Hank Aaron, the home run champion of Major League Baseball in the pre-steroid era, has died in Atlanta at the age of 86.  Aaron slammed 755 home runs over a 21 season career.

Aaron played briefly in the Negro Leagues for the Indianapolis Clowns before joining the then-Boston Braves organizations of Major League Baseball in 1951.  After three minor league seasons, he got the call to join big-league Braves team, who had moved to Milwaukee, in March 1954.

Aaron became a respected leader in the league and in the public, fighting for civil rights and player worker rights.  As he approached the career home run record held by Babe Ruth, Aaron was deluged with racist hate mail, a fact buried at the time by the league.  During the offseason of 1973-74, when he was one home run away from tying Ruth, Aaron received multiple death threats. 

KMOV: “With the possibility of a presidential pardon off the table, St. Louis attorney Al Watkins is lining up his client’s defense strategy Watkins is representing perhaps the most recognizable figure from the unrest – Jacob Chansley, 33, also known as the ‘Qanon Shaman’. ‘Let’s roll the tape. Let’s roll the months of lies, and misrepresentations and horrific innuendo and hyperbolic speech by our president designed to inflame, enrage, motivate,’ said Watkins.”

“‘What’s really curious is the reality that our president, as a matter of public record, invited these individuals, as President, to walk down to the capitol with him.’ Watkins said President Trump’s inaction was a wake-up call for some, including his client ‘He regrets very very much having not just been duped by the President, but by being in a position where he allowed that duping to put him in a position to make decisions he should not have made,’ said Watkins. ‘As to my client, the guy with the horns and the fur, the meditation and organic food…I’m telling you that we cannot simply wave a magic wand and label all these people on January 6th the same.’ “

“Senate votes 93-2 to confirm Lloyd Austin as U.S. secretary of defense, making him the first Black American to take the position” reports NBC’s Sahil Kapur.

“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to send the article of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Senate on Monday, launching the start of the former president’s trial on a charge of incitement of insurrection over the deadly Capitol riot. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced the schedule Friday. ‘There will be a trial,’ Schumer said. ‘It will be a full trial, it will be a fair trial’ Trump is the first president to be twice impeached and the first to face a trial after leaving office. While the transmission of the article launches the trial, the schedule ahead remains uncertain. On Thursday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell proposed pushing back the start Trump’s impeachment trial to February to give the former president time to prepare and review his case” – AP.

Open Secrets: “Former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign aides played key roles orchestrating a rally protesting certification of President-elect Joe Biden‘s victory in the 2020 presidential election before hundreds of rioters breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But the full extent of the Trump campaign’s ties to the protests may not be not fully known due to its use of shell companies that hide details of its financial dealings and the central role ‘dark money’ played in the protests. Multiple individuals listed on the permit granted by the National Park Service worked for Trump’s presidential campaign, as first reported by the Associated Press over the weekend. That raises new questions about the Trump campaign’s lack of spending transparency and the unknown extent of the event’s ties to Trump aides.”

“Federal authorities charged a city Department of Sanitation worker in the Capitol riot — after The Post identified him and revealed clear photos of him at the scene of the Jan. 6 siege, according to court documents. Dominick Madden, 43, was charged in Washington, D.C., with violent entry into the Capitol, remaining in a restricted building and disorderly conduct in a restricted building, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Thursday” reports the New York Post.

“In an affidavit by an FBI agent supporting the complaint, the investigator repeatedly mentions a Jan. 14 Post story that helped authorities identify the Q-Anon-backing garbage man. ‘The article identifies the sanitation worker as Dominick Madden, 43, and reports that videos were circulating online that identified Madden, who was photographed and videotaped shouting the QAnon slogan, wearing a QAnon hoodie, and waving a trump flag in front of the Capitol building,’ the FBI agent wrote in the affidavit. The investigator then gave a description of Madden to the Capitol police based on the article, who returned video surveillance of him inside the historic building.”

NBC News: “A professional video-gamer aged just 25 is hanging up his controller and has announced his retirement, due to a thumb injury. American Thomas Paparatto who goes by the name ‘ZooMaa,’ was known for competing in ‘Call of Duty’, and said in a heartfelt note Thursday that he would bow out for the ‘foreseeable future’ due to a wrist and thumb injury. ‘It breaks my heart to step away from a game I put my heart and soul into every single day for eight years,’ he said in a statement posted on Twitter. ‘Unfortunately, the injury has returned making it really hard for me to compete at the highest level against some of the best players in the world. Playing through the weakness and pain in my hand just isn’t possible anymore.'”

“An Allegheny County Common Pleas judge apologized on Thursday for posting a photo on her private Facebook page of her husband dressed as one of the rioters at the U.S Capitol. Judge Kim Eaton said the costume was meant to make fun of the rioters while she celebrated the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. ‘My family and I were very excited about the new administration in Washington and were celebrating this historic inauguration today when the photo was taken,’ the judge said in a statement. ‘In our celebration, I exercised poor judgment and I realize that the photo sends the wrong message given the tragic events of January 6th.'”

“In an interview, Judge Eaton said she understands the costume was insensitive and the photo was meant only to be seen by her close circle of friends. ‘People on my page know me, and I stand on my reputation. And people on my page know my husband.’ The judge said her clothes in the photo, which included a blazer and a pair of Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers, was meant to be an homage to an outfit frequently worn by Ms. Harris, and she described herself as a ‘liberal Democrat.’ ‘I’m not a white supremacist, and you can quote me on that,’ she said. ‘Actually, [the costume] was making fun of white supremacists'” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

KMOV: “An 8-year-old girl in Sullivan, Missouri is getting bombarded with phone calls at all hours of the day from people thinking they’re calling the Arizona COVID-19 vaccine hotline. ‘I had to turn off my phone because it kept waking me up in the middle of the night,’ Sophia Garcia said. Garcia used to live in the Phoenix area before her family moved, and her number is very close to the hotline number. ‘We just went through and deleted probably 30 to 40 phone calls,’ said Emily Lewis, the girl’s mother. Lewis said she offered to change her daughter’s number, but Garcia said it is so easy to remember she wants to keep it. ‘She was upset over the weekend, but now this morning right before school, she woke up and she’s like, ‘I’m going to change my voicemail.’ We’ll see if this helps,’ Lewis said. Garcia then changed her voicemail to give the actual hotline number.”

“Great spirit, but with Dominion voting machines and rigged election processes, you’re just engaging in the needed theater for single-party dictatorship. If you care about flipping a state, why didn’t you as the GOP actually put up a fight in California? Didn’t do anything about that, and then lost Nevada, Colorado, and now Arizona and GA. Trail of success there.”

– The current top comment on the Breitbart article “Exclusive – Republican Doug Collins Mulling Bid Against Democrat Raphael Warnock in Georgia” posted early Friday.

Politico: “Former President Donald Trump’s supporters are mobilizing to exact revenge on the 10 House Republicans who supported impeachment last week, thrusting the GOP into a civil war just as party leaders are trying to move on from the Trump era. Pro-Trump Republicans are racing to launch primary challenges. The former president’s donors are cutting off the Republican incumbents. And Trump’s political lieutenants are plotting how to unseat them. The unrest shows how Trump is all but certain to cast a shadow over the Republican Party long after he’s left the White House. Trump has split the GOP, pitting his loyalists against those who say he incited the Capitol Hill insurrection and want to expunge him from the party.”

“Whether the Trump-inspired primary challengers succeed is far from clear. Dislodging an incumbent is notoriously difficult, and Republican leaders are expected to move aggressively to protect their members. But the early activity illustrates the degree to which Trump’s staunch allies are determined to make his critics pay a price. ‘The stance taken by Liz was very contentious here in Wyoming,’ said Republican Bryan Miller, a retired Air Force officer expected to run against Rep. Liz Cheney, a House GOP leader who vocally supported Trump’s impeachment. ‘This isn’t going to be a passing thing that just goes away. It’s growing and growing and growing every day across the state. People are unhappy.'”

A new study by NPR found that the nearly 20% of those so far arrested for an attempted coup at the Capitol on January 6th were veterans of the United States military.

NPR compiled a list of more than 140 people arrested and facing charges relating to the domestic terrorist attack at the Capitol that left five people, including one Capitol Police officer, dead.  Twenty-seven of those, nearly 1 in 5, were once members of one of four branches of the military.  (None of them were from Space Force.)

By comparison, only 7% of US citizens have served or currently serve in the military, whose members are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

More than 39.4 million people watched the Biden inauguration Wednesday, about 4% more than the 38.35 million who watch the 2017 event which the Trump camp called the most watched inauguration in the history of everything, Variety reports.

CNN was the most-viewed network with 9.9 million people tuning in.  ABC, NBC, CBS and MSNBC each had between 6- and 7-million viewers.  Fox News had a paltry 2.74 million viewers.

Sean Spicer was unavailable for comment.

Nineteen-year-old Tre Brown stole $1 million from a Kroger grocery store in Duluth, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, over a two week period and went on a shopping spree for guns, clothes, shoes and a car, which he promptly totaled, the New York Times reports.

With the store compliance officer away, Brown processed more than 40 credit card refunds between $75 and $78,000.  Brown, who worked at the store’s fuel center, claimed that the returns were for lottery tickets.

He then went on a shopping spree that netted him a trove of high-end sneakers and clothes, as well as guns.  He also bought at least one car, a Camaro, which police report was totaled in an unspecified accident.

Police had no record on where the balance of the money is.  He was arrested for theft by taking and released on bail.  No word on if he used a credit card to pay bail.

People are losing it over Joe Biden. The people I’m talking about are mostly conservatives and Republicans who are watching with horror as the inauguration they happily thought Donald Trump was going to invoke the insurrection act and prevent ended up occurring. Their attitude is that any word uttered about the inauguration that doesn’t serve as an open denunciation of Biden is an implicit endorsement of Biden. Republicans and conservatives are eating their own. They’re lashing out at anyone they think isn’t openly seeking to destroy Biden – at Moscow Mitch for failing to stab Biden to death in the rotunda on Wednesday, or at Kevin McCarthy for not detonating a suicide bomb at the same occasion. This is madness and it must stop.

Now I’m going to ramble out several unconnected sentences to make this satire really hit home, since the rest of that stupid New York Post editorial from 2016 about ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ that I used for the first paragraph after having replaced all the nouns in kind of sucked. The fervid cancel culture on the right is insane. The Bubbublunski Dossier, a fake phony fraud document was foreign interference by China and Chairman Xi. The hateful rhetoric from the MAGA Proud Boy Oath Keeper QAnon White Nationalist Lives Matter mobs needs to stop immediately and those dickhead need to accept that Biden is their president. Biden Derangement Syndrome is a terrible affliction and the closet homosexual men who suffer from it should seek help.

A health department doctor in Harris County, Texas was fired and will be charged after stealing a vial of coronavirus vaccine, allegedly so he could inoculate his family, KTVT CBS-11 Dallas reports.

Dr. Hasan Gokal stole a vial that contained nine doses of the coronavirus vaccine in late December from a county vaccination site in Humble, Texas.  He told a coworker of his theft, which led to his firing and arrest.

“He abused his position to place his friends and family in line in front of people who had gone through the lawful process to be there,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said. “What he did was illegal and he’ll be held accountable under the law.”

He faces up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, on Day 2 of the Biden Administration, is continuing to block Democrats, who have a controlling ever-so-slight majority in the chamber, from actually taking control by threatening to filibuster the initial organizing rules package.

Because of McConnell’s intransigence, Republicans remain in control of the committees, even as the Senate is split 50-50, with Democratic Vice President the deciding vote in the chamber.

Not surprisingly, it’s an unprecedented move.  And also not surprisingly, McConnell is doing it while whining about the importance of “minority rights” in the Senate.  (And no, he’s not talking about the rights of non-white non-male persons.)

According to TheWeek, McConnell is demanding that the Senate preserve the filibuster in its current form so that Republicans can block any legislation that does not secure at least 60 votes in the Senate. 

https://twitter.com/dotjenna/status/1352444122540470273

NBC News: “U.S. Capitol Police are investigating a report that Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., tried to bring a gun onto the house floor on Thursday, a department spokesperson told NBC news. During a House vote on Thursday afternoon, Harris was stopped at security and then immediately turned around. He briefly huddled with Rep. John Katko, R-N.Y., by the elevators, and may have discussed the weapon with Katko, according to a report by HuffPost.”

“‘One security official present saw a firearm on the person of Rep. Harris and relayed that to his superiors,’ a Capitol official told NBC News. ‘To be clear, Rep. Harris did not enter the Floor.’ The metal detectors, which were ordered to be put in place by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., after the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.”