Walter Einenkel

Hello all you Friday folks. It’s been another week following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Whether or not a peace can be negotiated in the near future remains to be seen. At the same time, the Biden administration got some good news about the tools with which they hope to create better environmental policy, but also continue to feel the well-deserved pressure to get more done from Democratic officials facing upcoming elections.

On Thursday, former California Governor and action-movie hero Arnold Schwarzenegger recorded a video and put it out “through various different channels,” in hopes of reaching some of the Russian citizens who are likely unable to get news outside of Putin-sanctioned war propaganda. Schwarzenegger, popular around the world as a real-life muscle-bound superhero, does have an appeal that’s hard to pin down.

Next week, a 44-year-old Pittsburgh woman, Jennifer Heinl, will be sentenced for her part in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Back in November, Heinl pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of demonstrating in a Capitol building. The Federal government is asking that Heinl spend two weeks in jail, spend three years under probation, and pay $500 in restitution.

For the first time since 1989, a case of polio was discovered in a boy in Jerusalem, Israel. According to the country’s Health Ministry, the child had not been vaccinated against the disease. As such, the Health Ministry implored any families whose children are behind on their vaccination schedule to get them up to speed as soon as possible.

It is Friday and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues. Revelations about the nature of Trump’s DHS reveal complicity in the insurrection. The GOP landscape is filled with the hypocrisy we have come to understand as endemic to the conservative lifestyle. And, after a year and a couple of months, President Joe Biden seems to be leaning more and more toward making some of the executive decisions he promised to make when he was running for office.

What is there to say about Fox News and the right-wing-o-sphere that hasn’t been scratched by the nails of demons into the toilet stall walls of hell? Every day, every hour, every minute, Fox News and the propaganda machines it has birthed are either selling their audience lies, misinformation, and disinformation about the world, or selling them pillows, telling them to sell their gold, and saying that the way out of debt is to give Magnum P.I. your home via a reverse mortgage.

It is Friday. The relentless pace of the invasion of Ukraine is brutal. Calls from Ukrainians for the U.S. and NATO allies to enact a no-fly zone have been tempting to some but don’t change the nature of the problems on the ground. In fact, they may only exacerbate what is already an intolerable and inhumane situation.

You may remember Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte as the bully who physically assaulted reporter Ben Jacobs the night before Gianforte won a 2017 special election in Montana. Gianforte was running to fill corrupt Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s vacated seat.

The Qronicles is a series that will collect some of the news, videos, and general mis/dis-information roiling around the conspiracy world of QAnon. You can cringe, you can laugh, but these folks are organizing and showing up at the polls!

This Qweek (see what I did there?!?!?!) on the QAnon Chronicles, we have Canadian truckers—or is it Canada truckers? (See what I did there???) Is the Disney corporation really a Satanic cult? The evidence might surprise you.

It is Friday. Our country’s traditional news media wonders what to do now that the bigger, more robust infrastructure bill—the one that might actually ameliorate many of the issues they now write about with their hands in the air—has not passed.

What is there to say about Fox News that hasn’t been scratched by the nails of demons into the toilet-stall walls of hell? Every day, every hour, every minute, Fox News is either selling its audience lies, misinformation, and disinformation about the world, or it’s selling them pillows, telling them to sell their gold, and saying that the way out of debt is to give Magnum P.I. your home in a reverse mortgage.

On Monday, Republican Florida man Rep. Matt Gaetz was one of 113 Republicans willing to join the Democrats in the House in support of HR 4445. The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021 seeks to end the big business practice that forces employees to arbitrate disputes involving claims of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace.

The Qronicles is a series that will collect some of the news, videos, and general mis/dis-information roiling around the conspiracy world of QAnon. You can cringe, you can laugh, but these folks are organizing and showing up at the polls!

This Qronicles we are going to try to collect together some of the QAnon world’s stories over the past couple of weeQs (see what I did there?). There are QAnon folks pleading guilty for participating in the Jan.

It is Friday! This week has been filled with a mixture of ennui and anticipation for less ennui. The flashiest battles going on right now seem to be between the Republican Party and the Republican Party. While the Liz Cheney establishment wing of the GOP diminishes, they still have one ace card—the MAGA wing of the party probably broke at least a million laws.

On Wednesday, Minneapolis police executed a no-knock warrant on a downtown apartment and then in the next nine seconds, proceeded to shoot and kill 22-year-old Amir Locke, as he lay wrapped up in a blanket on a couch. Interim police Chief Amelia Huffman told reporters that the shooting took place around 7 a.m. The officers who entered the apartment were SWAT team members acting on warrants in service of the St. Paul Police Department.

The song “Amazing Grace,” the hymn written by Anglican priest John Newton in 1772—put to music in 1835 by William Walker—has in modern times been closely connected with the American abolitionist movement and our subsequent civil rights movement. And rightly so. John Newton was a former enslaver of Africans, bringing them to England in the 18th century and spending later years repenting as a Christian.

Hello Friday! As if on cue, our infrastructure continues to literally crumble, and the pittance put forward to fix the myriad issues BBB would have helped to ameliorate remain critical to our country’s future. The Biden administration is being pressured to make the moves that the majority of Americans support, come hell or high water—and the latter is coming, thanks to climate change.

On Wednesday, 57-year-old Robert Keith Packer, known as the long-bearded prick wearing the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt during the insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, pleaded guilty to “parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.” This guilty plea is a misdemeanor carrying a maximum sentence of six months in prison. His sentencing date is April 7.

On Wednesday, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo—Gov. Ron DeSantis’ choice to continue being Florida’s surgeon general—advanced on to the next state Senate committee. The Tampa Bay Times reports that Democratic state Sen. Lauren Book informed the panel that the four Democrats on the panel would not vote on Ladapo’s confirmation, and walked out in protest. “We don’t feel that we’re getting any answers.

On Monday, famous rock ‘n’ roll musician Neil Young reportedly posted an open letter (now deleted) to his management team and record label demanding that his music be removed from music streaming juggernaut Spotify. Rolling Stone reports the letter highlights Young’s dissatisfaction with the streaming service’s support of podcaster Joe Rogan’s show The Joe Rogan Experience.

“They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.

Hana Horka was a well-regarded Czech folk singer. She was a member of one of the oldest Czech folk groups still active, Asonance. She died at the age of 57 from COVID-19.

According to her son Jan Rek (23), Horka had become influenced by the anti-vaxxer movement. Rek says that, because of her refusal to get vaccinated, she decided the best pathway to get a pass to travel and play at venues requiring proof of vaccination or recent infection was to catch the virus herself.

Hello, Friday folks! This week has been sad-face, angry-face, consternation emoji! The Democratic Party—with no help from the Republican Party, of course—is unable to protect the voting rights of Americans. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has virtually no friends other than Mitch McConnell and John Kennedy, and those two guys don’t keep friends.

The  singer, actor, and performer Meat Loaf passed away late Thursday night, according to a post made by his family on his Facebook page. No official cause has been given. The popular performer had a tough run of health problems over the last few years, but he was working on new material and touring since the the fall. According to an unconfirmed report from TMZ, the singer had canceled a “business dinner” earlier this week after catching COVID.

Tennessee Republicans are hoping to turn the “blue bastion of Nashville” red by splitting it up between two more Republican-strangled districts. Since every move the Republican Party makes seems to spit in the face of the law (at least for now, since so many right-wing activist judges have lifetime positions), the constitutionality of their gerrymandering moves is always in question.

John Kuczwanski, the 53-year-old Legislative Affairs Director for the State Board of Administration,  died on Jan. 6, 2022 after a road rage shooting incident. The other person involved in the incident was taken into custody but subsequently released.

This past year, Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld began hosting a podcast called The Brief. With loads of help from Daily Kos’ Cara Zelaya, Carolyn Fiddler, and Dorothy He, and myself, we have rolled out a year’s worth of episodes, with interviews with elected officials, political advisers, legal experts, grassroots organizers, and our own in-house elections experts and reporters.

It is Friday. It will be a long three-day weekend for the do-nothing Senate, as the corruptions of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have left voting rights to hang in the balance. The Supreme Court handed down a decision slamming the rights of workers across the country, and federal courts followed that up by being exposed for their own weak labor practices. In equally dismal news, the Jan.

Mandates are anti-freedom. Vaccine mandates for military members are anti-freedom. Mask requirements are anti-freedom. All kinds of public health measures are anti-freedom, according to the Republican Party. Unless, of course, we are talking about people in need of some government assistance. No, not tax-exempt religious assistance. No, not corporate welfare assistance: We’re talking about the millions of citizens and families not making ends meet in our country.

Remember Glenn Beck? He’s still around and he’s still doing what he’s always done: grifting away. His modern look includes spectacles and a sort of Kentucky Fried Chicken Colonel Sanders look. Surprising no one, Beck’s evidence-free conspiracy theory stylings, now common on the right, are focused on all of the same tropes of misinformation, disinformation, and anti-vaxxer clickbait that allows for making money on his BlazeTV network.

On Wednesday, the United States’ oldest surviving World War II veteran died. Lawrence Brooks was 112 years old, according to the National WWII Museum. Brooks was the youngest of 15 children, born to sharecroppers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His family moved to Mississippi after the Great Depression. 

When Brooks was 31 years old, he was drafted into the Army “and spent World War II in the predominantly African American 91st Engineer Battalion.