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• Had he done one thing Tuesday night, Joe Biden would have won the internet:  turn to Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy while the nihilists of the GOP shrieked at the SOTU and said, “Kevin, can’t you control your caucus?”
• Biden owned McCarthy and Republicans at the State of the Union.  I do not recall a SOTU when a President got the opposing Party to commit to a political promise he proposed during the speech.
• Ron DeSantis has made Florida a real-time experiment in the validity of the adage, “Those who forget history are bound to repeat it.”   One difference: Florida students can’t forget history they were never taught.
• Biden doesn’t order the shootdown of the balloon until after it gets to the East Coast; conservative bitch.  Biden orders one shot down just after it reaches US airspace, conservatives bitch.  I see a pattern.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CVIII”

Ron DeSantis’s censorship of any books that might make white students–particularly the male ones–feel bad about racism in the United States forced Duval County, Florida to remove a biography  of the man for whom Major League Baseball’s humanitarian award is named.

NBC News reports “Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” was removed by school officials because passages in the book detail the racism the Black Puerto Rican baseball player experienced as he rose to stardom in the sport, and they felt it was inappropriate subject matter for the K-3rd grade target audience.  Another book, on the life of Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor, was also part of the 176 books reported from an outside watchdog group that have been removed from Duval school libraries.  The county had retained 52 media specialists to review 1.5 million books, magazines, videos and other things that are housed at school facilities to determine their appropriateness under DeSantis’s law banning the teaching of things like slavery, racism, women’s rights and the fact that LGBTQ people exist.

An outspoken advocate for social issues relating to race and poverty, the 38-year-old Clemente died in a plane crash as he helped ship supplied to earthquake victims in Nicaragua in 1972.  The future Hall of Famer’s career ended with him having exactly 3,000 hits, 12 Gold Gloves, an MVP award and two World Series championships.

Not for nothing but maybe don’t acknowledge that Trump hung out at Jeffrey Epstein’s place at all if you want to make it sound like nothing happened with all the teenage girls he pimped out.

Desperate for people to like him, archvillain Elon Musk refused to accept the fact that Twitter users had tired of his antics, believing instead that the platform he owns was actively suppressing his reach, Platformer News reports.  After one of the company’s top two engineers explained that the underlying analytics and data–as well as an audit of the algorithm–verified it was a drop in audience engagement and not a conspiracy to silence him, Musk fired the engineer abruptly because he did not believe him saying, “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

Musk is facing continued skepticism about his management of the social media platform, with usage down at least 9% since his takeover.  Musk’s vow to be transparent has apparently backfired on him:  a new feature showing how many people have actually seen individual tweets has led to heavy users realizing their posts are not generating the views they once did.  Random advertising and posts from people not followed by the user led to vocal dissatisfaction with Musk’s leadership.

A recent outage in service in which users were informed that they had reached their tweet limit was reported caused by an employee who had deleted key files for an internal service that monitors posting rates to detect spam and other malicious actors.  Musk had fired the team that oversaw that internal service.

Lawyers working for fat former President Trump found another folder with classified document markings on it at Mar-a-Lago and promptly turned it over, along a laptop used by a current Trump aide – which also contained a digital copy of that same classified material and had been connected to the internet – to the FBI last month, sources tell ABC News about something possibly just a little bit more important than that one extra file found at Mike Pence’s house in Indiana on Friday.

Earlier on Friday, Trump whined to Fox News about the ongoing Justice Department special counsel investigation. “I have been going through this for six years – for six years I have been going through this, and I am not going to go through it anymore. And I hope the Republicans have the courage to fight this. I have been proven innocent for six years on everything – from fake impeachments to [former special counsel Robert] Mueller who found no collusion, and now I have to do it more? It is not acceptable. It is so unfair. It is so political,” moaned the fat Orange God Emperor.

UPDATE 2/10/2023 6:45 PM EST: CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reports the Trump aide is named Chamberlain Harris, who works for the “Save America PAC,” and damn that does not sound good.

Georgia Republican Party Chair and fake Trump 2020 elector David Shafer on Friday told his fellow MAGA dickheads he won’t be running for a third term in this summer’s election as Fulton County prosecutors are targeting him in the 2020 election coup attempt and over the failure to defeat Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock last year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

“I have felt for some time that I should re-focus on my family which would include, at least for the short term, scaling back on my volunteer activities,” Shafer wrote in an email to other state party leaders. On top of the Warnock win and the criminal investigation, Shafer was also feeling heat from the party for backing MAGA primary challengers that failed to defeat Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and Attorney General Chris Carr. Shafer is also fat and should probably use the time to get in shape in the event he goes to prison.

A source at the Pentagon tells ABC News the object shot down over Alaska on Friday was “cylindrical, silver-ish gray.” When asked if it was “balloon-like,” the source said, “All I say is that it wasn’t ‘flying’ with any sort of propulsion, so if that is ‘balloon-like’ well – we just don’t have enough at this point,” as if that’s going to somehow de-sensationalize this whole shitshow.

Using the word “UFO,” even if technically accurate as it was an unidentified flying object in the strictest sense, probably won’t cause anyone to believe it’s anything other than simply another spy balloon or something else otherwise relatively conventional. The Pentagon spokesman John Kirby also didn’t slightly nudge in the same direction when he told reporters “We don’t know what [the] entity is,”and that there was “no indication that it’s from a nation.” That won’t get anyone excited.

In the pre-scheduled “raid” of former Vice President and Race Bannon cosplayer Mike Pence’s Indiana home, the FBI recovered one additional classified document not previously returned by Pence’s attorneys, the New York Times reports.

The New York Times reports that President Joe Biden ordered the shootdown of an unknown craft flying over Alaskan airspace.  The craft was not identified as a balloon, but officials say it was traveling slower and at an altitude higher than commercial aircraft.

President Biden will travel to Poland on February 20th to the 22nd, just shy of the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the White House said in a press briefing Friday.

In related news a Russian push to capture a key railroad junction in the eastern town of Vuheldar reportedly went very badly for Putin’s army on Friday, with Russian troops said to have abandoned 30 armored vehicles while fleeing from Ukrainian defenders, according to a UK intel assessment. It’s not clear if this failed push marked the start of Russia’s long-expected offensive, but either way it’s hard to see how it bodes well for Putin’s desire to regain momentum on the ground in Ukraine.

Corrupt piece of shit Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will apologize and fork over $3.3 million in taxpayer funds to the four of his former top deputies who he fired in October 2020 after they accused him of crimes he almost certainly actually committed, the Texas Tribune reports.

“After over two years of litigating with four ex-staffers who accused me in October 2020 of ‘potential’ wrongdoing, I have reached a settlement agreement to put this issue to rest,” said Paxton. “I have chosen this path to save taxpayer dollars and ensure my third term as Attorney General is unburdened by unnecessary distractions. This settlement achieves these goals. I look forward to serving the People of Texas for the next four years free from this unfortunate sideshow.”

Paxton has been reelected twice while under indictment for securities fraud and is at risk of being disbarred for misconduct during his failed Supreme Court lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to overturn his Orange God Emperor’s loss in the 2020 election.

Emails obtained by the Washington Post reveal that evil little bastard Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign banned guns from the November election night party in Tampa but tried to make it look like it was city officials’ fault due to the obvious “political optics” of such a move.

“DeSantis/his campaign will not tell their attendees they are not permitted to carry because of the political optics,” wrote Chase Finch, security manager the city-owned Tampa Convention Center, in an email to other city officials on October 28th, as they prepared for what ended up being Ronnie’s victory party as he crushed former Governor Charlie Crist by 17 points. “Republicans largely being in support of [the Second Amendment]. Basically it sounds like they want us to say it’s our policy to disallow firearms within the event space if anyone asks,” Finch continued in the email.

Naturally DeSantis’s team denied it to the Post. “We do not comment on speculation and hearsay. The Governor is strongly in support of individuals’ constitutional right to bear arms,” said DeSantis’s deputy press secretary. “We follow the guidance of the FDLE and local law enforcement to keep the governor and his family safe during events,” said his campaign’s spokeswoman.

Alchua County, Florida GOP Chairman Tim Marden, who told the Post he skipped an event with DeSantis last year because there were metal detectors at the door, said he believed it and somewhat surprisingly acknowledged the hypocrisy. “In my thinking, it was a little hypocritical to have this measure in place for law-abiding citizens at a time when a lot of folks in the gun community will condemn a Democratic politician for having a security force,” said Marden.

Disgraced former President Trump will testify in his defense in the trial over the lawsuit brought by writer EJ Carroll, who credibly accused the fat bastard of rape in 1995, Bloomberg reports.

Fat former President Trump has “been watching” small-faced MAGA activist Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA organization, increasingly frustrated over Kirk’s apparently growing relationship with Donald’s all-but-official 2024 GOP primary rival Ron DeSantis, NBC News reports.

“Trump feels like he has made Charlie and Charlie’s ungrateful and [Trump’s] not been happy for a while. He’s like, ‘You call him and you tell him he’d be nothing without my son,’” a Trump minion told NBC, apparently referring to Don Jr’s close ties to Kirk and appearances at Turning Point events.”I see that [Kirk’s] trying to cover all his bases. Trying to triangulate between Trump and DeSantis. And Ron may not care, but Trump notices,” shit like Kirk’s DeSantis interview from last month.

“Trump world is very aware of what’s coming out of Turning Point,” said another Trump minion. “Charlie and Turning Point were very close to Trump since the beginning. But the distance has grown since the beginning of 2022. And then you get to the end of 2022, there’s a coordinated effort for TPUSA to build that relationship with Ron. Why? Charlie wants to be next to the new shiny thing on the block. Like so many others, there would be no Charlie Kirk without Donald Trump.”

A US Defense Department official on Friday told ABC News the gondola under the ChiCom spy balloon that terrified the pants-wetting weasels of MAGAmerica before it was shot down on Saturday has been located off the coast of South Carolina and appears to be largely intact.

Military personnel have not yet retrieved the gondola, said to be at least 30 feet long, but are now working to winch it up to be taken for examination by Defense Department intel, per ABC.

Federal agents arrived at the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday morning to search for classified documents Pence had hanged on to after leaving office, Nexstar reports.

For the umpteenth time, Pence and now-President Joe Biden’s post-Vice Presidential document fuckups were just that, and neither of them intentionally took classified materials upon leaving office and neither of them defied a subpoena for their return, in contrast to the Orange God Emperor.

In their own words. pic.twitter.com/C7HNCJqtSK

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 10, 2023

A spokesperson for edgelord Senator Kyrsten Sinema on Friday told CNN’s Manu Raju that the Arizona “independent” did not tell lying piece of shit Republican Congressman George Santos to “hang in there buddy” prior to the State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

“This is a lie,” Sinema’s staff said following a Thursday night Newsmax interview in which Santos said he’d had an exchange with Sinema. “‘Hang in there buddy.’ I said, ‘Thank you, madam senator.’ She was very polite, very kind,” Santos told similarly unhinged Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly.

A new profile of far right psychopath Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna by the Washington Post treads some of the same ground but goes deeper than the local MAGA Florida blog’s report on her we picked up last year. Among the lowlights are how Luna claimed in an interview to be part “Jew-ish” too because her Catholic German-American father (son of a former Nazi Wehrmacht soldier), joined a Messianic Jewish Church at some point when he was struggling with drug addiction.

“I am also a small fraction Ashkenazi,” Luna told Jewish Insider last November. Her actual birth name was Anna Paulina Mayehofer before she changed it to her mother’s maiden name, Luna, to sound more Latina sometime around 2019, ahead of her first run for Congress in 2020.

So toss this “Jew-ish” heritage into the pile of already known/alleged batshittery, such as that Luna is a witch, worked as a stripper while serving in the Air Force, claimed her Mexican great grandfather was personally executed by Pancho Villa – fifteen years after Villa’s death, left her (apparently real) Hispanic heritage, filing a protection order against her paternal uncle for questioning her on social media, and claiming Roger Stone tried to poison her (again, that one might not be that far-fetched).