Republicans Are Trying to Sell Leak Suspect Jack Teixeira As Some Kind of Whistleblower

It should be obvious through the events of the week that, a) there is too much government material that is classified and, b) there are too many people with the clearance to handle all of that material. So here we have Unlucky Jack Teixeira of Dighton, which is in that part of the Commonwealth (God save it! ) that we usually refer to as, “Down there by Rhode Island.” From the Washington Post:

According to the criminal complaint, a member of Teixeira’s online messaging group on Discord told the FBI that during one of the conversations, Teixeira said that he had stopped writing down the contents of classified documents because “he had become concerned that he may be discovered making the transcriptions of text in the workplace, so he began taking the documents to his residence and photographing them.”

The charging document also describes how that member of the group told the FBI that in February, after Teixeira posted a government document in their small group, the member reposted that image elsewhere on the internet — setting off a chain of events that led to the revelations of the past week, and a criminal case against Teixeira.

Teixeira, the complaint notes, has held a top-secret clearance since 2021 and has the authority to view a smaller category of highly classified material called sensitive compartmented access.

Teixeira is 21. This would have him getting top-secret clearance when he was 19. I’d like to believe he was some kind of intel superstar but the fact that he got caught as fast as he did raises some doubts in my mind. And if the official story is true, and Teixeira really did do this to impress a bunch of anonymous teenage gamers, then he’s going to be the dumbest person ever to darken the doorsteps at Leavenworth.

Now, you would think that the general Republican take on this story would be to castigate the Biden Administration for being lax with the nation’s secrets. Certainly, that would be the first club out of my bag. But this is a whole different GOP with a whole different set of psychoses, and the loudest voices in this Republican Party are trying to sell Teixeira as a whistleblower trying to draw attention to the administration’s war crimes in Ukraine, and I am not kidding about this. From The Hill:

“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” Greene said on Twitter. “Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?” the congresswoman added.

“Tonight, the news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine,” Carlson told viewers. He continued, “They are treating him like Osama Bin Laden, maybe even worse actually, because, unlike Al Qaeda, apparently, this kid is a racist.” The host was referring to reports that the Discord server in which Teixeira shared the documents contained several racist memes.

Carlson honed in on a portion of the documents that mention the number of special forces stationed in Ukraine and their various countries of origin. According to the document, there are 14 U.S. special forces stationed in Ukraine. “The United States is a direct combatant in a war against Russia. As we speak, American soldiers are fighting Russian soldiers,” Carlson claimed, “This is a hot war between the two primary nuclear superpowers on Earth. And yet, this war has never been formally declared. It has not been authorized by Congress. And for that reason, this war is a violation of American law. It is a crime.”

That’ll get you on RT, big guy, but it won’t roll back the war-making powers to Congress, the ones that you cheered so lustily back in 2003. Also, embassy guards in Ukraine are not “in a war” with anybody. Unless Carlson sharpens up between now and next week, his testimony in the Dominion lawsuit could be a bloodbath.

In Arkansas, highly qualified Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Attorney General Tim Griffin, previously d/b/a an RNC hatchet man and one of the central figures in the Rove-Bush plot to ratfck the US Attorneys offices across the country for voter-suppression purposes, are combining to bring back the good old days before the troops rolled into Little Rock back in ’57. From Fox16 in Little Rock:

Griffin’s office filed the motion to intervene in the Western District of Arkansas for El Dorado, Hope and Lafayette County school districts to end programs addressing the racial imbalance in school students and staff. The motions allege these same programs are no longer necessary and block the schools from participating in the state’s 2013 school choice law...

…Griffin’s motions say that the school districts no longer segregated and the importance of school choice in Arkansas means the current rulings in force need to be overturned. “School choice is the law today in Arkansas. Unconstitutional, race-based consent decrees from decades past are denying equal rights to parents to select the school that best meets the needs of their children,” Griffin said.

This, of course, was the central pillar of Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act, the argument that prompted the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s famous quip about how you don’t throw out your umbrella in a rainstorm just because you are not at the moment getting wet. Roberts, of course, won the decision and the Day Of Jubilee was declared throughout the land. Griffin’s just extending the celebration.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Delta Bound" (Maria Muldaur with Tuba Skinny): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: On Monday, while up in Lexington and Concord, minuteman cosplayers try not to shoot each other and passersby, we will be running a marathon again in Boston, an event that changed forever 10 years ago. Here’s the race from 1938, a gentler time, at least relative to the next seven years. Some of the finish line scenes never change. The guy being carried off the course, for one. Also, Clarence DeMar, who won this thing seven goddamn times (!), finished seventh on this day. The first runner across the line that day was 85-year old Peter Foley, to whom was given a two-hour head start. The winner was Les Pawson, a Rhode Island millworker who’d won the race in 1933, and who would win it again in 1941. One of the more striking aspects of the video is how completely rural Hopkinton was back then. Suburban sprawl was 20 years away. History is so cool.

Praise Jesus! The documentary I've been hoping would be made for five decades is finally here! One of the high points of my days as a sportswriter was shaking this man’s hand at the 1990 NBA All Star Game where he was visiting with Spike Lee because they’d shot those Nike ads together. Made my toe shoot up in my boot!

Discovery Corner: There are about a dozen-gazillion jokes I could make about two-faced people in Washington, but in this booth of the shebeen, we armor ourselves in awe and wonderment and let the news speak for itself. From Smithsonian:

In northern Peru’s Nepeña Valley, archaeologists have discovered murals of two-faced men in golden headdresses. One image depicts a man holding a feather fan and a goblet, from which four hummingbirds drink. In another, a man holds a feather fan, as well as an unknown object that’s now partially obscured. Estimated to be 1,400 years old, these murals are impressive for their elaborate detail alone. But researchers say they’re also unique: Such images have “never before [been] seen in Moche art or any other pre-Hispanic tradition of the Andean region,” says Jessica Ortiz Zevallos, the Peruvian director of the Archaeological Research Project, to Hyperallergic's Taylor Michael.

The unusual murals were found on a pillar inside a ceremonial hall. Experts don’t know what the two-faced men represent, but they have a few theories: They could be deities, though this possibility is less likely, as Moche art more often portrays deities with non-human characteristics like fangs or wings, Trever tells Live Science's Owen Jarus. Instead, she says, “The artists may have been experimenting with how to show movement, and two narrative moments at once.

If you squint hard, the head on the right does look a bit like Lindsey Graham…No! Stop!…Look at what we found!

Hey, StudyFinds, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

“Therizinosaurus is famous for its sickle-like claws, each as long as a samurai sword: Edward Scissor-hands on speed. We all saw Therizinosaurus in ‘Jurassic World’ hitting deer and killing the giant predator Giganotosaurus. However, this is unlikely. These long, narrow claws were too weak for combat,” says study co-author Dr. Chun-Chi Liao, an expert on therizinosaurs from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, in a university release. “Our engineering simulation shows that these claws could not withstand much stress.”

Turns out the chicks dug the long, sharp claws.

“Not all therizinosaur hand claws were so useless in combat, but most other related species could use their claws as powerful hooking tools when feeding on leaves from the trees,” Dr. Chun-Chi Liao adds. “So, we conclude that the largest claws of any animal ever were actually useless in mechanical function, and so must have evolved under sexual selection to be used in display. The adult Therizinosaurus I guess could wave the claws at a competitor and effectively say, ‘look at me, back off’ or wave them around in some way like a peacock can use its tail in display to attract females for mating.”

I would like to state for the record that, if I encountered an animal that was 40 feet long and six tons, and which had claws the size of samurai swords, I would not wait around to see how useless the claws were in combat. But I am still glad they lived then to make me happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday for the kickoff of Dominion Voting v. Fox News Channel. Wheeeeeeee! Be well and play nice, ya bastions. Stay above the snake-line. Wear the damn masks. Take the damn shots, especially the damn boosters. And spare a moment for the people of Ukraine, and of the earthquake zone in Syria, and of all the tornado zones across the country.

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