The Biden administration is willing to brief former Trump officials on newly discovered intelligence that China sent spy balloons into U.S. airspace during their time in charge.

The offer, described by senior Biden administration officials on Sunday night, comes as former President Donald Trump and senior members of his national security team say they were never briefed on such an incursion by a Beijing-sent aircraft.

“This information was discovered after the prior administration left. The intelligence community is prepared to offer key officials from the Trump administration briefings on [China’s] surveillance program,” one of the officials said. The official, along with several others, asked not to be named in order to discuss sensitive information.

Briefers would also be willing to discuss Beijing’s similar operations in East Asia, South Asia and Europe over the last several years, the official said.

The proposal to brief the Trump officials is the latest development following the military’s shootdown of a Chinese spy balloon on Saturday, seven days after it entered U.S. airspace. Republicans and former Trump officials said this week that they would have downed the airship as soon as it appeared, and criticized President Joe Biden for waiting until the balloon was over water before bringing it down.

https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1622660320132046848

Boebert said, “We pray for our president. Let his days be few and another take his office. That’s why I filed the articles of impeachment for Joe Biden. Unfortunately, he does have a really good insurance policy named Kamala Harris.”
The psalm Boebert was referring to:
https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1622663807905538053
Conservative churches have become a hotbed of illegal political activity. Churches enjoy tax-exempt status on the condition that they stay out of partisan political activity. It doesn’t get any more partisan than a Republican member of the House addressing a congregation and telling them to pray for the demise of the President Of The United States.

Our long national nightmare, which was neither long nor a nightmare, came to a deflating end on Saturday afternoon. NBC News reported:

The U.S. downed the Chinese surveillance balloon off the Carolina coast on Saturday, a U.S. official said, setting off a tense exchange between the two nations. An F-22 raptor with a single missile shot down the balloon at 2:39 p.m., according to a senior defense official. It was between 60,000 to 65,000 feet in the air when it was downed.

In a healthy and mature political environment, this would likely be seen as a story related to diplomacy, espionage and tense relations between the world’s two most powerful countries. After all, by all appearances, China made a serious mistake for which officials in Beijing appeared wholly unprepared. What’s more, the timing of the incident did China no favors: It was poised to welcome Secretary of State Antony Blinken and focus on its post-Covid vision......

Step Four was coming to the realization that similar incidents did, in fact, happen while Trump was in the White House. In fact, according to the Pentagon, Chinese balloons “transited the continental United States at least three times during the prior administration.”

Though the details surrounding those incidents are sparse, a Washington Post report added that the Defense Department notified Congress over the weekend of “several previous incursions of U.S. airspace by Chinese surveillance balloons, with earlier sightings near Texas, Florida, Hawaii and Guam. ... The defense officials said that several of those events occurred during the Trump administration, [Republican Rep. Michael] Waltz said.”

All of which led to Step Five, which largely consisted of Republicans pretending not to notice Step Four. In fact, Rep. Mike Turner appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” and when Chuck Todd reminded the Ohio Republican about balloon-related incidents from the Trump era, the House Intelligence Committee chairman brushed off the relevant detail and quickly went back to targeting the Democratic White House.....

I don’t doubt that GOP officials will continue to make a fuss, perhaps as some kind of clumsy effort to put Biden on the defensive ahead of tomorrow’s State of the Union address, but reality does not appear to be on Republicans’ side on this.

Trump and DeSantis are leading the way for Republicans on race, education, and gender identity. This can't end well.

Former President Donald Trump has been on a tear in the past two weeks, working to convince his supporters that he’s the only one who can save their children. He’s pledged to purge “the radical zealots and Marxists” from the Education Department, vowed to have federal agencies “stop” gender-affirming care for minors across the country, and called for parents to be allowed to elect their children’s school principals directly.

Trump’s current focus on children and education may diverge from his past campaigns, but he’s only following the road map that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has drawn. Though DeSantis hasn’t officially announced that he’ll challenge Trump for the GOP nomination, he has captured the heart of many Republicans who want a more polished version of Trump’s gleeful denigration of minorities. And it’s already clear that the cold war between the two ahead of the 2024 presidential primaries will be brutal, nasty, and anything but short......

For his part, DeSantis hasn’t been particularly subtle in using the right-wing moral panic over critical race theory and transgender youth as his launching pad for the White House. The so-called Don’t Say Gay law and the Stop Woke Act, which limits teaching of race in public schools, has produced a chilling effect on his state’s teachers. In the last month alone, he’s forced the College Board to revise its AP African American history class and proposed mandating courses in Western civilization for all high school students.

The New York Times recently received plenty of justifiable side-eye for a piece that described DeSantis as merely “taking on the education establishment.” But that framing speaks to the efficacy of his deflections. In DeSantis’ version of events, the book bans that are rolling out across Florida aren’t evidence of his government’s authoritarianism. No, he is simply reflecting the will of parents across the Sunshine State. That the parents he’s supplicating to are almost universally white, Republican and frequently conservative activists masquerading as a grassroots uprising is beside the point......

The Republican primaries will thus be defined by two men who are deliberately trying to outbid each other for the support of the lowest common denominator. And with them positioned as the candidates to beat, no matter how crowded the field may become, it’s guaranteed to be a race to the bottom.

But, after days of being hounded by reporters, on Thursday, the College Board reportedly told their membership that DeSantis had nothing to do with the updates to the program.

“To be clear, no states or districts have seen the official framework that will be released on February 1, much less provided feedback on it,” the College Board said in a letter to its membership, according to Politico.

The letter obtained by Politico went on to say that the course had “been shaped only by the input of experts and long-standing AP principles and practices.”

According to Politico, those experts included “300 professors of African American Studies from more than 200 colleges nationwide, including dozens of historically Black colleges and universities.”

Moreover, the College Board had apparently completed working on the new course in December before DeSantis’ outburst.

The DeSantis administration may have been too quick to celebrate. But it’ll be worth watching to see what changes were actually made and if the College Board has any plans to stand up to DeSantis publicly.