Putin sends the cops to tear apart Navalny’s apartment and headquarters:

Police have raided Alexei Navalny’s apartment and the headquarters of his Anti-Corruption Foundation in Moscow after investigators opened a new inquiry into alleged breaches of coronavirus restrictions during last week’s mass protests.

On Wednesday evening police banged at the door of Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who yelled back that her lawyer was on the way. At the same time, a close Navalny ally, Lyubov Sobol, demanded that police identify themselves as they prised open the door to a studio that broadcasts Navalny Live.

Investigators searched the offices of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the team that put out a recent investigation into a £1bn palace allegedly built for Putin’s personal use. Police also raided the homes of Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary, and other aides.

They’re looking for some excuse, no matter how flimsy, to throw him in prison for a few decades.

It’s an anniversary.

Enlightenment.

Why would anyone have any reservations about this form of activism?

Republicans are all like “It’s not such a big deal.”

Regardless of the explanations and justifications, the procedural vote is just the latest, clearest sign of fading Republican support for finding Trump responsible for the Capitol riot three weeks ago.

You can see their point. It was almost three weeks ago. Generations have been born and died since then. Memories have faded. It’s in the past now. Nobody gets hot under the collar about the War of 1812 and it’s the same with this.

Shortly after the incident, Lindsey Graham – one of the president’s closest allies in the Senate – said the president’s actions “were the problem” and that his legacy was “tarnished”.

Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly was “pleased” with the House’s impeachment efforts and said just last week that the mob that attacked the capital was “fed lies” and “provoked” by president.

That was then, this is now. It’s old old old news. In the interests of national somethingsomething we have to move on while pretending it never happened.

The Republican Party’s evolving views on the president’s culpability are probably best captured by the shifting comments of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

During the impeachment debate in the House of Representatives two weeks ago, McCarthy said Trump “bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack by mob rioters” and recommended that he be formally censured by the chamber.

Last week, he said he didn’t believe Trump “provoked” the rally and then, a few days later, that “everybody across this country has some responsibility” for creating the political environment that led to the insurrection.

Mostly, to be fair, the Democrats. All that refusing to agree that the election was stolen just because there’s zero reason to think it was – so petty, so selfish, so ungenerous.

Meanwhile, those who spoke out against the former president and haven’t walked back their comments are facing growing calls for political retribution from within their own party.

As is only right. How dare she rebuke this wise and saintly man?

The Republicans are so shameless.

All but five Senate Republicans voted in favor of an effort to dismiss Donald Trump’s historic second impeachment trial on Tuesday, making clear a conviction of the former president for “incitement of insurrection” after the deadly Capitol siege on Jan. 6 is unlikely.

Just utterly shameless. Trump is a horror, and what he did before during and after the election was horrifying, including in terms that Republicans would normally sign up to (precedent, law, rule-following, respect, civility, tradition, truth-telling, Constitutionality), yet they’re still defending him.

What seemed for some Democrats like an open-and-shut case that played out for the world on live television is running into a Republican Party that feels very different. Not only do senators say they have legal concerns, but they are wary of crossing the former president and his legions of followers.

Meaning they’re afraid of him? If that’s the case he still has power, and that’s a very bad thing.

Democrats rejected the argument that the trial is illegitimate or unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office, pointing to an 1876 impeachment of a secretary of war who had already resigned and to the opinions of many legal scholars.

Democrats also say that a reckoning of the first invasion of the Capitol since the War of 1812, perpetrated by rioters egged on by a president as Electoral College votes were being tallied, is necessary.

“It makes no sense whatsoever that a president, or any official, could commit a heinous crime against our country and then defeat Congress’ impeachment powers — and avoid a vote on disqualification — by simply resigning, or by waiting to commit that offense until their last few weeks in office,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

You’d think.

Another point about that evasive non-response from Essex –

“a person can experience unknown genders”

What can that possibly mean? The whole point about these oh so important “genders” is that the people who claim to have them and experience them say they know they have them, and what they are, and what we have to do in relation to the fact – the cold hard fact – that they have and experience and know them. They don’t say it’s just some vague state of mind or mood, much less that they don’t know they have it, they insist, with menaces, that it’s real and they experience it and that experience is knowledge that it’s real. The reality is what they beat us over the head with. We are not to say it’s just something they think, we are to say it’s really real, just as real as sex or even realer, and it’s the sure and certain knowledge of eternal GenderSoul.

And in any case I don’t see how anyone can experience something while not knowing it. Experiencing it entails being aware of it. You can’t describe your experience of being under anesthesia because your brain was rendered incapable of experiencing it. If you don’t know about it, it ain’t your experience.

Ah yes the infinitude of genders again. You just can’t have too many genders.

Very cunning, very very cunning, but the problem remains – if we don’t know what they are how can the guidance guide us into the correct behavior and mode of address and belief?

We derived some wholesome amusement from the infinite genders doctrine way back in February 2017:

This is hilarious. It’s incoherent nonsense, but it’s also hilarious.

The modest title is:

What Does Multigender Mean? 10 Questions You May Be Afraid to Ask – Answered

Questions answered! Hooray! It’s always good to have an expert around.

There is an infinite diversity of genders in the world.

Each person has a totally unique interpretation and relationship with any gender they inhabit, and there are at least as many genders as there have been humans who have lived.

At least.

Gee, if only we could do that.

Ever since President Joe Biden emerged as the winner of the United States’ presidential election, Fr John Zuhlsdorf has been carrying out exorcisms about what he describes as “fraud” and “lying” during the vote-counting process. 

The prominent priest-blogger and President Trump supporter, also claimed that his Bishop, Donald Hying of Madison, granted him the authority to carry out the exorcism rite.  

His Bishop says oh no he didn’t.

The priest-blogger did an exorcism the day before the insurrection.

“I have the permission of the bishop to say this, which increases the authority of the praying of the prayer,” he said ahead of his 5 January exorcism which he carried out in Latin. “As exorcists will confirm, the demons are very good with electronic equipment.”

And MAGA types are very good with Latin.

The priest-blogger explained his reasons before he did the exorcising.

“I think it’s amply clear, there’s enough evidence to demonstrate that there was fraud in some places, and people had to commit that fraud, it didn’t happen by itself. It seems to have been well-organised. I am deeply concerned that anyone involved in this has put their soul in terrible mortal peril,” he said. 

“We have to be concerned about the people involved in this who might have lied, or who might have committed fraud, concerning this election. This is not cheating to steal the election to 5th grade class president. This is something on a whole different scale, it’s quantitatively so vastly larger, that it’s qualitatively a different kind of a situation and sin. This isn’t like going over and stealing a newspaper off your neighbour’s porch.”

What about priests who spread lies about a legitimate election? What kind of situation and sin is that?

Fr Zuhsldorf runs one of the world’s best-read Christian blogs, which offers a combination of liturgical, political and culinary commentary. With tens of millions of visitors since 2006, Fr Zuhlsdorf is a relentless critic of liberal culture and supportive of elements of Trump’s political agenda. Unsurprisingly, he is not a fan of Pope Francis, and at one point told his supporters it was not a sin to pray for the death or resignation of the Roman Pontiff.

He sounds nice.

They were blocked.

The commander of the D.C. National Guard said the Pentagon restricted his authority ahead of the riot at the U.S. Capitol, requiring higher level sign-off to respond that cost time as the events that day spiraled out of control.

Is it because BLM protesters are scary while angry white guys who want to kill all the Democrats are just a little energetic?

Local commanders typically have the power to take military action on their own to save lives or prevent significant property damage in an urgent situation when there isn’t enough time to obtain approval from headquarters.

They can give the orders in an emergency.

But Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, said the Pentagon essentially took that power and other authorities away from him ahead of a pro-Trump protest on Jan. 6. That meant he couldn’t immediately roll out troops when he received a panicked phone call from the Capitol Police chief warning that rioters were about to enter the U.S. Capitol.

“All military commanders normally have immediate response authority to protect property, life, and in my case, federal functions — federal property and life,” Walker said in an interview. “But in this instance I did not have that authority.”

It also had to do with the disaster last summer.

The Pentagon required the highest-level approval for any moves beyond that narrow mission, in part because its leaders had been lambasted for actions the D.C. Guard took during last year’s racial justice protests, including helicopters that flew low over demonstrators in D.C. Top officials concluded those maneuvers resulted from “fragmentary orders” that hadn’t received high-level approval and were looking to prevent a repeat of that situation.

So, great. They wildly overreacted to a legitimate protest, and the blowback from that caused them to twiddle their thumbs as a fascist insurrection battered its way into the Capitol. This is all fine.

In the days before the protest, all the living former defense secretaries warned the Pentagon not to get involved in the peaceful transition of power, after reports that former national security adviser Michael Flynn had raised the possibility with President Donald Trump of declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.

The day before the Jan. 6 event, a senior U.S. official told The Post the military had “learned its lesson” after being rebuked over Trump’s heavy-handed response to racial justice protests last year. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the details of the preparations, said the military would be “absolutely nowhere near the Capitol building” because “we don’t want to send the wrong message.”

Always fighting the last war instead of the current one.

Fauci agrees that it’s nice not having Trump ruining everything.

“One of the things that we’re going to do is to be completely transparent, open and honest,” Fauci told reporters [last week]. “If things go wrong, not point fingers, but to correct them. And to make everything we do be based on science and evidence.

“That was literally a conversation I had 15 minutes ago with the president, and he has said that multiple times.”

Asked if he would like to amend or clarify anything he said during the Trump presidency, Fauci insisted he had always been candid, noting wryly, “That’s why I got in trouble sometimes.”

…

At Thursday’s briefing, Fauci was asked how it feels to no longer have Trump looming over him. “Obviously, I don’t want to be going back over history but it’s very clear that there were things that were said – be it regarding things like hydroxychloroquine [pushed as a treatment by Trump] and things like that – that really was uncomfortable because they were not based on scientific fact.

“I can tell you, I take no pleasure at all in being in a situation of contradicting the president, so it was really something that you didn’t feel that you could actually say something and there wouldn’t be any repercussions about it. The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know, what the evidence, what the science is and know that’s it, let the science speak, it is something of a liberating feeling.”

Something of an understatement.

That’s one way of looking at it.

But it’s the wrong way. It’s not that we lacked the language and understanding of a truth, it’s that we hadn’t been bombarded with the rhetoric and bullying of a stupid ideology.

“Trans identities” are not a scientific discovery, they’re a pseudo-official name for a type of fantasy.

The fact that the ideology of “trans identities” is younger than the lack of the ideology of “trans identities” does not mean that the ideology is truth. Lots of things are young and new and also bullshit. It’s a delusion to think that knowledge and understanding always and everywhere improve over time. People in the 80s didn’t have QAnon, either, and that didn’t make them worse off.

Josh Hawley is a piece of work.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, called out Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, for claiming in a widely read op-ed that he’s been “muzzled.”

In a cover essay published by the New York Post on Monday, Hawley claimed that he’d been “canceled” and “muzzled” in the U.S. The title of Hawley’s essay is “It’s time to stand up against the muzzling of America.” The GOP lawmaker, who has been widely criticized for formally objecting to Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes when they were certified by Congress earlier this month, linked to the article in a tweet Ocasio-Cortez later retweeted with criticism.

The New York Post is owned by the powerful Murdoch family, who also own Fox News. Headed by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the family is estimated by Forbes to be worth approximately $20.6 billion. The New York Post was ranked in 2019 by Cision, a public relations and software company, as the fourth most widely distributed daily newspaper in the country. The newspaper’s website says that it had more than 73 million unique visitors in November and more than 400 million page views.

The New York Post probably wouldn’t publish anything I wrote; does that make me muzzled?

Ocasio-Cortez is right about his deep unpopularity:

Senator Josh Hawley’s former academic adviser at Stanford University says he’s “distressed” and “bamboozled” by the Missouri Republican’s actions surrounding to the January 6 insurrection against the U.S. Capitol.

The raised fist, for instance, which was swiftly followed by the violent attack on the Capitol.

“I am more than a little bamboozled by it, certainly distressed by it,” David Kennedy, a professor emeritus of history at Stanford told The Kansas City Star for an article published on Sunday. Kennedy served as Hawley’s academic adviser when the future senator attended the elite university; he later penned a foreword for a 2008 book Hawley wrote about former President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt.

…

A number of corporations and companies have announced that they will no longer contribute financially to Republican lawmakers, such as Hawley, who objected to the certification of Biden’s win.

Is that the “muzzling”? But nobody has to contribute financially to any lawmakers, and not doing so certainly isn’t censorship.

There is discussion over whether or not to charge all the insurrectionists, not because some of them were innocent bystanders but because the courts could be swamped.

The internal discussions are in their early stages, and no decisions have been reached about whether to forgo charging some of those who illegally entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.

Justice Department officials have promised a relentless effort to identify and arrest those who stormed the Capitol that day, but internally there is robust back-and-forth about whether charging them all is the best course of action. That debate comes at a time when officials are keenly sensitive that the credibility of the Justice Department and the FBI are at stake in such decisions, given the apparent security and intelligence failures that preceded the riot, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss legal deliberations.

Federal officials estimate that roughly 800 people surged into the building, though they caution that such numbers are imprecise, and the real figure could be 100 people or more in either direction.

Among those roughly 800 people, FBI agents and prosecutors have so far seen a broad mix of behavior — from people dressed for military battle, moving in formation, to wanton vandalism, to simply going with the crowd into the building.

I suspect that white people “going with the crowd” into the Capitol building in defiance of fences and cops and “Closed to the Public” signs get viewed more forgivingly than not-white people do. Possibly.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping won’t get him out of this one. Giuliani being sued for telling damaging lies:

An election technology company that has been the focus of consistent conspiracy theories by Donald Trump and his allies has sued the former President’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani for defamation after he pushed the “Big Lie” about election fraud on his podcast and TV appearances.

Dominion Voting Systems is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages.

“Just as Giuliani and his allies intended, the Big Lie went viral on social media as people tweeted, retweeted, and raged that Dominion had stolen their votes. While some lies — little lies — flare up on social media and die with the next news cycle, the Big Lie was different,” lawyers for Dominion wrote in the lawsuit, filed in DC District Court on Monday morning. “The harm to Dominion’s business and reputation is unprecedented and irreparable because of how fervently millions of people believe it.”

Wouldn’t you think a lawyer would be more cautious? Maybe that’s just me.

“Dominion’s defamation lawsuit for $1.3B will allow me to investigate their history, finances, and practices fully and completely,” Giuliani told CNN in a statement Monday. “The amount being asked for is, quite obviously, intended to frighten people of faint heart. It is another act of intimidation by the hate-filled left-wing to wipe out and censor the exercise of free speech, as well as the ability of lawyers to defend their clients vigorously.”

Is the right wing love-filled? I hadn’t noticed that so much.

All the kids are doing it.

Pure fluff, but it is nice to have actual humans there again.

On Sunday, the first dogs arrived from Delaware, where they had been waiting until things were unpacked and settled enough to allow a comfortable entry for the two German Shepherds at their new pad.

“Champ is enjoying his new dog bed by fireplace and Major loved running around the South Lawn,” the White House said a press release early Monday morning. Champ lived at the vice president’s residence during the Biden’s time there, and Major was adopted by the family in 2018 from a Delaware pet rescue.

Awwww.

On Sunday they picked up bagels at a deli in Georgetown.

Biden’s visit to a DC dining establishment on Day 5 of his presidency already ties him with the number of local restaurants former President Donald Trump visited. In his four years in Washington, Trump seldom ate out and when he did, only did so at one place — the steakhouse at the Trump hotel.

This is what I mean. The painful narrowness and mental poverty of the man. He’s never read a book, he doesn’t eat out, he eats steak and burgers, he doesn’t go to movies or plays, he doesn’t go to museums or galleries, he doesn’t have dogs or cats, he doesn’t walk when everyone is walking but rides in a golf cart instead…the he doesn’ts are infinite. So it’s nice to have humans there again, humans and canines.

They’re not wasting time.

The single article of impeachment against Donald Trump will on Monday evening be delivered to the Senate, where the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, is promising a quick but fair trial.

Trump made it easy for them, by standing up there and ordering the crowd to march on Congress.

Pelosi is going to take the article from the House to the Senate later today, and that’s the start of the impeachment, but then they’re pausing for two weeks to get a lot of urgent work done and give the lawyers time to prep.

Though the Senate is now controlled by Democrats, two-thirds of senators must vote against Trump if he is to be convicted. That means 17 Republicans must go against a former president from their own party. As of Friday, according to a tally by the Washington Post, 42 senators had said they supported impeachment, 19 were open to conviction, 28 were opposed and 11 had made no indication.

Dozens of influential Republicans are said to be lobbying senators to convict. McConnell has said the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, leading to the deaths of five people including a police officer, were “fed lies” by Trump.

If Trump is convicted, senators could also vote to ban him from ever holding public office again. That only requires a majority vote.

Here’s hoping.

Also, hey now, what’s that fancy thing on your wrist, sir, and why are you not covered in coal dust?

Tan suit tan suit tan suit!

Awwww.

Feminism can’t defend women if it’s forced to speak for those who do not share this experience.

Why are we being forced, or at least bullied and bullied and bullied, to speak for the people who don’t share our experience? What is that? I still can’t take in how it’s grown and then swallowed everything.