Convicted felon President Trump’s regime on Thursday withdrew their subpoenas to New York Times reporters who had printed a story about the fat slob’s Qatar Force One 747 having security flaws – itself obvious enough from the plane switch to the real Air Force One in the UK – after a federal judge indicated would nuke the subpoenas, Lawfare’s Anna Bower reports.

Let’s just get the political part out of the way first: There is no political part. Of course being the Villages all suspects are presumed MAGA until proven innocent, but this David Allen O’Brien character is just a slippery bastard with no discernible online footprint and this blogger was extremely thorough in attempting to find something, anything that would confirm his and his readership’s priors. The usually reliable go-to of VoterRecords.com was a dead end and trying to find a Dave or David O’Brien on Facebook is like trying to find a crypto scam on Twitter.

Actually that’s not fair because if you were for some reason looking for a specific crypto scam on Twitter you would have an easier time than you would looking for a specific Dave O’Brien on Facebook. Seriously try to use it to track down someone, anyone, with even a medium-generic name like that for just a few minutes and there’s no other conclusion than that Schmuckerberg and co deliberately designed it to frustrate the fuck out of users seeking any kind of informational value whatsoever out of it. The search box even ignores quotation marks around a specific string…

So yes, it is a goddamned shame that documentary evidence of the 67 year-old O’Brien’s MAGA status remains elusive because hooooo-leeeee shit this very well could be the MAGAest/Villages-est story ever: According to a Sumter County Sheriff’s Office arrest report obtained by Villages-News.com, the sad, lonely senior citizen recently joined Tinder in search of a significantly younger woman willing to physically debase herself in exchange for $1,000 “each visit,” plus gifts and dinner.

Convicted felon President Trump on Thursday told Axios in an “exclusive” that he’s “considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it…” they “want to negotiate” but “they haven’t received enough pain yet… Relations with Bibi are very good. I would meet with him if he is here” and so on and so forth in a stream of consciouness delivered to quasi Trump spokesman Barak Ravid in the interview. Ravid then organized it into bullet points.

What this dipshit Mike Collins omits from his low-energy tirade citing the New Jersey DMV voter registration shitshow as making it “clear that even using a state driver’s license for voter ID has been compromised” is that New Jersey doesn’t actually require voter ID and the fuckup was at the registration level in the state’s DMV system. If the Garden State did have a voter ID law then in all likelihood those 400 or so still would have been able to cast a ballot after having presented a valid driver’s license to the election staffers. But basic logic and MAGA rhetoric’s usual incompatibility aside, Collins’s fairly muted invocation of the systemic error is something of a credit to Gov Mikie Sherill’s swift and transparent disclosure of the fuckup. Getting out in front of it was never going to be the wrong call and likewise there wasn’t much better she could have done in actual execution.

Still, seriously expected much more fire than this beta’s whimpering on Newsmax and thus far Sherill’s handling seems to have done more to blunt the screaming meltdowns than first estimated.

Also worth noting is Collins bitching about how his Senate race opponent, incumbent Dem Jon Ossoff, won in 2020 because of “drop boxes” and “mailing absentee ballots to everyone and their family,” thing that Collins says Georgia Republicans had taken care of since then. Left out of that hollow simulacrum of “optimism” for his chances against Ossoff is that those “reforms” preceded other Dem Senator Rev Raphael Warnock’s reelection to a full six-year term in 2022.

But hey, it was a good bull case for Collins for Senate 2026 if you skip that part.

“A year ago the United States of America attacked, very powerfully, the Houthis, for their interference with commerce and trade, by shooting at ships. Since that time, and during our conflict with Iran, they have acted very responsibly. Unfortunately, now they are starting up again, shooting at two Saudi Arabian ships last night. Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if they do this again, the US will hold Iran responsible, in that the Houthis are a Surrogate and/or Proxy of Iran, and major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran and, of course, the Houthis, themselves, who I am very disappointed with in that they have, until now, acted very professionally and smart,” posted convicted felon President Trump on Thursday, very disappointed with Iran as well as the lack of professionalism from the Houthis, an ethno-religious minority in Yemen whose Iran-backed militia have activated to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, specifically outbound Saudi oil shipments.

Brent Crude oil futures topped $99/barrel in pre-market trading on Thursday due to the attacks.

“A new Emerson College Polling survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53 percent to 42 percent. President Trump holds a 39 percent job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57 percent,” says the intro to this month’s national survey from the not-terribly-reliable pollster that usually overrates GOP candidates.

Would suck for the GOP if Emerson’s in its usual mode and overrating them here. Really suck.

The headline above is the entirety of convicted felon President Trump’s own comment Thursday morning whilst sharing on Truth Social a John Solomon article about spandex-wearing grapple-freak Jim Jordan’s Wednesday night criminal referral of former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, underscoring the fat bastard’s utter impotence at his own political objectives.

Why does he have to wait for a dipshit like Gymbo to make a criminal referral? Why didn’t a grand jury hand down an indictment of Smith like 17 months ago? This is the best case they’ve got?

Expanding the mess that convicted felon President Trump created, Yemen-based Iranian proxy scumbags the Houthis attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea on Thursday, the AP reports.

Good God this is stupid… Jackass Steve Scalise didn’t even remember the full line, saying “For God’s sake – you can’t get pasta at Olive Garden without a picture ID! Why not be able to show a picture ID to vote?” when he forgot the “pasta pass” part of that. That’s the key here, in which the establishment requires those who have paid for their unlimited pasta pass promotional membership whatever to present a photo ID to servers in order to be served unlimited portions of pasta, not just to “get pasta.” They wouldn’t fucking card you to simply purchase pasta off the menu but again, this was most likely a case of Scalise simply forgetting the crucial “pasta pass” condition to the ID requirement rather than “truthful hyperbole” like claiming photo ID is required to buy cereal.

Still, even given that this is just so goddamned stupid it’s almost nauseating. First off, despite having an Italian-American surname Scalise seems about as paisano as Whoopi Goldberg is Jewish and as such obviously isn’t averse to legitimizing the faux-Tuscan strip-mall chain. Have some goddamned pride in your heritage, you wanker. Other than that wrinkle it is pretty on-brand that this new talking point is something regular MAGAmericans can relate to since to them Olive Garden is the fancier option than Papa John’s when it comes to “Italian cuisine.” The place you go for your anniversary when Applebee’s and Chili’s are for birthdays or just when you’re tired of pretending to like venison from the deer you shot. Plus you only wanted the antlers for your truck grille anyway.

A new Fox News national survey finds Democrats leading Republicans 53 to 46 percent on the generic congressional ballot ahead of November’s midterms, a delta just one point shy of the 48 to 40 percent lead Dems held in July 2018 and a finding that Fox themselves write ominously that “53 percent is the highest percentage either party has received on the generic House ballot in Fox News polling since 1996.” Dems also have a 68 to 57 percent edge to the GOP on voter enthusiasm.

In related news, a 54 percent majority of Trump 2024 voters told the Economist’s weekly YouGov survey that they approve “of Donald Trump and his family doing business with foreign countries while he is serving as President” while just 26 percent disapproved. Glad they’re happy about that.

Republican West Virginia state House Assistant Majority Leader Elliot Pritt was hit Wednesday with a federal criminal complaint charging him with enticing a minor after an investigation found that he communicated with a girl through Roblox and Snapchat, West Virginia Watch reports, noting that Pritt is a public high school teacher in his day job, so tips and icebergs and all that.

“What Elliott Pritt is accused of doing is shocking, disgusting and disappointing in every way. My heart aches for his family, and if any part of these serious allegations are true, the law should be applied in full force,” said state House Speaker Roger Hanshaw in a statement, skipping the whole “witch hunt” song and dance that usual goes with Republicans closing ranks.

“No child should ever be exploited by anyone, especially by the adults placed in positions of trust and charged with preparing young people, many of whom our statistics tell us unfortunately have no other caring adult figures in their lives. Effective immediately, Delegate Pritt has been removed from all official roles connected with his service as a member of the House of Delegates… I urge Elliott Pritt, for the benefit of his family and the people of his District, to spare his students and his colleagues at every level the continued embarrassments and distractions and to resign from elected office as soon as he is able,” Hanshaw continued, not mincing words as though it were a Dem.

Could be the other crimes that the complaint hinted at: Actual physical sexual abuse since the girl was in eighth grade in 2024, demanding that she send nudes, sending her nudes, etc.

In a clip posted Wednesday by clip guy Aaron Rupar too short to rip and paste in here, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton on Wednesday told Fox News that the International Criminal Court is “a kangaroo court, but ultimately, it’s not about Prime Minster Netanyahu and Israel” – referring to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s aborted threat to order “Bibi” cuffed in September – “it’s about arresting Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio in the future if they ever travel abroad.”

So yeah, if you had any doubts that the ICC is becoming less and less an abstraction to bitch about because Netanyahu and his scumbag friends facing justice and more and more of a potentially serious future threat to the MAGA Regime then well here’s Tom Cotton sure making it sound like a potentially serious threat to his Orange Overlord’s retinue. What was missing there however was a citation of the ICC’s “kangaroo” status, like a single example of when it had actually rigged a trial or withheld evidence or whatever. If anything delegitimizing it is actually harder than the MAGA propaganda complex might perceive because of some inconvenient historical precedent: Even though the US is not a party to the Rome Statute and has laws specifically proscribing handing over American defendants to the court given that the apprehensions of Subsaharan psychopaths Bosco Ntaganda and Dominic Ongwen were aided by State Department officials in 2013 and special forces infantry in 2015, respectively. Meaning that the ICC’s legitimacy was recognized by the US for at least those two and undermining it is effectively demanding they be released.

Presiding over a not-very-modest ribbon-cutting ceremony in the town of Braunau am Inn on Wednesday, Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner on Wednesday hailed the opening of a new federal police station in an old building, one chosen specifically because of its sentimental value to and a draw for MAGAmerican and other extremists since, as mentioned in the headline, it was where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889. “The Republic of Austria, the state, the county is facing up to this heritage, the terrible heritage of this time, and commits itself to deal with it,” Karner said, per the AP.

“This entails this house and this address,” Karner added as he dedicated the new precinct – in front of which now sits a memorial stone inscribed with “For freedom, democracy and liberty. Never again fascism. Millions of dead remind us” – at the end of a nearly decade-long planning and conversion that cost $22.8 million following the building’s 2017 appropriation from a private owner who had refused to sell for reasons not made clear. They had previously rented it to the government to sub-let to various non-profits so it might have just been asking price rather than any “sentimental” value.

Still, the fact that they spent $22 million and about five years renovating a 19th century residential building instead of just demolishing it and building a new police station for a fraction of the time and cost is just weird and inexplicable. Then again keeping it intact but giving it to, say, an LGBTQ or Jewish organization to operate some kind of community center would probably be painting a target on those people’s backs so maybe the police is station is actually kind of the least bad of all options that were available. Plus it just makes it easier to catch the “tourists,” like the four Germans who were arrested in 2024 for laying white roses in front of the house and then posing for Nazi salutes.

“From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran,” posted convicted felon President Trump on Wednesday, upping the ante he was evidently unwilling to up previously for reasons known only to him and possibly his handlers.

Trump posted it while en route to Dover AFB for the dignified transfer of the four soldiers killed by Iranian action in the region last weekend, as just prior he wrote “Heading to Dover Air Force Base to HONOR OUR HEROES!” with obvious excitement over what he sees as a patriotic-themed photo op.

Modeling scout Daniel Siad, who was under criminal investigation by French prosecutors in connection to his prolific recruitment of victims for convicted felon President Trump’s former best friend Jeffrey Epstein, was found Epsteined in his home near Paris on Wednesday, France24 reports.

“An investigation to determine the cause of death was opened on Monday evening following the discovery,” said the Nanterre prosecutor’s office in the announcement. Siad, 69, had yet to be questioned by investigators, but had publicly stated he was looking forward to clearing his name after it appeared thousands of times in the US Justice Department’s shitshow of a records dump.

“In This busyness I feel like fisherman some time I cache quick, some time no fish,” Siad wrote to Dirty Jeff in 2014 and yes the “fishing” was a metaphor. He was talking about girls and women.

DEGREES AND DOLLARS: The DSA is seeing success with highly educated college graduates who aren't making very much money. @ByronYork breaks down a new analysis of the Democratic Socialists of America, revealing how high education and low income define the movement's narrow core:… pic.twitter.com/rN7u7BwL7j

— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) July 22, 2026

Outgoing World Bank chief economist Indermit Gill tells Reuters the current full-blown restart of convicted felon President Trump’s feckless war against Iran could increase inflation and with it interest rates, knocking global growth back to as low as 1.3 percent, down from 2.9 percent in 2025.