Will Be Wild: In December of 2020 President Donald Trump considered a plan written by outside advisers to have the US military seize all the voting machines in the US. 

  The draft order revealed by the January 6^th committee said, “Effective immediately, the Secretary of Defense shall seize, collect, and retain and analyze all machines …” The order also would have provided for the appointment of a special counsel to charge and prosecute people for election fraud. The woman who would have been appointed was to be Sydney Powell, the Trump campaign lawyer who’d been claiming that the Chinese and Venezuelans had helped fix the election.

  This was just one of the revelations in yesterday’s public hearing by the House January 6^thinvestigating committee. At the closing of the hearing Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney said Trump tried to contact a witness before the committee, an incident the committee referred to the Justice Department.

  The Committee also laid out proof that Trump had planned the march on the Capitol in the days before January 6^th, but tried to make it look spontaneous.

  During the afternoon, committee members detailed how nearly everyone in an official capacity in the White House had told Trump he lost the election, resulting in the president going to outsiders who backed his big lie of election fraud. “On Friday, Dec. 18, his team of outside advisers paid him a surprise visit in the White House that would quickly become the stuff of legend,” said Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin. “The meeting has been called unhinged, not normal, and the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.”

  When White House lawyer Pat Cipillone was told of the meeting that included Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, and the chief executive of Overstock.Com, he rushed in and it turned into a shouting match. Cipillone said, “I don’t understand how they had gotten in.”

  Cassidy Hutchinson, the assistant to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, texted to operations chief Tony Ornato that, “The west wing is UNHINGED.” 

  The next day Trump sent out his Tweet calling supporters to Washington on January 6^th saying, “will be wild.”

  The committee displayed a series of social media messages in which followers said they had been inspired by Trump and were ready for a fight. One of them said, “Trump told us to come armed. Fucking A, this is happening.” Another said, It ‘will be wild’ means we need volunteers for the firing squad.”

  Jason Van Tatenhove, the former chief spokesman for the Oath Keepers, described how the group evolved into a white supremacist organization with aspirations to become a militia.

  Describing the January 6^th insurrection, he said, “What it was going to be was an armed revolution.” He said, “this could have been the spark that started a new civil war.

  Wrapping up, Rep. Jamie Raskin cited Trump’s 2016 inauguration speech in which he used the term “American carnage.” Raskin said, “‘American carnage,’ that’s Donald Trump’s true legacy.”

The Shooting Gallery: Video of the police response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas shows officers moving toward the classrooms occupied by the gunman then retreating even though two of them had ballistic shields and one was armed with an assault rifle.

  The sound of children screaming was edited out.

  The video is immediately being cited as proof of police failure and the way for police not to respond in such an emergency.

  The video also includes the final assault in which heavily armed officers go down the hall and kill the shooter. Oddly, while this is happening, one officer steps up to a wall dispenser and rubs his hands with sanitizer.

Abortion Rights: Kansas votes next month on a constitutional amendment that would make abortion illegal in that state. The measure has support from a lot of religious institutions.  Abortion is currently legal in Kansas as the result of a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court ruling that found the state constitution includes the right to an abortion. 

The War Zone: Ukraine yesterday carried out a long-range rocket strike on Russian forces and military equipment in Russian-held territory of the country as the government says it plans a counter-offensive using hundreds of thousands of troops.

  The strike hit an ammunition dump in the Kherson region and killed 52 people, Ukraine’s military said. The Ukrainians are believed to be now using advanced American HIMARS mobile artillery systems. 

The Spin Rack: Twitter has sued Tesla founder Elon Musk to force him to follow through on his abandoned offer to buy the company. Under the law, they can do that. The suit says Musk feels “free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away.” — Swamped by travelers, London’s Heathrow Airport asked the airlines to stop selling tickets for summer travel after capping the number of passengers departing from the hub at 100,000 a day in order to limit lines, baggage delays, and cancellations. — The President of Sri Lanka has fled the country with hordes of protesters calling for a change in political leadership. —  Starbucks announced it is closing 16 stores in five cities because of  dangerous “incidents.”

Way Out: NASA yesterday released the first pictures taken by the Webb telescope peering deep into space and time. The pictures reveal colorful stars and galaxies that existed more than 13 billion years ago but can be seen because their light is still travelling through space.

  The pictures defy description. See them at NASA.gov.