“An arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a national group representing the top law enforcement officers in their states, sent out robocalls encouraging people to march to the U.S. Capitol the day before the building was stormed by a pro-Trump mob. ‘At 1 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” said the voice on the recording, which was obtained by NBC News.”

“The calls, which did not advocate violence or suggest the building should be breached, was sent out by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, a fundraising arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association. The groups share funding, staff and office space in Washington, D.C. In a statement to NBC News, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who runs the fund, said the calls were sent out without his knowledge. ‘I was unaware of unauthorized decisions made by RLDF staff with regard to this week’s rally,’ said Marshall, who assumed his role Nov. 10. ‘Despite currently transitioning into my role as the newly elected chairman of RLDF, it is unacceptable that I was neither consulted about nor informed of those decisions'” – NBC News.

Politico: “President Donald Trump has many prized possessions. But few seemed to inspire as much personal joy as his Twitter feed. Trump routinely boasted of the social media bullhorn he possessed. He credited it with launching his political trajectory. And he used it as a tool to lacerate his foes. On Friday night, he lost it. And, then, he lost his mind.”

“The president is ‘ballistic,’ a senior administration official said after Twitter permanently took down his account, citing the possibility that it would be used in the final 12 days of Trump’s presidency to incite violence. The official said Trump was ‘scrambling to figure out what his options are.’ So too was much of the political universe, which has become bleary-eyed obsessive about Twitter these past four years as Trump used the medium to fire advisers, sink legislative initiatives, encourage social duress and, lastly, praise the scores of MAGA faithful, just days after hundreds of them violently ransacked the Capitol.”

• It so nice having a slow news week when you just sit back and relax.
• If Donald Trump doesn’t have a Twitter account, does he still have followers?
• In the melee of this week, the biggest thing that happened this week was the victories of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the Georgia Senate runoffs.  The Democratic majority in the Senate will provide for a smooth transition thanks to being able to confirm Biden’s nominations.  And it will lead to at least two years of smoother operation without Mitch McConnell blocking everything.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday”

Democratic California Congressman Eric Swalwell took a moment while appearing on “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC to thank another member of Congress who was appearing on the show, Mikie Sherrill, a New Jersey Democrat, for her help and leadership during Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol.

“Lawrence, real quickly, you have Mikie Sherrill, my colleague on,” Swalwell interjected after explaining potential presidential impeachment proceedings in the House.  “I want to say that having veterans in the Congress, like Mikie, they serve us well for the policy perspective they bring, but on Wednesday, when the floor was assaulted, they served us well because of the experience they have in the past in theatres of war.  They were able to help other colleagues put on their gas masks, not panic, find their ways out.  I’m so grateful that Mikie was there to assist with us that day.”

A US Naval Academy alumnae, Sherrill was a combat helicopter pilot flying  H3 Sea Kings.  She left the Navy in 2003 with the rank of Lieutenant Commander after ten years of service.

Sherrill is one of 77 military veterans serving in Congress this session.

The United States passed another grim milestone in the coronavirus pandemic that has swept across the country in the last year:  300,000 people were diagnosed with coronavirus in the last 24 hours, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

On Friday, 310,080 new cases were identified, according to the site, 11% higher than the previous daily high, set less than one week ago on January 2nd.  The seven day moving average hit a new high at 2,934.

The number of daily fatalities hit its fourth highest daily total, with 3,777 people dying from coronavirus on Friday.

Internet message board Reddit has blocked the subreddit r/DonaldTrump on Friday, another in a series of actions by internet social platforms to limit the ability of Trump followers to disseminate messages of hate and organize on their platforms, TheVerge reports.

Last year, Reddit deleted the subreddit r/The_Donald after it was being used to propagate disinformation about the elections.  In this case, Reddit said it shut down r/DonaldTrump after moderators of the subreddit were repeatedly warned to delete posts inciting violence and insurrection, but refused to do so.

“Reddit’s site-wide policies prohibit content that promotes hate, or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals. In accordance with this, we have been proactively reaching out to moderators to remind them of our policies and to offer support or resources as needed,” a Reddit spokesperson tells The Verge. “We have also taken action to ban the community r/donaldtrump given repeated policy violations in recent days regarding the violence at the US Capitol.”

✔️ https://t.co/lQmZvooFYW

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 9, 2021

“I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me – and YOU, the 75,000,000 great…patriots who voted for me. Twitter may be a private company, but without the government’s gift of Section 230 they would not exist for long. I predicted this would happen. We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we…also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED! Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH. They are all about promoting a Radical Left platform where some of the most vicious people in the world are allowed to speak freely…”

…is as far as I could get before the mods nuked it. Unfortunately I was unable to take a screenshot before I refreshed the page. See the deletions here.

Axios: “Google has pulled Parler, a social media app for conservatives and far-right extremists, from its app store following the company’s role in the deadly U.S. Capitol siege this week. ‘In order to protect user safety on Google Play, our longstanding policies require that apps displaying user-generated content have moderation policies and enforcement that removes egregious content like posts that incite violence,’ José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson said.”

Silencing people, not to mention the President of the US, is what happens in China not our country. #Unbelievable

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) January 8, 2021

Just a reminder that the President of the United States still has the official White House Twitter account, the entire White House Communications team, and the White House Press Corps that can disseminate Trump’s messages. Deleting his Twitter account simply means he can’t whip off thoughtless missives when he’s perturbed.

We are living Orwell’s 1984. Free-speech no longer exists in America. It died with big tech and what’s left is only there for a chosen few.

This is absolute insanity! https://t.co/s2z8ymFsLX

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 9, 2021

Parler’s feed is failing to load as of 7:00 EST Friday. Could be the result of a mass exodus from Twitter in response to Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter.

…or just poor system architecture. Parler’s production value is noticeably shittier than Twitter’s.

Yes. This is for real. Five years and tens of thousands of outrages hidden behind an arbitrary policy of “World Leader Significance” or whatever the fuck it was. Trump is gone from Twitter.

Said Twitter in a blog post explaining the move: “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them – specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter – we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence. In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action. Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open. However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement.”

Reuters: “Being tall is the giraffe’s competitive advantage, giving it the pick of leaves from the tallest trees, so scientists were stunned to find two giraffe dwarves on different sides of Africa. ‘It’s fascinating what our researchers out in the field found’ Julian Fennessy, co-founder of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, told Reuters in a videocall on Friday. ‘We were very surprised.’ Most giraffes grow to 15 – 20 feet, but in 2018, scientists working with the foundation discovered an 8 1/2-foot giraffe in Namibia. Three years earlier, they had also found a 9-foot 3-inch giraffe in a Ugandan wildlife park. They published their findings in the British Medical Journal at the end of last month. In both cases, the giraffes had the standard long necks but short, stumpy legs, the paper said. Skeletal dysplasia, the medical name for the condition, affects humans and domesticated animals, but the paper said it was rare to see in wild animals.

Apple has given Parler–the social media platform that has become the favored site for conservative, extremists and insurrectionists–that it must implement a comprehensive moderation policy to root out threats of violence and hate speech within the next 24 hours or it will be expelled from its App store, Buzzfeed News reports.

“We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property,” Apple wrote to Parler. “The app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.”

Questioning her future with the Republican Party, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski said Donald Trump should resign from the presidency immediately for his role in stoking domestic terrorism, the Anchorage Daily News reports.

“I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage,” Murkowski said in an interview.  “I think he should leave. He said he’s not going to show up. He’s not going to appear at the inauguration. He hasn’t been focused on what is going on with COVID. He’s either been golfing or he’s been inside the Oval Office fuming and throwing every single person who has been loyal and faithful to him under the bus, starting with the vice president. He doesn’t want to stay there. He only wants to stay there for the title. He only wants to stay there for his ego. He needs to get out. He needs to do the good thing, but I don’t think he’s capable of doing a good thing,”

Murkowski also questioned her own role within the Republican Party, given that Republicans have proven themselves to be a lot dedicated to Trump, not conservative ideals. 

ABC News reports that Democrats will present articles of impeachment against Donald Trump on the floor of the House on Monday, citing Trump for “incitement of insurrection” for his role in the coup attempt by his followers on Wednesday.

The articles will cite Trump “willfully inciting violence against the government of the United States” by firing up a crowd to take violent action against the Capitol.  By his words, Trump “encouraged—and foreseeably resulted in—imminent lawless action at the Capitol.”

During a lengthy conference call with members of the Democratic caucus, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi reportedly said “The president chose to be an insurrectionist.”

The Atlantic: “Over the past two days, Trump loyalists have been bickering online over whether to take credit for and celebrate their most dramatic action yet, or distance themselves from the scene by calling up familiar conspiracy theories to explain it away. Some may genuinely believe, as they say, that paid ‘crisis actors’ are responsible. Many don’t seem to know what they believe, or what is most savvy to present, and pivot from post to post. Still others, like Gray, are consistently frustrated and outraged that anybody on their side wouldn’t be proud of what happened Wednesday afternoon. ‘The blue-check conservatives, all the popular ones, put ‘1776’ in their bios and tweet about how it’s time for patriots to stand up and fight,’ he told me. ‘Then they turn around and condemn patriots doing exactly that.'”

“The coalition, in other words, is experiencing a schism – and you can watch it on Twitter, or by flipping through Instagram Stories. As soon as #StopTheSteal went offline in a serious, dangerous way, everyone who had been posting about it had to choose a side, or a reality. Broadly, the Republican establishment and its voters have had to grapple with whether they want to continue claiming the party’s radical flank. Wednesday ‘was probably the most visceral experience of watching a political party fracture,’ says Joan Donovan, the research director at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. ‘It seems to me that we’re in the midst of watching MAGA become its own movement.'”

“President-elect Biden has just compared me and another Republican Senator to Nazis. You read that correctly. Think about that for a moment. Let it sink in. Because I raised questions in the format prescribed by the laws of the tinged States about the way elections were conducted in the state of Pennsylvania, lust as Democrats did about ether states in 2001, 2005, and 2017, he is calling me a Nazi. This is undignified, immature, and intemperate behavior from the President-elect. It is utterly shameful. He should act like a dignified adult and retract these sick comments. And every Democrat member of congress should be asked to disavow these disgusting comments” – Statement from Josh Hawley bitching about Biden ripping him a new one.