Jesus thinks he has fixed the irony meter.

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Something pretty after a rough few days: from the last Winter Olympics, in Sochi:

This just in (i.e. just tweeted by Benjamin Wittes with an extra-emphatic “BOOM”) –

Indictment of INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY LLC

The Post yesterday:

The latest revelations come after U.S. intelligence officials warned this week that Russia is gearing up to meddle again, this time in the November elections. Yet even as analysts urge preparation for the next round of online disinformation, major questions remain from 2016 over how Russians inserted themselves into a rollicking American political campaign without setting off more alarms in the United States — or triggering efforts to combat the disinformation effort.

The analysis by Albright, who is the research director at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism and is part of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, involved analyzing tweets from accounts that Twitter told Congress in November were controlled by the Internet Research Agency, a private firm in St. Petersburg often described as Russia’s leading online troll farm. Albright also catalogued more than 11,000 links from those tweets and ranked the most popular sources. (Twitter gave Congress a second list of accounts linked to the troll farm last month, but it has not yet been made public.)

I think this is the first indictment of a Russian perp?

Senator Marco Rubio claims to know, somehow, that restrictions on gun ownership would not have prevented yesterday’s slaughter at a public high school.

Sen. Marco Rubio said Thursday that gun restrictions would not have prevented the mass shooting at a high school in his home state.

“I understand. I really do. You read in the newspaper that they used a certain kind of gun and therefore let’s make it harder to get those kinds of guns. I don’t have some sort of de facto religious objection to that or some ideological commitment to that, per se,” the Florida Republican said.

“If we do something, it should be something that works. And the struggle up to this point has been that most of the proposals that have been offered would not have prevented, not just yesterday’s tragedy, but any of those in recent history,” Rubio added. “Just because these proposals would not have prevented these does not mean that we therefore raise our hands and say, ‘Therefore, there’s nothing we can do.'”

But how does he know that?

Or, to put it another way, what does he think is the reason for all these mass shootings in schools that happen here but not in France or New Zealand or Canada or Norway or the UK or Japan?

Does he think there is no connection? Does he think that the ease of buying an assault rifle at age 19 has nothing at all to do with the ease with which Nikolas Cruze shot all those people yesterday?

The Florida senator had received $3.3 million from the National Rifle Association as of October 2017, according to The New York Times. Following the Pulse nightclub shooting, Rubio made similar comments, telling the BBC that tougher gun regulations would not have prevented the attack.

Why wouldn’t it?

If it were more difficult and more risky to obtain a gun, then some violence-craving people might be put off trying, and others might try and fail. Some might try and find themselves having an unpleasant conversation with the police. Maybe so many would be discouraged or fail that the numbers of shooting deaths would decline sharply, and the option would stop seeming so easy and so attractive. Maybe over time the US could become like other reasonable countries where violence isn’t a constant threat.

I don’t think Marco Rubio knows that that’s not possible.

Guest post by Maureen Brian, originally commenting on a Facebook posting of mine of Trump tweeting:

So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!

If the behaviour of young Mr Cruz was so bad that he had to be expelled from school then clearly he had problems. He had had problems for some time.

Was he offered any sort of support long ago? Was that support even available? Did anyone offer support to his family?

Before we rush to station a brigade of psychiatrists in every school or fall for the “of course, he was just crazy” line let’s just get real.

Many teens go through rough patches. Many are hard to live with: I know I was. But there are low tech, cost-effective, proven interventions which will help most of them sort themselves out – counselling, a sports club, a change of school even.

Instead the situation was allowed to escalate and he seems to have fallen faut de mieux into the hands of some white supremacist nutters.

Somebody failed him. Quite a few people, probably. Mass shootings are not inevitable but you do have to be ready to foresee and prevent them.

Enough with this being totally bewildered again and again and again.

Via:

The Times is live-updating the latest Random Explosion of Carnage:

• Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said he would meet with state lawmakers to secure more funding for school safety and the treatment of mental illness. “If we have somebody that’s mentally ill, they can’t have access to a gun,” Mr. Scott said.

• The authorities said the AR-15 rifle that Mr. Cruz used in the attack was purchased legally. “No laws were violated in the procurement of this weapon,” said Peter J. Forcelli, the special agent in charge for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Miami. In Florida, an AR-15 is easier to buy than a handgun.

It’s not about “mental illness,” it’s about horrifyingly easy access to weapons that should be reserved to the military.

• With the Parkland shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern United States history have come in the last five months. Here is a graphic that records the grim toll of school shootings across the nation.

Three of the ten worst in just the last five months. Is it unreasonable to suspect that Trump’s encouragement of open expressions of hatred and contempt has a lot to do with it?

Democrats are repeating their calls for tougher gun legislation.

“At some point, we’ve got to say enough is enough,” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said on the Senate floor. “Let’s talk about that 19-year-old carrying an AR-15. Let’s do what needs to be done, and let’s get these assault weapons off our streets. Let’s accomplish something on background checks.”

…

But in an interview on WIBC radio on Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan said that public policymakers “shouldn’t just knee-jerk before we even have all the facts and the data.” He added, “We need to think less about taking sides and fighting each other politically, and just pulling together.”

But we do have the facts – unless there’s a huge fraud going on – that an assault rifle was used and that 17 people were killed. We also have relevant facts about previous shootings. I think those are relevant facts when we point out that without that kind of gun, an angry ex-student can’t kill as many people as easily. All these school shootings are school shootings – they involve guns, so yes, we do get to say that guns should not be so easy to get, especially the rapid-fire kinds of guns.

Some of the survivors implored Congress to finally take action. Republicans called for prayers, but argued that no single fix to the nation’s gun laws would deter a shooting like the one on Wednesday.

In what universe? If Cruz had been unable to get his hands on an AR-15 he would not have been able to shoot so many people.

You couldn’t make it up.

Can the Left let the families grieve for even 24 hours before they push their anti-gun and anti-gunowner agenda? My goodness. This isn't about a gun it's about another lunatic. #FloridaShooting

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) February 15, 2018

Can the Left let the families grieve for even 24 hours before they push their anti-gun and anti-gunowner agenda? My goodness. This isn’t about a gun it’s about another lunatic. #FloridaShooting

Where to begin?

We’re not preventing the families from grieving, or interfering with their grieving.

What “agenda”? The only “agenda” is to try to stop this horrendous thing from happening over and over – in fact to try to prevent it from ever happening again, on the grounds that it’s a thing that should never happen.

Can the Right stop framing the attempt to prevent future mass shootings as some sort of sinister “partisan” “agenda”?

Can the Right take a good look at the realities and grasp that it’s not automatically a core conservative belief that access to all kind of portable weaponry including assault rifles should be wide open?

Yes it’s about another “lunatic” or rather another alienated rage-addicted violent man, but if the alienated rage-addicted violent man had not had access to assault weapons he would have had a hard time inflicting the kind of slaughter he did. Yes it is about alienated rage-addicted violent men but it’s also about how easily they can get and keep and load and use guns.

In conclusion – we’ve done nothing to interfere with the families’ grieving. If only we could. Nothing can interfere with that. People like Tomi Lahren should consider maybe not using their grief to argue that we should do nothing to prevent mass shootings in schools.

Ugh. I feel dirty.

The BBC yesterday:

The Australian Football League (AFL) has agreed for the first time to allow a transgender footballer to play women’s football at state level.

Hannah Mouncey, 28, who previously played at local level in Canberra, hopes to take to the field in the state of Victoria this season.

The AFL said it wanted everyone to be able to play Australian rules football.

Before she began her gender transition in 2015, Mouncey played for the Australian men’s handball team.

The AFL’s decision means she can now partake in any of its affiliated state leagues during the 2018 season.

…

Australian rules football consists of two teams of 18 players and takes place on an oval-shaped field.

Players can position themselves anywhere on the field and may use any part of their bodies to move the ball, making it a more physical-contact sport, more similar to rugby.

Rugby is like US football, a full-contact sport, and very violent. Hannah Mouncey is 6’3″ and 220 pounds.

Garrett Epps on widening contempt for the rule of law in the US such as for instance

the litigation tactic adopted by Michael Turzai and Joseph Scarnati, two Republicans who are respectively the speaker of the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives and the President of the Pennsylvania State Senate, in an emergency stay application filed with Justice Samuel Alito. The application asked Alito to block a decision of Pennsylvania’s State Supreme Court. That decision—rendered as an order on January 22 and explained in a lengthy opinion on Thursday—invalidated the system of U.S. House districts approved by the Republican legislature for election of members of the U.S. House next fall.

The state court held that the partisan nature of the district plan violated the Pennsylvania Constitution’s requirement of “free and equal” elections. The court ordered the legislature to draw up a new congressional district plan in time for the congressional elections this November.

Federal courts have no authority to overrule a state’s Supreme Court about what that state’s constitution means, Epps says, but Turzai and Scarnati asked anyway, because they really really wanted to. Alito said nah without even passing the request on to the full court.

Astonishingly, as Alito was pondering the request to throw the U.S. Supreme Court under the bus, Senate President Scarnati was also informing the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that he had no intention of obeying its stupid order anyway. “In light of the unconstitutionality of the Court’s Orders and the Court’s plain intent to usurp the General Assembly’s constitutionally delegated role of drafting Pennsylvania’s congressional districting plan,” Scarnati’s lawyer wrote to the Pennsylvania justices, “Senator Scarnati will not be turning over any data identified in the Court’s Orders.”

Appellate lawyers generally consider “I don’t have to obey no stinking order” a high-risk argument strategy. It tends to leave any judge with an ever-so-slightly jaundiced view of the party invoking it.

Maybe the plan is to imprison all the judges? Or kill them? Sounds a bit Pakistan-like, but that’s what happens when contempt for the law spreads.

Pennsylvania Republicans are doing their best to render the Pennsylvania Supreme Court powerless.

In short, Pennsylvania is in the middle of a state constitutional crisis, and one side of the dispute is willing to threaten the independence of the state’s courts for the chance at six extra House seats.

Readers in North Carolina may find the fracas oddly familiar-sounding. After Republicans gained control of the legislature there in 2011, state courts blocked a number of their conservative innovations, including an attempt to abolish teacher tenure and a measure to bar the state’s Democratic governor from appointing a majority on local election boards.

The Republican legislative majority struck back. It has done away with the state’s public financing system for judicial elections (thus making candidates dependent on big donors), and has voted to require every judicial candidate to run under a partisan label (thus making judges explicitly partisan). It also abolished the party primaries for judicial office—meaning that incumbents would face multiple challengers rather than one strong one. When vacancies occurred on the state court of appeals, legislators “unpacked” the court, abolishing the open seats, to prevent the Democratic governor from appointing new judges.

The Republicans then offered redrawn judicial district maps that would have made the bench radically whiter and redder. When these ran into heavy weather, they canceled this year’s judicial elections altogether. They proposed making every judge run for re-election every two years. They are now mulling a plan to abolish judicial elections altogether, so that the legislative majority can name an all-Republican pool of candidates for every judgeship in the state. In other words, one way or another, the state courts are to be annexed to the power of the Republican legislative majority.

Scary enough yet?

And speaking of trying to slash budgets for everything that’s not weapons or presidential travel while also pissing it away on graft and trumpian whims – Donnie’s Excellent Parade will cost between 10 and 30 million.

Trump’s military parade would cost between $10 million and $30 million, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said on Wednesday.

Mulvaney offered the estimate during questioning at the House Budget Committee. He said the White House hasn’t yet budgeted for the parade and would either rely on Congress to appropriate funds, or use money that already has been approved.

“The estimates I’ve seen, they’re very preliminary, is between 10 [million dollars] and 30 [million dollars] depending upon the length,” Mulvaney said. “Obviously an hour parade is different from a five-hour parade in terms of the cost and the equipment and those types of things.”

Trump’s proposed budget (which mercifully won’t get through Congress) slashes science and the arts and humanities, while in another part of the forest his hires steal public money in every creative way they can think of. The latest example:

Veterans Affairs Secretary David J. Shulkin’s chief of staff doctored an email and made false statements to create a pretext for taxpayers to cover expenses for the secretary’s wife on a 10-day trip to Europe last summer, the agency’s inspector general has found.

Vivieca Wright Simpson, VA’s third-most senior official, altered language in an email from an aide coordinating the trip to make it appear that Shulkin was receiving an award from the Danish government — then used the award to justify paying for his wife’s travel, Inspector General Michael J. Missal said in a report released Wednesday. VA paid more than $4,300 for her airfare.

The account of how the government paid travel expenses for the secretary’s wife is one finding in an unsparing investigation that concluded that Shulkin and his staff misled agency ethics officials and the public about key details of the trip. Shulkin also improperly accepted a gift of sought-after tickets to a Wimbledon tennis match, the investigation found, and directed an aide coordinating the trip to act as what the report called a “personal travel concierge” to him and his wife.

The Secretary and his delegation’s three and a half days of meetings in Copenhagen and London  cost $122,334 and the inspector general doesn’t know exactly how much of that was stolen for personal use, but it’s not lunch money.

Shulkin is one of five current and former Trump administration Cabinet members under investigation by agency inspectors general over their travel expenses, an issue that forced Tom Price to resign as Health and Human Services secretary in the fall.

Not that it’s a pattern or anything.