Hot and getting hotter near noon Friday here in California’s Central Valley — heat dome it is with the current temps in the low 90s and a forecast for a high of 103-degrees by the afternoon.
Summer spike surprise — not!

Also hot this morning is the news cycle on the hearing last night by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection/riot at the US Capitol by the T-Rump’s thugs and the general mood of the journalistic reviews have been way-good and generous.
I watched the first half, Liz Cheney’s meticulous, calm outline of the sordid state of affairs involved with the incident, bringing T-Rump into the forefront as the asshole who created all this shit — and Cheney delivered probably the best line of the night to her fellow Republican nit-twits: ‘“I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible … There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”‘

In your face asshole T-Rump turds! Although I didn’t catch the last hour live, the entire session was a TV bonus, even increasing drama with some new video footage of the actual insurrection horror on that day which was intense, coupled with Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards’ testimony left not much to the imagination.

A spin-off of sorts, this morning on the streets of DC a T-Rump on jail-time notice:

This is driving around Washington, DC pic.twitter.com/AL9wisgWRF

— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) June 10, 2022

I came across a number of some most-excellent reviews of the hearing this morning, like a precise summation by Digby, including a nutshell analysis on future hearings exposing the T-Rump being up to his ass in criminal activity:

The committee plans to going to knock down the Big Lie by answering a big legal and moral question: Did Trump know he had lost the election? The answer is clear: Yes, he did. Everyone around him told him so. His former aide and current associate Jason Miller testified that their own number-crunchers told him he had lost. Attorney General Bill Barr told him that spreading the lie that the election was stolen was “bullshit.” His own daughter, Ivanka Trump, testified that she believed what Barr said. And we learned all of this from hearing their very own words in videotaped testimony, which made it all the more powerful.

Another via Aaron Rupar at his Public Notice newsletter, and along with a good, insightful (as usual) audit of the proceedings, was this note on the future sessions:

Thompson and Cheney said that future hearings will establish that Trump not only gave no orders to deploy the National Guard on January 6 to stop the violence and destruction, but told White House officials that the mob was “doing what they should be doing” even as his staff pleaded with him to call them off.

According to Cheney, Trump reacted to the “hang Mike Pence” chants not be expressing concern for his VP, but by telling people “maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it.” Given Trump’s seemingly demented state of mind, you can begin to understand why House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been unwilling to testify about a heated phone call he had that day with Trump.

Along with the presentation, journalism also made a bold stroke as the committee hearings did give hope to a shitload of people (including me):

The Jan. 6 hearing was horrifying. It also gave me hope. My new column. https://t.co/vd59hUFLlW

— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) June 10, 2022

Media columnist Margaret Sullivan at The Washington Post late this morning:

The hearing was riveting. It was skillfully and wisely presented for an American audience that hasn’t been paying attention to every news development or investigation stemming from the incomprehensible Capitol assault of Jan. 6. An audience that, for a multitude of reasons, may have been tuned out.

And it was horrifying. Can anyone who heard U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards testify before the House select committee Thursday night ever forget her account of slipping in blood as she struggled through hours of hand-to-hand combat with her own countrymen who were calling her a traitor? I can never forget hearing her say these six words: “It was carnage. It was chaos.”

So, yes: Riveting. Horrifying. But strangely, for me, at least, the hearing was also heartening — and even inspiring. The material was awful to behold, but these two hours, presented by every broadcast TV network without interruption during prime time, radiated something simple and deeply important: the truth.

This truth was intertwined with a genuine quest for accountability. Such a quest may be futile. But that doesn’t make it any less crucial.

For a couple hours on Thursday evening, I felt something that — amid the brutal onslaught of recent mass shootings, including in my hometown of Buffalo — I haven’t felt in a while. Deep pride in being American and at least some slight hope that our nation might be able to right itself.

In general, the news media’s handling of the hearings was a positive part of this. I made it a point to watch the hearing on the three broadcast networks, starting out with CBS and changing occasionally to ABC and NBC. The cable-news audience, after all, is largely spoken for; they’ve already made up their minds.
…
The whole presentation and the coverage of it came off as serious, accessible, clear, and driven by mission — to tell the truth. The networks, as far as I could tell, did not shy from allowing their audiences to hear the profanity of Trump’s longtime loyalist, former attorney general Bill Barr, when he described the claims of significant election fraud and a rigged outcome: “It was bulls—.”

The audience was warned, several times, that there would be disturbing images and explicit language, but they were not shielded from it.

To their credit, the networks decided to treat Americans as sentient grown-ups. They did not indulge in what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen sarcastically described, in reference to Fox’s appalling decision, as the public’s right not to know.

Of course, Fox News bullied through the event (the Fox Business channel carried it live, but Tucker was Tucker), and despite that small, sear of a tear in the fabric of the public’s right to know, the hearing was way-Okay.
Ready now for Monday, the reported second hearing in the month-long series of sessions devoted to what Sullivan termed as that rare of rare — the truth.

A day later, here we are once again…

(Illustration out front found here)