Category: Uncategorized

Fulton County, Georgia Judge Robert McBurney on Thursday publicly released brief sections of a report on the special purpose grand jury investigation into fat former President Trump and his minions’ failed attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 election in the state. There’s not much to it, indicating that the full report is viewed as a charging document by Fulton DA Fani Willis’s office.

“A majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it. The Grand Jury recommends that the District Attorney appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling,” the report says which, well no shit, they’re Trump minions of course they fucking lied under oath. The report also says the grand jury found “by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.” Also no shit about that one.

Again, that there’s almost nothing in there is a good thing. This means the grand jury recommended that people be hit with criminal charges beyond the incidental perjury. If they had concluded that the conduct by Trump and his minions was improper but not criminal you would see it in this report.

An attorney defending the leadership of the Proud Boys in their trial on charges of seditious conspiracy on Thursday told the court they will move to subpoena fat former President Trump to testify on the stand about the lead-up to the Capitol riot, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.

“We’re going to ask the government for assistance in serving Mr Trump,” Norman Pattis, attorney for Proud Boys captain Joseph Biggs, told DC Circuit Judge Timothy Kelly just minutes ago. It’s not clear how sincerely the Proud Boys actually want Donald to testify, or if it’s merely an effort to hold the trial up. Kelly’s reaction should say a lot about the move, so stay tuned.

Scumbag MAGA lawyer John Eastman on Wednesday filed a lengthy response to the California Bar Association’s misconduct charges against him, defending his actions to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election as proper practice but at the end requesting that the proceedings be delayed until he’s no longer under federal criminal investigation so he doesn’t have to plead the Fifth.

“To the extent Respondent is under threat of criminal prosecution, implicating his Fifth Amendment rights, abatement of the disciplinary proceeding is arguably necessary to protect his rights and is within the Bar Court’s discretion to order,” Eastman wrote, raising the interesting pickle that he’s in, defending his license to practice law after having had his phone seized by the FBI executing a search warrant and been exposed as having requested a presidential pardon (which he didn’t get).

Citing Nimrata “Nikki” Haley’s campaign launch speech call for mandatory mental competency tests for all federal politicians over age 75, Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade on Thursday asked the former South Carolina governor how she thought 76 year-old disgraced former President Trump would do on such a test, to which Haley said Trump “did great the last time he did it.”

Haley didn’t go any further on Trump, predictably making it about President Joe Biden, so it’s not clear what competency test that Trump took she’s referring to, and it almost certainly can’t be anything other than the infamous “Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV,” bit from that Fox News interview back in 2020. Which was, uh, not really something that should be held up as an argument that Donald is now or ever was mentally stable enough to hold the most powerful office in the world.

Election law watchdog group the 65 Project announced on Thursday they plan to file bar misconduct complaints against four lawyers who represented Republican gubernatiorial loser Kari Lake and Secretary of State loser Mark Finchem in their frivolous post-election lawsuits, NBC News reports.

“This was [a] pre-planned, orchestrated effort to disrupt Arizona’s election even before it began and claim that there was fraud,” 65 Project managing director Michael Teter told NBC of the bullshit lawsuits Lake and Finchem filed to contest their clear losses. The 65 Project was recently successful in getting the California State Bar to charge shitbag MAGA attorney John Eastman with misconduct over his efforts to overturn Trump’s humiliating loss in the 2020 election.

Explosive new evidence heard in the inquest into the mysterious April 2022 death of a 67 year-old Irish man have revealed the twist ending: The chicken did it, according to the Irish Examiner.

County Roscommon man Jasper Kraus, a cancer survivor who had been in poor health at the time of his death on the afternoon of April 28th, was found semi-conscious and bleeding profusely from a leg wound on the floor of his kitchen by his tenant, Corey O’Keeffe, who promptly called emergency services. Operators talked O’Keeffe through staunching the bleeding and performing CPR during the 25 minute wait for paramedics to arrive at the rural home, during which Kraus sadly expired.

His final words, according to O’Keeffe’s testimony: “Rooster.” Kraus’s daughter, Virginia Guinan, arrived shortly after the paramedics, and observed a trail of blood leading outside to the chicken coop. It was there she found the evil clucker: An “aggressive” Brahma male who had attacked Guinan (and reportedly a child) before, the blood still dripping from his claws. The article doesn’t mention what happened to the chicken, we assume he was beheaded and consumed for his crime.

“…Janel is a true Patriot who will Make Wisconsin Great Again! Her RINO opponents don’t care about the State. They are led by Liz Cheney, who lost her race in Wyoming by the biggest margin in History, Cryin’ Adam Kinzinger, and RINO Robin Vos, who barely won re-election against an opponent that no one ever heard of. Janel Brandtjen is a fantastic person who has my Complete and Total Endorsement for State Senate!” continued the fat bastard in a Wednesday night post.

Which is exactly what Democrats wanted, as they’ve been spending big to help Brandtjen win the primary next week. The race will determine whether or not Republicans gain a veto-proof majority in the state Senate and free rein to pass all sorts of draconian election and abortion laws and potentially even remove Democratic Governor Tony Evers from office.

“A federal grand jury in Miami returned an indictment today charging a Florida man with willfully failing to pay over employment taxes and to file individual income tax returns. According to the indictment, from 2009 to 2019, Paul Walczak of Palm Beach Gardens owned multiple health care companies, including NuVista, Palm Health Partners and a health care employment company called PHP Employment Services, LLC (PHPES), which he formed in July 2010. As the owner of PHPES, Walczak allegedly exercised control over the business’s finances and was responsible for paying over to the IRS the employment taxes, including federal income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes, withheld from his employees’ wages. The indictment alleges that from 2016 to 2019, Walczak did not pay over to the IRS more than $6 million in withholdings,” says a Justice Department press release.

What the press release doesn’t mention is how Walczak’s mom, Elizabeth Fago, is a Trump donor who was reportedly a key player in the plot to steal Ashley Biden’s diary during the 2020 campaign.

There's been reports of a possible meteorite this evening west of McAllen. One of the satellite tools we use is the Geostationary Lightning Mapper & it measures lightning as observed from space. GLM detected a signal at 523 PM with no storms around. No official confirmation yet. pic.twitter.com/1NKRZTZU9C

— NWS Brownsville (@NWSBrownsville) February 16, 2023

Within the next few days, President Joe Biden will publicly address the incidents of unidentified objects flying over the United States and Canada, including a Chinese balloon reportedly carrying surveillance equipment, NBC News reports.

Four objects in total have been shot down, including one over Lake Huron this past week.  Officials have described some of the objects as “commercial” or “benign,” indicating they may have been foreign in origin but they were not malicious.

Suggesting he was getting intel from inside law enforcement about investigations into himself and other in the far right group, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was tipped off by a lieutenant in the Washington DC Metropolitan Police about the warrant issued for him and his impending arrest, USA Today reports.

Shane Lamond, a leader of the DC Metro police intel squad, had previously been suspended from his position, but court documents show he was passing information to Tarrio and others.  Lamond and Tarrio had a series of text messages in which Lamond asked if Tarrio had called in an anonymous tip claiming credit for burning a Black Lives Matter from a historic Black church in December 2020.  Tarrio responded, “I did more than that,” and attached social media postings reportedly showing him burning the banner.

In later messages, Tarrio told other members of the Proud Boys that he got information about the investigation from his contact “in DC intel,” telling his members, “This stays here,” because of the sensitivity of the contact.  From Christmas through Tarrio’s arrest, Lamond and Tarrio exchanged messages about the arrest warrant being issued.  On the day of Tarrio’s arrest, the messaging app shows settings were changed to self-destruct the messages between the pair.

Officials of Norfolk Southern Railway scheduled to attend a Wednesday community meeting near East Palestine, Ohio, where one of their trains derailed causing a chemical explosion that forced residents to evacuate, backed out at the last moment citing threats to their safety, CNN reports.

The corporation, which has a market cap north of $50 billion, offered $25,000 to help the displaced citizens of the town and surrounding area impacted by the explosion of railcars carrying numerous chemicals including vinyl chloride.

“We have become increasingly concerned about the growing physical threat to our employees and members of the community around this event stemming from the increasing likelihood of the participation of outside parties,” the company said in a release.

With the knowledge and cooperation of the Biden team, FBI agents searched for classified documents at the University of Delaware, President Biden’s alma mater where he taught as an adjunct professor while he was a United States Senator and to which Biden donated his papers in 2011, the Associated Press reports.

The papers, collected during Biden’s Senate career that spanned four decades, are not subject to the same rules as those covered under the Presidential Records Act, so it was within Biden’s right to give them to his alma mater.  However, laws regarding classified documents would still apply, a violation greatly mitigated by Biden’s cooperation with the search, unlike his predecessor.

US officials reported they had followed the flight path of the Chinese balloon that passed over Alaska, Canada and parts of the continental US from the time it took off, originally on a trajectory that would take it near Guam and Hawaii, but the craft got blown off course by prevailing winds, ending up over the Aleutian Islands.

Per Reuters, the US military tracked the balloon launch from a location off the southern coast of China, Hainan Island.  The craft headed due east before getting caught in northerly winds.  After passing through Canada, it floated over Montana and was finally shot down off the coast of South Carolina, where the military reports it has salvaged critical electronics from the crash site.

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has issued a subpoena to disgraced former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to testify to a grand jury investigating his role in the failed attempt to overturn Donald’s humiliating loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, CNN reports.

A lawyer for Hunter Biden’s art dealer told House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer to piss off in response to a letter asking for information on who bought Hunter’s paintings, citing ethical arrangements with the White House and a recent Supreme Court decision, USA Today reports.

Untitled by Hunter Biden.

Comer had asked New York-based art dealer George Berges for testimony and receipts on the buyers of Hunter’s artwork because it just has to be some money-laundering scam and he’s an untalented crackhead, blah blah blah. The truth is that the pieces are actually pretty fucking impressive, irrespective of their completely subjective “worth” that may or may not be skewed by the fact that it was the president’s son who painted them. There’s no denying that it took a lot of skill and concentration to conceive of and execute them, no matter what you think of how they actually look. There’s probably a reason we’d never actually seen the pieces before: If they were finger paintings then right wing media and dumb hicks like Comer would’ve been tweeting them five times a day, every day, to push that the sales were obviously a scam. It’s better to keep how they look hidden from the eyes of the MAGA base, who might then start to do their own research on the modern art market and find that paintings of a similar caliber regularly sell for astronomical sums.

In what could presage a fight conservatives want to take to the Alito-run Supreme Court, an Oklahoma state judge ruled that a lesbian couple’s child, conceived using a sperm donor, is actually the child of the sperm donor and not the child of the wife who did not carry the pregnancy, KFOR NBC-4 in Oklahoma City reports.

Oklahoma Special District Court Judge Lynne McGuire ruled Kris Williams has no parental rights for the son she and her wife, Rebekah Wilson, have raised since birth.  McGuire determined Harlan Vaughn, the sperm donor the couple met using an app called JustABaby which facilitates such arrangements, is the legal parent of the boy.

Vaughn claimed that the arrangement for the sperm donation was done only with Wilson, who did not mention Williams.  Williams and Wilson married while Wilson was pregnant.  However, McGuire relied on Oklahoma’s Uniform Parentage Act, which lays out the state’s laws regarding parental rights and while it takes into account adoption, something which Williams did not pursue because she was the spouse of the mother, it does not consider same-sex marriages or artificial insemination, allowing a loophole through which Vaughn jumped.

In an effort to combat a symptom and not the root problem, a key FDA committee voted unanimously to make NARCAN, a drug used for decades to prevent overdoses from opioids and fentanyl, available over-the-counter, NBC News reports.  The final decision by the agency on a nasal spray version of the drug is expected by the end of March.

More than 100,000 people in the US died of accidental overdoses in 2021, making it the top cause of accidental death in the nation, topping automobile accidents.  The move is designed to take away some of the difficulty to and stigma with getting the drug.  “For the sake of the public and saving lives, I believe this medication should be available over the counter as soon as possible,” Dr. Katalin Roth, a professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, said following the vote.

Also known by the generic name naloxone, NARCAN was available only by prescription previously, and pharmacies frequently did not stock the drug even if the patient had a prescription.  However, many states had implemented programs to work around the federal distribution restrictions so individuals could get the drug, like distributing it through community health centers.

Hanging out with fellow Evangelicals at a “parental rights” event in Minnesota on Wednesday, former Vice President Mike Pence confirmed to CBS News he would fight against getting roped into testifying to Jack Smith’s grand jury on Trump’s coup attempt. “I’m going to fight the Biden DOJ’s subpoena sent to me last week because it’s unconstitutional and because it’s unprecedented and the DOJ knows that,” said Pence. “The Constitution of the United States provides the Executive Branch cannot summon officials in the Legislative Branch into a court in any other place.”

Likely thanks to unexpected temperate weather–most people weren’t stuck at home for extended periods due to massive snowstorms–consumer spending in the United States took an unexpected jump in January as pundits’ fears of an impending recession reduced, ABC News reports.

Consumer spending jumped 3% in January, following up on a disappointing holiday spending season, with restaurant sales skyrocketing 7.2% over December.  Year-over-year restaurant sales increased an incredible 25%, largely due to easing coronavirus concerns.  The data are not adjusted for inflation, which obviously plays a part in the spending increases, but typically consumer sales fall between December and January, so an increase is a pleasant surprise.

In other non-impending economic doom news, Goldman Sachs modified its economic forecast to lower the risk of a recession in the US from 35% to 25%, following the release of last week’s jobs report which showed a growth of more than half a million jobs in January.  Additionally, the Fed announced plans to increase interest rates to between 5% and 5.25% to quell inflation.