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Commission on Presidential Debates Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf is understandably pissed that the Biden and Trump campaigns are bypassing their system this year by setting up their own face-offs hosted by CNN and ABC News (with maybe more on the way). But he tells Politico Playbook he’s nevertheless impressed by how well Biden played this and got Trump to take the bait, saying the fat fuck’s immediate and unconditional acceptance “could end up being one of the great blunders of the entire election cycle,” adding “Someone called me this morning and said it was political malpractice.”

Farenkopf says he suspects Trump completely ignored his campaign staff and posted “Let’s get ready to Rumble!!!” just 43 minutes after Biden challenged him, without bothering to read the details of Biden’s terms. “It was a pretty spectacular job by the Biden people,” said Farenkopf.

Asked for comment in response to Farenkopf’s scoring, Trump campaign chair Chris LaCivita lost his shit. “Frank’s political analysis is as relevant as the Commission on Presidential Debates is… which is… oh wait… done. The bottom line is we have debates that are a far cry more than an outdated Washington committee filled with a bunch of washed up swamp rats could deliver. Frank’s a cassette tape living in a digital world and some of the biggest political blunders on the Republican side have been in participating in his ‘commission’s’ debates,” wrote LaCivita in a text. The reaction kind of tracks with CNN’s Wednesday afternoon reporting that Team Orange was “irked” by “the fact that Joe Biden somehow took over the debate narrative” by moving first that morning.

In a total throwback to the mid-20th century anti-colonial uprisings and conflicts that largely ended the once-vast global empires of the European powers, the French government in 2024 is rushing to contain an outbreak of violence on the distant Pacific island territory of New Caledonia, as unrest sparked by a pro-independence movement among the native Kanak people has led to rampant arson, looting, and violent clashes that have left at least five dead, the AP reports.

French President Emmanuel Macron has declared a state of emergency lasting at least 12 days and sent 1,000 troops the island of 270,000 lying about 900 miles northeast of Brisbane, Australia. It’s not the first rodeo there as the last time France imposed a state of emergency was in 1985. The freedom fighters’ main gripe is the National Assembly in Paris this week passing a law allowing residents who have lived in New Caledonia for 10 years to cast ballots in provincial elections, which seriously pissed off the Kanaks. The indigenous group comprises a roughly 40 percent plurality in the territory but fear the Metropolitan French are purposely encouraging more people to relocate to the colony to water down Kanak political power. Complicating matters is some Azerbaijani fuckery, as France has (with evidence) accused the grimy former Soviet state of supporting the Kanak nationalist movement in retaliation for French support of the Azeris’ hated rivals in Armenia.

Under the mess is a large deposit of nickel, crucial to EV battery production. Above it is the simple fact that, unlike most other French territories in the Carribbean, South America, and the Indian Ocean, New Caledonia is not fully integrated, although residents are enfranchised in the presidential and European Parliament elections. It’s on Paris to invest in the people with exceptional political and economic generosity if they want to hang on to the islands, and it’s on the Kanaks to demand a very, very large percentage of the royalties from nickel extraction disbursed onto debit cards with their national flag on it. The other option might seem awesome at first, but probably ends with a shit ton of Chinese communist navy personnel calling the place home by the end of this decade.

Dem think tank Third Way will this weekend try to get this ad in front of fat former President Trump by running it in New York City, Palm Beach, and in Dallas where the Orange God Emperor is headlining the annual convention for violent right wing terrorist group National Rifle Association.

“Seventy-three percent of people step into a religious place of worship at least once during the year on the primary day of worship (eg Sundays for most Christian churches). However, only 5 percent of Americans attend services ‘weekly,’ far fewer than the roughly 22 percent who report they do so in surveys” says the abstract of a University of Chicago study of cell phone GPS data out of a sample of 2.1 million anonymized phones examined in a ten-month period from April 2019 to February 2020.

“The intensity of religious observance correlates with a host of other activities. For example, relative to non-attenders and infrequent attenders, frequent religious attenders are less likely to go to strip clubs, liquor stores, and casinos,” the study also found, a surprising indicator that at least some of the Americans who moralize based on religion are not in fact fucking hypocrites.

In what seems like it’ll be the new normal, CTV News reports that 122 wildfires – 32 of them deemed “out of control” – most of them in the northern reaches of British Columbia and Alberta or in neighboring Saskatchewan or the Northwest Territories – are burning as of Friday morning.

At least 60,000 people have been evacuated in Alberta alone – remember, this is a pretty vast and sparsely populated region, which speaks to the scale of the fires. More than 4,000 square kilometers have been burned already in 1,023 recorded wildfires in 2024. The weather forecast calls for a low pressure system bringing light rain over the next few days that will slow but not snuff out the flames.

Opinion | GREG GUTFELD: Don't expect a 'fair fight' in Trump-Biden debates, it's 'not part of the Democrat playbook' https://t.co/ZVKjs4Bfnv

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 17, 2024

Is it Florizona or Aridora?  A woman in Arizona, a.k.a. West Florida minus the humidity, was arrested by federal agents for getting remote IT jobs for tech workers in North Korea and running a laptop farm that allowed them to log into companies’ computer systems, the BBC reports.

The woman, 49-year-old Christina Chapman is charged with stealing the identities of 60 Americans under which she was able to secure work for three North Korean workers from 300 companies, including a number of Fortune 500 companies,  a television network and at least one defense contractor.

Chapman set up a laptop farm in her Arizona home, allowing the North Korean workers to appear to be working from a home address in the US using the companies’ proprietary hardware, while the workers were signing in from their locations in North Korea, something the indictment says was done with permission of the regime of Kim Jong-un.  Since 2020, Chapman was able to collect nearly $7 million in compensation from the companies for a fake personnel placement company, taking a large cut for herself.

The last witness for the prosecution, Michael Cohen, returned to the stand for another six hours of cross-examination Thursday, largely keeping cool under inconsistent and choppy questioning by defense attorney Todd Blanche.  

• A gaggle too big to list of Congressional lackeys showed up to supplicate themselves to Donald Trump.  Committee hearings in DC were postponed because of this shameful sycophancy.  
• Observers noted Trump’s attorney was frequently getting angry and flustered, while Cohen largely remained calm and cool.
  Read More ▶ “The beginning of the end to Trump trial testimony”

We really should’ve ran this one live but shit happens and we forgot they were starting at 8 PM EDT because too many Republicans went to Manhattan to watch Trump’s trial. What a glorious shitshow.

Police in Colorado and Texas are investigating “Stop the Steal” douchebag activist Ali Akbar, aka Ali Alexander, for grooming underage boys and asking them for dick pics, the Daily Dot reports.

Arizona Democratic Congressman and nominee for the Senate Ruben Gallego continues to garner support from around the state which will not make the opponent in his general election, reigning delusional un-Governor Republican Kari Lake, happy.

As Politico reports, Gallego has been gathering donations from donors who had previously supported then-Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in her 2018 Senate race and earlier Congressional races.  Plus, Gallego will attend a fundraiser this weekend hosted by supporters of the late Republican Senator John McCain, who are ditching the string of insane candidates the GOP has touted in the state recently.

Gallego already has a substantial fundraising advantage:  at the end of March, he reported having $9.6 million cash versus just $2.5 million for Lake.  Sinema has a $10 million war chest, collected largely when she was still with the Democratic Party.

Now we’ll be totally upfront about this homewrecker: Texas MAGA Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne’s campaign website specifically says she’s “a single, working-mother of two amazing kids,” so it’s not like her fucking around with a fellow House Republican, Georgia MAGA Congressman Rich McCormick, is as big of a scandal is it could be. It’s just pretty close. Oh yeah this was confirmed by the Daily Mail, the dirty rag that still nails good scoops like this. They updated their story. Props to Laura Loomer for actually getting something right too, as she had Van Duyne named an hour ago.

While Republicans continue to obstruct bipartisan programs to stem illegal border crossings at the command of adjudicated rapist Donald Trump, the Biden Administration works to speed up processing of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers entering the United States.

Per Reuters, the program would process asylum claims for single adults within 180 days by setting up “recent arrival dockets” at immigration courts in five cities:  Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City.  Immigration courts–which are headed by administrators appointed by the Attorney General, not actual jurists–are facing a long backlog because of budget and personnel shortfalls stressed by Republican obstructionism.

“This administrative step is no substitute for the sweeping and much-needed changes that the bipartisan Senate bill would deliver,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement, jabbing at Trump’s slavish GOP House caucus.

Separate reporting on Thursday further confirmed your preexisting biases about MAGA Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas’s commitments to corruption and extremism.

Bloomberg Law reports that Clarence’s lawyer Eliot Berke just outright refused to answer any of the Senate Dems’ questions about why the old bastard received a $267,000 loan from some healthcare industry shitbag who then forgave it, money which Clarence used to buy an RV. “At the moment, Justice Thomas has done absolutely nothing to address the perception that he may have failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in forgiven debt on his federal income tax returns,” wrote Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden and Senator Sheldon White House in a letter to Berke on Thursday.

The New York Times reports that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, a lot of “patriots” hung American flags upside down – the universal symbol for distress – to express their horror at their Orange God Emperor’s defeat. Samuel Alito was long-rumored to have been one of them, but now have confirmed it by reaching out to his neighbors and reviewing their photos, dating January 17th, 2021. Alito blamed his wife in an email in response to a request for comment. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag. It was briefly placed by Mrs Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs,” Sam wrote. He did not elaborate on what those “objectionable and personally insulting” signs actually said, so that’s probably bullshit.

With conservatives in Texas and Florida passing a law allowing chaplains to serve as school counselors in public schools in the states, the IRS-recognized religious congregation the Satanic Temple wants in, and that’s making the overt Christians who pushed through the bill nervous, NBC News reports.

While the Satanic Temple’s official stance is that no religious teachers should be in public school, it will demand equal representation within each state’s schools.  “If they pass these bills, they’re going to have to contend with ministers of Satan acting as chaplains within their school districts,” said Lucien Greaves, a co-founder of the Satanic Temple, which calls itself nontheistic. “We think the public should know in advance that that’s what the outcome of these bills can be.”

Incidentally, “Lucien Greaves” is a pseudonym of the co-founder who has been the target of threats of violence and death from the self-declared Christ-loving “christians” particularly after installing a sculpture of Baphomet at an Arkansas courthouse after the state had installed a monument to the Ten Commandments on its grounds.

Georgia MAGA Congressman Rich McCormick’s wife Dr Debra Miller filed for divorce on Thursday, citing infidelity after 12 years and 7 kids, the Daily Mail reports. When asked for comment about the divorce and who Rich was fucking on the side, Miller said simply “ask Rich and his colleague.”

Sources in the House said it’s more or less an open secret at this point, except for the identity of the colleague, with one other member saying they were holding hands under the table during a recent meeting of the Republican Study Committee. Our guesses include Virginia Foxx, Kat Cammack, Elise Stefanik, and Jason Smith, but that’s just us. Everyone else is just going to say it was Marjie Greene.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday officially pardoned racist piece of shit MAGA vigilante Daniel Perry, who had been sentenced to 25 years for the murder of white US Air Force veteran Garrett Foster during a July 2020 BLM protest in downtown Austin, the Texas Tribune reports.

With Perry now a free man, the paraplegic governor – unaffectionately nicknamed “Low Energy Greg” for his failures to provide adequate electricity for Texans – has fulfilled the orders of now-fired white nationalist TV host Tucker Carlson by pardoning a likely pedophile who texted friends about hunting “a negro daddy” and Muslims prior to murdering Foster.

Spandex-wearing grapple-freak Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for not handing over the recording of President Biden’s interview with documents fuckup special counsel Robert Hur so Republicans could selectively clip segments of it to use in ads to help fat former President Trump get elected again.

The indicted wife of indicted New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez has been diagnosed with Stage-3 breast cancer, the Senator’s office announced Thursday, NBC News reports.  Nadine Menendez is also facing charges relating to her part in a corruption scheme that netted the couple hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and even a car.

“As a result of constant press inquiries and reporters following my wife, she has asked me to disclose her medical condition.  Nadine is suffering from Grade 3 breast cancer, which will require her to have mastectomy surgery. We are of course, concerned about the seriousness and advanced stage of the disease,” the Senator said in a released statement.  Nadine will undergo additional surgery with radiation treatment a potential future option.

Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana.

So today, the @TheJusticeDept is taking the next step to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug under federal law.

Here's what that means: pic.twitter.com/TMztSyyFYm

— President Biden (@POTUS) May 16, 2024