Category: Uncategorized

As the once-a-decade redistricting process turns out to be a wash at best or even a net loss of several solid seats for House Republicans, the Senate GOP aren’t in any rush to level the playing field overall, NBC News reports. “Nah, just the courts can handle it,” said Lindsey Graham when asked if he’d support legislation to end partisan gerrymandering, adding “That’s just the way the game has always been played.” Texas Senator John Cornyn responded to the same question with “I don’t have any silver bullets for it. The main protection is the Voting Rights Act in minority voting districts,” which is a complete lie, seeing as how the Supreme Court stayed a federal court order killing off a pretty blatant racial gerrymander in Alabama, adding “Other than that, it’s pretty much the wild, Wild West.” Said Missouri Senator Roy Blunt, “I think it’s best left to the states. And the states go too far. The courts have every right to step in – and often do.”

House Oversight Committee Chair Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney has asked the National Archives for information about the fat Former Guy’s theft and destruction of documents subject to the presidential records act and probably even classified material as well, the Washington Post reports. Wrote Maloney in the letter: “Removing or concealing government records is a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in prison… I am also concerned by recent reports that while in office, Pres. Trump repeatedly attempted to destroy presidential records”

Maloney makes sure to add the kicker: “Republicans in Congress obsessively investigated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server for official communications,” while “Trump’s conduct, in contrast, involves a former president potentially violating a criminal law by intentionally removing records, including communications with a foreign leader, from the White House and reportedly attempting to destroy records by tearing them up.”

The Department of Homeland Security has sent a bulletin to law enforcement agencies warning it “has received reports of a convoy of truckers planning to potentially block roads in major metropolitan cities in the United States in protest of, among other things, vaccine mandates for truck drivers,” and “the convoy could severely disrupt transportation, federal government, and law enforcement operations through gridlock and potential counterprotests,” Yahoo News reports.

The memo explains “the group intends to start in California as early as mid-February [during the Super Bowl] and travel to Washington, D.C., as late as mid-March, reportedly gathering truckers as they travel across the country,” but as of this week the plan “appears to be purely aspirational because the event is only being discussed online,” though “this could change quickly.”

Staff at the White House found toilets to be clogged with printed paper during the Orange God Emperor’s administration, Axios reports on an except from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s upcoming book “Confidence Man – The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America”. Maybe that was why the Donald complained about how “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,” during a plumbing industry roundtable back in 2019.

“And this is, by the way, a Democrat Party that, as they want to defund the police, as they want to take away protection for working people, they’re also giving crack pipes to criminals using taxpayer dollars,” insurrectionist-adjacent Republican Senator Josh Hawley states.  “I mean this is the most pro-criminal administration in American history.  It’s outrageous, and I can’t wait for the American people to get a chance to weigh in at the ballot box.”

(And doesn’t the above screen cap look like a photo of Josh Hawley in drag?)

In the latest disruption, top US car seller Toyota announced that it was shutting down a factory in Ontario as Ford said an engine factory in Canada will temporarily cease production as the economic impact of the Canadian trucker protests manifest, Reuters reports.

While the blockade of key bridges along the US-Canada border have led to the decision to shut down, other factors–such as severe weather and an ongoing computer chip shortage–also contributed to the shutdown.

“I think it’s important for everyone in Canada and the United States to understand what the impact of this blockage is – potential impact – on workers, on the supply chain, and that is where we’re most focused,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said on Wednesday.  “We’re also looking to track potential disruptions to U.S. agricultural exports from Michigan into Canada.”

The National Archive found classified information among the documents Donald Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago after moving out of the White House on January 20, 2021 when Joe Biden was sworn in as President of the United States, the New York Times reports.

The documents were part of the 15 boxes of documents and records Trump returned to the National Archives earlier this month, including records Trump tore up or otherwise tried to destroy.  The National Archives referred the matter to the Department of Justice for possible criminal investigation.

After the discovery of the information, the Archives contacted the Justice Department for guidance on how to handle the documents; the DOJ referred the matter to the Archives inspector general.  It was unclear to the Times reporters what the inspector general did in the case.

Hip hop legend Snoop Dogg purchased Death Row Records, one of the most recognized record labels in the genre and the label that launched his career nearly three decades ago, the Associated Press reports.

Although Death Row only produced a few dozen original albums from 1992 to 2012, the label was known for producing exceptional talent in hip-hop.  Founded by Dr. Dre, Suge Knight, the D.O.C. and Dick Griffey, Death Row Records had been dormant for the last decade.

Private equity firm Blackstone owned the Death Row brand, and they were happy to sell it to Snoop.  “We are excited to put the Death Row Records brand back in the hands of a legend like Snoop Dogg.  We wish him success in the years ahead as the brand moves forward under his leadership and vision,” David Kestnbaum, a senior managing director at Blackstone, said.

I tried, folks.  Normally, I’d try to write up a transcript of the batshit crazy things right wing lunatics spout, so you don’t have to listen to it if you don’t want to.  But I can’t with the Robert Urich fanboy and foam fragments magnate Mike Lindell this time.  It’s something about Garland spilling evidence and Fox dismissing Trump.  Listen to it at your own risk.

No soup for those who illegally spy on Members of Congress, but they will be thrown in the goulash.#Gazpacho #Gestapo

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) February 9, 2022

A day after they were launched into orbit last week, the majority of satellites launched by SpaceX were rendered useless by a serious solar storm, Reuters reports.  Of the 49 satellites launched to be part of the Starlink internet communications network, 40 of them were destroyed in what is thought to be the largest single day loss of orbiting electronics in history.

In orbit 130 miles above Earth, the satellites were hit with a power geomagnetic blast on February 4th.  The US Space Weather Prediction Center had issued a warning for a “geomagnetic storm watch” for the two days prior to the SpaceX rocket launch.

The storm caused density in the low Earth orbital space where the satellites were released to increase significantly, causing drag and friction for the satellites, causing significant damage.

Trump advisor and Simon Bar Sinister cosplayer Rudy Giuliani asked a Republican county prosecutor in Michigan to seize the county’s voting machines and turn them over to the Trump campaign, the Washington Post reports.

Giuliani called Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter weeks after the November election to ask him to arrange for the county to give the campaign the machines so they could extract data from them to prove their claims of election fraud.

Rossiter told Giuliani no:  “I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause.”  Rossiter informed Giuliani that as a prosecutor, he didn’t have the authority to seize anything without a court order. 

Scores of students at a Huntington, West Virginia high school staged a walkout of their homeroom period Wednesday to protest being mandated to attend an Evangelical revival assembly held at the school during school hours last week, ABC News reports.

While a preacher told the students that Jesus was the only way to save their souls and that no one can get to heaven unless they believe in Christ, a Jewish student asked if he could leave.  He couldn’t, he was told by a teacher, because the doors to his classroom were locked.  Another texted his father, “Is this legal?”

Huntington High School, with around 1,000 students, was in an open-study period during the assembly, when students study for exams, finish term work or participate in clubs.  The assembly was organized by a Christian student group, and attendance was supposed to be voluntary, but at least two teachers took their entire classes to attend.

Said the President at a meeting with energy executives, “Are you getting less resistance when you start talking about wind and the windmills? I know they cause cancer…” to semi-racous laughter then recovered with a “Bad joke, bad joke. Shouldn’t be kidding about that,” and moving on.

“As the domestic terrorists running the January 6 partisan witch hunt are well aware, President Trump has invoked Executive Privilege, and it is not my privilege to waive. They should negotiate any waiver of the privilege with the president and his attorneys directly, not through me. I refer this tribunal to Chapter 21 of In Trump Time for what is in the public record about the Green Bay Sweep plan to insure election integrity – the last three people on God’s good earth who wanted chaos and violence on Capitol Hill were President Trump, Steve Bannon, and l. Why did Pelosi, the Capitol Hill police, and the Pentagon leave the perimeter unguarded?” says the shitty board game designer Peter Navarro in a statement to CBS News Congressional correspondent Sara Cook.

Said the unfaithful wife and white nationalist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene “Not only do we have the DC jail which is the DC gulag, but now we have Nancy Pelosi’s Gazpacho Police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff, spying on American citizens that want to come talk to their representatives…”

The sale price on homes with their address on a street named after a Confederate military figure or sobriquet sell for an average of 3% less and stay on the market longer than comparable properties on streets with normal names, Bloomberg CityLab reports on an Emory University analysis.

“Some of the discussions about Confederate streets so far have focused on the principled reasons, the benefits of changing the name versus the cost of changing all the signs,” says the study’s lead author, Emory Finance Professor T. Clifton Green. “There could also be economic benefits to changing these things.” The effect is distributed unevenly across the 35 states found to have residential streets with one of four names: “Robert E Lee”, “Stonewall Jackson”, (full names only, as “Lee Street” or “Jackson Avenue” are too generic on their own), “Confederate”, or “Dixie”, as naturally it’s less of an issue in the actual former rebel states than it is elsewhere. The mean Confederate street name discount works out to $7,000 on a $240,000 house nationally. There was plenty of data to work with, as even Massachusetts and California have streets with such names, and besides the homes being slightly older than average, the research team were able to find plenty of comparable control properties sold in the same quarter of the year, same census tract, similar age and stats on property size, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc to make the contrast clear as day.

We’ve said it once and we’ll keep saying it again and again and again: MAGA doesn’t pay.

The House January 6th Select Committee has subpoenaed the mentally unhinged Trump minion and shitty board game designer Peter Navarro for documents and testimony, ABC News reports.

The National Archives have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into the fat Former Guy over his absconding of presidential records to Mar-a-Lago as well as his habit of tearing up papers subject to official record keeping, the Washington Post reports.

Missouri's crowded US Senate race: Snapshot of the Republican candidates https://t.co/OUaWb5HRnP

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 9, 2022