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On Tuesday a Manhattan judge dismissed voting tech company Smartmatic’s defamation claims against Sidney “Kraken” Powell and day drinker Jeannine Pirro while leaving the case against Fox News and mental patients Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo intact, with the claims against day drinker mental patient Rudy Giuliani intact, Deadline reports. “Even assuming that Fox News did not intentionally allow this false narrative to be broadcasted, there is a substantial basis for plaintiffs’ claim that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth,” wrote Judge David Cohen in his 61 page opinion.

Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed Bonesaw and United Arab Emirates Commander-in-Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan refused to take calls from President Biden seeking to work with them on easing oil prices in recent weeks as Russia began its assault on Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reports. The two dickheads didn’t want to talk unless Biden was prepared to help them bomb civilians in Yemen like Trump and Kushner did in exchange for cash to bail out their failing real estate investments. “There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen. It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil]” an administration official told the Journal.

Other Saudis sticking points were legal immunity for Prince Bonesaw, and help developing nukes to wipe Tehran off the map before Iran develops nukes to wipe Riyadh off the map. Meanwhile Emirati foreign ministry officials told the Journal they would look into rescheduling a call with the President.

“When I walk into a room and I’m up here with Thomas Massie and Matt Gaetz in a room full of truckers, boy I know I’m in for a good time!” Congresswoman (and woman who totally misinterpreted the title BJ and the Bear, officer)Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA) tells the people participating in the so-called “People’s Convoy” that aims to annoy commuters around the DC Beltway.

Former Tampa Bay-area Dunkin Donuts manager Corey Pujols was sentenced to two years house arrest, an anger management course, and 200 hours of community service after pleading guilty to felony battery in the death of 77-year old registered sex offender Vonelle Cook, the AP reports. Cook, who was white, had repeatedly called Pujols the n-word during the May 2021 altercation in the store, which resulted in his immediate cancellation by Pujols’ fist.

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio getting cuffed in Florida on conspiracy charges over his involvement in planning and coordinating his fascist street gang’s participation in the Capitol riot.

Michigan GOP Chairman Ron Weiser and other top officials in the state party are ignoring calls to take action against far right state House special election candidate RJ Regan over recent comments suggesting that rape victims should just “lie back and enjoy it,” the latest in a string of hateful shit including Anti-Semitic and COVID conspiracy theories, the Detroit Free Press reports.

The Free Press repeatedly asked Weiser whether the party would pull support or demand Regan withdraw from the May 3rd special election to fill an open seat in Western Michigan, and got no response besides a statement saying “Mr. Regan’s history of foolish, egregious and offensive comments, including his most recent one are simply beyond the pale. We are better than this as a party and I absolutely expect better than this of our candidates,” and nothing else.

On Sunday during a livestream Conservative activist circlejerk on Rumble, just days after his close primary win, Regan said “Having three daughters, and I tell my daughters, ‘well if rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it so.’ That’s not how we roll, that’s not how I won this election. We go right at it.” Regan also recently tweeted that the Russian attack on Ukraine is Putin rightly taking on “massive corruption, bio labs and money laundering,” with that second bit referring to a batshit QAnon conspiracy theory about the invasion. In 2021 posted a meme on his Facebook page claiming “Feminism is only applied against white men, because it has absolutely nothing to do with protecting women as a sex or defending the feelings of individual women. It is a Jewish program to degrade and subjugate white men.” Sounds like a true Conservative.

Texas Capitol rioter Guy Reffitt, member of the 3%ers MAGA White Nationalist militia, who first made headlines after his son turned him in to the FBI following violent threats in retaliation for “snitching” in the weeks after the January 6th, 2021 insurrection, was quickly found guilty Tuesday on two counts of civil disorder, one of obstruction of an official proceeding, one of obstruction of justice and one of entering a restricted area with a firearm, all federal felonies carrying decades in prison. Reffitt’s trial was the first in what is sure to be a long string of MAGA insurrectionists too fucking stupid to cut their losses and take a plea deal taking their chances with a jury of their peers.

The deck was completely stacked against Reffitt from the start, with voluminous evidence of his intent shown to jurors on video – including him saying he planned to drag Nancy Pelosi down the Capitol steps by her hair, his son Jackson and a Capitol Police officer testifying for the prosecution’s case, leaving Reffitt’s defense attorney to work with “People say outrageous things,” and This case has been a rush to judgment – most of it based on a lot of bragging and a lot of hype,” and telling the prosecutors to “Be the grown-ups in the courtroom.”

Former or not former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has been indicted on a federal conspiracy charge in relation to his group’s involvement in the Capitol riot, the Washington Post reports.

Tarrio had been ordered to stay out of Washington, DC on January 6th after his arrest two days earlier on firearms-related charges, and he was not in the capital at the time, but he has acknowledged communicating with various key figures in the attack.

President Biden is expected to announce a ban on Russian oil imports as had been hinted at in reporting on Monday, relieving Republicans and their propaganda trolls of the incongruity of bitching about already high gas prices and that America is “funding the war on Ukraine” by buying oil from Russia. Not that they cared about the obvious inconsistency of the two positions, but now regardless they can just bitch about even higher gas prices from the move.

NEW!

President Donald J. Trump:

“BREAKING NEWS: HIGHEST GAS PRICES IN HISTORY! DO YOU MISS ME YET?” pic.twitter.com/lXvepwMHyg

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 8, 2022

Wisconsin state Senate Republicans, despite knowing full well that their enabling the “Red Mirage” of 2020 was basically the original sin that caused Trump and his cult to go completely apeshit over losing and the fact that the GOP majority lower chamber of the state legislature already passed the measure, are set to kill off a bill that would allow for absentee ballots to be tabulated the day prior to election day, citing bullshit reasons like leaking of possible lax security of counting or results leaking early, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports. “Counting the ballots should be driven by security not speed. Why would we want to give bad actors the chance to see ballots prior to Election Day?” said MAGA hell witch Rep. Janel Brandtjen, adding it “gives bad actors an extra day to cheat,” raising the question of whether these assholes even want elections at all.

Republican state Senator Kathy Bernier, a “RINO” who of course is retiring because she’s had enough of this shit, said the bill “would have helped with the number of ballots, and it’s all transparent,” adding that MAGA activists “who are all in an uproar over the ballot dumps now are the very same people screaming at legislators not to pass the Monday count bill.”

A new Politico/Morning Consult survey shows President Joe Biden’s approval rate at 46%, a jump from the 41% he hit on February 27th, showing some upward movement in line with an 8-point surge in the most recent NPR/Marist poll. “It’s not unusual for presidents to see their numbers improve immediately following a major address like a State of the Union, or for the so-called ‘rally around the flag’ effect to provide a similar boost when the country is facing a security threat. Biden’s speech last week gave him a chance to capitalize on both of those impulses in the U.S. electorate, so it’s plausible that we’re seeing some real upward movement here” said Morning Consult Senior Politics Editor Cameron Easley to Politico Playbook.

MAGA lawyer and insufferable dick John Eastman, attempting to argue that he was in fact formally representing the Orange God Emperor during the post-2020 election period (he wasn’t) and thus his emails are subject to attorney-client privilege (they aren’t) in his lawsuit against the House January 6th Select Committee argued in a Monday motion the “2020 election remains a hotly contested subject of debate to this day. The Wisconsin Special Counsel has recently issued a report finding illegal and fraudulent voting practices that affected the outcome of the Presidential Election in that state… This Court would need a full-scale trial, complete with expert audits of the contested state election tallies before it could even consider Defendants’ arguments for breaching the work product privilege,” confirming his true objective is to waste time.

The Polish border authority reported Tuesday that at least 1.2 million refugees have crossed into the country from Ukraine since the Russian invasion began on February 24th, with 141,500 having been processed on Monday alone. At least 1.7 million overall have fled Ukraine since the attack began, with the majority of the remainder having headed to neighboring eastern European nations Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova, and Romania, per the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which estimates as many as 4 million Ukrainian refugees could be displaced internationally by July.

Meanwhile, Russian forces have opened up an evacuation corridor for civilians in the contested northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy after airstrikes killed nine on Monday, CNN reports. The corridor, if it is actually a corridor and not a death trap like others have been, will open for 12 hours, from 9 AM to 9 PM local time, allowing Sumy residents to move from to the central city of Poltava via Holubivka and Lokhvytsia. More live updates on the situation in Ukraine follow:

Satellite images show construction activity at a nuclear testing facility in North Korea, the first time since 2018 the site has seen new construction and a sign that it could be used shortly to test a new device, Reuters reports.

The private satellite, operated by the California-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, spotted a new building, repair to an existing building and lumber at the Punggye-ri site.

Contrary to claims by the previous administration that North Korea was going to completely denuclearize because Donald Trump had a photo op with Kim Jong-un, North Korea didn’t give up their nuclear research.

China will pressure Taiwan to join the mainland.  North Korea will continue to develop nuclear weapons.  The Islamic State and al Qaeda provide asymmetric threats dedicated to stifling Americans in the Middle East.  And that was all before Russia invaded Ukraine.

So says the newly declassified annual threat assessment from the United States Intelligence Community, released Monday by the House Intelligence Committee.   Written by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the report is signed off on by all 17 national security agencies.  Because it was written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the report doesn’t examine the implication of the attack, but it does note Moscow’s determination to dominate regional nations.

“In the coming year, the United States and its allies will face an increasingly complex and interconnected global security environment marked by the growing specter of great power competition and conflict, while collective, transnational threats to all nations and actors compete for our attention and finite resources,” the report says.

The United States Senate passed a bill Monday evening that makes lynching a federal hate crime, a measure that finally passed the chamber after numerous attempts, the New York Times reports.  The bill will now go to the White House where President Biden is expected to sign it into law.

“Although no legislation will reverse the pain and fear felt by those victims, their loved ones and Black communities, this legislation is a necessary step America must take to heal from the racialized violence that has permeated its history,” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey and a sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement Monday.

“This is the year, now is the time, that we do the right thing,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolinain a speech on the Senate floor Thursday.  “Not for Republicans or Democrats, but for Americans who’ve watched, with bewildered eyes and confused hearts, their government fall short on issues of importance to them again and again and again.  Let this year be the year we put politics to the side and we get it done.”

Imagine this at the next table:  Congresswoman (and rejected sandal model) Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA) tells conspiracy theorist (and secret Veruca Salt cosplayer) Alex Jones that she’s “working for free” in Congress because she’s gotten all her fines for not wearing a face mask taken out of her congressional paycheck.

Boo freakin’ hoo, Marge.  You made the choice not to wear a mask repeatedly, so you’re paying the cost.