-Barack Obama on Big Lying Republicans

The window of plausible deniability is closing on the most powerful Republicans in the country over their involvement in the attempted coup and violent insurrection. Merrick Garland, your office has been on line one for nine months.
 

• The Washington Post ran an exposé over the weekend about the so-called “command center” Trump loyalists led by Rudy Giuliani set up at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, just down the street from the White House. In the days leading up to the Capitol riot, it served as the central organizing hub for efforts to strongarm GOP state officials into overturning their election results, and creating the strategy, outlined in the infamous Eastman memo, whereby Vice President Mike Pence would refuse to certify Joe Biden’s victory. These plotters spent tens of thousands of dollars on hotel rooms, which they billed to the Trump campaign.
   
• Many of the same Trump allies and elected officials who helped organize, finance, and advance the procedural planning for the failed coup were also intimately involved in planning the “Stop the Steal” rally outside the White House on January 6. In an explosive new report, Rolling Stone sources involved in the planning and organizing of that rally say they participated in “dozens” of planning briefings with GOP members of Congress and their staffs, and that they were even bribed with promises of “blanket pardons.” They are reportedly prepared to testify about it all to the January 6 committee.
   
• If there’s a fig leaf left for the seditious nethers of the Trump world, it’s the artificial claim that they couldn’t possibly have known a splinter faction of rallygoers would get violent. But that excuse seems to be falling apart, too. On January 5, Steve Bannon said “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow” and has just been referred to the Justice Department for defying a congressional subpoena for testimony about how much he and Donald Trump knew about plans for January 6. Furthermore, the Rolling Stone sources say senior administration officials, including Mark Meadows, had opportunities to prevent the mob at the Capitol from becoming violent, but did not—and we can all remember Trump and others reacting with glee in real time to footage of the violence.

As a fuller picture of the last insurrection comes into focus, so does planning for the next one, unfortunately.
 

• Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has appointed a pro-insurrection lawyer as Texas’s secretary of state. John Scott represented Trump in a lawsuit aimed at overturning Pennsylvania’s election results. Under a recent order from Abbott (who in turn took orders from Trump) Scott will oversee another sham audit/propaganda blitz in the state, which Trump won by over five points, and (more importantly) will also oversee draconian new voter-suppression laws when voters head to the polls for next year’s midterms.
   
• The erosion of voting rights, and the steady march of election-subversion tactics, understandably has Democratic voters in GOP-run swing states spooked. In Georgia, activists are daunted by the likelihood that Democrats in Congress won’t pass democracy-protection legislation, and will thus have to “out-organize” voter suppression. Against that backdrop, President Biden endorsed changing filibuster rules to advance the Freedom to Vote Act for the first time last week.

Check out the first episode of Crooked’s new weekly series Offline with Jon Favreau! Offline examines society’s online habits, looks inward and reaches for hopeful ways we can regain control over our hyperconnected world. This week, Jia Tolentino, New Yorker staff writer and author of Trick Mirror, joins to discuss how the internet has turned life into an endless performance, why that makes politics hard and virtue signaling easy, and what being online during the pandemic has done to our collective psyche. To listen, follow along on the Pod Save America feed. 

That foghorn you hear blaring from the Almost Heaven can mean only one thing: We have more vague updates on the state of the Build Back Better act. Admiral Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has reportedly insisted on scaling back the bill’s paid-leave proposal, isn’t a fan of its effort to complete the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, and also doesn’t want to add dental and vision coverage to Medicare. In better news, though, through her weird objections to increasing high-end corporate and individual tax rates, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has reportedly opened the door to a tax on billionaire assets, which would be a hilarious and awesome place for her to land after taking dictation from No Labels for months. President Biden wants a public agreement on the final deal by week’s end, so he doesn’t show up to next week’s climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland empty-handed, and Manchin says a framework could be in place by then.

• Jared Kushner, who helped cover up the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, stands to receive $2 billion from the Saudi regime to fund his private-equity firm. 
   
• The Biden administration says it doesn’t have the legal authority to make Moderna’s vaccine blueprint public, so that other countries can manufacture it.
   
• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has offered to pay insubordinate police officers who lost their jobs in other states for defying vaccine mandates $5,000 to relocate to Florida where they can remain unvaccinated in all their interactions with civilians.
   
• Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has reiterated her demand for a DOJ investigation of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, where it’s apparently common for deputies to form “cliques” that “encourage violence,” otherwise known as gangs. 
   
• The Sudanese military has dissolved the country’s government and placed its political leaders under arrest; the U.S. responded to the coup by pausing $750 million in assistance, but has stopped short of calling it a coup.
   
• Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has signed the state-GOP’s redistricting bill and will now face multiple lawsuits for imposing an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 
   
• Liberty University threatened students who reported being raped with punishment, and when the school’s communications director tried to get to the bottom of it in response to press inquiries, her bosses fired her. 
   
• Here are two stories about how extremely online right-wingers have ruined their Montana communities.
   
• New rhythmic lemurs just dropped. 

Multiple news outlets simultaneously combed through the full trove of The Facebook Papers—official company documents disclosed by whistleblower Frances Haugen—and unlike previous glimpses into Facebook’s corporate culture, these portray a more nuanced picture of a big company trying to maximize the good it does in the world and minimiz-hahaha, just messin’ with ya! It’s all completely awful. There’s much more than summarized below, but for starters:

Here’s a story about how Facebook created a generic conservative persona to test where the algorithm would lead her, then said nothing when their experiment confirmed it quickly flooded her feed with conspiracy theories, hate speech, and other content that violated the company’s own rules. Here’s a story about how Facebook lifted limits on  election-related misinformation after November, contributing to the spread of lies that culminated in the January 6 insurrection; and about how the company has known how to reduce disinformation and violence incitement but has frequently chosen not to do so. Here’s a story about how Mark Zuckerberg overruled staffers who wanted to create a Spanish-language voting-information resource for WhatsApp users, because he thought it would look partisan. Here’s a story about how, despite all the problems Facebook has caused American society, the damage it’s done to other countries is far, far worse. And, to put a fine point on that, here’s a story about how Apple threatened to remove Facebook from the app store, based on evidence that traffickers in the Middle East used the service to buy and sell Filipina maids; Facebook got Apple to relent by promising to rein in the activity, but then did basically nothing about it.

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Moderna says its coronavirus vaccine produces a strong immune response in children aged 6-11.

Astronomers have for the first time detected what they think is a planet outside the Milky Way galaxy, and also directly observed the youngest planet they’ve ever discovered.

President Obama stumped for Terry McAuliffe and it was pretty good. 

Officials in New York have sealed 200,000 marijuana convictions and are in the process of expunging hundreds of thousands more.