Category: Uncategorized

• Republicans used veterans’ health as a pawn in a craven political gambit that they lost.  May they burn in a burn pit in Hell.
• The GOP is trying to claim that the Inflation Reduction Act will raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year, which Biden promised wouldn’t happen.  That’s a lie; there is no tax increase in the bill.  They’re rebranding expected price hikes on products and services–from companies that now have to pay a minimum tax that want to make up for lost profits–as actually a “tax” on consumers.  They won’t condemn companies making record profits for squeezing working families; instead, they lie to blame Biden, and absolve corporate greed.
• First thing Democrats should promote after they gain seats in the Senate in the midterms: elimination of the tens of billions in federal tax credits and tax breaks for fossil fuel companies.  Gain three more seats–I’m looking at you, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio–and Manchin’s assured objection becomes meaningless.  
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume LXXXI”

Photo de Proxima du Centaure, l’étoile la plus proche du Soleil, située à 4,2 année-lumière de nous.
Elle a été prise par le JWST.
Ce niveau de détails… Un nouveau monde se dévoile jour après jour. pic.twitter.com/88UBbHDQ7Z

— Etienne KLEIN (@EtienneKlein) July 31, 2022

An eminent French physicist has admitted that the image he tweeted out last week, claiming that it was an example of the high-quality photographs taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, was actually a piece of spicy Spanish sausage, CNN reports.

“Picture of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away from us. It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail… A new world is unveiled everyday,” Étienne Klein, the director at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, said in a tweet last week in an apparent joke that got out of control.

He later fessed up in a follow-up tweet:  “Well, when it’s cocktail hour, cognitive bias seem to find plenty to enjoy… Beware of it. According to contemporary cosmology, no object related to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere else other than on Earth.”

Washington Republican Congressman Dan Newhouse, one of ten House Republicans with a spine enough to vote to impeach Donald Trump after the Trump-led Republican domestic terrorist attack on Congress on January 6, 2021, took the second spot in his primary, advancing to the November general election, Politico reports.

Newhouse will face Democrat Doug White in the general election to represent Washington’s 4th Congressional District after the pair topped the “jungle primary” in the state.  Newhouse held off a challenge from Trump-endorsed MAGAt Loren Culp.

White received 25.5% of the vote to Newhouse’s 25.4%.  Culp has with 21% with 85% of the votes counted, according to the New York Times.  Newhouse becomes the second Republican who voted to impeach Trump to win a spot in general election.  California’s David Valadao held off a challenge from MAGAt Chris Mathys for the second spot in the redrawn California 22nd District in June.

You may know Brendan Straka as one of the hundreds of Republican domestic terrorists who attacked Congress on January 6, 2021 to undermine the Constitution and reinstall loser Donald Trump back into the White House for a second term.  Or you may not know him at all.  (God bless ya if you fall into the latter category.  You are truly lucky.)

The two photos above are from Friday:  the one of the left is his Twitter post–and yes, he has an active Twitter account, so not *all* MAGAts are silenced on social media as they claim–where he was promoting a speech he was giving during the cult fest.  The pic on the left, feature Equine-American Congresswoman and fellow performance artist Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Ga.) shows him reenacting the brutal jailhouse conditions he subjected himself to by being a domestic terrorist.  Look at the fake tears!  The bare feet (on him, thankfully… many of you just ate, I’m sure), the MAGA cap that wouldn’t be allowed in a prison but is there thanks to artistic license.  Oh, the horror!  The pain!  Oh, the… whaddaya mean he was never in jail and he was given three years probation for his crimes?  So it’s just fraud then?  Typical.

A third person has died after being struck by lightning during an intense storm that swept through the Capital region Thursday evening, the Associated Press reports.

An unidentified 29-year-old man died Friday after being injured in the strike, which instantly killed James and Donna Mueller, 76- and 75-years-old respectively, who were in DC from Janesville, Wisconsin to celebrate their 56th wedding anniversary.  A fourth victim, a woman, is hospitalized in serious condition after the lightning strike at Lafayette Square.

So far this year, eleven people have died from lightning strikes in the United States.  Another wave of storms Friday has left this intrepid reporter without power for the last two hours, as more intense lightning struck the area.

Each Dec Schumer puts out schedule for Senate I set Grassley family reunion based on schedule. For 2nd yr in row I won’t be at reunion I’m in DC to fight Dems irresponsible tax&spend bill. Need a Republican majority to hv schedule we can count on & A RESPONSIBLE FISCAL AGENDA

— Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) August 5, 2022

Poor Chuck Grassley.  The 88-year-old Iowa Republican doesn’t like that his job as one of the 100 members of the Senate gets in the way of his social schedule.  The senior GOP Senator just wants to take time off to spend with his family, but the gosh-darn business of running the most powerful country on Earth is getting in the way.  He sits in a chamber that meets just 190 days, roughly, every year; that’s just 38 work weeks.  He doesn’t have to campaign, given his status as a fossil in a safe Red state.  The only thing he has to do is vote every once in awhile to support Republican efforts to fuck everything up.

If he wants to spend more time with his family, perhaps he should retire.  Or better yet, just leave the Senate one Republican short.  He won’t have to worry about missing his reunion, and Democrats can get shit done.

The Germans have a word–schadenfreude–which is the feeling of happiness one gets from the misfortune of another.  We’ve all got a little schadenfreude at the moment as a jury in Austin, Texas awarded the families of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre $45.2 million in punitive damages for his defamation of them and their lost child for consistently claiming the mass murder of 20 first graders and six teachers was a hoax, a government conspiracy and/or a false-flag event.

The conspiracy theorist is looking at nearly $50 million for his Sandy Hook lies when the $4.1 million in compensatory damages is added to his total bill. However this may be reduced due to vagaries in Texas civil law that limit punitive damages. And he’s facing at least three other defamation trials for his Sandy Hook ramblings.  Enjoy the schadenfreude.

Ask be the court to explain why he did’t sue Hillary and a shit ton of other defendants over the 2016 election and Russia investigation within the four year statute of limitations, the Orange Tyrant’s lawyers told the court he was too busy presidenting to sue them earlier, Bloomberg reports.

The Donald “was preoccupied with carrying out his eminently important presidential duties and was therefore impeded from effectively asserting his rights,” grossly incompetent lawyers Alina Habba and Peter Ticktin wrote in a Thursday night filing to Florida federal Judge Donald F Middlebrooks.

The problem for Trump however is that since all the conduct was known to him by October 29th 2017, then the lawsuit should’ve been filed by that date in 2021. And the fat fuck waited 14 months and four days after he left office to file it on March 24th, 2022, so it does not sound like the “I was busy pretending to be president” shit is going to fly with the judge.

From the motion to quash Fulton County grand jury subpoena to Lindsey Graham: “After the 2020 election, Senator Graham had two months before he had to vote to certify the results of the election under the Electoral Count Act. As Senator and Chair of the Judiciary Committee, he also had to examine the issues that arose from that election and determine whether to hold hearings or propose legislation. As part of his legislative investigation, the Senator made phone calls to the Georgia Secretary of State, which helped him decide to vote to certify Joe Biden as President. Faced with the Senator’s investigation, which is objectively ‘legislative,’ the District Attorney here wants to question Senator Graham about his subjective ‘motivation[s]’ for making the calls.”

“She does not claim to know those motivations – she alleges nothing concrete about them. She instead essentially says that ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’ and then speculates about how those blanks might be filled in. Our Constitution and laws, however, prevent this speculative inquiry into Senator Graham’s motives and legislative activity. The District Attorney’s response rests nearly entirely on the idea that this is ‘a grand jury’s criminal investigation’ into ‘third-party criminal’ conduct, as if the relevant immunities fall away in the face of criminal proceedings.”

A group of Michigan fascists has succeeded in pushing a ballot referendum to cancel a tax levy that would fund the local library because they were upset that the library stocked books on LGBTQ culture and sexuality that are geared toward adolescents, WZZM ABC-13 in Grand Rapids reports.

By a 1,905 to 1,142 margin, Jamestown Township voted to cancel a property millage that was dedicated to funding the Patmos Library.  A group of activists fought against the budget item, which provided 80% of the budget for the library in the town of around 8,600.

What started the backlash?  A display of books covering LGBTQ issues, including “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” written by American cartoonist and author Maia Kobabe, who uses non-binary Spivak pronouns and who details eir struggles with gender and sexual identity.  (“Eir” is a gender-neutral possessive Spivak pronoun.) The award-winning book has been praised for providing a first-person view of the process of gender- and sexual-self-discovery.

The fascists, however, claimed that merely having the book and others like it available for loan from a public library was “grooming children for sexual exploitation” to be non-straight and non-binary, because having information available is a dangerous thing, they believe. 

The US issued a much stronger than expected jobs report, with the unemployment rate hitting its post-World War II low.  But on the Fox propaganda network website landing page, the only thing you’ll find about the jobs report is a typically anti-Biden story:  “‘YOU CAN’T HIDE’: Biden hypes up jobs report while vowing relentless hunt for COVID relief fraudsters.”

To be fair, it’s more than they had just an hour before when the only story on the jobs report was a very Chuck Todd-esque, “Markets will be in for a ‘rude awakening’ following jobs report, economist warns”, a story from some guy who runs a company called “MacroMavens” who thinks Americans finding jobs at a record clip is really bad for the country, its residents and its companies.  According to a search of Google News, MacroMavens has been a news source in just ten English language news reports since the beginning of the year, with three of those referring to the same May newsletter the “Maven” apparently puts out.

So what constitutes bigger news on Fox than an amazingly strong jobs report?  Of course, an obligatory Hunter Biden laptop story… ’cause what else will Tucker Carlson have tonight.  Oh, and a story about Rosie O’Donnell’s parenting skills and how her “not normal” childhood included visiting Madonna regularly.  One of their Editor’s Picks:  a weirdly designed Porsche Cayenne.  And a story about Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer disregarding “experts” about government spending, a story which curiously didn’t quote the MacroMavens.

Golden slumbers fill your eyes
Smiles await you when you rise
Sleep pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby

Photo: Daniel Ceng Shou-Yi/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa pic.twitter.com/GZXFuX1vee

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) August 5, 2022

“Although Senator Mastriano is happy to cooperate with your committee, as he has nothing to hide,” opens the letter from some weasel lawyer representing Pennsylvania State Senator and Republican gov candidate Doug Mastriano to House January 6th Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, already lying in the first sentence, before going into his spiel, “I do have concerns that are particular to him, given the conduct of the committee up to this point. Senator Mastriano is currently the Republican nominee for Governor and is engaged in a hotly contested general election race.”

“Given the committee’s demonstrated propensity for releasing edited clips of interviews without the requisite context to support a false partisan narrative (i.e. your recent tweet of edited and misleading portions of former Acting-SECDEF Miller to support a knowingly false claim by the committee about National Guard activations), I am concerned that there is a risk that your committee will do the same to Senator Mastriano. Members of your party like Sean Patrick Maloney, Democratic Campaign Chair, have openly admitted that the goal of the hearings you are conducting is intended to paint the Republican party as irresponsible and power hungry ahead of the midterms. For this reason, my client has legitimate concerns that your committee may attempt to influence the outcome of the Pennsylvania state elections through the dissemination of disinformation,” and blah blah blah a bunch of bullshit calling the interview “election interference”.

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will travel to Eastern Kentucky to view the devastating aftermath of the deadly flooding that has struck the region in recent weeks and the right wing extremism that has ruined it for much longer, the AP reports. The president will join Democrat Governor Andy Beshear, who was elected in 2019 by 5,000 votes over an historically unpopular Republican incumbent in a race where a Libertarian won 23,000 and the GOP swept every other statewide race, in touring the aftermath of a deluge that killed at least 37 people, probably 32 or so of whom would not have died of fentanyl overdoses within the next three years.

More than 1,300 had to be rescued from the floods, the majority of those do end up voting this November will cast a ballot for Senator Rand Paul, whose policy goals would make funding for such life-saving rescues impossible, let alone assisting them rebuilding their homes or escaping poverty and unemployment that has been endemic to the region for decades. Paul will not be joining the governor or the president, as he’s busy trying to prevent the Democrats from passing a bill that would increase taxes on virtually no one living in the flood zone.

While Republican Florida Senator (and Bat Boy of World Weekly News fame all grown up) Rick Scott has a unique take on reality during his speech delivered at CPAC in a Disney-automaton-like demeanor.  Scott claims that by having privately-owned and operated social media platforms monitor threatening and offensive content on their sites, they’re engaging in “modern-day book-burning” as part on the GOP’s fear-inducing Cancel Culture War on fictitious Cancel Culture.  (We won’t even discuss how the right wing literally burns books, seen here and here and here, because that’s to on-the-nose.)

I look forward to working with the members of the Republican National Committee, @MayorOfMKE Cavalier Johnson, the Milwaukee Host Committee, and @visitmilwaukee to deliver an incredible convention for our Party and nominate the next President of the United States!

— Ronna McDaniel (@RonnaMcDaniel) August 5, 2022

“Governor Greg Abbott today announced the arrival of the first group of migrants bused to New York City from Texas. The migrants are being dropped off this morning on a green bus at Port Authority Bus Terminal at Gate 14. In addition to Washington, D.C., New York City will now be a drop-off location for the busing strategy as part of the Governor’s response to the Biden Administration’s open border policies overwhelming Texas communities.”

“‘Because of President Biden’s continued refusal to acknowledge the crisis caused by his open border policies, the State of Texas has had to take unprecedented action to keep our communities safe,’ said Governor Abbott. ‘In addition to Washington, D.C., New York City is the ideal destination for these migrants, who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city. I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief.’ In April, Governor Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to charter buses to transport migrants from Texas to Washington, D.C. Since the beginning of this busing strategy, thousands of migrants have been transported to the nation’s capital while providing much-needed relief to Texas’ overwhelmed border communities. As one of the few cities in America with right to housing laws, New York City is required to provide emergency shelter for every unhoused person,” says a statement on Abbott’s website.

It’s not clear who Abbott thinks he’s trolling here. Sending them to DC at least made some sense politically as the impotent paraplegic wanted to make a point that Washington Democrats should have to deal with a “situation they created.” But New York City is not Washington and Mayor Adams should respond by bussing the residents of the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the governor’s mansion in Austin, telling them Greg Abbott welcomes American citizens to his home.

Several years after the Mueller Investigation implicated then-President Trump in at least 10 instances of obstruction of justice, DC Metro police on Friday confirmed Mueller and his wife were killed Thursday by a lightning strike in the park adjacent to the White House.

The deceased were Jim and Donna Mueller, tourists in their mid-70s from Janesville, Wisconsin with no known relation to former FBI director and Trump-Russia investigation Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but we wanted to mislead our right wing readers into thinking somehow God smote their once feared and hated enemy who in 2017 and 2018 represented a grave threat to the Trump Administration. Of course we’ll be accused of clickbaiting readers with such a headline and lede, and we plead guilty as charged. However in our defense, we like to think of our clickbait as existing on a separate plane as that of inferior news aggregator sites like Raw Story.

They and their ilk do it to mislead readers with headlines like “Republican Congressman says Trump will be indicted” so you have already clicked and they got 75 cents from you impression of the five dozen autoplay video ads on the page by the time you see that the “Republican Congressman” is fucking Adam Kinzinger. Our clickbait is meant simply to troll you for our own amusement.

The Republican voters who work from dawn to dusk manufacturing automotive parts, steel girders, and ammunition to protect liberty, roughnecking for oil and natural gas, growing crops or milking cows, cutting down trees for lumber, carrying a badge and gun to protect small business owners and their families from Antifa/BLM scumbags, or any other real American job, the kind of people who saw what was happening in the 2020 election and thought they had to help do something to fight back and stop the steal, kicking in what little extra they could while cutting back on Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas gifts for their kids in 2020 ended up paying Melania’s dressmaker $60,000 to overturn the stolen election, USA Today reports.

The four payments to Hervé Pierre Braillard between April and June 2022 are listed as “STRATEGY CONSULTING” on the FEC’s website, which means the fashionable and more likely than not homosexual French guy who also made dresses for Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama was consulted on strategies to reinstate the 45th president to the White House more than a year after Sleepy Joe Biden was fraudulently inaugurated. The traditional families of America’s heartland who made sacrifices to push back against the woke cultural elitists who want to silence you while sipping their fancy French cappuccinos should appreciate the transparency on Save America PAC’s payments to Braillard. It shows President Trump is still fighting for them to protect law and order.

The ChiCom ambassador has been summoned to the evil capitalist overlord’s palace for punishment over the ChiCom regime’s insults to democracy, CNN reports. “After China’s actions overnight, we summoned [ChiCom lackey] Ambassador Qin Gang to the White House to demarche him about the PRC’s provocative actions. We condemned the PRC’s military actions, which are irresponsible, at odds with our long-standing goal of maintaining peace and stability and across the Taiwan Strait,” said pro-democracy enforcer National Security Council coordinator John Kirby, aka John the Cruel. Qin will be subject to immense psychological torture and be repeatedly offered inferior Western tea by White House staff during his compulsory visit.