Category: Uncategorized

Seven people who were protesting the construction of an 82-acre police training facility in Georgia have been charged with domestic terrorism after a shootout with law enforcement officials trying to clear the land left one dead, CNN reports.

Protestors hope to protect the forest that would be destroyed to make room for what they’ve dubbed “Cop City,” the $90 million facility.  Activists with a group called “Stop Cop City” say officers aimed guns into wooded areas where protesters had spread out.  Police say they were fired upon from the woods.  Police were sweeping the woods where the facility would be built in an effort to rid it of protestors’ campsites, spread out across the location.  Police report removing more than two dozen campsites.

An Australian cane toad’s reign as the largest toad discovered was quite short.  Days after being discovered in the rainforest of north Australian and being dismissed as a fake, researchers captured the 2.7 kilogram/6 pound toad.  “I’ve never seen anything so big,” park ranger Kylee Gray told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation News.  “[It was] almost like a football with legs. We dubbed it ‘Toadzilla.'”

According to the BBC, Toadzilla was taken to a lab where it was officially weighed and examined.  But with the cane toad being an invasive species in Australia–coming to the isolated continent from Central America on container ships–the lab euthanized the amphibian.

Florida federal Judge Donald Middlebrooks on Thursday slapped Trump and his incompetent lawyers Alina Habba and Peter Ticktin with fucking $937,989.98 in sanctions for their conduct in the failed batshit lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, John Podesta, Andrew McCabe, and literally dozens of other defendants over the 2016 election and subsequent Russia investigation.

“This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim. Thirty-one individuals and entities were needlessly harmed in order to dishonestly advance a political narrative. A continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law, portrays judges as partisans, and diverts resources from those who have suffered actual legal harm,” Middlebrooks wrote in the order ripping into the two assholes and hitting them with the massive sanctions, now totaling just under a million dollars after he already stuck them with $50,000 in November.

A staffer in Conservative Alberta, Canada Premier Danielle Smith’s office sent a series of emails to the Alberta Crown Prosecutor’s office last fall pushing back against their case against the right wing clustertruckers who blockaded border crossings protesting the Canadian government’s COVID vaccine mandates last year, the CBC reports on some pretty textbook MAGA fuckery up north.

“This is so improper on so many levels – it’s pure interference with Crown independence,” said one source in the prosecutor’s office and lol this is the kind of bullshit we Americans dealt with every day for four years while Trump was in office, not to mention we’re still stuck with no end in sight to the residual effects of his regime’s normalization of political interference in criminal investigations.

For her part Smith has scarcely denied she wants the clustertruckers to walk, questioning if the cases are still in the public interest and if the prosecutors can convict them. “I’ve put it to the prosecutors, and I’ve asked them to do a review of the cases with those two things in mind. And I’m hopeful that we’ll see a true turning of the page. And so do you continue on in prosecuting one when the public has moved on? That’s the big question that the Crown has got to to come to terms with,” said Smith in an interview with MAGA site RebelNews.com’s Canadian branch last month.

“So if you wanna understand, if you really wanna understand how the American government actually works at the highest levels and if you wanna why they don’t teach history anymore, one thing you should know is that the most popular president in American history was [melodramatic pause] Richard Nixon.  Richard Nixon.  Yet somehow without a single vote being cast by a single American voter, Richard Nixon was kicked out of office and replace by the only unelected president in American history.”

Well, Tucker lies again.  Richard Nixon was never “the most popular president.”  He peaked in popularity at 67% job approval in his first term, numbers surpassed by his three predecessors and even Jimmy freakin’ Carter.  And while Nixon did overwhelming win reelection against a historically unpopular George McGovern, LBJ and FDR won greater percentages of the popular vote.  And finally, Richard Nixon was “kicked out of office;” he resigned in disgrace after trying to illegally influence the 1972 election through corrupt methods; his Republican Party Congressional leaders told him there was enough support for impeachment, and he resigned rather than have the evidence aired publicly.

The NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans reached an important milestone in the 2022-23 season on Wednesday: Zero reported break-ins or thefts of vehicles parked around the team’s Smoothie King Center arena in the city’s central business district for the first time in weeks, 4WWL reports.

That’s right. For one night at least Pelicans fans were treated to a stellar defense from the guards outside the paint and this would require more research of pro basketball coverage tropes to really be a slam dunk satire-ish real news article. On a related note, fuck Bill Simmons.

The United States Coast Guard has been tracking the movements of a suspected Russian spy ship meandering off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands, CNN reports, in an area used by international cargo ships sailing through.

The ship, said to be designed to look like a commercial vessel, has been in the US Economic Exclusive Zone, an area where foreign ships, including foreign navy vessels, freely move.  This ship, however, is drawing more attention.  “In recent weeks, the U.S. Coast Guard has continued to monitor a Russian vessel, believed to be an intelligence gathering ship, off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands,” the Coast Guard announced in a press release.

In 2017, the US forced the SSV Viktor Leonov to move on after lingering off the East Coast of the United States, sailing from Connecticut to Florida before heading to Cuba.  The Coast Guard repeatedly cited the ship for unsafe maneuvering because the Leonov would operate in poor weather and at night without its running lights.

The National Republican Congressional Committee on Thursday deleted their website’s profile page for Congressman George “Kitara” Santos in a development that we’re not sure of the implications of but does not sound like good news at all for the lying piece of shit and proud House GOP member.

Separately, both of the denials that Santos issued Thursday morning over recent reporting on him were just hours later contradicted by further evidence emerging. On the “Kitara” side of things, the New York Post obtained video of Santos dancing in a drag parade in Brazil in 2005. On the stealing $3,000 from a GoFundMe Santos set up for a disabled New Jersey veteran whose dog was dying of cancer in 2016 side, the crowdfunding company confirmed to CBS News that they had that year suspended the account associated with that particular drive. Inspiring!

Three staff members at a Salt Lake City-area plastic surgery practice and a friend of one of the staff members were indicted this week on charges they secretly injected as many as 2,000 children with saline solution instead of the COVID-19 vaccine, issued falsified vaccination cards for adults, and took $50 payments over Venmo and PayPal to fill out the fake vax cards, Ars Technica reports.

The indictment alleges Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah owner Dr Michael Kirk Moore Jr, his office manager, and a staffer dumped the 2,000 or so vax doses down the drain and replaced the vials with harmless saline solution. Separately, with the help of Moore’s neighbor, they distributed fake vax cards in exchange for a $50 “charity donation” via the payment apps, a case that was difficult for the feds to crack as the assholes would only do it if for a person if they had been referred by another previous recipient of a fake vaccination card from the practice.

Most acts of criminal right wing batshittery fall into one of two categories: You have the people that say and do certain stupid, evil things out of cynical ambition – like the Republicans who knew Trump lost but voted to object to it anyway – and the others that do it strictly out of true belief in their moronic cause – like the Capitol rioters. This case is pretty fascinating because it has both elements. These scumbags actually believed they were saving children by faking their COVID vaccinations AND they were making a few extra bucks by selling bogus vaccination cards to adults.

The conservative fancon organization helmed by a man who grabs other men’s penises without consent announced Thursday that a man who grabs women’s genitals without consent will deliver the keynote address to all the penis and female genitalia grabbing fans in the audience in March.

They will let him deliver the keynote address because he’s a star. When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything, even grab penises and female genitalia without consent.

Ya gotta love hypocrites.  They’re just so… obvious.  Meet North Dakota Republican state senator David Clemens, and please note the imprecise part in the hair, the defined line in his ‘do, and the mismatched hues of his follicles, telltale signs of a non-original, temporary cranial pilosity.  Clemens, ya see, introduced a bill that would require everyone use the pronouns God gave ya at birth, because there is no changing what God gave ya, no matter how uncomfortable you are with your appearance. And Clemens–again, he of rug-wearing infamy (and I say this as a follically-challenged individual myself, so it’s completely okay to mock a bald man in denial)–wants to fine any individual who works for an entity that receives state funding up to $1,500 if they refer to an individual with pronouns that do not reflect the sex they were assigned at birth.

So while Clemens can try to hide the genetics he was blessed with by God, so people will refer to him as haired and hirsute while laughing at his hairpiece behind his back, he wants to require everyone else to suffer by forcing them to be confronted with their unpreferred image daily, unlike him.

In what we will take as an unexplicit admission by the court that a conservative was responsible but they just won’t say it, the Supreme Court has released a short statement saying essentially, “Well, we tried,” announcing that after an internal investigation, they have not identified who leaked the Dobbs decision overturning the right to bodily autonomy and revoking the Roe decision acknowledging the right to an abortion.

At the time, conservatives hyped the leak as some liberal plot to get the justices to reverse course on their votes, thereby protecting  a patient’s right to seek reproductive care, despite the fact that the release of the decision as a 6-3 vote would commit the justices to their positions early in the opinion writing process.  A conservative justice would not be able to switch their decision–as Roberts reportedly was because he disagreed with the harsh language and sweeping ruling of the Samuel Alito-written opinion–without experiencing the backlash of conservatives, who are prone to exhibit their displeasure with bullets and anti-government violence.

Over the last week disgraced former President Trump and his fans have been claiming that President Biden’s Obama-era classified documents fuckup is worse than the Mar-a-Lago situation because, as Vice President at the time, Biden never had the authority to declassify such documents. That Trump and his lawyers still have yet to publicly produce literally any evidence whatsoever that the fat bastard had actually declassified the documents the FBI found he had stolen from the White House – let alone assert it before a judge – hasn’t been mentioned in this new line, but it’s not like they have a lot to work with. The fanboys just take it as an article of faith that Trump declassified the docs and also that the FBI planted them to frame him – depending on which day of the week it is.

Anyway it turns out this theoretical quantum superposition is even more meaningless than it was previously, as Politifact have identified Executive Order 13526, signed on December 29th, 2009 by President Obama, specifically authorizing the Vice President of the United States to classify and declassify government documents at will. Neither Trump nor Biden have rescinded EO 13526 or superseded it with a subsequent executive order, thus it remains in effect to this day.

No, it does not appear that Biden ever took steps to declassify the documents that ended up in his home and office in 2017, but that he was not able to at the time was supposed to be the huge difference between he and the Orange God Emperor. Well now he was. Thanks Obama!

A devastating cyberattack struck critical KFC and Taco Bell infrastructure in the United Kingdom on Wednesday, forcing parent company Yum Brands to halt all extra crispy, gravy-smothered, fiesta-style, crunch-tastic, extra spicy supreme commerce at as many as 300 UK stores, the AP reports.

The stores were reopened on Thursday and no further attacks have been reported. It’s not clear if the company negotiated with unknown cyber-extremists to end the ransomware attack or what their demands even were. Or if the terrorists are even still alive. Maybe Colonel Sanders is not just a marketing character but also the name of some ruthless ex-black ops mercenary leading a highly skilled team on call to eliminate threats to the company with extreme prejudice – and they went into action. If they’re not going to tell us what happened then we just have to use our imaginations.

“I want you to have a choice,” Republican Florida Governor and albino Oompa Loompa with a thyroid condition Ron DeSantis announced at a definitely-not-a-campaign rally Thursday morning.  But alas, his declaration is not about reproductive health, or marriage partners, or even books available at a school library.  DeSantis is referring to gas stoves, something only 8% of households in Florida have, in an effort to stoke outrage about a non-existent Biden policy the GOP wants to leverage.

The Santa Fe, New Mexico-area district attorney investigating movie star Alec Baldwin over the 2022 accidental shooting death of a cinematographer on a western film set will announce Thursday that Baldwin will be charged with involuntary manslaughter, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The charges will be celebrated by Trump fanboys as some sort of karmic vindication of Baldwin’s outspoken liberal politics and in particular his regular stints portraying their Orange God Emperor on Saturday Night Live. However Spartan’s official editorial stance is that Baldwin has always been a douchebag both privately and publicly irrespective of his politics, so fuck him either way.

The reports that I would let a dog die is shocking & insane. My work in animal advocacy was the labor of love & hard work. Over the past 24hr I have received pictures of dogs I helped rescue throughout the years along with supportive messages.

These distractions won’t stop me!

— George Santos (@MrSantosNY) January 19, 2023

The United States officially hit the debt limit on Thursday, a major achievement in government spending. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen celebrated the news by shuffling things around with “emergency measures” to buy more time before the House GOP deliberately causes a default.

Famous Brazilian-American drag queen Kitara (aka Congressman George Santos) had once aspired to be crowned “Miss Gay Rio de Janeiro,” a prestigious honor accorded only to the most fabulous, most flamboyant of story hour performers in Rio, a source formerly close to Kitara told Reuters.

Kitara denied having those dreams in a tweet on Thursday, calling the story “categorically false” in a tweet, but Kitara has been known to play fast and loose with the truth on a wide array of subjects such as the Holocaust and 9/11 attacks. “The media continues to make outrageous claims about my life while I am working to deliver results, I will not be distracted nor fazed by this,” Kitara added.

Far-right Colleyville, Texas Mayor Bobby Lindamood, locally famous for his QAnon memes and January 6th conspiracy theories, has been ordered to pay $199,750 in fees seven years after losing a defamation suit over accusations he molested his stepsister decades ago, sent photos of his cock to co-workers at a family business, and boned a prostitute in Las Vegas, the Texas Observer reports.

The long and complex case began in 2015, when Lindamood was first running for a seat on the city council, challenging incumbent Mike Taylor. A sheet detailing the lurid allegations about Lindamood’s personal MAGA lifestyle habits was placed anonymously in residential mailboxes across the city by parties unknown just days before the election. Lindamood lost that race and accused Taylor and other Colleyville residents of the hit in a defamation lawsuit just days later. The case was dismissed in 2018, but along the way the defendants got a hold of a 2011 deposition from a separate case against his stepmother in which Lindamood had admitted to fondling his drunk stepsister while he was married (and while the stepsister was allegedly a minor), to being been in a room with a hooker in Vegas, and that his dad had accused him of sending pics of his junk to coworkers at the family business. And still this guy got elected to city council in 2016 and then mayor later.