The Shooting Gallery: California Gov. Gavin Newsom was meeting yesterday with families of victims in the Monterey Park ballroom dancing massacre when he was pulled aside and told of a shooting in the small coastal town of Halfmoon Bay that left seven people dead. It was the second mass shooting in the state in three days.

  Authorities say a man shot and killed four people at a mushroom farm then went to a second location and killed three more.  Newsom said, “This happens over and over, and over again, only in America.”

  A suspect, 67-year-old Zhao Chunli, of Half Moon Bay, was arrested after pulling his car into the parking lot of a sheriff’s office substation, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office said. Sheriff Christina Corpus said Zhao was an agricultural worker and they brought in a detective who speaks Mandarin to talk to him.

  Corpus said, “It was in the afternoon, when kids were out of school.For children to witness this is unspeakable.”

Patriot Games: Four members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia were found guilty yesterday of seditious conspiracy for their part in the January 6^th insurrection.  This came just shy of two months after the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, was convicted of the same charges. 

  The defendants — Roberto Minuta, Joseph Hackett, David Moerschel, and Edward Vallejo — were tried separately from Rhodes for lack of space in the federal courtroom in Washington. Prosecutors had charged that Minuta, Hackett, and Moerschel joined others in the mob forcing their way into the Capitol, while Vallejo stayed behind in a Virginia hotel room stocked with rifles and texting offers to bring those guns into the city.  

  The jury deliberated for about 15 hours over three days. Prosecutors had argued that the defendants had plotted to keep Donald Trump in power despite losing the 2020 election for the presidency.

  “These defendants, they perverted the constitutional order,” prosecutor Troy Edwards told the jury. “They were willing to use force and violence to impose their view of the Constitution and their view of America on the rest of the country.”

  Also convicted yesterday in a separate trial was Richard Barnett, 62, of Gravette, Arkansas, who famously posed for a picture with his boot up on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk. Barnett faces up to 47 years in prison. His lawyer told The NY Times, “He loves God. He loves his country. He understands he did something wrong. He doesn’t think his life should end because he put his feet up on somebody’s desk.”

The War Room: Poland’s prime minister said his government will ask Germany for permission to send German-made tanks to Ukraine but will go ahead with or without Germany’s say so.

  Germany has maintained a policy that countries using their tanks must ask permission to give them to another country. “We’ll ask for permission, but it’s a secondary issue,” Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki told reporters. “Even if we ultimately don’t receive permission, then, despite that, we’d transfer our tanks to Ukraine together with others within a small coalition, even if Germany is not in the coalition.”

  The German Leopard 2 tank is reputed to be one of the best main battle tanks in the world and is deployed by a variety of countries. The US M-1 tank is ferocious, but also has a fuel guzzling gas-turbine engine and requires a lot of technical maintenance.

  Germany may be softening on the tank question. Their foreign minister told French television Germany “wouldn’t stand in the way” if Poland decided to send Leopards to Ukraine. 

  On the battlefront, Russia has sent in tens of thousands of new troops over the last few months, but they’ve made little difference, arriving at the front “ill-equipped, ill-trained” and “rushed to the battlefield,” a US official has been quoted as saying. 

Nonstop Beating: The family of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols yesterday was shown the police bodycam video of his arrest by Memphis police in which he was fatally beaten. 

  A family lawyer, Anthony Romanucci said, “It was an unadulterated, unabashed nonstop beating of this young boy for three minutes. As he spoke, Nichols’ mother stood by weeping, head in hands, occasionally uttering, “Oh my God.” Romanucci  said, “Not only was it violent, it was savage.”

  Nichols, who was Black, died after three days in a hospital. Five Memphis police officers, all of them also Black, have already been fired.

 The Spin Rack: An 11^th person died of wounds from the Monterey Park dance hall massacre. —Spotify is laying off 600 employees, joining the trend with other tech companies to shrink their staffs. — The Philadelphia Inquirer dug up a photo of former President Donald Trump posing “thumbs up” with former Philly mob boss Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino at a South Florida golf course. Just two guys who like golf. — Former FBI agent Charles McGonigal, the former special agent in charge of counterintelligence in the FBI’s New York office, is facing charges that he worked with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who has been on the US sanctions list since 2018.

Below the Fold: Evidently selling candy is now political. The Mars candy company changed the look of its “spokescandy” M&M cartoon characters and Fox News host Tucker Carlson is outraged.

   The Brown candy’s stilettos have been reduced to office-attire heels. Green has lost her white high-heeled boots for low sneakers. Orange, Red, and Yellow are in hiply loose high sneakers, and there’s a new purple character in honor of International Women’s Day. 

  Carlson complained about the “woke” candy characters. “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous, until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them” Carlson said. “That’s the goal.”

  What he seems to be saying is that his fantasy is to pick up a sexy M&M candy character. 

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