Category: Uncategorized

Welcome to the White House, Commander. pic.twitter.com/SUudQnPv29

— President Biden (@POTUS) December 20, 2021

JK Simmons as J Jonah Jameson in 2019-2021, and JK Simmons as J Jonah Jameson in 2002-2007

That this era of pop culture is just one endless churn of adaptations, sequels, prequels, reboots, and remakes is a road with deep ruts in it. The numbers really don’t lie. Vanishingly few of the top box office earners in the last two decades were developed wholly originally (or were adapted from less widely known novels, comic books, foreign films, etc). Quite a lot of pixels have been dedicated to bemoaning this fact on websites by and for white people. It is a problem but it does not appear constantly complaining about it is making any difference. It’s not like Disney says “Hey, you know that Slate writer really ripped us a new asshole. Let’s scrap Avengers 5 and the live action Pocahontas remake and start developing something new and original.” They’ll keep cranking out the same characters over and over and over again until the demand from audiences changes.

With 100 active duty service members being involved in verified cases of extremism in the past year, the Pentagon has introduced new rules explicitly prohibiting members from participating in such activities, the Associated Press reports.

The move also follows the arrests of dozens of active duty service members, reservists and veterans following the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress, when people with connections to the formed military-style “sticks” in efforts to breach the Capitol building.

While the new rules do not differ in substance from the previous guidelines, they are far more explicit in banning specific activities such as liking the social media posts from extremist groups.  It’s the first time the Pentagon’s codes of conduct include provisions for social media.

The jackass literally describes himself as a “controversial American joumalist, political commentator, activist, and businessman. He hosts a worldwide radio and television show – The Alex Jones Show – and operates a media company, Infowars” in the complaint, seeking a “declaratory judgment that the Select Committee is not a lawfully constituted committee and that its actions to date have been wholly without legal authority” and “A declaratory judgment that the Defendants have violated the Rules of the United States House of Representatives by issuing a deposition subpoena to Jones without Defendant Thompson first consulting with a duly appointed minority ranking member on the Select Committee.”

California MAGA terrorist Robert Lemke was sentenced to 36 months in prison plus another 36 months of supervised release after pleading guilty to making more than 50 threats to politicians and journalists between November 2020 and January 2021, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced Monday. Among the journalists and politicians targeted were CNN’s Brian Stelter, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries.

One message Lemke sent to Stelter had a pic of Stelter’s father’s grave and said “Such a nice place”, per the New York Daily News. Another showed a pic of his mother’s home saying there were “nice dense trees” behind the house. Lemke apparently snapped after Stelter said on his Nov 15th, 2020 show that “the 2020 election is over even though President Trump is still in denial about that. The claims of voter fraud are the fraud… Millions of people are buying into this parallel universe.”

“The Trump Organization has continually sought to delay our investigation into its business dealings and now Donald Trump and his namesake company have filed a lawsuit as an attempted collateral attack on that investigation. To be clear, neither Mr. Trump nor the Trump Organization get to dictate if and where they will answer for their actions. Our investigation will continue undeterred because no one is above the law, not even someone with the name Trump” says New York State Attorney General Letitia James in a statement responding to Trump’s lawsuit.

Meanwhile the complaint itself finally surfaced, and it basically says that, because Letitia James said some mean things about Trump, he seeks that she “immediately cease or, at a minimum, appropriately limit all ongoing investigations of Plaintiffs pending resolution of this action” and that he gets “relief from Defendant’s ongoing, unbounded investigations and enjoining her from being involved in any manner in any civil or criminal actions against Plaintiffs”.

NEW: During their show in Dallas, President Trump reveals to @BillOReilly he got the vaccine booster shot. pic.twitter.com/fhkOQEeeEQ

— No Spin News (@NoSpinNews) December 20, 2021

“Don’t, don’t, don’t… that’s alright, it’s a very tiny group up there,” Trump said to the crowd while being booed – the intensity of which unfortunately was not clear from the audio since he reacted so quickly and loudly. It could have been the entire audience, since they’re also a “very tiny group“.

This is also a guy who said boosters were a “money making operation” for Pfizer back in August, and then told the Wall Street Journal that he would “probably not” get boosted in September, so maybe his fans are right to be pissed at him contradicting himself so blatantly on his rants.

The Biden Administration is expected to announce Monday a new target of minimum fuel economy standards for all vehicles sold starting in the 2023 model year aiming to reach a projected industry-wide target of 40 miles per gallon by 2026, the Associated Press reports.

The unfaithful wife to some poor schmuck had some great things to say about the crowd at Turning Point USA conference over the weekend their “diversity” and their love of Jesus and Trump. You will never guess which one elicited audibly louder cheers from the audience when she mentioned them.

President Joe Biden personally ordered the White House statement by Press Secretary Jen Psaki to include how Senator Joe Manchin made a “sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President”, CNN reports. Luckily for the White House, we don’t work there, otherwise there’d be a lot of c-words in that statement too.

The New York Times reports the Orange God Emperor is suing Letitia James to block her probe of all the fraud he committed before he became president. “[James’s] mission is guided solely by political animus and a desire to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against a private citizen who she views as a political opponent,” the complaint reportedly alleges.

Nearly a half billion dollars worth of concrete reinforced steel bollards and other materials are sitting at sites across the length of the US-Mexican border, John B. Washington writes in a piece for the Atlantic. The Department of Defense technically owns the material, and some of it could be easily repurposed, but the bollards – hollow steel tubes filled with concrete and rebar – would be tough to scrap given the labor-intense removal of the concrete. Washington did not mention anything about the moat filled with alligators and snakes Trump wanted to have placed in front of his border wall. It is unlikely the moat was ever dug and even if it was the snakes and alligators have almost certainly slithered/crawled away for lack of human prey.

Joe Manchin privately told Dem colleagues that parents receiving the child tax credit just piss away the money on drugs, the Huffington Post reports on a leak clearly intended to shame the asshole for acting like a Republican. Not explained by Manchin was that even if it is true in some cases, why people who don’t do drugs should be deprived of the credit because of the actions of others.

Manchin also reportedly said the sick leave policy would be abused by people who would fake sickness to go on hunting trips which, again, doesn’t really justify denying it to those who would actually need it. Just because his state is has more unemployed heroin addicts per capita than any other state shouldn’t mean others should suffer, but here we are.

Former President Trump is “increasingly agitated” by the House Jan 6 Select Committee investigation and particularly freaked out over his minions pleading the fifth since that’s what guilty people do, per a new report in the Guardian. Trump is also furious with Mark Meadows over how much he’s shared with the committee and Kevin McCarthy for being unable to stop the investigation from happening – and that a criminal referral could be in the cards. “I think that the justice department will keep a keen eye on what evidence the committee has accumulated, as well as looking out for witnesses for a potential case” said NYU law professor and former Defense Department special counsel Ryan Goodman. “One of the outcomes of the committee’s work and the public hearings will be to demonstrate individuals who might be wanting to come forward as witnesses and that’s got to be very important to justice department prosecutors.”

Israel has added the United States to its “no-fly” list – joining Canada, Switzerland, Italy, and Belgium, among other countries with which its citizens cannot travel to without special permission given the spread of the Omicron COVID-19 variant, Reuters reports.

The National Hockey League has suspended games in which either team would have to cross the US-Canadian border, and it completely shut down the operations of a sixth league team because of an ongoing coronavirus outbreak, the Associated Press reports.

Cross border games will be shut down from Monday through Thursday, with the league rescheduling any games that will be impacted.  Games from teams within the same country will go on as scheduled.

The Detroit Red Wings will also suspend team operations due to an outbreak on the team.  The team will have two games in the coming week rescheduled.  The Colorado Avalanche, Florida Panthers, Calgary Flames, Nashville Predators and Boston Bruins have also had similar instruction from the league.

Research from Weill Cornell and other medical bodies shows that the Chinese vaccines Sinopharm and Sinovac – which make up nearly half of all COVID-19 shots administered globally – offer basically zero protection against infection by the new Omicron variant, the New York Times reports.

National Institutes of Health Director Dr Francis Collins, in his last few days on the job before his replacement takes over, tells CNN he faced pressure from the Trump Administration to endorse hydroxychloroquine and to fire Dr Anthony Fauci in 2020.

Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old upstart progressive from the Social Convergence Party, won a 10-percentage point victory of a far-right candidate who favored the authoritarian rule of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, signaling a strict rejection of conservative ideology in a nation that had seen significant political division, Reuters reports.

With more than 80% of the vote, Boric had 55.52% versus the Republican Party’s Jose Antonio Kast’s 44.48%, a lead which was growing as more votes are counted.  Chile’s political Left has been pushing a message that the market-based economic policies and individual choice regarding the coronavirus pandemic have not benefit the majority of the population.

“I just spoke to @gabrielboric and congratulated him on his great success,” Kast said on Twitter. “From today he is the elected President of Chile and he deserves all our respect and constructive collaboration. Chile is always first.”

A company planning to construct a pipeline through thirty Iowa counties is fighting a court order requiring it to name the corporate and government landowners on whose lands the company intends to build, the Associated Press reports.

The Iowa Utilities Commission demanded Summit Carbon Solutions the information release, but it exempted the company from naming individual landowners who would be impacted by the $4.5 billion carbon dioxide pipeline.  Much of the land is owned by family trusts and corporations that would be named in the filing.

Environmental advocates assert that having the names of landowners public provides support for landowners who are not interesting in having a pipeline run through their properties.  It would allow those impacted to file collective lawsuits and to challenge the project in municipal and county hearings.