Are you familiar with the phrase Fuck Around and Find Out?
Fuck Around and Find Out is a catchphrase warning that taking negative steps will result in unwanted consequences.
Where did it start? Some people say they remember if from the military in the 80s. Others say that it was commonly said by Black people in the South in the 70s. I don’t know where it came from, but the meaning of it is that if you take unwise, illegal, stupid, and hedonistic actions, you will eventually find out why those actions were a bad move.
Refusing to wear a mask and engage in safe behaviors is Fuck Around. Ending up on a ventilator is Find Out.
Partying all night, every night in college is Fuck Around. Failing out at the end of the year is Find Out.
You get it.
Sometimes (often) Find Out doesn’t come right away. You can Fuck Around by eating crappy food and not exercising for years and years before your heart gives out (Find Out).
But Find Out is usually out there — just biding its time.
Trump and his evil henchmen did some truly awful Fuck Around leading up to (and including 1/6) and my friends, we are finally, FINALLY, at the start of Find Out.
And it is great to be here.
So far, these hearings have exceeded my expectations. The committee is clearly showing a lot of illegal activity and the DOJ is clearly interested and also on the case.
It is pretty clearly showing crimes. Eastman has very very clearly committed some super serious crimes
and remember HE DID THIS WITH TRUMP. This will not just bite Eastman in the ass.
The Jan. 6 select committee makes a criminal referral — its own way
The Jan. 6 select committee made its most forceful case Thursday that Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election was more than an affront to the democratic process — it was a crime.
For all the panel’s public quibbling over whether to vote on referring Trump to the Justice Department for a possible criminal case, members did it their own way. They used Thursday’s public hearing to present what they see as some of their most compelling evidence and thereby mount a case, with Attorney General Merrick Garland watching, that Trump broke the law in his effort to make former Vice President Mike Pence single-handedly overturn the election.
“It was clear that the president was upset with the vice president not agreeing to do something that was clearly illegal, and so he wanted to put as much pressure on Mike Pence as he could,” committee chair Bennie Thompson told reporters Thursday.
“What the president wanted the vice president to do was not just wrong. It was illegal and unconstitutional,” panel vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said.
Their case came into sharp relief Thursday, when the panel presented its evidence in a clear chronology.
and the DOJ is on it
There was law breaking
Trump was told Eastman’s plan was illegal – but tried it anyway
Eastman wouldn’t take no for an answer on overturning the election
Eastman emailed Giuliani about receiving a presidential pardon after January 6
The Jan. 6 hearing’s devastating case against Trump’s co-conspirator
Thursday’s hearing of the select committee investigating the insurrection took us inside the White House in the lead up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and the star was John Eastman, author of the blueprint for Donald Trump’s effort to overthrow the 2020 election.
The committee and witnesses offered a devastating case against Eastman, one that both reinforced what was already known and offered new information that made the president and his pet lawyer’s conduct look even worse — and perhaps criminal.
But as you ponder the case against Eastman, remember this: Eastman functioned as Trump’s agent throughout. Trump directly instructed his vice president, Mike Pence, to heed to Eastman’s advice, and to carry out his scheme.
and it isn’t just trump and eastman...
but Eastman is key...
One thing that the hearings are doing is encouraging people to come forward with MORE information
Why?
After the committee’s third public hearing today, we can see why. The window for getting onto the good side of the investigation by cooperating with it is closing, and the story the congress members are laying out makes it clear that those sticking with Trump are quite likely in legal trouble.
In interviews with Pence’s former counsel Greg Jacob, as well as retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, formerly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the committee established that this plan, advanced by lawyer John Eastman, was illegal. Indeed, Eastman himself called it illegal, first at length in October 2020, and then in both written and verbal admissions after the election. And the committee established that Eastman, as well as others, told Trump the plan was illegal.
Luttig is such a giant in conservative legal circles that he was talked of for the Supreme Court in place of Samuel Alito, and his words bear extraordinary weight. Luttig hammered home that Trump’s scheme was an attempt to overturn the rule of law and to destroy our democracy. And, he warned, the danger is not over. Trump and his supporters remain “a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
Luttig urged Americans to remember that the fate of our democracy is in our hands and to reject the fever dreams of the Trump Republicans in favor of “a new vision, new truths, new values, new principles, new beliefs, new hopes and dreams that hopefully could once again bind our divided nation together into the more perfect union that ‘We the People’ originally ordained and established it to be.”
“The time has come,” Luttig wrote, “for us to decide whether we allow this war over our democracy to be prosecuted to its catastrophic end or whether we ourselves demand the immediate suspension of this war and insist on peace instead. We must make this decision because our political leaders are unwilling and unable, even as they recklessly prosecute this war in our name.”
Remember, the DOJ is on this
and on Trump
and trump can’t pretend that he didn’t know this was illegal because we have evidence of people telling him that again and again.
Trump aides told him that using Pence to overturn election was illegal
President Donald Trump and his aides knew that it was not legal for his vice president, Mike Pence, to attempt to thwart Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021, but they nonetheless mounted an unrelenting pressure campaign that did not abate even after rioters stormed the Capitol and threatened Pence’s life, according to new evidence presented Thursday by the House committee investigating the attack.
Leading the campaign was Trump lawyer John Eastman, who over the two days before Jan. 6 spoke repeatedly with top Pence aides about whether the vice president would either reject outright Biden’s winning electoral college count or suspend the day’s proceedings to allow seven contested states to reexamine their popular votes, witnesses said.
Committee members made the case not only that Trump and his advisers knew that Pence did not have the power to block Biden’s victory, but that their public statements to the contrary incited the rioters who invaded the Capitol that day, some of them chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” as they walked past a mock gallows erected outside the building.
and don’t worry about this:
An ‘I-believed-my-own-lies’ defense won’t work for Trump
On June 13, the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6 heard testimony devastating to Donald Trump. It came from many former Trump allies, including former Attorney General William Barr.
Barr testified that Trump “wasn’t listening” when Barr explained that Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud were “bullshit.” Barr said there was “no indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” and mused: “I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with, become detached from reality.”
Some have expressed the idea that such testimony might support a credible defense for Trump to any potential criminal charges — because he was deluded enough to believe his own BS. According to this misguided theory, Trump lacked the “criminal intent” necessary for conviction because he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong.
Incorrect. The law distinguishes between refusing to accept inconvenient truth to get your way and mental disturbance sufficient to excuse illegality, between adopting strategic blindness and not knowing your facts from a hole in the ground.
Judges commonly instruct juries that “willful blindness” to facts in front of you establishes criminal intent. A drug courier handsomely paid to carry a closed package into the United States doesn’t get off the hook by saying, “I never looked inside it.”
what we need to do is make sure ALL OF THEM have to answer for this.
No Republican candidate should be able to escape the Jan. 6 hearings
Not a single Republican running for office this November should be able to escape the revelations of the House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation.
a lot of Republican candidates will have to face some uncomfortable questions. Let’s start with the flock of Senate candidates spouting the “big lie.” They include Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Adam Laxalt in Nevada and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. The media and Democratic opponents should demand answers to questions such as:
- Do you regret peddling a lie about elections that has since been entirely debunked?
- If no, why do you support a lie that every court and election audit has rejected and that almost everyone in the Trump White House acknowledged was nonsense?
- If you believed the loony claims advanced by a few Trump officials, how are voters supposed to trust you with important decisions?
- Are you a patsy for conspiracy theories? Or are you knowingly lying to the public?
These sorts of questions are especially important in races for state-level positions that oversee elections.
On one level, this is about the GOP’s war on democracy and its refusal to accept defeat and support the peaceful transfer of power. But more fundamentally, it is about these Republicans’ willingness to lie — or be taken in by lies — if it suits their career ambitions. Democrats should mince no words: Such people should not hold public office.
Again, just in case you missed it, this is NOT good for trump
And more is coming
Other Good News
Sonia Sotomayor Reassures Liberals As Conservative Decisions Loom
she did perhaps offer some reassurance to the crowd — ahead of what is expected to be a devastating series of decisions for progressives coming in June — that ultimately, “the arc of history bends toward justice.”
In response to a question about rapidly declining public trust in the Supreme Court, Sotomayor said that institutions like the court are made up of human beings and that it is human nature to “make mistakes.”
One “mistake” she raised was the 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford where the court found that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” therefore denying them the rights and privileges of citizenship throughout the entire United States.
The Dred Scott decision is widely agreed to be among the worst decisions issued by the Supreme Court in its history, both for its racism, inaccurate history and poor legal reasoning. But, as Sotomayor noted, the decision was ultimately overturned by the adoption of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. And even though the racist logic continued in the court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision upholding racial segregation, that, too, was overturned in the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
“When we, as institutions, have made mistakes,” Sotomayor said. “Other parts of the branches [of government]” and “the people have worked to make change.”
“Dred Scott lost his 11-year battle for freedom,” she said. And yet, with the decision in Brown, “He won the war.”
“That’s why I think we have to have continuing faith in our court system, in our system of government,” she added, noting that that the system allows for constitutional amendments and legislation to address outcomes like Dred Scott.
That is why “I truly believe in the magical words, ‘the arc of the universe bends towards justice,’” she said.
Bipartisan bill aims to curb foreign influence in U.S. democracy
A House bill introduced Thursday seeks to curb foreign influence in U.S. democracy by imposing a lifetime ban on members of Congress, senior military leaders and senior executive branch officials from lobbying for a foreign government or political party, among other measures.
The legislation would also compel tax-exempt groups, including think tanks, to disclose high-dollar donations and gifts from foreign powers and require political campaigns to verify that donors have a valid U.S. address, using the three-digit CVV code on the back of credit cards.
The bill has bipartisan backing. Its lead sponsor is Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat and Marine veteran from a conservative-leaning district in Maine, who said one of the chief problems with the U.S. political system is that “corruption is either completely legal or punished with slaps on the wrist.”
Biden signs Asian American Pacific Islander museum commission into law
President Joe Biden signed a law Monday that lays the foundation for a National Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture.
“Today, I’m honored to sign into law something that is long overdue — the National Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture, here in Washington, D.C.,” Biden said.
The law creates the Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture Act, which will research and submit a plan that would establish a museum dedicated to the community in Washington, D.C.
A glimmer of hope for polar bears
But there is a very small glimmer of hope for these iconic predators, revealed today in a study published in the journal Science. It finds that a newly documented population of polar bears in Greenland seems to be surviving without much sea ice for most of the year. Instead of hunting only on ice that forms in the sea, these bears are also using ice that breaks off of glaciers that flow into fjords from land, which is available year-round. Not many studies have documented this behavior before.
The authors suggest that in a warming world, regions with glacial ice might be strongholds for the species, helping them hang on.
FDA authorizes Covid-19 vaccines for younger children
The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines are now authorized for emergency use in young children. The US Food and Drug Administration expanded the authorizations for the vaccines Friday to include children as young as 6 months.
The White House has said vaccinations for younger children may begin next week.
Biden’s rousing speech before the AFL-CIO is exactly the message Democrats need
President Biden and his White House staff have received a lot of criticism lately, much of it from Democrats nervous that his message isn’t breaking through or that he isn’t hard enough on Republicans. Biden must have heard the complaints.
At a rousing speech before the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia on Tuesday, he sounded like he used to as vice president and on the campaign trail when he inhabited the persona of “Joe from Scranton.” His delivery was punchier and at times angrier than usual. He mocked and knocked Republicans’ plutocratic economics. And he made a stronger-than-usual case that Republicans are blocking economic progress. He was rewarded with multiple ovations.
Biden took his time reminding the audience what a mess the country was when he took office, including Americans “waiting in line for an hour for a box of food.” "That’s what we inherited,” he said. His argument boiled down to an effective message: Look how much better off we are, even if there’s more room for improvement.
Biden’s been a good president
Every administration has its ups and downs; today I examine why the Biden White House is taking more than its fair share of hits.
The Joe Biden who ran in 2020 appeared wiser, sadder, somewhat deflated, and seemed to be taking on the presidency as a public service and a burden. Time and tragedy had tempered Biden, and I liked him even more than I did in his flashier, Jason Sudeikis–like youth. These days, I think he’s done a pretty good job, especially given the fact that he’s dealing with a pandemic, revelations about an attempted American coup d’état, and an economic slowdown over which he had no control.
Oh, and by the way: He’s also managed (so far) to head off World War III and a possible nuclear conflict. We seem to forget that this is Job One for every American president, but while we’re griping about the gas prices (over which Biden also has no control), the Russians are replaying the Eastern Front against 40 million Ukrainians and also threatening NATO. It’s been reassuring to have a steady hand in charge of our foreign policy.
The good news about gun control isn’t the bipartisan deal
There is good news about gun policy in America. But it’s not the bipartisan agreement that emerged on Capitol Hill this week.
The deal between 10 Republican and 10 Democratic senators is better than nothing. But it amounts to small-bore measures that don’t really address the central problem — the broad availability and circulation of guns in the United States, including weapons such as the AR-15 that are often used in mass shootings.
First, those involved in public policy who are not accountable to hardcore Republican voters have come to agree that guns are the problem.
The second big shift is that the national Democratic Party is no longer afraid of gun control.
Judge rejects Steve Bannon’s motion to throw out contempt of Congress charges
federal judge on Wednesday refused to throw out the charges against Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress, sending the former Donald Trump adviser to trial next month.
Judge Carl Nichols of the DC District Court rejected Bannon’s motion to dismiss the case against him, including his arguments that the House select committee’s subpoenas were illegal and that he was protected by the secrecy of the presidency because he had been in contact with Trump at the end of his administration.
The decision is likely to add firepower to the House’s January 6 investigation, which is holding public hearings this month on its findings, and it blesses the Justice Department’s decision to indict Bannon, who had left the Trump administration in 2017.
Getting closer to a vaccine for cancer
For decades, researchers have been trying to harness the natural power of the human immune system to fight cancer, looking for ways to circumvent the defenses tumors use to thwart it. Despite early disappointments and challenges, scientists studying cancer vaccines believe they now are closer than ever before. While these vaccines are still a long way from approval, researchers think they represent the future of cancer care.
“It’s a very exciting time for the field of cancer vaccines,” says Vinod Balachandran, an oncologist and surgeon-scientist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “We have made so much progress in understanding how the immune system recognizes cancers. There are dozens of cancer vaccine candidates under study by researchers around the world.”
On the Lighter Side
What can you do to save democracy?
I set up a place where we can donate and the funds will be distributed evenly between the tossup House and Senate races. Think of it as a one stop shop for using your $$$ to save democracy. Here is the link:
Here are some other things you can do:
And don’t lose hope. Together, we can do this!
I am so lucky and so proud to be in this with all of you ✊🏼✊🏾✊🏽🧡💚💛💜✊🏾✊🏽✊🏻