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The man who killed five at a drag show at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club in November said he planned to be “the next mass killer,” warning them to not stand in his way as he tried to amass a cache of guns and ammunition, family members told law enforcement after a June 2021 armed standoff at his mother’s house, the Associated Press reports.

Even with that explicit report, the county sheriff declined to pursue a “red flag” order that would have prevented Anderson Aldrich from buying and possessing weapons likey because El Paso County Sheriff Bill Elder is a conservative who refuses to file such motions because he believes in the unfettered right of anyone he approves of to possess a firearm.

“There were many warning signs,” a spokesman for Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis told the AP. “It appears obvious that an Extreme Risk Protection Order law could have and should have been utilized, which would have removed the suspect’s firearms and could very well have prevented this tragedy.”

As if you didn’t need another indication that MAGAts and conservatives are a deplorable lot–far more than the “half” specified by Hillary Clinton–here’s a MAGAbilly outside the church where the funeral for deceased Black Democratic Virginia Congressman Don McEachin was held Wednesday in Richmond.

Remember, folks:  the GOP is the Party of Family Values, they claim.  They believe in “Christian charity,” they claim.  They believe they walk in the steps of Jesus.  Until that all becomes way to burdensome on them and they have to let their rage rule.

Tourism officials on the tiny, isolated South Atlantic island of St Helena, population 4,439, really want you to come check out their 190 year-old tortoise Jonathan, whose recent birthday was celebrated with a “cake” made out of lettuce, tomatoes, and possibly some croutons too.

So apparently pivotal is the massive super-centenarian reptile to the British colony’s tourism industry that the bureau’s Twitter profile’s banner has been “Jonathan-ized” with both a photo and cartoon depiction him to beckon visitors to come to a place 1,200 miles from Africa and 2,500 miles from Brazil. It’s not clear what else there is to do there besides seeing a lumbering tortoise and Napoleon Bonaparte’s former grave site. Former, as his remains were exhumed and repatriated to France in 1840, 19 years after his death in exile on Saint Helena. There appears to be plenty of beautiful natural scenery to enjoy for hikers and beachgoers, but not enough to really justify flying out to the middle of nowhere in our opinion at least. So our official editorial position is to open up a massive tortoise-themed casino with a giant Napoleon hat-shaped waterslide by the pool.

UPDATE (5:57 p.m. ET):  Pedro Castillo has been impeached and arrested, according to CNN.

Original story:  Pedro Castillo, the left-wing populist president of Peru, stated he would dissolve the nation’s Congress and install a temporary government hours before the Congress was to vote on impeaching him and removing him from office, CNN reports.

A former school teacher who won election by just 40,000 votes, Castillo has faced multiple attempts by conservatives to oust him from office, sometimes joined by traditionally left-leaning labor unions, since he took office in July 2021.  In a speech televised nationally Wednesday, Castillo called for new parliamentary elections and said he would assemble a committee to craft a new constitution.

Two previous impeachment attempts failed.  Peru’s Congress is comprised of 130 representatives divided among 14 different political parties.  The head of Peru’s supreme court described Castillo’s actions as a “coup d’etat” and called on Vice President Dina Boluarte to oust Castillo and take over the presidency.  Seven cabinet members have resigned in protest.

Trump lawyers have turned over to the FBI two additional classified documents they found in an off-site storage unit Trump rented in West Palm Beach, Florida, the Washington Post reports.  It’s unknown if there were more non-classified government documents found along with them.

An outside team of contractors reportedly undertook a search of various Trump-controlled properties found the documents at a storage unit at a site not at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago flop house and burnt steak emporium run by a private company.  While the storage unit was locked, there was no other significant security at the site to protect the documents, indicating Trump doesn’t give a shit about US national security.

The search of the storage unit came about as Trump’s lawyers face a deadline tomorrow to confirm in court that all documents had been returned to the government.  The unit, which was rented by the General Services Administration, the government agency that helps outgoing presidents who lost elections to transition to civilian life, was rented to temporarily store material that had been placed in an office space in Northern Virginia in the months after Joe Biden’s inauguration.  This means that the classified documents were likely in an unsecured location for months before being moved to Florida.

Tweeted and deleted by short little bastard former Trump White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Wednesday. And to think that these people want to run the American education system.

“A seven-count indictment was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging Andrii Derkach with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Acts (IEEPA), bank fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and four counts of money laundering in connection with the purchase and maintenance of two condominiums in Beverly Hills, California. Derkach allegedly purchased the properties in violation of new U.S. sanctions imposed earlier this year and concealed his interest in the transactions. Derkach remains at large,” says a DOJ press release.

This son of a bitch was one of the main conduits of Russian interference in the 2020 election, feeding information on Hunter Biden to Devin Nunes and Rudy Giuliani, among others, as they tried to gin up a scandal to torpedo Joe Biden’s candidacy before he had even launched a campaign. You all know the rest: Trump was impeached over it, people ignored the “laptop from hell” in large part because of the impeachment, then he lost reelection. This is just some unfinished business.

A former aide to Vladimir Putin said in an early Wednesday Telegram post that the Russian dictator is looking at holing up in Venezuela if he’s still alive whenever his rule becomes untenable, the Daily Beast reports. “The leader’s entourage has not ruled out that he will lose the war, be stripped of power, and have to urgently evacuate somewhere,” former speechwriter Putin Abbas Gallyamov posted, claiming it was reliable information from the inside, adding that an executive at state-owned oil company Rosneft resigned from his post to lead the project dubbed “Noah’s Ark.”

“As the name implies, it’s about a search for new land to go to in case it becomes completely uncomfortable in the homeland. The leader’s entourage has not ruled out that he will lose the war, be stripped of power, and have to urgently evacuate somewhere,” Gallyamov wrote. China was considered the first and best option, but Putin’s team reconsidered after deciding that the ChiComs might not cooperate since they hate “losers,” according to Gallyamov. Another Telegram channel reports that Kremlin big wigs have been working to obtain papers and are buying up properties on Venezuela’s Margarita Island, where the believe they’ll be safe from extradition. Lower-ranking Putin goons are looking at various other South American countries such as Argentina, Paraguay, and Ecuador. We’ll just skip the part where we detail the parallels with those countries, particularly Argentina, being famous as the refuge of Post-World War II Nazi fugitives.

German police on Wednesday arrested at least 25 individuals in connection to a QAnon-linked far right terrorist group calling themselves “Reichsbürger” who were allegedly plotting to storm the country’s parliament and overthrow the government, the Washington Post reports.

As many as 3,000 cops participated were involved in the coordinated raids, which targeted locations associated with the group in 11 of Germany’s 16 states. At least one of the individuals arrested was a Russian national because, no shit, of course there would probably be some Kremlin connection to a far right QAnon group. The raids and arrests come two days after police in Japan cuffed eight members of a QAnon-linked cult for attempting to disrupt COVID vaccine distribution. It would be nice for the hard fist of the law to go 3-for-3 against Q Nazis in the former Axis Powers on the week of the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, but it might be too much to hope for given the recent ascension of a far right government in Italy. Still two out of three ain’t bad.

A new report from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau obtained by CBS News finds that 967,400 new adult citizens were sworn in during the 2021-2022 fiscal year ending September 30, 2022, the third highest on record. The new wave comes as a direct result of the Biden Administration’s fast-tracking the process for citizenship by eliminating all sorts of red tape.

It’s an absolute nightmare for the MAGA nativists who think “their” country is being taken away from them and likely to net more lifetime Democratic voters than Republicans or independents. “It is good for the nation for people to fully become part of this nation, join it in the fullest way that they can. That has been a priority since the beginning of this administration and we’re going to continue the focus on ensuring that people who wish to become Americans, can be,” said USCIS chief Ur Jaddou.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was named Time Magazine’s Person of The Year 2022 on Wednesday, a far better pick than 2021’s Elon Musk and yet another disappointment for the fat orange egomaniac whose campaign in 2019 photoshopped his head onto the body of a then-16 year-old girl after she won instead of him as they expected.

With the last election of the cycle finished, let’s see how well Donald Trump’s endorsements did.  Using data from Ballotpedia, here’s the final numbers:

Overall, Trump did very well overall:  80% of his endorsements for federal office or governors won.  But he endorsed incumbents in 74% of the races he chose to get involved in, and most of those were in deep, deep Red states, so he clearly ran up his numbers with those.

It’s when he wandered into endorsing candidates in open seats or when his endorsee faced a challenger that Trump stumbled mightily.  In races for open seats with no incumbent running in the Senate, House or Governor’s races, he won just 62%.  (A note on this:  in one of those races–the Pennsylvania Senate race, Trump lost twice.  His first choice in the GOP primary, Sean Parnell, dropped out before the primary due to a domestic abuse accusation, and Mehmet Oz lost the general.)  When he endorsed a challenger to an incumbent–either Democrat or Republican–he won just 11 races out of 35.

Georgia Dem Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock has aborted brain damaged idiot and deadbeat dad Herschel Walker’s career in Congress, Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman projects.

Walker had pulled Warnock short of the 50% margin necessary to avoid a runoff on election day last month, but the heat was turned down considerably relative to the January 5th, 2021 double-header runoff election owing to Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto’s tight win in Nevada, taking control of the Senate off the table for Republicans in this runoff. Herschel Walker was also an historically shitty candidate whose flaws and baggage political scientists could not have created in a lab if they wanted to design the perfect person to lose what should’ve been an easy election.

Minnesota state regulators have filed a civil lawsuit against an in-state cannabis company that distributed an edible product with 50 times the legal amount of THC allowed by the state and which has been linked to at least one death, NBC News reports.

Moorhead-based Northland Vapor manufactured and distributed a product branded “Death by Gummy Bears” that had 100 mg of Delta-8, a largely unregulated THC-derivative, in each piece; package of “Death by Gummy Bears” had 2,500 mg of THC.  State law limits THC levels to 5 mg per piece and 50 mg per package.

The Minnesota’s Board of Pharmacy called for the company to recall and destroy the product–a supply estimated to be worth $7 million–as well as being barred from manufacturing the product in the state.

Jessie Watters is literally talking about how horrible it is that someone (they say) said shark researchers are racist because they’re mostly white men.  Isn’t it ridiculous, Watters said in bro-ing with fellow broservative Clay Sexton, and yes, we must agree:  it really is, primarily because it’s not anything anyone is talking about.

But that’s what you’ve got to do when the GOP candidate to whom your network donated hours of free airtimes to seems on the precipice of going down in flames in a Senate runoff.  So while real networks are covering the election–and the conviction of Donald Trump’s companies in a massive fraud case–Fox will cover sharks.  Or the cost of a suicide prevention net on the Golden Gate Bridge.  And then how short people using umbrellas impede tall people.  (Yeah, really.  Watters whined about that.)

This is how election deniers are made.

— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) December 6, 2022

Tough to know where to start here. The New York Post really did publish and auto-tweet a pre-write article about Warnock winning on Tuesday afternoon. You can see this one spammy auto-aggregator site picked it up before they pulled it. Naturally it’s Kari Lake’s campaign which sees parallels to the Great Chyron Fuckup of October 2022 in which an Arizona TV station (Kari Lake’s former employer, no less) mistakenly aired a test graphic showing Hobbs winning a few weeks before the election.

Never mind that the vote totals shown on the graphic were fairly far off from the final total, it still meant that “the fix was in.” Calling it “how election deniers are made” just comes across as an Everest-sized pile of pure butthurt that won’t ease anytime soon. Maybe the best part is how they do nothing to lay out how these media outlets – both of which are owned by Rupert Murdoch, by the way – are supposed to be in on rigging the election. The fanboys never ask either.

“Disappointed with the verdict in Manhattan, but will appeal. After looking at millions of pages of documents, over many years, much to the detriment of record setting murder and other forms of violent crime that are taking place in New York City, the Government was able to get an employee to ‘plea’ in order for a very reduced sentence. This case was about Allen Weisselberg committing tax fraud on his personal tax returns, etc., with he and every witness repeatedly testifying that President Trump and the Trump Family knew nothing about his actions, which he admits were done solely for his own benefit, and with no benefit to the two companies. Why would Corporations, which knew nothing about Weisselberg’s personal tax returns, be prosecuted for that person’s conduct?”

“There was RELIANCE by us on a then highly respected and expensive accounting firm, and law firm, to do this work. The accounting firm also did his personal returns, which we are not even allowed to legally view. This case is unprecedented and involved no monetary gain to these two Corporations. It is a continuation of the Greatest Political Witch Hunt in the History of our Country. New York City is a hard place to be ‘Trump,’ as businesses and people flee our once Great City,” says Trump.

“But he has continued to work diligently to make out country and indeed the entire world better,” Republican North Carolina Congresswoman and member soon to inherit the mantle of the Stupidest Person in Congress, the 79-year-old Virginia Foxx, lauded on asparagus advocate and outgoing Republican Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert.  “This highest compliment I think I can pay him is that he is a good man who has always sought to do good. Our country has been blessed by Louie Gohmert throughout his life, and I am sure he will continue to do good.  I’ll miss you, Louie.”

We’ll miss you, too, Louie, for your sheer comic value.  But we’re happy you’ll no longer be destroying our nation from inside the halls of Congress.