Category: Uncategorized

MSNBC’s second-biggest nerd Chris Hayes sums up how the two major political parties are dealing with questions about their respective presidential nominees:  worried about the future of democracy and the future of the country, Democrats will question the fitness of their leader.  Republicans, fearful for their political futures, cower when faced with a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist.

As the media swirl like sharks around a shipwreck, longtime supporters of Democratic candidates have asked the Biden campaign to disclose the data that shows a viable path for the incumbent to defeat Trump, the Washington Post reports.

In a meeting on Wednesday, union leaders voiced their concerns that the campaign’s response after Biden’s poor debate performance nearly two weeks ago was weak and ineffective.  They reportedly told the campaign that the public’s belief in Biden’s ability to win is waning, and they wanted to see an effective plan of attack to reverse the campaign’s inertia.

One thing to note in the WaPo report is the third-hand account of how “despondent” senior campaign staff members feel, per an unnamed “Democratic strategist.”  Biden’s campaign team didn’t seem to reflect an Eyeore attitude:  “We can either worry or we can work, and this team is doing the work that wins elections,” Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said in a statement.

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch called on President Joe Biden to step down as the Party’s presidential nominee in 2024 after his poor debate performance so another candidate could take on Trump.

“But I, like folks across the country, am worried about November’s election,” Welch writes.  “The stakes could not be higher. We cannot unsee President Biden’s disastrous debate performance. We cannot ignore or dismiss the valid questions raised since that night.  I understand why President Biden wants to run. He saved us from Donald Trump once and wants to do it again. But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my view, he is not.  For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race.”

Welch becomes the first Democratic Senator to call for Biden to step down which is notable, but Welch’s influence is negligible.  Outside of Vermont and maybe New Hampshire, who knew Vermont’s other Senator?  But in the chamber of 51 in the Democratic caucus, one voice could carry.

Thanks to his incompetence and obstruction, former Trump lawyer and landscaper promoter Rudy Giuliani will likely face innumerable lawsuits from his creditors because the judge overseeing his bankruptcy filing said he’s leaning toward dismissing Giuliani’s case, the New York Times reports.

Giuliani has consistently missed filing deadlines and refused to comply with demands of information from his creditors, throwing his bankruptcy filing into chaos.  The lawyer representing two of Giuliani’s creditors, Fulton County election workers Shay Moss and Ruby Freeman, to whom Giuliani owes $148 million from a defamation settlement, told the judge that Giuliani’s continued refusal to comply could lead to an investigation into obstruction.

“So unless your honor wants to entertain putting America’s mayor in prison,” Rachel Strickland said in court, adding the relevant criminal statute, “I suggest you throw the case out.”  Giuliani agreed with this, asking the judge to toss the case as well.

One of the competitors at the Fourth of July Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island cheated to get into a finishing slot that had a cash prize, event organizers determined after looking at the videotape, USA Today reports.

Fourth-place finisher Nick Wehry was spotted fussing around his eating station after the contest ended and moving a plate from a competitor’s section to his.  Judges at the event in realtime count an empty plate as five hot dogs, the amount served on each.  By moving the plate, Wehry was credited with eating 51.75 hot dogs, not the 46.75 dogs he actually choked down, taking the $1,000 prize for fourth place; fifth place didn’t win a cash prize.

After reviewing the tape, however, judges saw Wehry move a plate that should have been credited to another competitor, but Major League Eating, the governing board for the gluttony, declined to change the finishing order announced at the time, allowing Wehry to keep the prize.   Professional eaters rarely make enough to live on, but it’s a way to put food on the table.

New York Democratic Congresswoman and legislative bad ass Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday filed articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices and free vacation enthusiasts Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito citing their persistent corruption, ABC News reports.

AOC noted Thomas’s unreported gifts and his refusal to recuse in cases where he has a clear conflict of interest–like January 6th cases where his wife was communicating with White House staff–as charges.  For Alito, Ocasio-Cortez cites his failure to recuse in cases where he has a clear and stated bias as well as his failure to report expensive gifts.

“The unchecked corruption crisis on the Supreme Court has now spiraled into a Constitutional crisis threatening American democracy writ large,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement. “Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito’s pattern of refusal to recuse from consequential matters before the court in which they hold widely documented financial and personal entanglements constitutes a grave threat to American rule of law, the integrity of our democracy, and one of the clearest cases for which the tool of impeachment was designed.”

House Oversight Chairbilly James Comer on Wednesday subpoenaed top White House officials Jill Biden aide Anthony Bernal, deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini, and senior adviser Ashley Williams for testimony on how they’ve been handling Joe Biden’s health, Axios reports.

The Kentucky jackass feigned “concern” that the three aides are among “several White House staffers who have taken it upon themselves to run the country while the President cannot.”

Failed Republican 2024 presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to speak at the Republican National Convention next week, the AP reports on what we guess is supposed to be some sort of “unity” or “reconciliation” thing after Trump destroyed him.

You can’t make this shit up: The Daily Beast reports that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to report a yacht trip and a helicopter flight to a palace in fucking St Petersburg, Russia as among the graft from right wing billionaires over his long and sordid career.

The only detail that makes this a little less fan fiction-y is that it occurred in 2003, long before the GOP really got in bed with the Kremlin. Senate Dems Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse listed it as among the “Likely undisclosed gifts from Harlan Crow and affiliated companies.”

“Crazy Nancy Pelosi is more of a cognitive mess than Sleepy Crooked Joe. She also suffers from a terminal case of TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. She is a total nut job, who impeached me TWICE, and lost. Now I see her going around, barely, and saying that I am a threat to Democracy.”

“No, this is just Radical Left Democrat Disinformation, which is all that they’re good at. She’s trying to convince anyone that will listen that Crooked Joe is a mental giant, and in great form, which everyone knows, he is not. She’s just continuing the LIE to the American People. Crazy Nancy is a threat to Democracy, a very sick one – And remember, she took full responsibility for not doing her job on Jan 6. It was her fault, and I’d like to thank her daughter for supplying the tape of Nancy’s ‘confession,’ but what took so long? Hiding evidence is a crime!” posted convicted felon former President Trump on Tuesday, lying on top of lying for the fun of it or he actually believes this shit.

“National Park Service archeologists working at Minute Man National Historical Park recently discovered five musket balls that were fired during the world-changing event known as ‘The Shot Heard Round the World’ on April 19, 1775. Early analysis of the 18th-century musket balls indicates they were fired by colonial militia members at British forces during the North Bridge fight.”

“The North Bridge battle site in Concord, Massachusetts, is a key location within Minute Man NHP and marks the moment when provincial militia leaders ordered members to fire upon their own government’s soldiers for the first time. The event was later termed ‘The Shot Heard Round the World’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1837 Concord Hymn because it immediately escalated an already boiling conflict between colonial rebels and British forces. The musket balls were discovered by archeologists conducting compliance activities in preparation for the park’s Great American Outdoors Act project. The musket balls were found in an area where, according to contemporary accounts, British soldiers formed up to resist the river crossing. Further analysis of the musket balls indicates that each one was fired from the opposite side of the river and not dropped during the process of reloading,” says a National Park Service press release about the old bullets.

Yeah. Old bullets, huge deal. The whole press release is almost friggin 900 words long. They just keep going on and on about them. You will learn far, far more than you ever needed to know about these goddamn 18th century musket balls by reading the whole thing. At least they didn’t give away what the bullets look like. No, they saved that for Saturday’s big debut in a display case at the North Bridge Visitor Center. From 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM you can see the bullets for yourself in real life if you happen to be in eastern Massachusetts. Or you could just start driving now and be first in line.

A Spanish tourist met the business end of a wild South African elephant’s foot on Sunday, getting the absolute snot stomped out of him for taking pictures of a calf, the AP reports.

The 43 year-old sucker had stepped out of his vehicle in the Pilanesberg National Park to snap the pics and, before he knew it, BAM! those freaking elephants flattened him like he was a plant or something. Just total elephant domination. Dude didn’t even have a chance. “In some cases, people are oblivious to the dangers in the parks,” said North West Parks Chief Conservation Officer Piet Nel after the elephant stomp-fest. “We must remember that you are entering a wild area.”

London police are searching for the individual responsible for a multiple murderer after three women from the same family were found shot dead from crossbow bolts inside the family home NBC News reports.

Police are searching for 25-year-old Kyle Clifford after finding the women, aged 25, 28 and 61; the women are believed to be from the same family but their potential relation to Clifford was not announced.  Officials instructed the public that Clifford is considered armed and dangerous, so if you’re in London and see a man walking down the street with a crossbow, take cover.

Former Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen on Wednesday petitioned the Supreme Court to weigh if the fat bastard can be held liable for jailing Cohen as a suspected act of revenge in 2020, NOTUS reports.

A patient in Colorado tested positive for plague last week, and officials have been unable to track the source of the infection, according to CNN.  Humans get plague through bites from fleas infected with the bacterium Yersinia pestis.

Shockingly, the United States reports an average of seven cases of plague each year–sometimes as high as 17–with Colorado one of the hot spots, having 67 reported cases since 1970.  If you don’t want to get plague, don’t hang out around the rodents the infected fleas live on.

While historically plague is real killer–you don’t get the name The Black Death for nothing–modern antibiotics can defeat the infection if treated promptly.  Currently, the United States has no vaccine against plague, although the Biden Administration awarded a $22 million research contract to develop one to protect the military who are deployed in areas where an outbreak may occur.

President Joe Biden told the Houston Chronicle that the White House tried contacting Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott to get the state requests required to release federal aid for victims of Hurricane Beryl, but they’ve not been able to “track down” state officials.

Abbott is on an “economic development” trip to Asia, so Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick should have assumed the duties of the Governor.  Patrick, however, apparently doesn’t know what the Governor of Texas is supposed to do.  Biden said he was responding to requests from Houston Mayor John Whitmire and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, but was unable to release aid without a request from the governor.

“I’ve been trying to track down the governor to see — I don’t have any authority to do that without a specific request from the governor,” Biden told the paper, noting that he had been “tracking” Patrick but had not spoken to him.  Biden said he was able to speak with Patrick on Tuesday afternoon, after which Patrick apparently submitted the needed requests because Biden released the aid.

“… and my father would’ve been the person that sent me there,” a definite apple that didn’t fall from that money tree Donald Trump, Jr. shouts like an artillery field instructor.  “Hey, we all need a little kick in the ass sometimes in your life.  Hunter needed it about fifty years ago but never got it.”

Junior suddenly looks down into the audience and appears to repeat something he just heard.  “I’m much cuter than that?  Well, thank you,” Junior sneers before doing a really bad white fraternity boy version of Barry White:  “Oh, I like you, baby,” then miming “Call me.”  Like we said:  ew.

A Washington, DC man’s murderers cut off his thumb so they could access apps on his cell phone which they used to pay for marijuana and alcohol as well as Uber deliveries, NBC News reports.

Police say 53-year-old Fasil Teklemariam was beaten and stabbed to death, around which time 19-year-old Audrey Denise Miller and 22-year-old Tiffany Taylor Gray removed his thumb.  Teklemariam reportedly had a “sugar daddy” relationship with Gray, and after the man’s death, the women and two other men removed electronics and valuables from Teklemariam’s residence.

After ghoulish Fox host Laura Ingraham demands to see Joe Biden’s MRI after giggling away calls for Trump to release his medical records, Republican House Oversight Committee Chair and Gomer Pyle tribute artist Jamie Comer concurs:  “That, that’s what we want to do.  We wanna bring Dr. O’Connor in.  We have a lot of medical questions.  I’m gonna ask Ronny Jackson who was a White House Physician to come in and sit with us to help us ask the appropriate medical questions and we want to know, was there a coverup, and if there was a coverup was it because this physician has the same kind of liability that the President’s brother has with the Americorp Health scandal.”

That’s a lot of “ifs” Jamie’s throwing out to try to get something–anything–to stick in the minds of Fox viewers.  And O’Connor won’t violate HIPAA and discuss the President’s medical care without Biden’s permission.  It’s against professional ethics.  And speaking of professional ethics…

A sailor in the US Navy attempted to access Joe Biden’s medical record but did not succeed, the Navy said on Tuesday, in an incident that happened four months prior to the current questions swirling around the President’s reelection, Reuters reports.

In February, a coworker reported to supervisors that a sailor searched the military’s electronic medical records system for the President’s name but was unable to access any files.  Records indicate the unnamed individual tried to access the records two additional times within hours of the reported attempt.  The sailor received an administrative discipline for the attempted violation of privacy.