Category: Uncategorized

Ed Gonzalez, the sheriff of Harris County, Texas, withdrew his nomination as President Joe Biden’s choice to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency after allegations of domestic abuse surfaced, MSN reports.

Nominated to head the agency in April 2021, Gonzalez was told in March that the Senate was going to hold off on acting on his nomination until allegations that he had abused his wife were investigated.

“I arrived at this decision after prayerfully considering what’s best for our nation, my family, and the people of Harris County who elected me to serve a second term as Sheriff,” Gonzales wrote in a tweet. “I am grateful to President Biden for the honor of nominating me, and I wish this administration well as it strives to overcome the paralyzing political gridlock that threatens far more than our nation’s border. Frankly, the dysfunction threatens America’s heart and soul.”

Following the revocation of a woman’s right to choose her health care, Vice President Kamala Harris warned that the conservatives on the Supreme Court are going to continue the ongoing GOP war against the things they don’t like, USA Today reports.

“I think he just said the quiet part out loud,” Harris said of Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote in his concurrent opinion that the Supreme Court should reconsider landmark civil rights decisions that recognized the rights to LGBTQ marriage, contraception, and non-procreational sexual acts. “And I think that is why we all must really understand the significance of what just happened. This is profound.”

Thomas’s opinion, as the Court overturned the right to privacy that underpinned a woman’s right to an abortion, said that the Court should revisit all the decisions based on that concept.  Thomas, who’s a Black man married to Ginni Thomas, who is white, did not list the Loving decision that made it illegal to ban interracial marriage as one of those cases to be reviewed.

After showing the clip of Republican Arizona Speaker of the State House Rusty Bowers, who has served in public office since 1993, decrying the dishonest attempt to overturn the November 2020 election, Fox anchor and Ursine-American Bret Baier asked Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate and woman who really likes drag queens Kari Lake why she continues to spread The Big Lie, to which Lake gives the copyrighted MAGAt reply:  “He’s a RINO and he hopefully will be defeated.  He is an absolute RINO.”

So now the MAGAts are all RINO hunting.

When asked how his caucus’s incumbents and recruits are supposed to handle attacks from Democrats on Justice Clarence Thomas’s vow to go after other related personal rights, political genius Kevin McCarthy said to Fox News on Monday that Republican House candidates have nothing to be worried about. “You read the opinion – he said no, this is only dealing with Roe v. Wade, not with anything else. I don’t think they will be used in a campaign. It’s inoculated from there,” said McCarthy, a man of character and well-earned self-confidence in his leadership.

A New York State Supreme Court justice overturned a resolution passed by the New York City Council that would have allowed more than 800,000 non-citizen residents of the city to vote in local elections, the New York Times reports.

Passed by the city council in December, the measure would have allowed documented immigrants who have not been naturalized to vote in local elections so long as they met all other legal requirements such as residency and age.

Justice Ralph J. Porzio of the state Supreme Court in Staten Island ruled that the provision violated the state constitution on voter eligibility and would require a referendum, not a council resolution, to be legal.  He did not rule on the legality of having non-citizens vote. 

Trump 2020 coup lawyer John Eastman was snagged in last week’s FBI sweep of MAGA scumbags involved in the fake electors plot, per a Monday court filing in Eastman’s case against the House January 6th Select Committee, with his phone searched by agents in New Mexico, CNN reports.

Like we wrote last week, the nationwide “Order 66” sweep that the would-be Trump toady Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Clark was shocked to see coordinated at the highest levels of federal law enforcement to inform himself and other targets they’re not fucking around was not publicly announced by the FBI and was only reported piecemeal by differing sources, so no one should be surprised that Eastman only let this out five days later or if Johnny’s not the last one to be reported to have entertained an unwelcome visit from the law that day.

Newly unemployed former South Dakota Attorney General and terrible driver Jason Ravnsborg, who shares with disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich the ignominy of being the only two statewide elected officials in the United States to be convicted and removed from office an impeachment trials in the 21st century, testified Monday at a state ethics board hearing about some stuff he did at his old job investigating Governor Kristi Noem’s helicopter parenting of her incompetent wannabe real estate appraiser daughter, the Associated Press reports.

“I’m not going to let this just drop. I think that they should pursue it and I do believe that, ultimately, the House will pursue it,” said Ravnsborg, who probably should’ve made a bigger deal out of Noem’s scumbaggery before he was kicked out of office for running over a guy while reading fucking Real Clear Politics articles on his phone while driving at night and then lying about it.

Radical leftist Staten Island ShopRite terrorist Daniel Gill, whose near fatal back slap attack on Rudy Giuliani shook America’s mayor to his core Sunday, was released from jail Monday after his charges were downgraded from second-degree assault involving a person over age 65 to third-degree assault, third-degree menacing, and second-degree harassment, the New York Post reports.

“The defendant smacked Mr. Giuliani in the back, causing him pain and imbalance. [Giuliani] took a step forward to steady himself… at which time the suspect said to him, ‘What’s up, scumbag,'” said Assistant Staten Island District Attorney Darren Albanese in court Monday, arguing Gill should’ve been at least slapped with supervised release because Rudy was in “much more pain,” than he initially said at the scene of the “attack”. It’s not clear if the “attack” was a heinous attempt on the life of an American hero who fought bravely for election integrity or not a big deal because Rudy’s in great shape and no violent leftist can take him down. They seem to want it both ways.

Rudy himself was pissed at Albanese’s boss, Democrat Staten Island District Attorney Mike McMahon, ranting “finally, I thought we had a DA in New York in Staten Island who was a real DA in favor of protecting victims and not letting criminals go free,” in response to Gill going free.

The attorneys general from 22 states pledged to defend the rights of women in their states to have access to abortion, reinforcing their states’ commitment to protecting individual rights as conservatives politicians in other states attempt to defame pro-choice activists, the New York Times reports.

In a letter written by Attorney General Leticia James of New York and signed off on by the Attorneys General of California, Maryland, Michigan and New Jersey, the officials also stated that they will defend the rights of women traveling to their states from other states where abortion has been eliminated or severely curtailed.

Other state Attorneys General have taken other actions to protect the right to abortion:  in Wisconsin, for example, officials have declared they will not enforce a 130-year-old law that banned abortion. 

QAnon freak Mesa County, Colorado clerk and Secretary of State candidate Tina Peters told the New York Times on Friday that high school dropout Congresswoman Lauren Boebert – whose Western Colorado district includes Mesa County and whose former campaign manager Sherronna Bishop is under federal investigation for the same crimes Peters and a deputy were indicted for back in March – had encouraged Peters “to go forward with the imaging” of Mesa County’s ballot tabulation machines to leak to MyPillow assclown Mike Lindell and his team of “cyber experts” for analysis to prove “hacking” of the 2020 election. What a fucking sentence.

Boebert’s staff quickly denied Peters’s claim to the Times. Though currently under a 13 count indictment for allowing some former pro surfer asshole wearing fake glasses to pass himself off as an “IT expert” (sent by QAnon freak former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, who also used to bang Russian spy Maria Butina) into county offices to make a copy of the software, Peters could win the Republican primary for Colorado Secretary of State on Tuesday. That’s another sentence.

In related news, Byrne was sued last week for defamation by former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer, a plaintiff who’s kicked some serious ass in court against the Trump 2020 Campaign for similar claims, and whose process server hilariously nailed Mike Lindell at a rally for Peters in April. Coomer’s complaint quotes Byrne from a MAGA documentary, speaking about how in July 2020, Byrne had a premonition of a “rigged” election brought on by “a very dear friend of mine, a part Native American guy who was kind of a spiritual advisor showed up and told me that he needed me to meet some people involved in this movement studying election integrity, election fraud. He died the next day, oddly enough, in a plane crash.” Okay, we’re done. Enough of this shit.

A Louisiana judge blocked the state’s laws banning abortion that was put into place upon the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision, agreeing with the plaintiff that the trigger laws did not meet due process criteria under state law, Reuters reports.

Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport, one of three abortion clinics in the state, filed a motion with Orleans Parish Civil District Court claiming three laws that went into effect immediately after the Supreme Court decision in which it claimed that the state’s laws were too vague to be enforced and did not make clear when an abortion is illegal, particularly given conflicting guidance on if abortion is legal to save the life of the woman.

Other similar lawsuits are being undertaken in Ohio and Utah, where similar laws triggered by the reversal of Roe took effect without proper notification to providers or detailed guidelines on when and where it would be legal to perform an abortion.

During the G7 Summit in Germany, French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly told President Joe Biden that the president of the United Arab Emirates told Macron that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia are virtually at their capacities to produce oil, dimming hopes for an increase in the international supply to lower fuel prices, Reuters reports.

Biden is expected to travel to Saudi Arabia to implore them to increase production to ease the global fuel crises that have seen retail prices of gasoline shoot up even though the price of a barrel of crude oil was at $110 per barrel.  In 2008, when gas was at a similar price, a gallon of gasoline in the United State sold for just $3.08; currently, gas prices hover around $5.00 per gallon.

“I had a call with MbZ (Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the UAE),” Macron reportedly told Biden.  “He told me two things. I’m at a maximum, maximum (production capacity). This is what he claims.  And then he said (the) Saudis can increase by 150 (thousands barrels per day). Maybe a little bit more, but they don’t have huge capacities before six months’ time.”

The House January 6th Select Committee have scheduled another live testimony hearing for Tuesday, a surprise addition to the lineup, CBS News’s Scott MacFarlane reports. Adding to the intrigue is that the witness list is not being made public ahead of schedule. The committee last week announced they would push the rest of the hearings to mid-July to incorporate newly developed evidence into their pretty fucking well-executed presentations, so whatever this new information is it’s probably a pretty damn big deal if it couldn’t wait a week or two.

An unnamed 36-year-old Atlanta man was arrested after he allegedly shot two Subway sandwich shop employees, killing one, after he complained that they had put too much mayonnaise on the sandwich he ordered, WAGA Fox 5 in Atlanta reports.

The assailant killed a 26-year-old female employee and wounded a 24-year-old woman at the shop Sunday evening.  The wounded employee’s 5-year-old son happened to be at the shop at the time of the shootings, but he was unharmed.

A good guy with a guy–in this case, the manager on duty of the Subway–returned fire but failed to hit the shooter.  “I don’t know what the world is coming to especially with our youth. They seem to be so hot headed,” the owner of the Subway, franchisee Willie Glenn, said. “Everybody wants to carry a gun. Everybody wants to scare somebody with a gun. It’s scary out here.”

The US Supreme Court on Monday tossed Coral Ridge v Souther Poverty Law Center, a case engineered to sell the MAGA majority on overturning the landmark 1964 case New York Times v Sullivan, which set the high bar on the ability for public figures to claim libel in media coverage.

In his dissent however, Clarence Thomas set an open invitation for other right wing-funded plaintiffs to take another crack at it, writing “I would grant certiorari in this case to revisit the ‘actual malice’ standard. This case is one of many showing how New York Times and its progeny have allowed media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity,'” basically saying Trump should’ve been able to sue any and every media outlet that ever said he’s a fat rapey traitor who enriched himself with Russian blood money.

The Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that a high school football coach who led prayers in the locker room and at the 50-yard line after games was unconstitutionally fired because his religious freedom rights were violated, the Washington Post reports.

In a decision written by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch whose spot on the court was secured by an unethical Senate maneuver by Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the court ruled that Bremerton High School coach Joseph Kennedy had his First Amendment infringed by the school board’s decision to discipline him.

Kennedy’s actions were more than simply praying in public.  Players and parents complained that Kennedy evangelized and conducted prayer sessions in the locker room that players were forced to attend.  Players and parents also contended that Kennedy punished players who did not participate by limiting their playing time on the field.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said more than a thousand civilians were inside a mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, Poltava region when a Russian missile struck the building Monday, causing a massive inferno and likely to be the most deadly strike on civilians since March.

“The occupiers fired rockets at the shopping center, where there were more than a thousand civilians. The mall is on fire, rescuers are fighting the fire, the number of victims is impossible to imagine,” Zelensky wrote on Telegram, adding “Russia continues to place its powerlessness on ordinary citizens. It is useless to hope for adequacy and humanity on its part.”

Hello @rusembusa. Just wanted to remind you all that this is your general. Remember a few years ago when all the Ted Cruz types were talking about how manly Russia was? Well 👇👇👇👇 he is three times the man of most pic.twitter.com/0dNQ665wnR

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) June 27, 2022

Facing a shortage of generals due to workplace hazards, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has called a retired legend back into action. Identified only as “General Pavel”, the 67 year old Afghanistan vet is said to twice or even three times the solider those dead guys were. The new battlefield commander is sure to cause serious dissent in the Ukrainian sniper ranks, who are no doubt already arguing over who gets first dibs on such a large and largely immobile target.

Democrats lead Republicans 48 to 41 percent on the 2022 Midterms generic ballot question of the June NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College poll, a ten point net swing from the April survey in which Republicans led 47 to 44 percent, and further widening the 47-42 Dem lead from May following the initial leak of the Roe v Wade draft decision. The question of “Would you definitely vote for or definitely vote against a candidate for Congress who will support a federal law to restore Roe versus Wade and the right to abortion?” brings an even more dire warning sign for the MAGA party, as 51 percent said “Definitely vote for” to 36 percent “Definitely vote against.”

Biden’s approval rating is also stuck at 40% in this survey, meaning Dems and pro-choice candidates in general are outperforming the president himself by 8 and 11 percent, respectively.

Again, polls are a fucking mess, there’s no one right way to calibrate against response bias and weigh lopsided samples, so on and so forth, but try sprinkling a little cautious optimism sugar on top of your morning bowl of mopey depressed libtard bran flakes. We’d prefer to avoid mentioning again the reason that this cause for cautious optimism is only a baseline, because it’s awful and sickening, though you can read it here if you so choose. The bottom line is at this point worry less about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and focus on Speaker of the House Gym Jordan (because Kevin McCarthy’s almost certainly fucked out of that job even with a GOP majority).

A federal grand jury in New York have subpoenaed records from DWAC, the company the Trump Media and Technology Group are planning to merge with so TMTG can “go public”, Axios reports. “TMTG is focused on reclaiming the American people’s right to free expression. Every day, our team works tirelessly to sustain Truth Social’s rapid growth, onboard new users, and add new features. We encourage-and will cooperate with-oversight that supports the SEC’s important mission of protecting retail investors,” said a statement from TMTG, which is weird because you’d think they’d be screaming “DEMOCRAT WITCH HUNT!”, claiming “executive privilege”, or suing the SDNY on the basis that “former president” is a protected class or something.