With increasing accounts of members of the military and police being involved with the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, the FBI is taking extreme precautions by running extensive background checks on members of the National Guard who will be in Washington, DC to secure the city during the inauguration on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports.

More than 25,000 National Guard troops, along with local police and federal law enforcement officers, will be part of the security at the Biden-Harris inauguration, and the FBI is vetting each one of them.

The concerns spring from an increasing amount of chatter federal officials have reported online about potential violence around the inaugural, a result of the unrest stoked by Donald Trump and conspiracy theorists who falsely believe the election was fraudulent, with Trump being the actual winner.

Vanderbilt place kicker Sarah Fuller, the first woman to score points in a Power Five conference football game, will attend the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on Wednesday, Politico reports.

“It’s an honor to be invited to participate in one of America’s greatest traditions,” Fuller posted on Twitter Sunday.  “This historic inauguration is especially meaningful for American women and girls. The glass ceilings are breaking.”

With DC in lockdown due to domestic terrorist threats, the Biden-Harris inaugural will have a small audience of invited guests for the historic event:  Harris will become the first woman elected to an executive branch position in US history.

“The Blue Demon has a long career as a professional in wrestling, the ring has always been his work scene and now he is looking to combine his career as a wrestler to seek to be mayor of Gustavo A. Madero. ‘My party is called progressive social networks, I am trying to become mayor of the GAM’, said Blue Demon about his candidacy.”

“In an interview with Gustavo Adolfo Infante on his YouTube program, he interviewed Blue Demon and asked him about his candidacy and what he would focus on if he were the mayoral winner: ‘I am going to focus on education, security and economics.’ Blue Demon has a long career as a professional wrestler and now he is looking to combine his career as a wrestler in his campaign for mayor of Gustavo A. Madero. If he wins, Blue Demon would not have to take off his mask because he would only have to be unmasked in front of the authorities, whom would also not reveal his real name” – Sopitas.com, translated by Google and edited for clarity.

President-elect Joe Biden will use an executive action to cancel the permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, according to CBC News.

On a briefing note circulated to key stakeholders over the weekend, the words “Rescind Keystone XL pipeline permit” were at the top of the list, CBC News reports.  Chief of Staff-designate Ron Klain released a list of priorities for Biden, but the Keystone Pipeline was not mentioned among them.

The Keystone pipeline already operates, running through six Midwestern states and ending in Port Arthur, Texas.  It allows Canadian oil to reach Texas refineries without incurring Canadian taxes or US tariffs, due to the Gulf Coast oil refineries being a designated Foreign Trade Zone.  This increases the profitability of the oil for petroleum companies.

The Trump Administration ordered the release of a Iranian woman who killed an American civilian advisor in Afghanistan in 2012 as part of its attempt to secure a peace agreement with the Taliban, the New York Times reports.

Nargis Mohammad Hasan had been in an Afghan jail since she killed the civilian contractor, Joseph Griffin, 49, of Mansfield, Georgia, in a “blue on green” murder at a US military base–Hasan was an Afghani police officer at the time of the murder.  She didn’t claim to be a member of the Taliban, nor did the Taliban acknowledge her as a member

But for some reason, she was released from jail this past fall at the Taliban’s request as the Trump Administration sought to gain a diplomatic victory in the run up to the November US presidential elections.

The LauncherOne rocket, Virgin Orbit’s bid into the aerospace field, reached orbit for the first time today and distributed its payload of nine CubeSats, tiny satellites that will orbit the Earth, the Associated Press reports.

This was Virgin Orbit’s second attempt with the LauncherOne, a 70-foot two-stage rocket that doesn’t launch like a conventional space vehicle, but instead is released by a 747 in-flight and then aims for the atmosphere.

Virgin’s was the first of two launches by private companies on Sunday:   Rocket Lab was expected to launch its Electron rocket from its New Zealand launch site.  A conventional launch rocket, this will be the Rocket Lab system’s 18th launch.

Ben Collins: “Over the last few years, I kept in touch with some QAnon supporters through direct messages, checking in on them to see if they’d ever come out of it when their next doomsday came and went. They’d typically first message me calling me a Satanic pedophile. I’d ignore it and ask questions. Usually they would draw hard lines. A big one was D5, which everyone thought would be mass arrests on December 5th two years ago. Didn’t happen, didn’t matter. It’s about belief, anticipation, an advent calendar. One day soon, their problems would be fixed. I would check in the week after the failed doomsdays. They’d point to a Q post like scripture, and say some ridiculous event proved it was still happening. An earthquake somewhere, a service interruption on Gmail. I learned something: these people don’t want to be humiliated.”

“So many Q people have staked their entire identities on this. There are no real-life happy endings with QAnon, especially true believers. Just constant embarrassment and almost surgical extrication from friends or family. So they retreat back to Q forums and pray for executions. There are a lot of QAnon influencers saying the 20th is their last stand, that if Biden is inaugurated they’ll admit they’ve been conned. But they won’t. They’ll equivocate and buck-pass. They’ll find secret patterns in his speech and say he was secretly arrested. It’ll continue. QAnon is a deeply pathetic and embarrassing thing to believe. For believers, there is safety from that embarrassment in increasingly volatile and toxic online communities. Getting people out of it safely is going to be very hard, but important. I’d reach back out to some of those Q people, but they’re banned [from Twitter] now. They grew to like me. I wasn’t a Satanic, blood-drinking pedophile, but I was covering for them, they thought, and they wanted to save me. Because they think they’re the good guys.”

The webpage for Parler, the controversial social media app favored by conservatives, right-wing radicals and other insurrectionists, is back up online with a simple homepage, CNN reports.

According to a WHOIS search, Parler is now being hosted by Epik, the same service which hosts Gab, 8chan and other services that do little to monitor the content posted by users and are therefore the home to people supporting violence and criminal activity.

The new Parler homepage is a static page featuring a fake post from John Matze, the CEO of Parler.  “Hello world, is this thing on?” it reads.  It also has a statement declaring the site had “technical difficulties.”

“Just a month before 13 men were charged by state and federal law enforcement for a far-right plot to allegedly kidnap and execute Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R-Clarklake) had a sitdown conversation with leaders of three Michigan-based militias. ‘I was in Lansing and members – the leaders, the so-called leaders – of three of the groups met in my office and we talked about their messaging, their purpose, what they are trying to accomplish and how they could improve their message,’ he told JTV host Bart Hawley in an interview on Sept. 10. ‘It was very fascinating and they’re not uniquely different than you and I. They bleed red, white and blue, but they feel like they are not being heard.’ He claimed in the interview that Michigan State Police assisted him identifying the militia leaders and that such a meeting ‘has never been done before.’ A spokesperson for Shirkey did not respond to a request for comment” – Michigan Advance.

Politico: “Small groups of right-wing protesters – some of them carrying rifles – gathered outside heavily fortified statehouses around the country Sunday as National Guard troops and police kept watch to prevent a repeat of the violence that erupted at the U.S. Capitol. There were no immediate reports of any clashes. Security was stepped up in recent days after the FBI warned of the potential for armed protests in Washington and at all 50 state capitol buildings ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday. A few people demonstrated in some capital cities, with crowds of only a dozen or two, while streets in many other places remained empty.”

“Some protesters said they supported President Donald Trump. But others said they weren’t backing Trump and had instead come to voice their support for gun rights or oppose government overreach. Some statehouses were surrounded by new protective fences, had boarded-up windows and were patrolled by extra police. Legislatures generally were not in session over the weekend. At the Ohio Statehouse on Sunday, about two dozen people, including several carrying long guns, protested outside under the watchful eyes of state troopers before dispersing as it began to snow. The roughly 20 protesters who showed up at Michigan’s Capitol, including some who were armed, were significantly outnumbered by law enforcement officers and media. At Oregon’s Capitol, fewer than a dozen men wearing military-style outfits, black ski masks and helmets stood nearby with semiautomatic weapons slung across their bodies. Some had upside-down American flags and signs reading such things as ‘Disarm the government.'”

“Today, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene released the following statement after her personal Twitter account was suspended for 12 hours: ‘Just days after the Silicon Valley Cartel launched a multi-front attack to chill free speech in America by deplatforming President Donald Trump and purging an unknown number of conservatives, Twitter has decided to suspend my personal account without explanation. The borderline monopolistic stranglehold a few Big Tech companies have on the American political discourse is out of control.'”

“If a conservative dares to utter a political opinion that is deemed unapproved by the internet police they are now subject to false accusations of ‘inciting violence’ simply for having an conservative view. Congress must act, and act swiftly, to protect free speech in America. Conservative Americans shouldn’t be afraid to speak their mind. They shouldn’t have to fear being cancelled by American corporations where they work, do business, and use services. They shouldn’t be scared into submission by Socialists who want to end their way of life. And with Big Tech silencing them, they literally can’t be heard” – Statement from Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

AP: “Members of President Donald Trump’s failed presidential campaign played key roles in orchestrating the Washington rally that spawned a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to an Associated Press review of records, undercutting claims the event was the brainchild of the president’s grassroots supporters. A pro-Trump nonprofit group called Women for America First hosted the ‘Save America Rally’ on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse, an oval-shaped, federally owned patch of land near the White House. But an attachment to the National Park Service public gathering permit granted to the group lists more than half a dozen people in staff positions for the event who just weeks earlier had been paid thousands of dollars by Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. Other staff scheduled to be ‘on site’ during the demonstration have close ties to the White House.”

“Since the siege, several of them have scrambled to distance themselves from the rally. The riot at the Capitol, incited by Trump’s comments before and during his speech at the Ellipse, has led to a reckoning unprecedented in American history. The president told the crowd to march to the Capitol and that ‘you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.’ Women for America First, which applied for and received the Park Service permit, did not respond to messages seeking comment about how the event was financed and about the Trump campaign’s involvement. The rally drew tens of thousands of people. In a statement, the president’s reelection campaign said it ‘did not organize, operate or finance the event.’ No campaign staff members were involved in the organization or operation of the rally, according to the statement. It said that if any former employees or independent contractors for the campaign took part, ‘they did not do so at the direction of the Trump campaign.’ At least one was working for the Trump campaign this month. Megan Powers was listed as one of two operations managers for the Jan. 6 event, and her LinkedIn profile says she was the Trump campaign’s director of operations into January 2021. She did not respond to a message seeking comment.”

“Netanyahu’s rival Gideon Sa’ar hired Lincoln Project founders Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens and Reed Galen in his effort to unseat the prime minister in the March election” reports The Forward’s Jacob Kornbluh, which is pretty goddamned hilarious that this Sa’ar guy was impressed enough by LP’s contributions to Trump’s defeat that he wants them to replicate it for Netanyahu.

“Russian opposition leader and Vladimir Putin critic Alexei Navalny has been detained by police after returning to Moscow five months after being poisoned by a nerve agent” – The Independent.

Senator Ben Sasse, The Atlantic: “The newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. She once ranted that ‘there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.’ During her campaign, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a choice: disavow her campaign and potentially lose a Republican seat, or welcome her into his caucus and try to keep a lid on her ludicrous ideas. McCarthy failed the leadership test and sat on the sidelines. Now in Congress, Greene isn’t going to just back McCarthy as leader and stay quiet. She’s already announced plans to try to impeach Joe Biden on his first full day as president. She’ll keep making fools out of herself, her constituents, and the Republican Party. If the GOP is to have a future outside the fever dreams of internet trolls, we have to call out falsehoods and conspiracy theories unequivocally. We have to repudiate people who peddle those lies.”

Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller is making an 11th hour attempt to install a former White House official to a career position as the top lawyer for the National Security Agency, a move national security experts call a blatant attempt to policize a top position, the Washington Post reports.

Miller ordered the Director of the NSA Paul Nakasone to install Michael Ellis to the position of NSA’s General Counsel by 6 p.m. Saturday.  Nakasone did not make the appointment and is said to be against Ellis taking the position.

Ellis was nominated for the position by Pentagon General Counsel Paul C. Ney Jr. in November.  He has not taken the position yet because he’s failed to take a required polygraph and fulfilled other administrative requirements.

Ellis, who was once Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Deputy Legal Advisor to the National Security Council, was reported by the New York Times to have given White House security documents to then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Republican Devin Nunes.  Prior to joining the White House, he had been Nunes’s legal counsel.

Rudy Giuliani, the Trump’s lawyer whom the Trump told aides not to pay, says that he’s working on a defense for Trump’s impeachment that relies on a claim that Trump’s debunked statements about voter fraud were actually true, ABC News reports.

Various media outlet have reported that Trump is having problems finding lawyer to defend him in his upcoming Senate impeachment trial, so Giuliani and Alan Dershowitz will reportedly be leading the effort.

Giuliani also spoke at the January 6th rally that precipitated the coup attempt at the Capitol, saying that the sides should have “trial by combat” to determine the future of the nation.