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A new Wall Street Journal survey finds short little bastard Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leading disgraced former President Trump 52 to 38 in the 2024 GOP primary race among likely voters. The question was posed only as a head-to-head however, and in the real world the presence of other candidates would likely splinter more of DeSantis’s support than Trump’s. When up against former Vice President Mike Pence, Trump crushes his erstwhile second-in-command 63 to 28 percent.

Legendarily uncourageous “Speaker-elect” Kevin McCarthy is facing an impossible demand from the hardcore MAGA wing of the House GOP caucus, who insist that their support is contingent on him allowing for any member, at any time, call a “motion to vacate,” which is exactly what it sounds like: the option to force a vote to remove and replace the Speaker, Punchbowl News reports.

The numbers aren’t totally clear quite yet, given the lack of a viable alternative, but at least six MAGA members of the House are dead set against McCarthy and will not budge. In a 222 member GOP caucus vs 212 Dems who will almost certainly all vote in unison for their Speaker candidate, McCarthy can afford to lose those six as long as they don’t vote for anyone else, since the Speaker is determined by a majority, not a plurality vote. If he fails to get a simple majority of members voting for a candidate by name then the House goes to a re-vote again and again until a winner is picked.

Attention whore billionaire Elon Musk encouraged his fanboys to vote Republican in the midterms and then did not actually vote himself, according to public records obtained by the Daily Beast.

The Democratic and Republican leaders of the respective House and Senate appropriations committees agreed to a framework for an omnibus spending bill, moving one step closer to a deal that would avoid a government shutdown, Politico reports.

“If all goes well, we should be able to finish an omnibus appropriations package by December 23rd,” Republican Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, the lead Republican negotiator and the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Specifics are not available, but negotiators had settled on a 10% increase in defense spending to $858 billion in earlier discussions.  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said earlier Tuesday that additional aid for Ukraine was included in the package, as was the Electoral Count Act, which would solidify the certification process for future presidents by closing gaps in language Donald Trump’s supporters seized on to stoke the Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress on January 6th, 2021, when Congress met to certified Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States.

It’s really amazing: Fox host Tucker Carlson appeals to flailing Twitter CEO Elon Musk to violate Twitter’s own terms of service and release people’s private direct messages because, Carlson claims without evidence, there will be information regarding things like, oh, Russia’s reason to invade Ukraine, and the origins of the coronavirus, and who bombed the Russian pipeline.

Let me say it again:  Carlson has no evidence of any of this.  It’s pure speculation.  Oh, and it’s no coincidence that Carlson’s own Twitter account is run by his staff, so he won’t be caught up in the juicy bits.

Despite assurances from the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, corporate manufacturers, foreign regulators, and his own state university system, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis needs to secure the GOP base in order to overthrow Donald Trump as the titular head of the Party, so he’s demanding the Florida Supreme Court empanel a grand jury to investigate all the crackpot false ideas conservatives have about coronavirus vaccines.

According to Politico, DeSantis held a virtual roundtable with Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a California doctor drafted from across the country because he was a national proponent of anti-vaccine, counter-public health pandemic measures favored by DeSantis and Republicans.  During the roundtable, DeSantis remarked that it’s illegal for public officials to lie to the citizens of Florida–a moment lacking self-awareness given his endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment–and he wanted to investigate lies he claims federal officials like Anthony Fauci told the public about the effectiveness of the vaccine.  DeSantis did not mention if he would investigate Donald Trump’s various claims about injecting disinfectant or sucking horse dewormer as treatments for the virus.  It will just be coincidental if the investigation finds his Republican rival culpable for misleading the public.

Republicans claim, without evidence, that Fauci and other officials overstated the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.  They point to reports entered in the VAERS system, a database of reports of reactions to vaccines and other treatments; medical professionals are required to report adverse reactions to VAERS but reports to VAERS are not verified and anyone can submit a report, so some unrelated events may be improperly causally linked.  Still, anti-government conspiracy theorists claim the database is complete, comprehensive and accurate. 

Love him or hate him–and there are extremes on both sides–comedian Adam Sandler has enjoyed a wide-ranging career, from an MTV game show to blockbuster movies.  Now, he can add one more line to his resume:  Winner of the 2023 Mark Twain Award for American Humor.

According to CBS News, the 56-year-old Sandler will get the award honoring his breadth of work in television, movies and music, from Saturday Night Live to “The Chanukah Song” to classic films like Happy Gilmore and the Grown Ups franchise.

“Adam Sandler has entertained audiences for over three decades with his films, music, and his tenure as a fan favorite cast member on SNL,” said Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter.  “Adam has created characters that have made us laugh, cry, and cry from laughing.”

The Congressional office of Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett were, for a time, the most opportune place for an asteroid to hit as the Freedom Caucus gathered for their Holiday Party, complete with Louie Gohmert, like a hippie who went for the cash, trying to look cool by strumming tunelessly on a guitar while Burchett passes out canned cheese on a Ritz cracker, calling it charcuterie.  Giving credit where credit is due, they didn’t let serial food poisoner and alleged former prostitute Lauren Boebert make the food or the entire caucus would be in toilet stalls (and none of that unisex bathroom stuff here!).

🔥🔥

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 13, 2022

That’s MAGA influencer Tim Pool, famous for his outspoken involuntary celibacy, demonstrating the kind of deep-seated personality defects that certainly contribute to it. Also nothing dissonant at all about an outspoken anti-vaxxer eager to put a fucking electronic chip in his brain.

Responding to a Monday story on his January 17th, 2021 text message to disgraced former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows begging for fat former President Trump to declare “Marshall Law” with just three days left before leaving office, far right South Carolina Congressman Ralph Norman told a newspaper in his home state the text was borne of “frustration” with losing.

“Obviously, Martial Law was never warranted,” Norman wrote in a statement that was likely edited by an underpaid staffer. “That text message came from a source of frustration, on the heels of countless unanswered questions about the integrity of the 2020 election, without any way to slow down and examine those issues prior to the inauguration of the newly elected president.”

What a fucking worm. All the “questions” were answered. Trump lost. The simple truth is that Norman and his ilk knew it and came up with all these bullshit conspiracies as a pretext to overturning the election so their Orange Allah could remain in power. That’s it. Of course a handful of stupid and impressionable members of Congress like Louie Gohmert and Scott Perry most likely actually sincerely believed in all the circlejerk fantasies about the Italian satellites and the server in Germany, but the vast majority of them simply wanted to destroy democracy and lied to the public about their reasons. That’s the bottom line and we periodically need to restate it to serve as a reminder of what these traitors tried to do to the United States of America in late 2020-early 2021.

In the latest in a string of violent incidents, the man reportedly chosen by incoming Georgia Republican Congressman Mike Collins was arrested last month on animal cruelty charges and is out on $1,200 bond pending a trial, Politico reports.

Brandon Phillips, 36, was arrested after an August 23rd incident where he kicked a dog belonging to a Georgia woman.  Wearing boots, Phillips kicked the dog so violently, he opened a wound in the dog’s stomach.  The warrant doesn’t specify the circumstances behind Phillips kicking the dog, but nothing in the report indicates the dog was violent or aggressive, unlike Phillips.

This is not the first time Phillips has exhibited a violent streak:  he was forced out as the head of Donald Trump’s 2016 Georgia election campaign after reports arose of a 2008 incident in which Phillips was charged with battery and felony criminal damage after he attacked a man, causing “cuts and bruises to the head and torso.”  In the same incident, he grabbed a woman’s computer and threw it.  He was sentenced to three years of probation, 50 hours of community service and fined $1,567 after taking a plea bargain.

The last public hearing for the House Select Committee investigating the Republican-led January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress will be held Monday, December 19th at 1 p.m. ET, ABC News reports.

Initial scheduling had slotted the meeting for December 21st.  Committee Chair Bennie Thompson said that a complete report on the committee’s findings will be available online after the last hearing.  With the House scheduled to go to Republican control with the next Congress, the committee will likely be disbanded, although there is an unlikely potential for the Senate to take up the investigation if it so chooses.

Small-handed presidential nomination loser, Florida Republican Congressman Li’l Marco Rubio, seeks to further distance young voters from the GOP by introducing legislation in the Senate that would ban TikTok from operating in the United States.

While Republicans hue and cry about limited free speech because social media platforms reasonably moderate content that is dangerous, threatening and hateful, Li’l Marco says he wants to ban Tik Tok, a platform that features short videos, because data is shared with the Chinese government.   In introducing the Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act), Rubio deviates from the standard conservative hysteria about how it will ruin precious American children to claim the Communist Party of China wants data from teenage girls doing a dance challenge.

“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok. This isn’t about creative videos — this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day,” Rubio wrote in a statement.  “We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”

One of the four current and incoming Black Republicans in the House, Florida Congressman Byron Donalds doesn’t deny the murderer of ten people at the Topps Supermarket store in Buffalo, New York was hunting Black people, but he completely fraudulently claims the shooter “cite[d] socialist theories.”  Technically, that is true:  in his 180-page manifesto, the shooter (whom we will not name) did cite socialist theories–only to say that he rejected them in favor of white nationalist, bigoted, homophobic, transphobic ideals.  In those pages, the shooter says he was converted to far-right extremism by reading 4chan, and he described himself as a neo-Nazi anti-Semitic white supremacist.  By claiming that he “cited” socialism, Donalds disingenuously implies that the shooter endorsed the theories that he explicitly rejected.

Why don't you hop off so that me and my attorneys can hop on?

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) December 13, 2022

“It’s near impossible to follow along Lake V. Hobbs. The lag is so bad that one or two words are muttered before buffering,” reports ABC 15 political analyst Garrett Archer.

The Biden Administration is finalizing plans to deliver more freedom to Ukraine in the form of Patriot missile defense systems to block Ivan’s dastardly assault on democracy, CNN reports. The plan just needs a sign-off from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and President Joe Biden before the formal announcement of more pain and suffering for the Cossack-dancing scum of the East.

Here’s MAGA influencer Benny Johnson saying FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s arrest just a day before he was to testify to a House hearing about the crypto clusterfuck a “Ghislaine Maxwell situation,” referring to Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend/fellow pimp. This crazy asshole is all over the place in this 96 second clip, going from saying it’s all about Bankman’s sinister donations to Dems and something something corruption and he was arrested to cover up what he knows to that the entire scam being some kind of intel community false flag plot to control the crypto industry and offering sympathy to the foolish patsy. It’s quite the entertaining tale Benny’s got here.

Johnson of course is far from alone in lamely trying to reconcile that a guy they just knew was going to get away with it because of his donations to Dems is now facing decades in prison for a litany of charges including campaign finance fraud. Most of the red hatters are merely claiming it was to prevent him from testifying on Tuesday, which in the real world is probably more evidence that the government actually doesn’t coordinate with itself in such situations than evidence that it does. The reason cited is some vague boilerplate “cover up” bullshit like they expected this guy to blow the lid off some massive Democratic Party conspiracy like the one Johnson made up above.

Still others just “know” why. “SBF getting arrested isn’t a good thing. He was meant to testify under oath before Congress today who would then charge him with a crime. Prosectors just saved SBF from incriminating himself. It’s all a joke and they’ve all been paid off,” writes MAGA crypto influencer Layla Heilpern. Not sure what else we can add to that. It’s perfect on its own.

With his net worth at one point calculated to be $340 billion, Elon Musk saw his fortunes fade in real time by more than $100 billion after he pledged to buy Twitter for $44 billion, giving the title of World’s Richest Person to Frenchman Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton SE, Bloomberg reports.

Currently worth a comparatively paultry $168 billion, Musk put up approximately $8.5 billion of his own money to facilitate the purchase of Twitter to take it private, using money from Saudis and others financing the rest.  The biggest hit to his wealth, however, is the plummeting price of Tesla stock:  when Musk impetuously offered to buy Twitter for around $54 per share in April, Tesla stock was sitting well above $300 per share; as of 11:00 a.m. ET Tuesday, it’s at $162, less than half its early April price.  As of November 1st, Musk owned more than 190 million shares of Tesla.  Tesla’s stock dip allowed Arnault to take bragging rights thanks to his net worth of approximately $180 billion.

Tesla stockholders have questioned Musk’s management of the Twitter takeover, with some objecting to Musk’s reported use of Tesla technical personnel to undertake projects at Twitter, whose staff Musk impulsively decimated, firing thousands of employees before trying to rehire some of them because he realized they were vital to the operation of the company.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday told Politico Congressional reporter Burgess Everett that the Dems will package the Electoral Count Act reform and another round of aid for Ukraine in with the omnibus bill Congress is trying to slap together before the end of the lame duck.

The Electoral Count Act reform bill closes the loopholes disgraced former President Trump tried to rope Mike Pence into exploiting during the final certification of the 2020 presidential election on January 6th, 2021, something Joe Biden himself should’ve done on January 6, 2017 if it were actually possible. It specifically says that only a state governor can submit the electoral college votes to Congress and rules out the bullshit theory that state legislatures can submit their own – something that didn’t actually happen in 2020, but was considered by some Republican state lawmakers. Nice to see it (hopefully) finally getting done.

Always one willing to help the Russians, Donald Trump, Jr. reposted at least one meme from a Russian troll farm that set up a phony account from right-wing tool and middling talented performer Kid Rock, one of the few friends Junior has in real life, Rolling Stone reports.

An investigation by Stanford University and social media tracking firm Graphika found Junior posted a meme that a fake “official” Kid Rock account “KidRockOfficial” had posted on conservative social media platform Gab, promoting the use of horse dewormer ivermectin to treat coronavirus.  Junior took a screenshot of the post and put it on his Instagram account with the comment, “Yup.”  While the Trump family of anti-scientists and their gullible followers tout ivermectin as a cure for coronavirus, no legitimate scientific study has found ivermectin to be effective in treating or preventing a coronavirus infection.  (Editor’s note:  I tried to find Junior’s Instagram post, but after the 300th idiotic meme, I couldn’t take it anymore.)

The study found the memes were posted by Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens, a Russian-run fake social media news company linked to a known Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency.  The investigation found more than 30 accounts combined on Gab, Gettr and Trump Senile Twit Simple Truth Social run by NAEBC, with more than 30,000 unique followers across the platforms.  The investigators identified this specific account because a mirror account on Gab had been linked to the Internet Research Agency in an earlier report.