while traveling:  in 2018, the royal couple charged more than $58,000 to taxpayers for a weekend jaunt to a luxury resort in Costa Rica.

“Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she knew there would be consequences for her vote against Donald Trump at his impeachment trial. And now there are. The Alaska Republican Party’s Central Committee passed a long resolution on Saturday criticizing the state’s senior U.S. Senator for multiple anti-Trump positions she took. Murkowski said she doesn’t regret her vote to convict Trump. ‘I felt strongly enough to do that at the time, to speak out after about it, and all the while knowing that there would be political repercussions,’ she said in an interview Monday. ‘And I understand that, and I accept that.’ The Central Committee also resolved to recruit a challenger to oppose Murkowski when she runs for re-election next year. But the party’s power to stop her is limited, Murkowski said, due to the open primary system Alaska voters adopted last year. ‘Well, I think the party still has resources,’ she said. ‘The party still has leadership that can weigh in. But in terms of what would actually be before the voters in a ballot, given the new construct that we voted in by initiative, I think there is some doubt there.'” – Alaska Public Media.

Texas Tribune: “At least 57 people died in Texas as a result of last month’s winter storm, according to preliminary data the state health department released Monday. The largest number of deaths – at least 25 – occurred in Harris County, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported. The deaths occurred in at least 25 counties between Feb. 11 and March 5, the state agency said. The majority of verified deaths were associated with hypothermia, but health officials said some were also caused by motor vehicle wrecks, ‘carbon monoxide poisoning, medical equipment failure, falls and fire.’ The preliminary data is ‘subject to change’ as state disaster epidemiologists gather additional information and additional deaths are verified, the agency said.”

“The winter storm plunged large swaths of Texas into subfreezing temperatures and overwhelmed the state’s electricity infrastructure, causing massive power outages. At the height of the crisis, nearly 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses were without power. That’s because nearly half of the total power generation capacity for the main state electricity grid was offline as weather conditions caused failures in every type of power source: natural gas, coal, wind and nuclear. Millions of Texans went days without power.”

“McConnell on the floor this AM, in talking about the filibuster: ‘Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like.’ McConnell says if Dems blow up the filibuster, he’ll require a quorum for everything. Past actions will seem like ‘child’s play”. McConnell says he would enact conservative policies with ‘zero input’ from Dems. Lists defunding planned parenthood, sanctuary cities and nationwide right to work, concealed carried reciprocity in D.C. and 50 states” reports Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman.

Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to new Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting the Department of Justice review the investigation conducted during the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, The Guardian reports.

After he was nominated to the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexual assault.  After she came forward, many other people came forward with accounts of drunken, sexually-loaded actions and comments by the nominee, most of which were not investigated and none of whom testified during the hearings.

Kavanaugh, who was combative and insulting during his confirmation hearings–including asking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee what alcohol they liked to drink after declaring that he has an unhealthy affection for beer–denied accusations of any wrongdoing when he was in high school, college and law school.

“Dutton Books, part of Penguin Random House, is out today with a paperback version of ABC chief White House correspondent Jon Karl’s ‘Front Row at the Trump Show’ ($18), and it includes some new reporting. A few nuggets: In mid-March of last year, Navy hospital ship Mercy was being deployed to Seattle to alleviate hospitals overburdened with infected Covid-19 patients. Instead, Trump redirected the ship to Los Angeles. The reason? Newsom had been complimentary of him, while Washington Gov. Jay Inslee had been critical. ‘Don’t you think we should send it to California? Gavin has been saying such nice things about me,’ Trump reportedly said, adding that Inslee was a ‘showboater’ and ‘a real jerk.’ VP Mike Pence was in the room during the exchange, per Karl.”

“Another anecdote about former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham is surprising given her seeming resentment of reporters and the fact that she never once held an on-camera press briefing. According to Karl, Grisham defied Trump’s orders to remove CNN’s Kaitlan Collins from a Covid-19 briefing room where Pence was speaking to reporters. ‘Go down there and get her out of there,’ Trump told Grisham, finding her in her office. ‘Mr. President, I really cannot do that,’ Grisham told Trump to his face mid-briefing, to which the president responded: ‘That’s because you are weak! You are worthless!'” – Politico Playbook.

“The Army initially pushed to reject the D.C. government’s request for a modest National Guard presence ahead of the Jan. 6 rally that led to the Capitol riot, underscoring the deep reluctance of some higher-ups at the Pentagon to involve the military in security arrangements that day. In an internal draft memo obtained by The Washington Post, the Army said the U.S. military shouldn’t be needed to help police with traffic and crowd management, as city officials had requested, unless more than 100,000 demonstrators were expected. The draft memo also said the request should be denied because a federal agency hadn’t been identified to run the preparations and on-the-day operations; the resources of other federal agencies hadn’t been exhausted; and law enforcement was ‘far better suited’ for the task” the Washington Post reports.

“The Army leadership made its position clear in deliberations at the Pentagon the weekend before the event, citing those reasons among others, according to four people familiar with the discussions, who like others in this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal Defense Department matters. The Army ultimately relented after facing pressure from acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, and realizing that District officials weren’t going to turn to the Justice Department for help instead, as the Army had wanted, the people said. Army Secretary Ryan D. McCarthy agreed to support the request, so long as a lead agency was identified and all other federal agencies ‘exhausted their assets to support these events,’ according to the recommendation he gave in a revised final memo to Miller, who approved the request. Still, the Army’s initial impulse to consider refusing military involvement in the security arrangements – even though the Guard is trained to assist law enforcement during large-scale protests and has done so regularly for decades in the District – shows the extraordinary steps officials at the Pentagon were taking to stay away from what was shaping up to be a politically toxic and volatile moment for the nation.”