…hard to see [DOT 18/1/22]

…do you ever see something & just think “surely not?”

In unusually sharp terms, the airline industry implied in a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and other top federal officials that Verizon’s and AT&T’s plans could add to the disruptions in the global shipping network that have fueled inflation.

High-speed 5G internet uses so-called C-band frequencies close to those used by aircraft to measure their altitude. The airlines say the technology can interfere with the instruments and create a serious safety hazard. Verizon and AT&T have argued that the aviation industry had years to upgrade any equipment that might be affected.
[…]
The airline executives said in their letter on Monday, which was reported earlier by Reuters, that aircraft manufacturers had informed them in recent weeks that the measures promised by Verizon and AT&T were not enough to prevent interference with aircraft sensors. They asked that the 5G technology not be activated within two miles of 50 major airports.

“Multiple modern safety systems on aircraft will be deemed unusable,” according to the letter, which carried the letterhead of Airlines for America, an industry group. “Airplane manufacturers have informed us that there are huge swaths of the operating fleet that may need to be indefinitely grounded,” stranding thousands of passengers and worsening turmoil in the supply chain, the airlines said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/17/business/airlines-5g-warning.html

…I don’t know who exactly seems to be at fault with this stuff…or the particular details that mean that the signal is apparently the same as that used in other places (like the UK) where this apparently isn’t a problem…because in the US the signal strength is significantly greater…but…not least since at least some of the coverage made a point of repeating that in parts of the states where 5G is available the data speeds provided by 4G up north in canada are actually faster…so on balance…although I’m not overly sympathetic to the case of airlines who are apparently too impoverished to have updated their onboard systems…it does sound as though the implementation of the 5G side of the problem could have been done better?

US airline CEOs call for “immediate intervention” from White House, FAA, FCC and DOT “to avoid significant operational disruption to air passengers, shippers, supply chain and delivery of needed medical supplies” as soon as Wednesday when C-Band 5G is activated. pic.twitter.com/alDx8w25cH

— Kris Van Cleave (@krisvancleave) January 17, 2022

…unlike some people…they surely knew this was coming?

Australia and New Zealand sent surveillance flights on Monday to assess damage in Tonga, which is isolated from the rest of the world after the eruption of a volcano that triggered a tsunami and blanketed the Pacific island with ash.
[…]
The surveillance flights would assess the situation in outer islands where communication is completely cut off.

Tonga’s deputy head of mission in Australia, Curtis Tu’ihalangingie, asked for patience as Tonga’s government decides its priorities for aid.

Tonga is concerned about the risk of aid deliveries spreading Covid-19 to the island, which is Covid-free.
[…]
“When people see such a huge explosion they want to help,” he said, but added Tonga diplomats were also concerned by some private fundraising efforts and urged the public to wait until a disaster relief fund was announced.

Any aid sent to Tonga would need to be quarantined, and it was likely no foreign personnel would be allowed to disembark aircraft, he said.

International communication has been severely hampered by damage to an undersea cable, which could take more than a week to restore, and Australia and New Zealand were assisting with satellite calls, he said.

Telephone networks in Tonga have been restored but ash was posing a major health concern, contaminating drinking water.
[…]
More than a day after the eruption, countries thousands of miles to the west have volcanic ash clouds over them, New Zealand forecaster WeatherWatch said.

Early data suggests the eruption was the biggest blast since Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines 30 years ago, New Zealand-based volcanologist Shane Cronin told Radio New Zealand.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/tonga-assesses-damage-tsunami-drinking-water-ash-concerns

…either way…I’m thinking if you asked people on the islands of tonga if 5G was a big deal…or so important it might be worth grounding flights over…I’m guessing you’d get some choice responses

The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a briefing on Monday there was significant infrastructural damage around the main island of Tongatapu. “We are particularly concerned about two small low-lying islands – Mango and Fonoi – following New Zealand and Australian surveillance flights confirming substantial property damage,” they said.
[…]
New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern said on Monday that contact had not yet been established with many coastal regions beyond the capital, Nuku‘alofa.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/18/tonga-volcano-first-pictures-after-eruption-show-islands-blanketed-in-ash-as-two-deaths-confirmed

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/14/worlds-poorest-bear-brunt-of-climate-crisis-10-underreported-emergencies

…& sometimes the sense of deja vu involved in the headlines is…dismaying

A more complete picture emerged Monday of what unfolded inside the Texas synagogue where an armed British citizen took a rabbi and three congregants hostage in an attack the FBI is now investigating as an act of terrorism. Cytron-Walker and another hostage, Jeffrey Cohen, described how hostage-taker Malik Faisal Akram revealed a gun as the group said prayers Saturday at Congregation Beth Israel, then repeatedly threatened them over the course of 11 terrifying hours. He allowed them to call their families, Cohen said in a lengthy Facebook post, and at one point told them to get on their knees.

Those accounts came as police in northwest England questioned two teenagers as part of an investigation that now spans two countries. Britain’s Greater Manchester Police said Sunday that the pair had been taken into custody by counterterrorism officers and that the department would assist U.S. officials with the inquiry. The agency declined to share further details Monday.
[…]
Details of the hostage-taker’s background were beginning to emerge in his home of Blackburn, a town in Lancashire, England, with a significant population of immigrants who arrived from Pakistan and India beginning in the 1960s. There, Akram grew up in a well-known family, his father the founder of a small mosque. He struggled with mental health issues, according to his brother, Gulbar Akram, who declined to elaborate further.

The area is “unfortunately well-known for producing some terrorists in the past,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security think tank.

In 2015, a 14-year-old from Blackburn became the youngest person convicted of a terrorism offense in Britain. The teen was jailed for inciting terrorism in Australia after instructing an Islamist militant to behead or kill officers at an Anzac Day parade.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/17/texas-synagogue-malik-faisal-akram-investigation/

…particularly the post-script

The British man who took hostages at a Texas synagogue had been under investigation by MI5 as a possible Islamist terrorist threat as recently as 2020, Whitehall sources acknowledged on Tuesday morning.

British intelligence closed the investigation, however, after officers had concluded Malik Faisal Akram from Blackburn posed no threat, and as a result he was able to freely travel to the US and purchase a gun.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/18/mi5-investigated-texas-synagogue-hostage-taker-malik-faisal-akram-in-2020

…although…well…there might be indications that in a lot of cases what’s there to see & what people actually think they see is…different

Every year, on the third Monday in January, America hosts a Sadie Hawkins-style role-reversal where the entire country pretends to celebrate a man whose achievements and values they spent the previous 364 days ignoring, demonizing and trying to dismantle. [That day], your favorite vote suppressors will take a brief respite from disenfranchising Black voters, denying history and increasing inequality to celebrate a real American hero.

That’s right, it’s MLK Day!

You might think it’s a little disrespectful to refer to a great American hero by his initials but, in this specific case, it’s perfectly fine. The actual Martin Luther King Jr who lived and breathed is not the man most people will be honoring today because that Martin Luther King is dead and gone. No, the man upon whom they will heap their performative praise with social media virtue-signaling is MLK, a caricature of a man whose likeness has been made palatable for white consumption. Like BLM, CRT and USA, the people who King fought against have now managed to flatten a three-dimensional symbol to a three-letter, chant-worthy phrase worthy of demonization or deification.
[…]
The real Martin Luther King would make white people uncomfortable.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/17/mlk-is-revered-today-but-the-real-king-would-make-white-people-uncomfortable

…or to put it another way

So, I scrapped my original speech and spent the entire first half of it reading excerpts from a bunch of Dr. King's speeches, but without telling anyone that I was doing so, leading the audience to think King's words were mine. And, whew, chile, it was AMAZING.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 17, 2022

"The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power. A nation that continues year after year to spend more $ on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 17, 2022

"Ever since the birth of our nation, White America has had a Schizophrenic personality on the ? of race, she has been torn between selves. A self in which she proudly professes the great principle of democracy and a self in which she madly practices the antithesis of democracy."

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 17, 2022

"The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation."

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 17, 2022

Then I read all the names that white Americans called King: charlatan, demagogue, communist, traitor — and brought out the polling showing more than three-quarters of Americans opposed King at his death while 94 percent approve of him now.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 17, 2022

When the speech was over, Father Pfleger, who had been been cheering me on from the crowd, whispered in my ear: That's what you call the "You Gone Learn Today" speech and I 💀. Because, yeah.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 17, 2022

-30-https://t.co/9QoKjWAooL

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 17, 2022

…that’s not the whole thread…which, like the piece by michael harriot for the guardian, is well worth a read…but…it’s a pretty good point?

…if it wasn’t one of those tuesdays that’s basically a monday in disguise I’d maybe also say that if you can find it there’s an epsiode of the boondocks that’s worth checking out

…but whatever you think about that idea…I’m guessing you’d agree that some people just shouldn’t be trying to cite that particular man in order to claim they somehow honor his legacy

“The tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting.”

— Martin Luther King Jr, 1963

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) January 17, 2022

…this, though…this might take the unwarranted association prize

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) gave his voters what they asked for as his first act in office, invoking the moral authority of Martin Luther King Jr. — on the actual birthday of the civil rights icon — to justify an attack on anti-racist teaching.

He used King’s own words in an executive order forbidding “inherently divisive concepts” in education, rendering Virginia the seventh state to ban outright the teaching of “critical race theory,” a graduate-level framework for understanding how policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism, something that is not taught in K-12 settings.
[…]
“We must equip our teachers to teach our students the entirety of our history — both good and bad … Only then will we realize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that our children ‘will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,’ ” the executive order states.

[…] This, the executive order claims, will coincide with “teaching our children the value of freedom of thought and diversity of ideas.”

The purpose of education, King wrote as an 18-year-old Morehouse College student in 1947, is to “save a man from the morass of propaganda.”

“Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction,” he wrote in the school paper.
[…]
On what should’ve been his 93rd birthday on Saturday, King’s memory was hijacked and defiled by a multimillionaire who rocketed to public office, powered by the very things King warned us about: falsehoods and propaganda.
[…]
Critical race theory is facts, evidence and information to be digested and analyzed by students, primarily the ones in law school. It is education. But for Youngkin and others who use it to scare uninformed White voters, it was political rocket fuel.

“We will eventually turn it toxic,” Christopher Rufo, the man who helped weaponize the concept, wrote on Twitter last March. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”
[…]
Too bad Youngkin didn’t read more from King, whose legacy is too often pacified.

“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance,” King wrote in his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” “It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/17/youngkin-king-critical-race-theory-disinformation/

…I don’t know for sure about the prize part…he’s up against some stiff competition…pretty much everyone opens their mouth & says something on the subject…no matter how insanely unqualified to mention the man their own words & deeds might paint them

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s MLK day post compared vaccination status to the segregation of the Civil Rights Era. pic.twitter.com/8l3mHnMoMp

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) January 18, 2022

Capitalism and democracy are compatible only if democracy is in the driver’s seat.

That’s why I took some comfort just after the attack on the Capitol when many big corporations solemnly pledged they’d no longer finance the campaigns of the 147 lawmakers who voted to overturn election results.
[…]
A report published last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington shows that over the past year, 717 companies and industry groups have donated more than $18m to 143 of those seditious lawmakers. Businesses that pledged to stop or pause their donations have given nearly $2.4m directly to their campaigns or political action committees (Pacs).

But there’s a deeper issue here. The whole question of whether corporations do or don’t bankroll the seditionist caucus is a distraction from a much larger problem.

The tsunami of money now flowing from corporations into the swamp of American politics is larger than ever. And this money – bankrolling almost all politicians and financing attacks on their opponents – is undermining American democracy as much as did the 147 seditionist members of Congress. Maybe more.

The Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema – whose vocal opposition to any change in the filibuster is on the verge of dooming voting rights – received almost $2m in campaign donations in 2021 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. Most of it came from corporate donors outside Arizona, some of which have a history of donating largely to Republicans.

Has the money influenced Sinema? You decide. Besides sandbagging voting rights, she voted down the $15 minimum wage increase, opposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and stalled on drug price reform – policies supported by a majority of Democratic senators as well as a majority of Arizonans.
[…]
Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union Pacs contributed about as much as corporate Pacs. Now, corporations are outspending labor by more than three to one.

According to a landmark study published in 2014 by the Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at all on legislation emerging from Congress.
[…]
It’s probably far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002: before the supreme court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, before Super Pacs, before “dark money” and before the Wall Street bailout.
[…]
The profits of big corporations just reached a 70-year high, even during a pandemic. The ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to 320-to-1 now.
[…]
In 1964, just 29% of voters believed government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves”. By 2013, 79% of Americans believed it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/16/corporate-sedition-capitol-attack-democracy-political-financing-donations-sinema-voting-rights

…so…to manage to stand out as glaringly hypocritical against that backdrop…you’d have to really work at it…wouldn’t you?

For the first time, Mr. Johnson’s own side is publicly calling for his head — from the Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross to a small but growing number of veteran lawmakers. An as yet unknown number of Conservative lawmakers have already submitted formal letters of no confidence.

Just a few weeks ago, as Mr. Johnson sat on his comfy majority of nearly 80 seats, there had been talk about him staying in power for a decade. He had changed the course of British history by delivering Brexit (however disastrously) and had seemed invincible within not just his own party but the entire country. A tussle-haired phenomenon known the world over by just his first name. That makes this change of fate all the more spectacular.
[…]
Clearly, something has changed. It may seem to some as a mere social kerfuffle, but it actually is a matter that cuts right to the hearts and souls of a nation. Mr. Johnson the joker is finally finding himself in the dock of public opinion, and the jury is turning against him because he has belittled our sacrifices and our pain. A search for his basic decency and compassion has discovered a man devoid of empathy, a leader who believes he is exempt from responsibility or honor. He could do what he liked with who he liked — attend a B.Y.O.B. party to enjoy the “lovely weather” — while others outside his charmed circle faced fines for meeting more than one friend outdoors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/opinion/boris-johnson-party-covid.html

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/16/what-will-happen-to-boris-johnson-now

…but even if he exits stage left in typical tory fashion with a bunch of knives protruding from his back…doubtless muttering about how it isn’t even the ides of march yet but alea jacta est…it’s not like the dubious shit that’s happened during his tenure will somehow get better on account of his downfall…even if the house of lords did just give him a failing grade on the last piece of homework he sent their way

The House of Lords has voted to make misogyny a hate crime in England and Wales, in a night of several defeats for the government in the upper chamber.
[…]
The Home Office minister Lady Williams pointed to a report by the Law Commission last year which concluded that making misogyny a hate crime would not prevent hostility towards women, but the amendment passed anyway on Monday night, thanks to support from Labour and the Liberal Democrats, with 242 peers backing it versus 185 voting against.

The vote came during a debate in the House of Lords on the Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, in which the government lost 14 divisions, including plans to make people locking themselves on to objects punishable by up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment, suspicion-less stop-and-search and introduction of “serious disruption prevention orders” against protesters.

Peers also voted to block proposals to give police new powers to stop noisy and disruptive protests in England and Wales, with Green peer Jenny Jones calling the plans “oppressive” and “plain nasty”.

Once the Lords have completed their scrutiny of the bill, which needs the approval of both houses to become law, it will return to the House of Commons.
[…]
Labour’s Lord Hain called the government’s plan to curb noisy protests via extended police powers “the biggest threat to the right to dissent and the right to protest in my lifetime”.
[…]
Adding to a raft of government defeats, peers also supported four other amendments including one aiming to protect Parliament Square as a place to protest, one that would require police officers to tell the truth in public inquiries, and one demanding an inquiry into the prevalence of drink-spiking offences.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/18/government-defeated-as-lords-vote-to-make-misogyny-a-hate

…& it’s not like they’re lashing out in all the same predictable ways as a distraction…oh, wait

The BBC will have to make deep cuts to its programme budgets after the government said the broadcaster’s funding would be frozen for the next two years, with the licence fee abolished completely in 2027.
[…]
[Nadine Dorris] said this would be the end of the current licence fee funding model for the BBC, raising doubts about the long-term financial future and editorial independence of the public service broadcaster under a Conservative government.
[…]
The decision, confirmed by government sources, was briefed to the media as part of a range of measures designed to shore up public support for Boris Johnson after he has faced calls to resign as prime minister.
[…]
Although the BBC will continue to receive £3.2bn a year in licence fee income, the costs of making its programmes are increasing rapidly due to rising inflation and competition from the likes of Netflix. As a result, the corporation will have to make hundreds of millions of pounds in spending cuts in order to balance its books.
[…]
The BBC has already made substantial cost savings behind the scenes, meaning the next round of cuts are likely to hit on-air services. As a result, the public should prepare for the BBC to provide less high-end drama and sports coverage, pad schedules with cheaper programmes, and potentially close some channels or services altogether. This could in turn erode support for the BBC if the public no longer feel they are receiving value for money from the licence fee.
[…]
Dorries’ allies said there would be no further licence fee deal under a Johnson government and they would start negotiations on an entirely new funding model for the corporation. The BBC’s existence and ability to raise money is underpinned by a royal charter that expires at the end of 2027.

The BBC has already been preparing for the end of the licence fee, with proposals including a universal levy on broadband subscriptions or funding the broadcaster with a grant from general taxation – although this could undermine its editorial independence and leave it even more at the whim of government anger. Making the BBC a paid-for subscription service similar to Netflix is difficult due to the widespread popularity of broadcast radio and Freeview television services, which cannot be put behind a paywall.

Negotiations over the amount the BBC can charge for the licence fee have been ongoing for some time, with a final deal delayed by Dorries’ appointment in the autumn. The government has repeatedly criticised the corporation’s news output, claiming it is biased against the government and linking negative coverage of the prime minister to the licence fee negotiations.

The BBC has faced repeated deep real-terms spending cuts since the start of the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010, with the Conservatives forcing the broadcaster to pay for free licences for the over-75s – then blaming it when they took the benefit away.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jan/16/bbc-licence-fee-to-be-abolished-in-2027-and-funding-frozen

While Boris Johnson has thankfully stopped short of declaring a war, he appears to be offering wobbling Conservative voters the next best thing: Operation Red Meat, involving threats to deploy the RAF and the navy against migrant boats in the Channel, plus some ritual BBC-bashing and assorted other wheezes designed to buy a beleaguered prime minister time. Presumably, he wants Daily Express readers to be under the vague impression that Britain is ready, if not quite to bomb refugees back to France, then at the very least to up the ante. Like the rest of Operation Red Meat, however, this one whiffs of something long past its sell-by date.
[…]
The new policy agenda, meanwhile, not only falls apart when prodded but lacks a compelling reason for Johnson himself to lead it. There are things, even now, that only Johnson can do; parts of the country only he can reach, emotional registers only he can strike, gambles so wild only he can get away with them. But does any Conservative voter keen to see this stuff enacted really imagine that Liz Truss couldn’t send in the gunboats, or that Rishi Sunak wouldn’t be eyeing up the BBC’s funding? Unlike Brexit, these aren’t concepts requiring the Johnson magic touch to bring them alive, and they don’t even convincingly feel like his idea.

If Operation Red Meat is a strategy for surviving the next few days only, rather than the next few years, then right now it may be the best that an office full of people worrying they might be sacked can manage. If they can just hang on long enough – and Theresa May hung on longer than seemed possible, as her chief tormentor Johnson doubtless recalls – then the shine may well come off potential successors in the meantime. Truss may overplay her hand, or Sunak be tarnished by the cost-of-living crisis. So long as Tory voters tell pollsters they’re switching to “don’t know” rather than directly to Labour, there’s always a chance of winning them back.

But not with a plan that sounds as if it could have been scribbled on the back of a fag packet after a particularly heavy “wine time” session, and not with a leader who still doesn’t seem to understand why people are so angry. It’s not the lack of red meat on the menu. It’s not the way the kitchen operates. It’s that they no longer believe the chef.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/17/boris-johnson-half-baked-policy-public-anger-migrants-bbc

…nothing to see here

Nadhim Zahawi has denied the government is rushing out a series of policy ideas in an attempt to save Boris Johnson, arguing that the prime minister is safe in his job despite a string of Downing Street parties during lockdowns.
[…]
In an earlier interview with Times Radio, Zahawi rejected the wider idea that No 10 had launched a fightback to save Johnson’s job under titles such as Operation Save Big Dog or Operation Red Meat.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/17/zahawi-denies-government-launching-policy-push-save-boris-johnson

…funny how that one disastrous idiot with the farcical hairdo & a clamitous record reminds you of the other one, isn’t it?

Former President Donald J. Trump returned on Saturday to Arizona, a cradle of his political movement, to headline a rally in the desert that was a striking testament to how he has elevated fringe beliefs and the politicians who spread them — even as other Republicans openly worry that voters will ultimately punish their party for it.

Mr. Trump’s favored candidate for governor, Kari Lake, is a first-time office seeker who has threatened to jail the state’s top elections official. His chosen candidate to replace that elections official, a Democrat, is a state legislator named Mark Finchem, who was with a group of demonstrators outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 as rioters tried to stop the certification of the 2020 election.
[…]
When Mr. Trump took the stage in the evening, he lavished praise on the slate of election-denier candidates in attendance. And he suggested that perpetuating his grievances about being cheated would be a decisive issue for Republican candidates.
[…]
But as popular as the former president remains with the core of the G.O.P.’s base, his involvement in races from Arizona to Pennsylvania — and his inability to let go of his loss to Mr. Biden — has veteran Republicans in Washington and beyond concerned. They worry that Mr. Trump is imperiling their chances in what should be a highly advantageous political climate, with Democrats deeply divided over their policy agenda and Americans taking a generally pessimistic view of Mr. Biden’s leadership a year into his presidency.
[…]
Those worries are particularly acute in Arizona, where the far-right, Trump-endorsed candidates could prove too extreme in a state that moved Democratic in the last election as voters came out in large numbers to oppose Mr. Trump. The myth of widespread voter fraud is animating Arizona campaigns in several races, alarming Republicans who argue that indulging the former president’s misrepresentations and falsehoods about 2020 is jeopardizing the party’s long-term competitiveness.
[…]
At the rally on Saturday, every speaker who took the stage before Mr. Trump repeated a version of the false assertion that the vote in Arizona in 2020 was fraudulent. Mr. Gosar, the congressman, did so in perhaps the darkest language, invoking the image of a building storm, a metaphor commonly used by followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory. And he called for people involved in counting ballots in Arizona in 2020 to be imprisoned.
[…]
For Republicans who are concerned about Mr. Trump’s influence on candidates they believe are unelectable, the basic math of such crowded primaries is difficult to stomach. A winner could prevail with just a third of the total vote — which makes it more than likely a far-right candidate who is unpalatable to the broader electorate can win the nomination largely on Mr. Trump’s endorsement.
[…]
As speaker after speaker attacked the credibility of the vote on Saturday — those with Mr. Trump’s official imprimatur were announced as “Trump endorsed” — several also called on the State Legislature to retroactively vote to overturn Mr. Biden’s win. Mr. Trump’s allies said they expect the issue to take on more urgency in the coming weeks, even though it would have no legal or practical impact.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/us/politics/trump-rally-republicans.html

…well, except maybe on that bottom line

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/inside-trump-s-secretive-endorsement-operation

…after all…the two things he craves most are arguably other people’s money (to cover his debts & the ever-present legal bills) & some of that sweet, sweet diplomatic immunity…sorry…”executive privilege”

But while frayed threads of fiction are nothing new to Trump, his open-air rally here was exotic and portentous even by his standards, a tacit acknowledgment of how much this year’s midterm elections mean for his chances to reclaim the Oval Office.

Having endorsed more than 90 candidates across the country, including Republicans in high-profile races here, he is trying to stock ballots with acolytes. If his favored candidates fare well, he will tighten his stranglehold on the GOP and improve his chances of winning in 2024.
[…]
Arizona is the state he lost by the narrowest margin in 2020, less than 10,500 votes. And his undercard Saturday night featured a blizzard of Trump-styled radicals — all of them election deniers — who hope to purge establishment figures from the party and take control of state and federal elections.

They included three House members — Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs and Debbie Lesko — who voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory; Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state who has associated himself with QAnon; and Kari Lake, a candidate for governor who said Saturday that she wants to imprison state officials who conducted the 2020 election.

Gosar, who was in contact with the organizers of the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, called himself “the most dangerous man” in Congress in a warmup speech.

As if to ensure that he couldn’t be out-Trumped at his own rally, the former president questioned whether the FBI helped stage the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — a favorite fabrication of Fox News host Tucker Carlson — and suggested an upside-down equivalency between a Capitol Police officer and the rioter he shot.
[…]
The combination put Trump firmly on Babbitt’s side but against an attack that he incited and she participated in. The crowd didn’t seem to care much about the logic. Trump was cheered intermittently between chants of “Let’s Go Brandon,” “F— Joe Biden” and “Lock him up!” — the latter a reference to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/ground-zero-2024-trump-spins-lies-conspiracy-theories

…they do say actions speak louder than words

TikToker @special_head spoke to people waiting to leave the Arizona rally. Some reportedly waited as many as three hours. One woman claimed that they couldn’t leave until Trump did because the Secret Service needed to keep the road secure.

A man wearing a “Gods Guns & Trump” shirt angrily told the TikToker: “The Secret Service can go fuck themselves. And fucking know how do their job right.”

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/hours-long-wait-leaving-donald-trump-rally/

And the priority parking lot was emptied

— President National Ambivalence Foundation (@uconnhenry) January 17, 2022

…still…even if tomorrow never comes…at least it’s only a couple more days until it’s friday?