Driving With Donald: With the Washington rumor mill pushing back against the dramatic testimony this week of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, several news outlets report that sources in the Secret Service say an angry President Trump did in fact demand to be driven to the Capitol as the January 6th insurrection was getting under way.

  CNN reports that the accounts from within the Secret Service “align with significant parts of Hutchinson’s testimony, which has been attacked as hearsay by Trump and his allies who also have tried to discredit her overall testimony.”

  The agents confirming the story to CNN said Trump said something along the lines of “I’m the fucking President of the United States, you can’t tell me what to do.”

  The sources said Trump did lunge forward, but did not confirm that he actually grabbed the steering wheel as Hutchinson said.

  It’s critical to developing evidence that Trump may have been at the head of a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the government that day.

The War Zone: Ukraine has retaken parts of the Kherson region west of the Dnieper River that Russia captured early in the war, The NY Times reports. Thinly stretched Russian troops are trying to hold territory they’ve taken in the south while further north they are crawling forward about a mile a day.

  Despite the damage they’re doing, Russia’s military performance in Ukraine is “pathetic” as well as “immoral, tactically incompetent, operationally stupid and a strategically foolish effort,” former defense Secretary James Mattis said in a speech in Seoul.

  “Nations without allies wither and we’re watching Russia wither before our eyes right now,” Mattis said.

  The retired four-star Marine was unsparing. Asked what military lessons could be taken from the war so far, Mattis said, “One is don’t have incompetent generals in charge of your operations.” 

   Making a literary allusion Mattis said, “The tragedy of our time is that Putin is a creature straight out of Dostoevsky. He goes to bed every night angry, he goes to bed every night fearful, he goes to bed every night thinking that Russia is surrounded by nightmares and this has guided him.” 

Breaking News!: In a spot of good news for the news business, a digital paper called The Baltimore Banner has gone into competition with the broadsheet paper, The Baltimore Sun, the only surviving daily paper in the city.

  Already the Banner has hired away some of the Sun’s best people and beaten the print paper on big stories. The reason this is good is that the Sun was bought by Alden Capital, a company that has collected and gutted newspapers across the country. They’re already doing that to the Sun. 

  Elsewhere in the newspaper business, The Villages Daily Sun, the daily paper in the Florida retirement community, The Villages, is now one of the top 25 papers for circulation in the US.

  Overall, though, the news about printed newspapers is not good. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that this year, for the first time, newspaper subscription income both print and digital will be greater than advertising revenue. Traditionally, advertising was the primary income and what subscribers paid for the paper just helped subsidize the cost of getting it to the front door … or the bushes. 

The Obit Page: Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, from the New York state Hassidic enclave Kiryas Joel, who got support from the Trump White House for his country doctor cure for Covid-19 early in the pandemic, has died of lung cancer at age 48.

  Early in 2020 with Covid-19 ripping through his community, Zelenko settled on what he claimed was an effective cure: a combination of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, the antibiotic azithromycin, and zinc sulfate.

  Claiming a 100 percent cure rate, Zelenko became the darling of the talk shows and President Trump with his usual hyperbole claiming it could be “the biggest game changer in the history of medicine.”

  It wasn’t. Research showed the Zelenko treatment did nothing and the FDA revoked its emergency authorization.

The Spin Rack: After the Kansas City council pledged to give financial assistance to city employees getting an abortion out of state, the Missouri attorney general said he would sue to stop that. Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said in a statement that the city will continue to “proudly and unabashedly stand up for the rights of Missouri women.” — With air travel in a near meltdown and overbooked, some passengers report that Delta Airlines this week offered $10,000 each to passengers who agreed to skip a flight from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Minneapolis. — Giant African land snails, which can grow to the size of a fist and were thought to have been eradicated from South Florida last year, have been seen again. They eat hundreds of kinds of plants and, most concerning in Florida, they also eat stucco.

Fan Safety: Roger Owens, the famous peanut pitcher at Dodgers Stadium who can accurately throw a bag of nuts from behind his back or between his legs, is no longer throwing at the stadium. Owens has pitched bags of nuts on “The Tonight Show,” and in two movies and three television series, but he can’t throw nuts at the stadium anymore. He has to gently hand them to the customer.

  A company called Levy Restaurants now runs the concessions at Dodger Stadium and told one complaining fan that the peanut pitching ban is for the safety of the fans. Of course. We’ve all heard about the number of Dodger fans killed and maimed by Roger Owens throwing peanuts. 

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