We begin today with Josh Marshall—again—of Talking Points Memo, excoriating legacy media for falling for the now-discredited Hunter Biden Laptop story.

For years I’ve continued saying, against what seems like the unified thinking of every reporter, editorialist and credentialed smart person, that the fabled “Hunter Biden Laptop” was obviously the product of a Russian influence operation. The story was absurd on its face. Somehow Hunter Biden decided in a drugged-up fugue that he needed to take his laptop to a computer repair shop. He then forgot about it. The legally blind owner of the repair shop decided to crack it open and look at the files (as one does, of course) and then somehow managed to get the contents to Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.

And yet basically everybody and I mean everybody ended up falling for this. Indeed, the very brief efforts to remain wary of the laptop story in the final days of the 2020 election have evolved into an object case of the dangers of censorship and even liberal media election meddling. It’s a decision — albeit one lasting only a few days — that everyone now agrees “we got wrong.” It was the centerpiece of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” nonsense. But Elon Musk going in for it isn’t the point. He’s a clown. All the serious people ended up doing exactly the same. This has always been bullshit. Media organizations at first wouldn’t touch the story because they’d spent the previous four years kicking themselves for allowing themselves to become the promoters of a Russian election interference and disinformation campaign with the purloined DNC emails back in 2016. Since the Hunter Biden laptop stories had all the hallmarks of exactly the same thing somehow happening to pop up in the final days of the 2020, of course they were suspicious. 

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The real issue, as I note above, is the reporters, editorialists and commentators, who vouched for and credited this whole edifice of lies and bullshit…

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This entire thing has been based on Russian plants and intelligence operations from the start. Every bit of it. It’s been obvious. And yet, well … they’re all dupes. Somehow almost a decade after this whole thing started we’re shocked to see, wow, Weiss’s office was being led around by another cat’s paw of the Russian intelligence services. We’re shocked. But why are we shocked? Every last person among the serious people of the nation’s capital and the sprawling thing called elite received opinion has egg on their face. And it’s not even clear they fully realize it yet.

Aidan Quigley of Roll Call says that Congress will have very little time when it returns next week to pass spending bills in order to avoid a government shutdown.

The Senate returns Monday, only to face impeachment articles the House adopted seeking removal of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas from office. The chamber could quickly dismiss the charges or hold a longer trial as some conservatives are demanding; either way, it’s a constitutional prerogative that must be dealt with first.

The House, meanwhile, isn’t back until Wednesday. That means the latest congressional leaders could theoretically release the text and still adhere to House rules requiring the legislation to be publicly available in advance is Monday.

But even assuming the House can pass the spending package as soon as Wednesday — possibly under suspension of the rules — that leaves little time for the Senate to process it by the end of the day Friday. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and other Senate hard-liners have shown a willingness to delay must-pass bills on several occasions, even if it’s clear they don’t have the votes to block them.

All of these factors have led to speculation that lawmakers may be forced to punt final action for a week with a short-term stopgap measure, lining up the first package of bills currently expiring March 1 with the remaining eight bills that lapse March 8.

Charles Blow of The New York Times says that with the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling about IVF and frozen embryos, this country careens even closer to a theocracy.

There have been cases before in which embryos were destroyed as a result of negligence, but the Alabama decision significantly ups the ante. It essentially turns cryopreservation tanks into frozen nurseries.

The idea is absurd and unscientific. It is instead tied to a religious crusade to downgrade the personhood of women by conferring personhood on frozen embryos.  

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Control of women’s bodies is the endgame. And some religious conservatives won’t stop until that goal is achieved. For that reason, intervening victories — like the overturning of Roe v. Wade — will never be seen as enough; they will only intensify a blinding sense of righteousness.

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The only thing that seems to be temporarily stopping congressional Republicans from pushing for a national abortion ban — after years of arguing that their goal was merely to allow individual states to make their own laws — is that the issue of reproductive choice is an electoral loser for their party.

Mark Joseph Stern of Slate notes that public defenders are good for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wednesday’s case, McElrath v. Georgia, involves a tragic set of facts. Damian McElrath spent several years slipping into schizophrenia before, in a fit of delusional paranoia, he stabbed his mother to death, convinced she was poisoning his food. Georgia prosecutors charged him with malice murder, felony murder, and aggravated assault. At trial, McElrath pleaded insanity, presenting a persuasive case that he could not distinguish right from wrong at the time of his crime. The jury partially agreed and returned a split verdict. On the charge of malice murder, the jury found McElrath “not guilty by reason of insanity”—an acquittal, but one that committed him to a mental hospital indefinitely. On the two other charges, the jury found him “guilty but mentally ill”—a conviction that subjected him to prison time, with the possibility of mental health treatment. The trial judge accepted the verdict and sentenced McElrath to life in prison.

After a complicated appeal, the Georgia Supreme Court declared that the jury’s split verdicts on malice murder (acquitted) and felony murder (convicted) were “repugnant” under state law. The court insisted that it was impossible for McElrath to have had different mental states at the same time, so the verdicts could not be reconciled. Thus, the court vacated both verdicts, effectively allowing the state to retry McElrath for malice murder despite the jury’s acquittal. McElrath argued that this retrial would violate double jeopardy, but the court disagreed, reasoning that the two verdicts were “valueless,” indistinguishable from a mistrial due to a hung jury.

Could it really be that easy to evade the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against double jeopardy? Can a court just proclaim that an acquittal doesn’t count because it doesn’t make sense? No, Jackson reasoned in her opinion on Wednesday: The Georgia Supreme Court got it wrong. To explain why, the justice went back to first principles. The Fifth Amendment states that no person may “be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” That means that “a verdict of acquittal is final” and serves as “a bar to a subsequent prosecution for the same offense.” An acquittal encompasses “any ruling that the prosecution’s proof is insufficient to establish criminal liability for an offense.” A jury’s acquittal is “inviolate” and cannot be reviewed, let alone overturned, by a higher court. This “bright-line rule” preserves the jury’s duty “to stand between the accused and a potentially arbitrary or abusive government that is in command of the criminal sanction.”

Lauren Weber of The Washington Post discusses nonprofits that made a lot of money through the trafficking of COVID-19 misinformation.

Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., received $23.5 million in contributions, grants and other revenue in 2022 alone — eight times what it collected the year before the pandemic began — allowing it to expand its state-based lobbying operations to cover half the country. Another influential anti-vaccine group, Informed Consent Action Network, nearly quadrupled its revenue during that time to about $13.4 million in 2022, giving it the resources to finance lawsuits seeking to roll back vaccine requirements as Americans’ faith in vaccines drops.

Two other groups, Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance and America’s Frontline Doctors, went from receiving $1 million combined when they formed in 2020 to collecting more than $21 millioncombined in 2022, according to the latest tax filings available for the groups.

The four groups routinely buck scientific consensus. Children’s Health Defense and Informed Consent Action Network raise doubts about the safety of vaccines despite assurances from federal regulators. “Vaccines have never been safer than they are today,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on its webpage outlining vaccine safety.

Elizabeth Wellington of The Philadelphia Inquirer caught the shoe salesman stealing again.

What unsettles me is the former president’s golden sneaker is a clear nod — albeit gaudy — to hip-hop culture, a culture he’s spent years vilifying. Yeah, I know. Why can’t Trump’s Sneaker Con appearance be about him connecting with his homies over footwear. Why are you making it about race?

The truth is, if it wasn’t for hip-hop culture, sneaker culture wouldn’t exist. And if it wasn’t for Black American culture, hip-hop wouldn’t exist.

Trump is a friend to neither, period. In fact, Trump and many of his Republican supporters are actively trying to wipe Black culture off the American landscape, most egregiously through continued attempts at voter suppression and banning books. Black people benefitted from slavery, so many say. Black history is not American history, they argue.

But sneaker culture is ripe for the taking?

The hypocrisy is astonishing.

Or, is it? Trump’s colonization of sneaker culture is totally on brand. All 1,000 of the limited edition Trump sneaker, made [by] CIC Ventures LLC, have sold out, netting the company at least $400,000. According to the website, the sneakers are not designed, manufactured, distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals. But Trump reported owning CIC Ventures in his 2023 financial disclosure.

Wellington is right regarding the connection of sneaker culture to hip-hop culture but I do remember that in the early 1970s, Converse Chuck Taylors were very popular. My little self wanted a pair soooooo badly. They went out of style when NBA players stopped wearing them in the late 1970s. And I do remember wanting a pair of those knock-off-Chucks called Bata Bullets, too.

I didn’t know that Chuck Taylors dated back to the 1920s, though.

So ...I would mark “sneaker culture” as “beginning” in the mid to late 1970s, perhaps; a little bit before hip-hop. In any event, sneaker culture was well under way by the time this song came out.

David Smith of The Guardian notes that former British Prime Minister Liz Truss showed up here. In the United States. At CPAC. And gave a speech. And blamed her downfall on “the deep state.”

In Wednesday’s opening session, an “international summit”, the ex-PM sat side by side with Nigel Farage, former leader of the Brexit party, both with small Union flags on the table in front of them.

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Not for the first time Truss, whose premiership last only 50 days, sought to portray herself as the victim of bureaucratic forces. “I ran for office in 2022 because Britain wasn’t growing, the state wasn’t delivering, [and] we needed to do more,” she said. “I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum. What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself.”

She continued: “What has happened in Britain over the past 30 years is power that used to be in the hands of politicians has been moved to quangos and bureaucrats and lawyers so what you find is a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.”

Truss was interrupted and asked to explain the meaning of “quango”. She replied: “A quango is a quasi non-governmental organisation. In America you call it the administrative state or the deep state. But we have more than 500 of these quangos in Britain and they run everything.”

Lettuce Liz is talking about “the establishment” in the original sense that former UK Spectator and Washington Post columnist Henry Fairlie used the word.

Mariko Oi of BBC News reports that Japan’s main stock index, the Nikkei 225, has hit a record high; just above its previous high of 35 years ago. But the Japanese economy is still suffering and has slipped into recession.

The Nikkei 225 rose 2.19% on Thursday to end the trading day at 39,098.68.

That topped the previous record closing high of 38,915.87 set on 29 December 1989, the last day of trading that decade.

Asian technology shares were boosted after US chip giant Nvidia revealed strong earnings, driven by demand for its artificial intelligence processors.

Global investors are returning to the benchmark index thanks to strong company earnings, even as the country's economy has fallen into a recession.

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The country's gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by a worse-than-expected 0.4% in the last three months of 2023, compared to a year earlier.

It came after the economy shrank by 3.3% in the previous quarter.

The figures from Japan's Cabinet Office also indicate that the country has lost its position as the world's third-largest economy to Germany.

Lilia Yapparova of the Russian independent media outlet Meduza interviews one of Bellingcat’s lead investigative journalists, Christo Grozev, about the beginnings of his investigation into the death of Russian activist Alexei Navalny.

In early 2021, when Alexey Navalny was getting ready to return to Russia just five months after being poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, Christo Grozev asked Navalny’s wife Yulia whether she realized that her husband would face certain arrest when his plane landed in Moscow.

“In response, she just smiled and said, ‘Christo, you’re so naive. They won’t just arrest him. They’ll keep him in torture chambers for years. And they might also kill him,’” Grozev told Meduza.

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“I’ve already gotten warnings from my sources that there could be an entire new wave of repressions and murders — that Putin has ‘special plans’ for Russian opposition leaders,” he told Meduza. If these reports are true, he noted, jailed opposition figures such as Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza will be “especially vulnerable” to Putin’s whims ...

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On Sunday, two days after Navalny’s death, Novaya Gazeta reported that Navalny’s body was in a morgue in the town of Salekhard, the capital of the region where he died, and that it has bruises suggesting he was physically restrained while convulsing.

According to Grozev, convulsions are a “typical symptom” of poisoning by high doses of organophosphates, nerve agents expressly prohibited by the U.N. Chemical Weapons Convention, to which Russia is a party.

Finally today, Renée Graham of The Boston Globe reminds us that when it comes to the job of defending civil rights and democracy, the “job’s not finished” simply because a charismatic leader dies. Never.

In a widely circulated clip from “Navalny,” the Academy Award-winning documentary about Alexei Navalny — often called Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “most formidable opponent” — he was asked what message he would want to leave for his fellow Russians if he were killed by his political enemies.

“Listen, I’ve got something very obvious to tell you — you’re not allowed to give up,” he said, speaking in Russian. “If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power to not give up, to remember that we are a huge power that is being oppressed by bad dudes. We don’t realize how strong we actually are. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive.”

More than a poignant epitaph for Navalny, who died last week under suspicious circumstances in a Russian penal colony, his words were also a pointed directive to his many followers. He not only echoed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s stance that the “appalling silence of the good people” is as destructive as “the hateful words and actions of the bad people” but also the civil rights leader’s last speech delivered the day before he was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis.

Try to have the best possible day, everyone!