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Instead of being responsible adults or competent government officials by paying the bills they’ve racked up, House Republicans will consider passing a series of “clean” short-term debt limit increases to buy time, a move that would unsettle global financial markets and leave the American economy teetering on the brink of a GOP-induced calamity.

Roll Call reports that the nihilists in the Republican House Caucus want to increase the chaos by matching the ending date of one of the short-term increases to terminate on September 30th, that last day of the government’s fiscal year.  That would essentially defund all government spending going into the new fiscal year, adding pressure to get a deal done, but also–given the disarray in the GOP and the ineffective leadership of House Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy (who may not be in that position after any given day because he ceded his )–increasing the likelihood that the government will pass the deadline without a deal.

Democrats have been pushing McCarthy to present any type of solution to the debt ceiling issue, but McCarthy has none.  “We have to try to get together and see what we can do in a bipartisan way, that’s true,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer said Wednesday.  “But on the debt ceiling, you know what I’d say to Speaker McCarthy when we sit down: Show us your plan.”

Republican Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has vowed to slow down all nominations submitted by President Joe Biden, saying it’s ostensibly because Biden improperly had government documents at his office and his home, but it’s really because Tom Cotton is a six-foot walking penis.

According to Politico, Cotton is suddenly incensed that fewer than 20 documents were found at an office formerly used by Biden and at Biden’s home in Delaware.  The documents, which were never sought by the National Archives, were back in NARA’s possession within a day of being found without the need for court action or million of dollars of taxpayer money going to a doomed legal fight.

“I’m prepared to refuse consent or to fast-track any nominee for any department or agency. And take every step I can on every committee on which I serve to impose consequences on the administration until they provide these documents for the Congress to make our own informed judgment about the risk to national security,” Cotton said.

An 87-year-old Holocaust survivor embraced modern technology, using a dating app to find love.  Unfortunately, he hooked up with a 36-year-old Florida con artist who milked the man for $2.8 million over a five-year period, CNN reports.

Calling herself “Alice,” Peaches Stergo met the unidentified victim, then a Manhattan resident, about seven years ago.  In 2017, she asked him for a sizable amount of money to pay for a lawyer to get a settlement she said she was due; in fact, there was no settlement and she kept the money.  She then created a stream of fake invoices, collection statements, correspondence and other material to convince the victim that she needed a $50,000 monthly allowance.  She also set up a fake email account and impersonated a bank employee to convince the victim that he would be repaid the cash he thought were going to help “Alice” out of financial scraps.

Instead, Stergo used the money to buy a house in a gated community in Florida, a condo, a boat, and numerous cars including a Corvette.  The victim ultimately told his son that he had no savings remaining, telling the son that “Alice” was going to repay him.  The son called the police.  Federal officials say more than half a billion dollars were lost in 2021 to romance app scammers.

Did you try to overthrow the government?
Are you worried that the rule of law is catching up to you?
Thanks to Kevin McCarthy, the attorneys at #InsurrectionLLC are standing by and ready to take your call… pic.twitter.com/M1Dv0nMj2V

— Eric Swalwell (@ericswalwell) January 26, 2023

Satellite photos have revealed a cemetery set aside for killed in action members of Russia’s group of paid mercenaries from Wagner Group show the toll Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is taking on Putin’s private army, NBC News reports.

The photos last autumn showed 17 grave sites at the cemetery, located about 200 miles into Russia from the Ukrainian border.  After Wagner Group fighters were used to hold territory at the eastern Ukrainian town of Soledar late last year, the number of graves jumped to at least 120, seven times the number.

Satellite imagery shows the area where the cemetery is located, near the Russia town of Bakinskaya in southwest Russia, containing one of six sections of the area designated for Wagner Group remains filled with bodies.  The five other cemetery sites are not occupied, yet.

Social media entrepreneur Donald Trump will have his accounts on Facebook and Instagram reinstated by parent company Meta in coming weeks after they were suspended for spreading lies and conspiracy theories in 2021, the New York Times reports.

US Secret Service agents sobered up enough to produce the 2023 National Threat Assessment Center’s report on mass attacks in public places, its report that is careful to not concentrate just on the extreme amount of mass shootings to placate the NRA and its minions in Congress.  Excerpts:

• “The study examines 173 mass attacks—in which three or more people, not including the attacker(s), were harmed—carried out by 180 attackers in public or semi-public locations between January 2016 and December 2020. In total, 513 people were killed and an additional 1,234 people were injured during these attacks.”
• “Nearly three-quarters of the attacks (n = 126, 73%) involved the use of one or more firearms, including rifles, handguns, and shotguns. Most attacks involving firearms were fatal (n = 105), while fewer than half of the non-firearm attacks were fatal. Other types of weapons used included bladed weapons (n = 28, 16%), vehicles (n = 18, 10%), blunt objects (n = 6, 3%), explosives (n = 3, 2%), and incendiaries or arson (n = 3, 2%). The other weapons included attackers assaulting victims using their fists or other manual means in combination with other weapons. Fourteen attacks involved more than one type of weapon, such as attacks with a vehicle and firearm or a bladed weapon and firearm.”

“The debt ceiling has proven to be incredibly effective,” Cuban-Canadian Ted Cruz (R-Quintana Roo) declares as he states his Party’s intention to once again jeopardize America’s credit rating, the world economy and millions of jobs for a self-promotional political stunt.  “In 2011, by standing strong on the debt ceiling, the Republican majority in the House forced passage of the Budget Control Act, the most significant constraint in federal spending in modern times.  When I arrived here in 2013, my Republican leadership was crowing about the great fiscal responsibility they saw because of the Budget Control Act, and then they turned around and abandoned it couple years later.”

A Fargo, North Dakota woman was arrested Tuesday night after cops caught her running out of a Catholic church without a shirt, bra, or shoes, immediately after she had broken in and destroyed a statue of the friendly Jewish hippie guy from ancient Palestine, ValleyNewsLive.com reports.

The incident is believed to be drug-related. The damage to St Mary’s Cathedral in downtown Fargo wrought by 35 year-old Brittney Marie Reynolds is estimated at $11,500 dollars based on a price the pastor, Monsignor Joseph Goering, found online for a similar statue. And yeah, it was apparently the whole statue, not just the head that was destroyed. No Catholic guilt about using a little creative license to recreate an iconic New York Post cover story here. It was not a sin to do so.

Hoping to repay some of the $13 billion in debt he accrued to fulfill his $44 billion impulse buy of social media platform Twitter, petulant proto-supervillain Elon Musk may sell as much as $3 billion in new shares of Twitter, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The money would help lower the amount of unsecured debt–which carries the highest interest rates–Musk leveraged to pay for Twitter at a purchase price 25% over market value at the time of Musk’s April offer.  Since his acquisition was completed, Musk has faced a wrath of criticism for his management of the platform, the company, its employees and his other ventures, making the record books after losing a jaw-dropping $200 billion in personal wealth in one year.

Should Musk choose to sell a portion of Twitter, the US government will keep a keen eye on suitors, wary of continued foreign influence at the popular social media site.

This year, more than 16 million people sought health care coverage through the exchange set up thanks to the Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare to credit the creator in a creative bit of rebranding), a record number of users, ABC News reports.

While three million people set up new accounts on the exchanges this year, the number of Americans who do not have health insurance fell to 8% last year, an all-time low.  When the healthcare exchanges were set up ten years ago, 15.7% of Americans weren’t covered.

The record usage comes despite Republican efforts to dismantle the system, which the GOP hates because Obama supported it even though it’s largely the same program touted by the conservative Heritage Foundation two decades before.  Failed politician and human Donald Trump vowed that he would dismantle the ACA and present a plan that would cover more people for more things for less money; he first made that pledge in 2015, but he has yet to present a comprehensive health care plan that was anything more than ramblings at a cult rally.

I've still yet to hear a decent answer as to why the DOJ held Biden's classified document scandal until AFTER the midterms.

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) January 25, 2023

Abigail Zwerner, the 25-year-old teacher from Newport News, Virginia who was seriously wounded when a six-year-old student in her class shot her with a gun he brought from home, has filed a lawsuit against the Newport News School District, the Associated Press reports.

In a statement read by her lawyer, Zwerner asserts school and school district administrators were repeatedly told about the disturbing statements and actions of the student but failed to act, a condition she described as “paralyzed by apathy.”  Told the student was suspected of bringing a gun to school, administrators did nothing.  A teacher took it upon herself to search the child’s bag, finding nothing, but suspecting he put it in his pocket for recess; “Well, he has little pockets,” an administrator commented, dismissing the report of a weapon.

“On that day, over the course of a few hours, three different times — three times — school administration was warned by concerned teachers and employees that the boy had a gun on him at the school and was threatening people. But the administration could not be bothered,” Zwerner’s attorney, Diane Toscano said.

The Biden Administration will announce Wednesday they’re sending 31 Abrams M1 tanks to help defend Ukraine from the ongoing invasion by Russia, the Associated Press reports.

It’s been confirmed. They are making your Xbox woke. It’s not enough that Microsoft founder Bill Gates put microchips in the COVID vaccines and veggie burgers or that he’s buying up thousands upon thousands of acres of farmland to grow genetically altered crops tended to by human trafficking victims kidnapped by FEMA who are eaten alive by the giant sentient mutant Venus fly traps guarding the perimeter if they try to escape. Now they want to indoctrinate your kids into a “woke” ideology by introducing a power save mode for when you leave your Xbox on pause.

MAGA white nationalist Nick Fuentes has been banned from Twitter again, only about 24 hours after being reprieved from a 2021 life sentence in the birdcage, the BBC’s Shayan Sardarizadeh reports.

It’s not clear if any one tweet prompted the ban or if Musk simply reversed his decision in response to the general uproar over replatforming the Mar-a-Lago dinner guest. At some point on Tuesday Fuentes had tweeted a “YE 2024” image for fellow antisemite Kanye West’s second doomed presidential campaign – for which Fuentes is the manager or whatever, who the fuck knows. West himself is still banned, allegedly permanently, over his tweet of an antisemitic meme last month.

Former President Jimmy Carter found classified documents at his home in Georgia and returned them to the National Archives at some point in the last 42 years, 0 months, and four days since he left office after being defeated by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, the AP reports.

It may or may not have been within the last several months since FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago to seize classified documents disgraced former President Trump had willfully refused to render to the National Archives. But the AP doesn’t know and nobody who knows could or would tell them.

“Former President Jimmy Carter found classified materials at his home in Plains, Georgia, on at least one occasion and returned them to the National Archives, according to the same person who spoke of regular occurrences of mishandled documents. The person did not provide details on the timing of the discovery. An aide to the Carter Center provided no details when asked about that account of Carter discovering documents at his home after leaving office in 1981,” they write in the article.

The timing of the discovery is probably meaningless. We guess it would be slightly more interesting if the Mar-a-Lago raid and/or the discovery of documents from Biden’s time as Vice President prompted a search and then a quiet return of intelligence reports on Leonid Brezhnev’s cross-dressing habits or whatever. But ultimately it doesn’t really matter other than further bolstering the contention that former Presidents and Vice Presidents fucked up but only the fat orange one acted criminally by going out of his way to refuse to comply with a lawful subpoena for their return.

Lying and thieving piece of shit Congressman George Santos made a habit of expensing $199.99 transactions at places like a Queens Italian restaurant and a fancy Miami-area hotel to his campaign, doing so multiple times in 2022, Politico reports while explaining that it doesn’t appear to be a coincidence that $200.00 is the max amount for which campaigns are not required to retain receipts for the FEC. It’s exceedingly rare for a campaign to mark an expense between $199.00 and $199.99.

Only 80 such transactions were recorded by all 450 or so House and Senate campaigns in 2022, and only 10 percent of campaigns had any $199 transactions. Santos did it 40 times. Not hard to imagine he would tell a waiter or hotel clerk to run the campaign card for $199.99 exactly and then pay the rest in cash or another card. Nice work if you can lie and cheat enough to get it.

A new CNN/SRSS survey conducted over the weekend shows at least some respondents get the difference between President Biden and disgraced former President Trump’s respective situations with classified documents being found at their homes, with only 37 percent answering that “Biden did something illegal” compared to 52 percent saying the same for the Orange God Emperor.

AT&T-owned satellite television service DirecTV has ignored the toothless threats from House Republicans tossed right wing propaganda network Newsmax from their lineup after failing to reach an agreement over an increase in carrying fees paid to the channel, a little under a year after similarly shitty competitor OAN suffered the same fate, the Daily Beast reports.