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Hells-wearing Florida Gov Ron DeSantis on Monday ordered his minions to explain how the fuck they let Disney outsmart him by doing a runaround of his takeover of the Magic Kingdom’s special municipal district, demanding “a thorough review and investigation” of maneuvers that escaped their noticed despite having been executed legally and publicly, the New York Times reports.

“These collusive and self-dealing arrangements aim to nullify the recently passed legislation, undercut Florida’s legislative process and defy the will of Floridians,” DeSantis wrote in the letter dated Monday to Florida Chief Inspector General Melinda Miguel. “Any legal or ethical violations should be referred to the proper authorities.” It’s not clear why the “Top Gov” doesn’t just drop it and go back to the drawing board legislatively to find some new way of inflicting punishment on Disney for daring to oppose his regime rather than risking further humiliation when in a few months the IG reports she hasn’t found shit and there’s no way for him to win here.

Where to start with Fox News’s breathless coverage of disgraced former President Trump’s motorcade ride from Mar-a-Lago to the airport West Palm Beach, Florida. Holy shit, it was hard picking a clip to lead with but we think Harris Faulkner trying to sound deep and philosophical as “Trump Force One” taxied on the tarmac wins very narrowly. Just before that was Kayleigh McEnany asking if NYC Mayor Eric Adams was threatening Marjorie Taylor Greene with his warning.

Before that it was the motorcade’s trip, with seemingly half of Twitter invoking the OJ Simpson white Bronco chase and the other half with a (seasonally appropriate) joking comparison to Jesus’s Stations of the Cross. Lowlights of the coverage include the motorcade having to stop at a red light while one of the Fox bimbos was complaining about the expected gag order in the case and Faulker just gushing over how many fanboys showed up along the route. Simply spectacular.

Disgraced former President Trump has retained “experienced white-collar defense attorney” Todd Blanche to defend him in his indictment in New York City, the Wall Street Journal reports. Blanche previously repped scumbag 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani’s crony Igor Fruman on charges related to the Ukraine scandal, so he’s got MAGA experience.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Monday specifically warned white nationalist QAnon freak Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to be on her best behavior at her 10:30 AM rally on Tuesday she better not try anything while her Orange Allah is being arraigned for his crimes.

In the most atrocious incident yet in the ongoing string of freight train derailments getting more national media attention than they normally did before that one in East Palestine, Ohio in February became an opening salvo in a secret genocidal race war against rural white conservatives, hundreds of cases of perfectly good beer spilled out of a wrecked train and into the Clark Fork river near Quinns, Montana on Sunday morning, the Montana Free press reports.

It’s not clear what brand of beer it is, as the photos of the scene posted on Facebook by the Plains-Paradise Rural Fire District aren’t close enough to identify them. They’re probably Coors or Keystone Light, which are basically water anyway, but that still makes this a far greater tragedy than some lame, boring toxic industrial chemicals nobody cares about getting pointlessly wasted.

https://youtu.be/CwJDLeCsVb0

At Sunday night’s Country Music Awards performance in Nashville, country music superstar Kelsea Ballerini gave the artistic middle finger to transphobic Tennessee Republican politicians by featuring a troupe of drag queens on stage for her performance of her song, “If You Go Down (I’m Going Down Too),” a song Ballerina and her collaborators wrote to celebrate friendships.

Tennessee’s draconian law banning drag shows–an art form that has been around for at least three millennia and has been practiced by ancient Roman actors, Shakespearian performers, and modern performers like Tyler Perry, Jack Lemmon, Robin Williams and Barbra Streisand–was supposed to take effect April 1st but a federal judge temporarily banned the law from going into effect.

Keep on fighting, Mr. President! We are with you, @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/EZFMYHDRzl

— Orbán Viktor (@PM_ViktorOrban) April 3, 2023

A new CNN/SSRS survey conducted after fat former President Trump was indicted finds 60 percent of respondent approve of his being charged and 76 percent see it as being at least somewhat politically motivated. Notably only 37 percent of respondents see Trump’s actions on the Stormy Daniels payment as definitely illegal versus 33 percent who see it as merely unethical, 20 percent not sure, and 10 percent (mostly Republicans) who say the fat bastard did nothing wrong at all.

Which makes for quite a bit of overlap among those who don’t think it was a crime and/or think of the charges as politically motivated and thus a real kick in the balls to the “Lock Her Up” crowd who danced with joy over the politically motivated acquittals of the Orange God Emperor in his two impeachment trials. God forbid Democrats internalize “might makes right” half as deeply as Republicans have over the years and capitalize on Trump’s legal vulnerabilities the same way that his party went out of their way to cover them. That it’s a politically motivated prosecution and a legitimate one can be true at the same time. The latter doesn’t magically cancel out the former.

And no, it is not a good thing for Republicans that so many who aren’t sure that Trump definitely committed a crime still want him prosecuted anyway. Those people still vote.

Sources close to Joe Biden tell Axios there’s no rush for the President to launch a 2024 campaign and that he’d rather focus on actually working as it draws a contrast with the batshittery of Trump and the Republican party amid the Orange God Emperor’s increasing legal peril.

“No Republican candidate or potential candidate will affect our timing,” said a Biden adviser. The official launch could come in July or even as late as the fall, sources say, with still much groundwork to be laid in terms of staffing for key positions such as as campaign manager and finance chair.

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed a number of Secret Service agents stationed at Mar-a-Lago to testify to the grand jury investigating fat former President Trump’s theft of classified documents from the White House following his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election and subsequent refusal to comply with a subpoena for their return, Fox News anchor Brett Baier reports, adding that the agents are expected to testify as soon as this Friday.

Baier did not report that Biden documents fuckup investigation special counsel Robert Hur had done the same to the Secret Service agents posted to now-President Joe Biden’s post-vice presidential detail between 2017 and 2021, or that a grand jury has even been impaneled in that case. In fact we’ve reported basically nothing about the so-called “political gift to Trump, GOP” that was supposed to completely end the Mar-a-Lago docs investigation since Hur was appointed. Of course that could change, but it’s been a few months and nothing “devastating” such as the content of Biden’s classified docs or his malign intent with hanging on to them has surfaced since.

Fat former President Trump’s lawyers are expecting Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan to impose a gag order on their deranged client during his Tuesday arraignment on as many as 34 felony charges related to his 2016 hush money payoffs, Breitbart reports while hilariously adding “could potentially undercut his ability to campaign on the issue of legal corruption during the primary.”

“The Trump legal team now thinks that the Manhattan judge will take the unprecedented step of silencing the presidential frontrunner with an unconstitutional gag order tomorrow. The Trump legal team is considering adding a First Amendment lawyer to the effort to combat this and will fight it all the way,” said a Trump legal team source, as if a judge telling a defendant to shut the fuck up about a case under pain of jail is “unprecedented” in a criminal proceeding.

Russian anti-terrorism officials on Monday arrested 26 year-old anti-war activist Daria Trepova as a person of interest in the explodey assassination of propagandist blogger Vladlen Tatarsky.

Aimenn Penny, a 20-year-old white supremacist from Ohio, threw two Molotov cocktails last week at a Cleveland church hosting two drag shows the following day in an attempt to prevent the performances, the FBI alleges in charging documents.

Local law enforcement found a broken bottle of Denaka Vodka, which goes for around six dollars for a fifth, and a broken Corona beer bottle at the scene as well as burnt cloth.  The devices left scorch marks on exterior portions of a church door and a sign was damaged in the attack.

Admitting to throwing the bottles at the church, Penny told FBI agents “that he was trying to protect children and stop the drag show event” according to the affidavit.  Penny is a member of a White Lives Matter group that harassed people at a similar event in another Ohio town on March 11th carrying Nazi flags and shouting “Heil Hitler” at passersby.

A well-known military blogger who vocally supported Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and was considered a mouthpiece for the Kremlin died when a bomb exploded at a cafe in St. Petersburg where he was appearing as a guest of pro-war group, CNN reports.

Roughly 1,000 miles from the Ukraine border–closer to new NATO member Finland’s border than Kyiv–the bombing in St. Petersburg shows the anti-Putin, pro-Ukraine movement in Russia is a far flung.  Vladlen Tatarsky died and more than two dozen others were injured when the explosive, reported hidden in a figuring, exploded at the cafe hosting the meeting of the Cyber Front Z group.

Federal prosecutors investigating disgraced former President Trump’s theft of classified documents from the White House have found some damning evidence that the twice impeached degenerate knowingly and deliberately tried to withhold documents sought by a May 2022 subpoena for their return whilst he was pretending to comply with it, the Washington Post reports.

Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina is doing his job here. Not well, especially the lame answer to the question about all the “Democrats” he says oppose Donald’s indictment in the Stormy Daniels case, but he’s doing it. He’s defending his client on TV (and presumably will be doing it in a courtroom starting on Tuesday). When George Stephanopoulos next asks him how does he know the charges are bogus, especially considering that there are as many as 30 of them (another report says roughly 24 charges), Tacopina does his best to make it sound excessive and frivolous, saying “they can extrapolate counts and make one thing into five counts,” that each individual payment is a count of a falsified business record. Tacopina rambles but the point he’s trying to make comes across enough.

And he may very well be right. We don’t know what’s in the indictment at this point and while this is obviously pretty much the most favorable possible guess he could be making to explain the high volume of counts, it’s a relatively educated and circumspect one. It’s also still a guess.

President Joe Biden will skip British King Charles III’s coronation later this month as his main focus is on a trip to Northern Ireland this Tuesday and White House staff don’t want to send him across the Atlantic twice in one month on account of his age, the Daily Beast reports.

“The guy is 80. They space out his big bursts of activity quite considerably. They did that too with Trump, and he was younger. When Biden does something like the State of the Union address, we didn’t see much from him in the following 48 hours,” said one source. “They don’t like to push him around the world too much.” For what it’s worth, Eisenhower didn’t attend Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation either, but he also spent more than enough time in England the prior decade. Charles and Biden may meet up in Northern Ireland, and it’s expect Jill Biden will attend to coronation.

“Secretary of State Antony J Blinken spoke today with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Secretary Blinken conveyed the United States’ grave concern over Russia’s unacceptable detention of a US citizen journalist. The Secretary called for his immediate release. Secretary Blinken further urged the Kremlin to immediately release wrongfully detained US citizen Paul Whelan. The Secretary and Foreign Minister Lavrov also discussed the importance of creating an environment that permits diplomatic missions to carry out their work,” says a State Department press release about a call between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

“President Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America, will deliver remarks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on Tuesday, April 4, 2023, at 8:15 PM EDT,” says a press release on disgraced former President Trump’s campaign website. No word if “fake news” is allowed.