Gore’s Current TV launches: Al Gore’s Current TV launched today – programming will be in “pods,” roughly two to seven minutes long, covering topics like jobs, technology, spirituality and current events. An internet-like on-screen progress bar will show the pod’s length.
Novak whines: Rightwing propagandist Bob Novak has been mum on his role in revealing the identity of secret agent for the better part of two years. Now one of sources at the CIA has said he warned Novak not to publish Valerie Plame’s name. Novak says the CIA guy didn’t warn him enough.
Yet more dirt on Dukester: Did scandal-prone GOP Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and his cronies create a shell company that was awarded an IRS contract – and then pocket most of the contract’s $3.5 mil?
So Ron DeSantis skipped the CPAC wingnut confab,
Because he’s been so busy with his freedom grabs.
We can only hope his experiments
Are anything but permanent —
Dr. DeSantis has turned Florida into his own fascism lab.
“For all his unusual strengths, Trump is defined these days more by his weaknesses — personal and political deficiencies that have grown with time and now figure to undermine any attempt to exploit the criminal case against him. … His base of support is too small, his political imagination too depleted and his instinct for self-absorption too overwhelming for him to marshal a broad, lasting backlash. His determination to look inward and backward has been a problem for his campaign even without the indictment. It will be a bigger one if and when he’s indicted.”
“I don’t know what he’s trying to do or what the goal is. Obviously, he doesn’t deal with foreign policy every day as Governor. So I’m not sure. I can’t speak to that. I can’t compare that to something else he did or said over the last few years because he doesn’t deal with it every day.”
— Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, distancing himself from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ apparent flip-flop on the war in Ukraine, on the Hugh Hewitt radio show.
“One of the things we learned post-Trump presidency is that he had ordered a bombing of a couple of fentanyl labs, crystal meth labs, in Mexico, just across the border and for whatever reason, the military didn’t do it. … I think that was a mistake.”
— House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-KY) told Fox & Friends that it was too bad that Donald Trump didn’t launch a military attack on Mexico to try to stop drug traffickers.
“Donald Trump asked his followers to sign a petition denouncing his potential arrest in New York,” Insider reports. “But signing this petition leads people straight to a page where they’re asked to give $3,300 or other suggested amounts of cash to his 2024 campaign.”
New York Times: “The report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations says that global average temperatures are estimated to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels sometime around ‘the first half of the 2030s,’ as humans continue to burn coal, oil and natural gas.”
Twenty-one members of the South Carolina State House are considering a bill that would make a woman who has an abortion in the state eligible for the death penalty, Rolling Stone reports.
“The National Republican Congressional Committee is plotting a sprawling battlefield in 2024, naming 37 Democrat-held House districts to its initial list of targets,” Axios reports. “It’s an ambitious strategy in a presidential year, when House results are often closely correlated with top-of-the-ticket margins. The last three presidential elections — all close by historical standards — saw flips of six to 14 seats in the House.”
Hate crimes in the US surged 11.6% in 2021, with the largest number motivated by bias against Black people, followed by crimes targeting victims for ethnicity, sexuality and religion, the FBI said in a report. The FBI reported hate crime incidents rose to 9,065 in 2021 from 8,120 in 2020.