One happy by-product of a terrible year that’s kept millions of people at home has been the sharp reduction in mass shootings in the U.S.—in 2020, there were just two, the last one occurring within days of the World Heath Organization officially declaring the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. And while the coronavirus is far from over—in fact, new cases are on the rise in 27 states with worrisome variants “spreading rapidly”—various parts of the country opening up because “it’s springtime” has led to a return to prepandemic life for many, which in America means a return to looking at one’s phone and learning that countless people were just murdered. And that, of course, means having to once again hear from spineless Republicans whose top priority is ensuring someone intent on killing a bunch of people can buy a gun to do so as quickly as possible.

During a hearing on gun violence on Tuesday—one day after a lone gunman killed 10 people in Colorado and a week after a separate gunman killed eight people in the Atlanta area—Senator Ted Cruz moaned that “every time there is a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders.” In a little catnip to the “they’re taking our guns!” crowd, he added, falsely, that Democrats want to strip “law-abiding citizens” of their right to bear arms:

Called out for offering “thoughts and prayers,” i.e. the constant refrain of shameless politicians who insist on doing nothing to prevent mass shootings, Cruz sneered, “I don’t apologize for thoughts or prayers,” saying that he “believe[s] in the power of prayer.” (Incidentally, prayer has yet to get gun control legislation passed.)

Picking up where Cruz left off, Senator John Kennedy compared mass shootings to drunk driving, forgetting that one must obtain a government-issued license to drive a car and register that vehicle, which makes it considerably more difficult to drive drunk than it is to get a gun and kill 10 people while they’re grocery shopping.

And then there was Senator Tom Cotton, who thinks mass shootings in the U.S. are not an issue of ridiculously lax gun laws and the stranglehold the NRA has on people like him, but a matter of rhetoric:

Echoing Cruz, Senator Cynthia M. Lummis opined that “Every time that there’s an incident like this, the people who don’t want to protect the Second Amendment use it as an excuse to further erode Second Amendment rights.” (In fact, people use “incident[s]” like these as prime examples of why gun control legislation is necessary.) For his part, freshman Senator Tommy Tuberville, who doesn’t know the three branches of government, said Tuesday, “I think we’ve got enough background checks.” In other words, the GOP is not going to do a single thing to stop gun violence but they look forward to pretending to care after the next mass shooting, which is presumably just around the corner.

Republicans are, however, all over fake voter fraud

Trump lawyer Sidney Powell: No one with half a brain would actually believe all that bullshit we said about Trump winning

It’s not her fault if most of Donald Trump’s supporters bought what she was selling, is the argument her lawyers are now trying to make: 

Right-wing lawyer Sidney Powell is claiming in a new court filing that reasonable people wouldn't have believed as fact her assertions of fraud after the 2020 presidential election. The election infrastructure company Dominion Voting Systems sued Powell for defamation after she pushed lawsuits and made appearances in conservative media on behalf of then-President Donald Trump to sow doubt about the 2020 election results. Dominion claims that Powell knew her election fraud accusations were false and hurtful to the company. In a new court filing, Powell’s attorneys write that she was sharing her “opinion” and that the public could reach “their own conclusions” about whether votes were changed by election machines.

“Given the highly charged and political context of the statements, it is clear that Powell was describing the facts on which she based the lawsuits she filed in support of President Trump,” Powell's defense lawyers wrote in a court filing on Monday. “Indeed, Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as ‘wild accusations’ and ‘outlandish claims.’ They are repeatedly labelled ‘inherently improbable’ and even ‘impossible.’ Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants’ position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”

In fact, a whole lot of people believed Powell’s baseless claims of election fraud, hence the attack on the Capitol that left five people dead, as Michigan Republican Peter Meijer noted on Twitter:

And Powell definitely didn’t sound like she was merely offering her “opinion” when she appeared with a hair-dye-streaked Rudy Giuliani at a press conference during which she insisted, among other things, the election was rigged by “communist money” in a scheme orchestrated by Hugo Chávez, who died seven years earlier. Though now that she’s been sued for $1.3 billion we can understand why she’d want to claim otherwise!

Elsewhere!

WHO Chief Says Rising Cases, Deaths Are “Truly Worrying Trends” (Bloomberg)

NYC will bring 80,000 municipal workers back to the office but not require they wear masks (NYT)

Black workers, hammered by pandemic, now being left behind in recovery (Politico)

Biden pushes House-passed gun reforms in the wake of Colorado mass shooting (CNN)

Citigroup has banned video calls on Fridays (Business Insider)

Prince Harry is working at a start-up now (The Wall Street Journal)

Puerto Rico gets over $900M in education funds previously restricted by Trump admin (NBC News)

A newly leaked pitch deck shows Goldman Sachs analysts were pleading for changes since WFH started. (Business Insider)

Democrats are hoping COVID-19 stimulus will help them defy history in the midterms (Vox)

Jack Dorsey sells first-ever tweet for more than $2.9 million (UPI)

Smugglers busted with $382K in gold and cash under their toupees (NYP)

— Andrew Cuomo’s Biographer on the Governor’s Brutish History
— How Officials in Trump’s White House Scrambled to Score COVID-19 Vaccinations
— A Private Jet of Rich Trumpers Wanted to “Stop the Steal”
— Donald Trump Is Drowning in Criminal Investigations and Legally Screwed
— The Wave of Anti-Asian Hate Could Last Beyond the Pandemic
— Could Brett Kavanaugh Be Booted From the Supreme Court?
— Leak of Bombshell CBS Investigation Led to Multimillion-Dollar Settlement
— From the Archive: The Day Before Tragedy

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