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More than two years into the pandemic and some people still haven’t learned right from wrong. Despite the number of arrests in connection to and warnings that selling fake vaccine cards is illegal, some people, especially Trump supporters, continue to do so. In the most recent incident of selling fraudulent vaccine cards to the Feds, a Colorado man identified as Robert Van Camp was arrested on Tuesday. Van Camp faces a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States in a federal court with an investigation spanning multiple states. He is accused of running a business that sold cards in several states.

“It was the purpose of the conspiracy for Van Camp, Co-Conspirator-1, and their co-conspirators to (a) fraudulently obstruct the government’s administration and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines and the government’s federal employee vaccination mandate,” the arrest complaint stated.

Van Camp was arrested after allegedly selling fake COVID-19 vaccination cards to at least four undercover agents after obtaining an electronic copy of a blank card. Prosecutors said Van Camp carried out the scheme with a co-conspirator who had a top-secret security clearance. His partner has been unidentified in court records.

“Pretty fucking nice, huh? I call them a work of art,” Van Camp told an undercover federal agent who was pretending to buy cards.

Markos and Kerry talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections

To another agent, Van Camp bragged about selling hundreds of cards, including in “Honduras, Costa Rice, Canada, France, Turks and Caicos, twelve different states, so my cards are fucking worldwide.”

“I mean, these things are gold,” he said, noting he sold some for over $170 each.

In efforts to hide his business, prosecutors said, Van Camp referred to the cards by code names and told buyers to do the same, calling them “gift cards.” His scheme lasted over a year.

According to court documents, Van Camp claimed he was making and selling the cards because of vaccination requirements.

”I’m not making cards ’cause I’m bored, I’m making cards ’cause I’m in the middle of a fucking war and I, and I have a lot of guns and ammo, like an arsenal,” he told one of the undercover agents, according to the court document.

Since the start of the pandemic, people have been creating fake vaccine cards in an attempt to make a quick buck off those individuals unwilling to follow safety precautions. Daily Kos reported multiple warnings issued by the FBI noting that fraudulent cards not only increase the risk of COVID-19, but that both buying and selling the fraudulent cards is illegal and could be charged as forgery. Making or buying counterfeit vaccine cards violates federal laws and can result in heavy fines and imprisonment.

According to CNBC, after announcing charges against two people in California who allegedly raised more than $140 million by falsifying COVID-19 tests, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday that criminal cases against 19 other defendants are in process. Van Camp was amongst the defendants, many of whom were medical professionals. He was noted as the one who bragged about selling vaccine cards to Olympic athletes. 

“And like I said, I’m in 12 or 13 states, so until I get caught and go to jail, fuck it. I’m taking the money!” he said according to court records. “I don’t care, I’ve saved a thousand lives.”

Seems like he is going to care now that he has been caught. Saving lives, though? Who is he kidding?

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Republicans are teeing up their next move toward making the U.S. government completely unable to function. If they take control of the House, as they are favored to do, they will come in already having laid the groundwork to begin impeaching Cabinet officials, starting with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandra Mayorkas.

On Monday, 133 Republican House members sent Mayorkas a letter accusing him of “disregard for the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws” and actions that have “willingly endangered American citizens and undermined the rule of law and our nation’s sovereignty.” Basically, Mayorkas has not kept every single one of Donald Trump’s hateful immigration policies in place. 

RELATED STORY: Dear reporters: Please don’t parrot back whatever noted liar Kevin McCarthy says at the border today

Though the letter doesn’t use the word “impeach,” it makes a not very veiled threat: “Your failure to secure the border and enforce the laws passed by Congress raises grave questions about your suitability for office.”

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House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made the threat explicit in the Monday border visit he used to try to distract from having been caught in a set of big lies about his attitude toward Trump and Jan. 6. “This is his moment in time to do his job,” McCarthy said of Mayorkas. “But at any time if someone is derelict in their job, there is always the option of impeaching somebody.”

Mayorkas is supposedly “derelict,” while Republicans have nothing bad to say about expensive and useless theater conducted at the border by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

But a move to impeach Mayorkas probably wouldn’t be the end of Republican efforts to hobble President Biden’s administration and make being a Cabinet official from one party punishable by impeachment if the other party held the House. The reporting at Axios can be faulted on many fronts, but the outlet has excellent Republican sourcing. Here’s what it takes from its sources: “For the first year of President Biden’s term, it was mostly the hard right of the GOP who entertained impeaching the president and his Cabinet secretaries. But those deliberations are now happening among a much larger group — even with virtually no precedent or legal justification.”

One Cabinet official has ever been impeached in U.S. history. Republicans are getting ready to make that commonplace, not because Cabinet officials suddenly magically got worse, but because the Republican Party is committed to sabotaging not just a Democratic administration but voters’ faith that the government can function effectively.

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Texas’ corrupt attorney general hopes the courts can yet again help him sabotage Biden’s agenda

Far-right Freedom Caucus is poised to have serious sway if Republicans take the House

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“I’m not getting in the car.”

This is what former Vice President Mike Pence said on Jan. 6, 2021 to Tim Giebels, the lead special agent tasked to protect him.

Thousands of rioters, many of them armed with weapons makeshift and otherwise, were laying siege to the U.S. Capitol while clamoring to hang him, the second person in line for the presidency of the United States. This conversation reportedly happened just before 2:30 PM.

It had been a little more than 90 minutes since Pence—after weeks of silence—finally released an official statement acknowledging he was constrained “unilaterally” by the Constitution, so could not do anything other than count Electoral College votes when he presided over a joint session of Congress that afternoon. 

Pressure had been mounting around him for weeks publicly and privately. In an interview with Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, this March, Short told Politico the vice president spent days crafting his statement. And agonizing over it.

“I do not believe that the Founders of our country intended to invest the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted during the Joint Session of Congress, and no Vice President in American history has ever asserted such authority,” Pence wrote on Jan. 6.

The whole statement was laden with historic contextual references and citations to clarify his reasoning. Line by line, Pence’s letter cut at the core of a strategy that those like attorney John Eastman had proposed to Trump to keep him in power: Use Pence as his puppet. 

In another time or place, a statement from a vice president before Congress met to certify electoral votes would have been perfunctory. 

But Pence understood, according to his chief of staff, he would have to do more. And he would have to be clear.

Trump, his aides, allies, and attorneys like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and Sidney Powell, among others, had for weeks broadcast a conspiracy theory about rampant fraud in the 2020 election and the need for “alternate electors” for Trump.

But those “alternate electors” were not properly sanctioned by the states they came from, and Pence knew long before he was headed to the Capitol that the bid was doomed. In the book Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Pence reportedly called on former Vice President Dan Quayle for guidance in late December 2020.

When Quayle told him there was “no flexibility” to avoid certifying the results and to “put it away,” Pence kept searching for a way through. The vice president was hopeful Trump’s many ongoing legal challenges to election results in battleground states would offer a remedy.

When it became clear there was nothing to be done legally, Pence put the wheels in motion for his role on Jan. 6, as he saw it. 

“It was a transparent effort to get in front of any accusations that there was any other slate that could’ve been legally accepted,” Short said of the Jan. 6 letter last month. 

So when Pence was in the Capitol at 2:26 PM on Jan. 6—a target newly painted on his back courtesy of a tweet from Trump two minutes before, saying his veep didn’t have the “courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution”—Pence was insistent that he wasn’t leaving the building. 

“I’m not getting in the car Tim. I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car,” he said.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and investigator serving the Jan. 6 committee, recently described that remark from Pence to Giebels as the “six most chilling words of this entire thing I’ve seen so far.” 

The exchange was reported by Carol Leonning and Philip Rucker in their book, I Alone Can Fix It, for the first time last year. They also reported that the then-vice president was distrustful that his security detail would do as he wished if he went with them on Jan. 6. 

Anthony Ornato, who oversaw the Secret Service detail operations at the time for the White House, ran into Pence’s National Security Adviser Keith Kellogg in the West Wing on Jan. 6, according to Leonning and Rucker. 

Kellogg said Ornato told him then they were preparing to move Pence to Joint Base Andrews in nearby Maryland.

According to an excerpt from I Alone Can Fix It, Kellogg also urged him not to take Pence anywhere.

“You can’t do that, Tony. Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it,” Kellogg said. 

Ornato, a former Secret Service agent, was appointed by Trump in 2019 to serve as deputy chief of staff for operations at the White House. The decision was controversial given that crossover between those two worlds is often frowned upon. 

Leonning and Rucker are not sure whether Pence understood that what was transpiring was an attempted coup, but Leonning told MSNBC recently she was sure Pence was “super suspicious and insistent on staying” regardless. 

For his part, Ornato has denied ever having the conversation with Kellogg about moving Pence. 

Having returned to the Secret Service full time after Biden was inaugurated, the Jan. 6 committee has already interviewed Ornato. He appeared voluntarily.

According to recently released testimony provided to the committee by Cassidy Hutchinson, Trump’s special assistant for legislative affairs, it was also Ornato who warned Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 4 that violence was possible in D.C. on Jan. 6.

RELATED STORY: Former aide says Meadows warned about violence coming to D.C. on Jan. 6

As for Pence, Short has said his boss simply did not leave because he did not want to give America’s global adversaries the fodder if he was seen “fleeing the Capitol in a 15-car motorcade” as rioters scaled the walls with everything from loaded handguns to sharp sticks. 

During his recent speech at Georgetown University, Raskin did not make a blanket suggestion that Ornato was part of a grand conspiracy on Jan. 6 to remove Pence from office or that the Secret Service was involved in a conspiracy. 

“I can’t say because we haven’t discussed that yet and we’re not there yet,” he said.

Though Raskin did say that what happened on Jan. 6 was unequivocally a “marriage between an inside political coup at the highest levels of the administration, with street thugs and hooligans and neo-fascists.” 

“No president has ever come close to doing what happened here in terms of trying to organize an inside coup and overthrow an election and bypass the constitutional order and then also use a violent insurrection made up of domestic extremist groups,” Raskin said. 

What exactly prompted Pence to tell Giebels that he trusted him but wouldn’t go with him in a car because Giebels wasn’t driving is unknown for now. 

The Secret Service is sworn to protect men like Pence, and whisking him away from the scene at the Capitol would not be beyond the normal bounds. He did eventually leave with his detail and was taken to a secure undisclosed location under the Capitol.

But the detail is notable, and the fact that Raskin finds it chilling is more so. He has been privy to information underlying more than 800 witness interviews by the committee, and has seen thousands upon thousands of pages of records. 

When there’s an attempted overthrow, no details can be taken for granted. 

“The hearings will tell a story that will really blow the roof of the House because it is a story of the most heinous and dastardly political offense ever organized by a president and his followers and his entourage in the history of the United States,” Raskin said during his remarks at Georgetown. “No president has ever come close to doing what happened here in terms of trying to organize an inside coup to overthrow an election and bypass the constitutional order.”

Raskin said for four years Pence demonstrated “nothing other than invertebrate sycophancy and obsequiousness to Donald Trump.”

But on Jan. 6, he was a “constitutional patriot” when he decided to stand against the push to stop the count.

“He knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was going to do,” Raskin said.

RELATED STORY: ‘Prepare to be mesmerized’: An interview with Jan. 6 investigator Jamie Raskin

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Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a message for her fellow Democrats ahead of the 2022 midterm elections: DO STUFF! “We’ve got nearly 200 days. If we don’t deliver, if we don’t get up off our rear ends and make it happen, we’re in real trouble,” she said in a Tuesday interview with Politico. “But if we do deliver, if we can get some tangible results that touch people’s lives, then we can go to the polls in November with our heads held high.”

She also wrote about it in The New York Times last week: “Democrats win elections when we show we understand the painful economic realities facing American families and convince voters we will deliver meaningful change. To put it bluntly: if we fail to use the months remaining before the elections to deliver on more of our agenda, Democrats are headed toward big losses in the midterms.”

Where she wants Democrats to deliver: an anti-price gouging bill, banning insider trading for Congress, lowering drug prices, taxing the rich, expanding overtime pay eligibility, and canceling student debt. These are promises made in the 2020 campaign that she says need to be delivered on, and soon.

Put a bill on the floor giving the Federal Trade Commission authority to investigate price gouging, she argues in the Politico interview, and “dare the Republicans to vote against it. A clean, simple bill.” Republicans keep yammering on about inflation, so here’s their chance, she says. “Let’s put it to the Republicans. Do they care about price gouging from the perspective of helping the consumers? Or from the perspective of letting the big corporations continue to get away with it?”

Voters, she writes at the NYT, have long identified corruption in government as a top concern, so Congress should act by starting at home. “[M]embers of Congress and their spouses shouldn’t be allowed to own or trade individual stocks.” She has bipartisan legislation with Montana Sen. Steve Daines to enforce just that, because “to tackle the urgent challenges we face—climate change, income inequality, systemic injustice—we must root out corruption.”

What else Congress can do, she says, is make billionaires pay more in taxes. “About two-thirds of likely American voters—including a majority of Republicans—say it’s time for billionaires to pay more in taxes,” she writes. “Nearly three-quarters of Americans want to put an end to wildly profitable corporations paying nothing or little in federal income taxes (yes, Amazon, I’m looking at you) and put into place a global minimum corporate tax.”

That can be done with just Democratic votes in the budget reconciliation bill that Democrats have available to use right now, and even Joe Manchin (WV) is theoretically in support of that (Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema could still be a problem).

As far as Manchin and the Build Back Better package he’s been fighting is concerned, she told Politico, “I don’t care about the titles, labels, I don’t care about who gets to carry the leadership mantle or the authorship for doing the pieces. We need to pick the pieces that the American people are counting on us to deliver on.”

That’s the Congress side of the equation. She also wants President Joe Biden to act. She outlined how the administration can cut prescription drug prices with executive action in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra this week. She urged Becerra to “move swiftly to use your existing authorities to give sorely needed relief to the millions of Americans paying far too much for their prescription drugs.”

Biden can also, she argues, act decisively “on everything from lowering prescription drug prices to ensuring that more workers are eligible for overtime pay can be executed by the president alone, using the authority already given to him by existing laws, without rounding up 50 Senate votes.”

Senate Republicans are already trying to flex their muscle with legislation trying to ban Biden from canceling student debt, Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson writes. There’s another issue where Democrats should dare Republicans to oppose them, Warren argues, again pointing to polling that shows how popular debt cancellation is with the voters that Democrats need to have turn out this November—women and Black and brown people. “With the stroke of a pen, the president could make massive strides to close gender and racial wealth gaps,” she writes.

Given the new polling from Daily Kos/Civiqs, Biden should heed her call. “The survey found that 67% of Democratic voters aged 18-34 believe Biden ‘made a lot of promises during his campaign that he hasn’t delivered on,’” Daily Kos’ Kerry Eleveld writes. That’s reinforced by a new Harvard Youth Poll which shows an 18-point loss in approval for Biden in the past year among 18-29 year olds; 85% of the respondents in that poll said they favor student debt relief.

“The urgency of the moment” demands that Democrats answer, Warren told Politico. “The things we need to do are things that touch people’s lives directly,” Warren said. “We promised to act on this. The Republicans did not.”

Force the votes, take the executive actions, and make Republicans—and Manchin and Sinema, if necessary—fight against the things that people want. The things that people need. What better argument to increase the Democratic majority in the Senate than making those two irrelevant.

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States nationwide are quickly introducing their own versions of abortion bans as the country awaits the Supreme Court decision regarding the Mississippi law that has the ability to limit abortion rights across the country by overturning Roe v. Wade. But banning abortion is not the only issue: Many GOP states are being sure to include no exceptions for rape, incest, and human trafficking in their anti-abortion bills.

In Ohio especially, the legislator who introduced the state’s latest abortion ban refuses to acknowledge survivor rights.

Rep. Jean Schmidt, who introduced the bill, not only wants to punish doctors who perform abortion—both surgical and through medication—but refuses to make exceptions for rape or incest.

Eli Mystal joins Daily Kos’ The Breif podcast to talk about the Texas abortion law and what it means across the country

“The time has come for Ohio to truly stand up for the rights of the unborn,” Schmidt said during a Wednesday committee meeting. “I pray to God every single night and every single morning that we end this carnage of killing innocent lives because I am pro-life.”

Doctors violating the bill can be charged for “criminal abortion,” which the bill has designated as a fourth-degree felony.

Under the bill, abortion is only allowed when at least two physicians submit in writing that the abortion was necessary in their “reasonable medical judgment” to avoid death or serious risk to the pregnant individual. The bill says such procedures must also be done “in the manner that provides the best opportunity for the unborn child to survive.”

In addition to jail time, medical professionals can face the loss of their licenses for violating the law.

Introduced on March 17, the bill in question, HB 598, bans all abortions in Ohio except for those performed “to save the life of the mother.” According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the bill is expected to take effect if the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide, is overturned.

Schmidt not only believes the ban will protect the “most vulnerable” but claims rape victims already face enough trauma, so an abortion will not help their situation. Defending her agenda on no exceptions for rape, Schmidt argued that whether or not a person ends a pregnancy, “the scars [from their rape] won’t go away.” 

Essentially she is taking away the power an abuser has had over their victim and giving it to herself or the government instead of putting it back in the survivor’s hands. 

This isn’t the first controversial comment Schmidt, who is also known as “Mean Jean,” has made. In a separate incident, when attempting block Planned Parenthood from receiving any federal money, Schmidt claimed that “32 of every 33 pregnant women who visit Planned Parenthood get abortions,” Politifact reported. She argued this because federal law already prohibits tax dollars from paying for abortions.

Seeing that Schmidt was president of Right-to-Life of Greater Cincinnati before she was elected to Congress and that she currently chairs the House Pro-Life Women’s Caucus, her comments are not surprising.

She even went as far as to talk to children as young as the age of 6 at a Cincinnati elementary about abortion, NBC News affiliate WLWT5 reported. Like other Republicans, she will say whatever she can to advance her agenda.

But Schmidt is not alone. Some Ohio legislators, including Sen. Sandra O’Brien, have also argued that the exception to rape and incest does not need to be included because the person “could always take contraception.”

One cannot determine how much trauma someone has faced. Legislators should not be able to decide whether or not a pregnancy should be carried to term, or use a survivor’s trauma against them.

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In a sea of tanks, armored personal carriers (APC), infantry fighting vehicles (IFV), armored fighting vehicles (AFV), Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Vehicles, it can be easy to overlook the vehicles that are most often responsible for getting soldiers where they need to be on the battlefield — Infantry Mobility Vehicles. Also known as Jeeps.

Well, not actually Jeeps. But these are the vehicles that serve the role somewhere between Willy’s Jeeps and the 6×6 truck “Jimmy” trucks that were workhorses of U.S. forces in World War II. They get soldiers from bases to units a lot faster and more reliably than a lumbering APC. They deliver critical spare parts to where they’re needed. They patrol towns and villages behind the front lines. Depending on the level of armor and equipment, they can even become surprisingly involved in combat.

When Russia invaded, there were already a number of vehicles serving this role in Ukraine. That included the home grown Kozak-2 and Novator,  and one that might be surprising — American Humvees. 

When the U.S. announced it’s latest package of assistance, it included 200 more Humvees. This may have seemed like another of those “we’re only adding to the complexity of their supply chain” moments, but Ukraine already had about 350 Humvees playing various roles in their military. The reason that Humvees are showing up in some of the images of vehicles destroyed in Mariupol and eastern Ukraine is not because these are vehicles that rolled off the plane outside Lviv and somehow drove through Russian lines to reach the Azovstal plant. It’s because these are what Ukraine was using already.

It’s also one of their principle needs. Missiles, drones, planes, and tanks may all get more press, but IFVs are almost as central to a functional army as food and ammo. When you look at those videos of the Russian military rolling down the road, and see a huge variety of poorly-maintained, cobbled-together vehicles serving in this role, that’s one of the best signs that the Russian military has enormous issues. When it comes to an actual light armored infantry mobility vehicle Russia has both tens of thousands and almost none. The GAZ Tigr and Iveco LMV theoretically fill this role, but the later has been quite a rare sighting in Ukraine. 80 GAZ Tigr are know dead.

18 Humvees of various configurations are known dead on the Ukrainian side. Several of these seem to have been captured intact and deliberately burned by Russian forces (something they’ve done not just in Ukraine, but in other conflict zones) as a sign of their disdain for America. That’s a good reason to smile. That’s one tough, capable, reliable vehicle that’s not going into service for Vladimir Putin, and Russian forces are depriving themselves.

The level of armor and equipment on a Humvee, or any other light armored vehicle, can vary greatly. They can carry levels of armor that will protect against light machine guns and be beefed up to protect occupants against IEDs. They carry their own machine gun mounts, or launchers for anti-tank missiles.

Now Ukraine is getting a whole new variety of vehicles that are in, or close to, the same category as the Hummvee. On Wednesday, Canada announced they were sending along 8 Roshel Senators (which are based on a heavy duty Ford truck). Those common underpinnings may make this vehicle easier to maintain — but this is a brand new vehicle, so how it will perform in the field is unknown. (Roshel, and Canada, are surely interested in finding out.)

The U.K. is sending along the Husky, which is based on a vehicle by that other producer of hardcore American trucks (that you may never have heard of if you don’t live in the Midwest), Navistar International. The U.K. may be sending as many as 120, hopefully along with some mechanics and a good collection of spare parts. Though if these things are reliable as an old International pickup, expect them to come in for service around 2050.

Sure, these vehicles are definitely not tanks. They’re not flashy. They’re just vital. And they get used up quickly in any serious engagement, especially if they come into contact with a serious armored column.

When they’re reading the list of equipment on the way, drones may be exciting, long range artillery may be a relief, but you can bet the guys in the field are most relieved to see more IMVs on the way.

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Your day probably hasn’t been weird enough, so let’s fix that right now with a quote from an ex-President of These United States.

“I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit,” said Donald J. Trump, previously in charge of this nation’s nuclear arsenal.

As reported by The Daily Beast, this and many other important fruit-related quotes have now surfaced thanks to an October deposition just now being filed in the civil lawsuit against Trump brought by Trump Tower protesters who were assaulted by Trump’s private security force back in 2015. Lawyers for those protesters were probing Trump’s history of encouraging violence against protesters in general, including his public request to a crowd at one of his 2016 rallies that “If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you?”

This led the man who could once issue orders to nuclear submarines, perhaps orders demanding that they pull up to a seaside McDonalds and order him some fries, to explain that he was justified in asking the crowd to “knock the crap” out of anyone who might try to throw fruit because his campaign had learned somebody might possibly be planning to throw fruit and the fruit-throwing could have been “very dangerous.”

Via The Daily Beast, then, are some of the fruit-related highlights of Trump’s testimony:

“You get hit with fruit, it’s—no, it’s very violent stuff. We were on alert for that.”

Tomatoes are: “very dangerous stuff.”

“You can get killed with those things.”

“Some fruit is a lot worse than—tomatoes are bad, by the way. But it’s very dangerous. No, I wanted them to watch. They were on alert. I remember that specific event because everybody was on alert. They were going to hit, they were going to hit hard.”

“You can be killed if that happens.”

The specific fruits Trump enumerated as “dangerous stuff” consist of “pineapples, tomatoes, bananas, stuff like that.” While the threat of pineapples is obvious, there remain few to no incidents of American politicians being pelted by pineapples, because they are simply too heavy to throw very far. Bananas could potentially be dangerous because, being of a boomerang-like shape, a skilled thrower could potentially throw a banana that would approach from an unexpected direction, foiling even the most skilled of Secret Service agents and resulting in a potential Dear Leader being poked somewhat annoyingly by one of the banana’s two somewhat pointy ends.

As for the “very dangerous,” “very violent,” and “you can be killed if that happens” nature of a thrown tomato, the dangers are a bit less clear. Is it possible the tomato juice could have combined with Trump’s velvety facial make-up to produce some sort of napalm-like solution? Is there a way for tomatoes and other thrown fruits to combine to produce, say, thermite?

Markos and Kerry talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections

These mysteries have not been cleared up, no doubt because government agents demanded that those explanations be deleted from deposition tapes lest terrorists from fruit-rich nations discover them.

Or, possibly, Trump had a dream about somebody pelting him with fruit onstage and was so terrified of such humiliation that the next day he ordered an entire rally crowd of chanting weirdos to “knock the crap” out of anyone in the building who was suspected of having fruit.

I mean, you could probably poke an eye out if you threw a chicken wing at someone—but Trump didn’t request similar assaults on those holding meat. Very suspicious if you ask me.

And how did the Trump campaign make it through such a trying time without any announcement, ever, declaring that from now on Jared Kushner was going to be put in charge of Fruit and Fruit Trajectories? How are we supposed to believe that Trump’s inner circle was concerned about fruit attacks if Kushner was tasked with authoring not even one Google-researched report on fruit dangers?

Anyhoo, this has been your regular reminder that the Republican Party put Donald Freaking Trump in a position of mind-boggling power on purpose, knowing full well his positions and histories and having many, many videotapes, some of them pornographic, on hand as documentation. And a bunch of preachers came to lay hands on him, and a bunch of top intelligence analysts tried to wedge a bit of vital knowledge into his head by giving him pretty pictures to look at when it became clear he wasn’t going to read intelligence briefings that weren’t pretty-picture based, and a bunch of Republican lawmakers stepped forward one by one to declare that Donald Trump was the most brilliant tax-dodging rapist they had ever met even after a lifetime of sucking up to other tax-dodging rapists, and none of it stuck and the man who wanted to dissolve NATO and proposed bombing a hurricane and thought that he and he alone had the chops to stand up to world dictators and bravely do, er, whatever they asked him to do …

… left office only after violence and is now carrying on a quiet life of explaining which fruits are dangerous (spoiler: all of them) and what his crack security team or just random Trump devotees ought to be able to do to someone Suspected Of Holding Fruit.

Enjoy the rest of your day, America. This is not, by any means, the last you will be hearing about this.

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Republican Rep. Cheryl Helmer of Kansas publicly declared that she doesn’t want to share the women’s bathrooms at the Statehouse with a trans colleague. “Now, personally I do not appreciate the huge transgender female who is now in our restrooms in the Capitol,” Helmer wrote in an email to University of Kansas graduate student Brenan Riffel, who is trans-feminine and uses they/them pronouns, as reported by The Washington Post. “It is quite uncomforting,” the email continued. “I have asked the men if they would like a woman in their restroom and they freaked out.”

Democratic state Rep. Stephanie Byers, an openly trans Indigenous woman serving Kansas, said on Tuesday that transphobic comments are nothing new, but the shocking part is that someone actually came out and said it, which is just about as gracious as anyone in this situation can be.

Obviously, Helmer should be censured in some way, but it’s unclear if anything will actually happen. Especially because Helmer has only doubled down on her comments, and more than just expressing her personal opinion, she is also trying to push anti-trans hate into law. The latest example is HB 2210, the bill she co-sponsored, which aims to make it a felony for physicians in the state to provide gender-affirming care, including hormones, to trans people under 18.

RELATED: The Republican hysteria campaign about trans rights is working on voters

“You can’t lop a penis off and then expect, you know, a little boy to now live his life,” Helmer said on Monday according to the Associated Press, adding that the person would be in “regret” for the rest of their life. No one is lopping the genitals off of children, period. Adding to this incredibly misleading and incorrect portrayal of science is the fact that Helmer is a retired school counselor and nursing instructor. 

Riffel, the student who received the initial response from Helmer, said in an interview with the Associated Press they weren’t surprised by Helmer’s feelings, given what it takes to sponsor anti-trans legislation. They said the rhetoric against LGBTQ+ folks has been the same for a long time, and at the end of the day, they just want to be themselves and live their life. 

In the same email to Riffel, by the way, Helmer reportedly claimed that a doctor can “inject meds” and “dilute” but cannot “destroy” what “God has done in the perfection of the HUMAN BEING.” Helmer also claimed that as a former biology major, she understands the biological difference between “a man and a woman.” She also claimed to Riffel that trans women are stronger and larger than cisgender women and therefore it’s dangerous for cis and trans women to share bathrooms.

Again, this is all transphobia, not accurate science or medicine.

If you’re wondering why these two were emailing to begin with, it’s because Riffel was a responsible concerned adult and reached out to Helmer to try and reason with her about her support of the anti-trans health care bill. 

“What have trans kids ever done to you?” Riffel asked in their email, according to The Washington Post. “Are they a threat to you? Should they be attacked for simply wanting to be who they want to be?” Hypothetically these questions would be a great way to engage with someone’s empathy and compassion, but Helmer used it as an opportunity to spew transphobia and hate.

And in case there is any confusion, Helmer confirmed in an interview with the Topeka Capital-Journal that she was referencing Myers in her email about the bathroom. 

Sign the petition: Demand the Senate pass the Equality Act and protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination.

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Right-wing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cost his state more than $4 billion in damages, thanks to a political stunt that slowed commercial traffic at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border to a trickle. He’s also bused asylum-seekers who have already been processed by U.S. officials from his state to Washington, D.C., as another fuck you to the Biden administration for its just decision to stop enforcing a racist Stephen Miller-created policy. 

This busing is a truly despicable scheme that’s using already-vulnerable human beings as a political props. But maybe one thing the governor didn’t really anticipate is that he’s inadvertently helped some migrants. The New York Times reports that a number have said they’ve appreciated the free, Texas-funded rides.

Santo Linarte López told the Times that he didn’t have much money left after traveling from Nicaragua, with hopes to meet family in North Carolina. “He said he did not understand why Mr. Abbott was paying for him to travel north, but he was grateful.”

RELATED STORY: Local advocates say they’re ready to aid asylum-seekers sent to D.C. under Abbott’s despicable stunt

It’s not clear if Linarte López’s trip was Texas to D.C. to North Carolina, but the Times reports that Abbott’s free rides have dropped some migrants off in the state, along with locations in Alabama and Georgia. Nearly 200 have traveled from Texas to D.C., where they’ve been “greeted by volunteers” who then “help them reach their desired destinations around the country to await their day in immigration court,” the report said.

Markos and Kerry talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections

“In a way, it’s actually perfect,” Welcome With Dignity spokesperson Bilal Askaryar said in the report. “Unintentionally, Governor Abbott sent them to one of the best places in the nation to welcome people.”

That, of course, was never Abbott’s goal. He initially peddled a plan that sounded a lot like he was going to kidnap groups of people across state lines. That was in front of cameras and reporters. But he was sedate in the state’s official release, which stated that the busing would actually be voluntary. “Any forcible busing of migrants across the country would be outrageous and blatantly unconstitutional,” ACLU of Texas staff attorney Kate Huddleston said in a statement reported by The Texas Tribune.

Eternally a gross human being, Abbott then made sure the busing was done in coordination with right-wing media. Not only did Fox News air dozens of segments about the stunt (which it of course didn’t do when it came to the failed $4 billion policy), but the first bus from Texas parked in front of a building that houses the outlet’s D.C. studio, Media Matters said. Political hosts from the network then applauded Abbott as having kept his promises, blah blah blah. 

But even if Abbott has said his free rides are voluntary, advocates have expressed worry that some migrants feel pressured to accept the ticket, Media Matters noted. Some may see uniforms and feel like their only option is to do whatever the officers suggest. I mean, if Abbott is going to give people free rides anyway, he could just have community-based organizations handle that for him. But that wouldn’t play as well on Fox News, would it?

Back in Washington, D.C, the Times reports that volunteers have used apps like WhatsApp to try to coordinate aid for newly arrived migrants. Texas has purposefully not shared bus arrival times (or even where they’ll drop people off), so they do their best estimations. But once they do get there, volunteers help them with food, plans for their next stop if they’re not staying in D.C., and reminders to check in with federal immigration officials as required.

Alberto Valdes Garcia, who was trying to get to Kentucky, was connected to a Quaker guesthouse for some rest before flying out of Ronald Reagan National Airport with a ticket provided by the Central American Resource Center. The Times reported that a volunteer would help make sure he got on to his flight okay. What a stark difference here: Abbott, showing the worst of humanity. Then these volunteers, showing the best.

“There’s all these advocates here who understand the system and understand the needs,” Askaryar continued in the report. “It might not have been the governor’s intention—I think he clearly wanted to create some kind of chaos—but the reality is that we’re really well prepared and really excited to welcome these people.” Chadrack Mboyo-Bola, a migrant from Brazil, certainly seemed appreciative. “I would like to say thank you to the governor of Texas,” he said in the report.

RELATED STORIES: 

Escobar says Abbott’s plan to get asylum-seekers out of Texas is more ‘politics of hate and cruelty’

Angry over Mexico’s remarks, Abbott threatens to reinstate stunt that cost state $4 billion

Texas remains secretive about actual results of expensive border theatrics because they didn’t work

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Climate change and the U.S. Navy-caused water crisis that led to three major wells shuttering in Honolulu—possibly forever—have led to a drastic reduction in water production in Oahu. Our changing planet has made conditions drier across the state of Hawaii, and a winter drought combined with the Red Hill fuel tank leak has Oahu’s Board of Water Supply concerned that it won’t be able to meet the demands of its residents. Already, the board has asked for a 10% reduction in water consumption per household and is reaching out to major sectors like hospitality, medical, and government to urge conservation. It bears being said that, if you’re considering vacationing to Honolulu, now is definitely not the time to put the strain on any already stressed community just trying to get its needs met.

They were once able to when the three wells that the Navy may have single-handedly eliminated were fully functioning. The Aiea-Halawa area alone received one-half of its water from the wells, while metro Honolulu received 20% of its water from them. The 2021 Red Hill fuel tank leak sent 19,000 gallons of fuel into that water supply, sickening residents, temporarily shuttering businesses, and forcing residents from their homes due to lack of clean water. According to activists, numerous residents are still grappling with the fallout and understandably wary of the quality of water flowing into their homes, if they’ve been able to return at all. Though the Hawaii Department of Health says that overall contamination is decreasing, there is still much to be done to mitigate this disaster and even more to be done when it comes to environmental justice.

The Navy is sending up to 5 million gallons of water through a filtration system then into the Halawa Stream per day and finally has plans to defuel the World War II-era fuel farm that sits just 100 feet above a major aquifer, but it didn’t arrive at these solutions without fighting them every step of the way. Only recently did the Navy drop two appeals over the Hawaii Health Department’s emergency order to defuel the tanks, following a ruling against the military earlier this month. Oahu’s access to clean water may never be the same again no matter what happens to the Red Hill facility. And efforts to expand water production, such as the Board of Water Supply’s plans to dig up six exploratory wells, could take up to seven years before reaching completion.

A majority of Hawaiians have been in favor of shuttering the Red Hill fuel tanks and there is a growing movement to demilitarize the entire state that has only gotten stronger. This isn’t the first time the community has come together in the wake of the Navy’s negligence, either. “It was the 2014 spill that really woke up a lot of people, and it was the first time that we saw information about the tanks really,” University of Hawaii professor and demilitarization activist Kyle Kajihiro told the Honolulu Civil-Beat. The 2014 spill saw 27,000 gallons of fuel leak from the same tanks that contaminated the water supply last year. At the time, Kajihiro called Red Hill a “disaster waiting to happen.” He was sadly proven right. Board of Water officials are hoping that conservation requests don’t lead to mandates that put the financial burden on consumers.