Category: Uncategorized

Having gotten a shit ton of clicks from other outlets on Sunday linking to their story about their 2024 presidential poll of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – showing Biden holding a lead in only the last one, the New York Times on Monday printed a follow-up story saying, verbatim, “If the former president is convicted and sentenced – as many of his allies expect him to be in the Jan 6-related trial held next year in Washington, DC – around 6 percent of voters across Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin say they would switch their votes to Mr Biden. That would be enough, potentially, to decide the election.”

And yeah, they hid this from the crosstabs published on Sunday too. Fucking assholes. At a Trump 48 – Biden 44 average across the six swing states this would work out to Biden 50 – Trump 42. They don’t break it down by state. Again, it’s possible, maybe even likely, that most of these respondents are lying to the pollsters and/or themselves. That’s still a fairly big shift contingent on an highly probable legal outcome and for the Times to wait 24 hours to add that important asterisk after happily playing up the “Biden is too old” angle in their initial reporting was pretty cunty.

An anthropologist was perusing the remains of the Halloween section of a North Fort Myers, Florida thrift store on Saturday, coming across an awfully realistic-looking human skull which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be an actual human skull, the Lee County Sheriff’s Office tells CBS Miami.

The store’s owner said they had found the skull in an abandoned storage unit they had purchased a few years ago in one of those auctions they used to have on reality TV. Florida law makes it a felony to “knowingly offer to purchase or sell… any human organ or tissue for valuable consideration,” with the key word being “knowingly,” so it’s unlikely the store owner will face charges. Cops are however trying to determine whose skull it might be and if it’s connected to a crime.

After weighing his options between remaining in power and abdicating his permanent dictatorship thus making himself vulnerable to prosecution or worse, Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to stick with staying in office until at least 2030, Reuters reports in an “exclusive.”

Rolling Stone doesn’t even believe porn is wrong, so why do they care about this?

— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) November 5, 2023

The headline was almost “Convicted felon doesn’t see what the problem is here,” but silly Jenna Ellis’s moronic response just barely loses out on the real lede: That far right Evangelical Christian Speaker of the House Mike Johnson installed the “Covenant Eyes” porn blocker software on his devices – and that he and his son are “accountability partners” when it comes to digital smut.

Summarized in a Washington Post article (available through gift link here), the MAGA cabal’s plans to exact revenge on Donald Trump’s enemies and, presumably, on anyone else they personally feel wronged them, with Trump himself creating a list of people he will direct the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to investigate and harass.

According to people who have heard the plans from the friends and advisors Trump has outlined these plans to, Trump intends to target people including his former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, his former Attorney General William P. Barr and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb who has made a number of cable news appearances pointing to Trump’s guilt in various investigations.

The vision for a Trump second term is being farmed out to a group of far-right think tanks, according to the WaPo story, with some calling for Trump to immediately call for martial law to mobilize the military after his inauguration to quell the expected massive protests that would dwarf the January 21, 2017 Women’s March peaceful demonstrations in Washington, DC, just like the Women’s March dwarfed a certain compensation-needing wannabe dictator.

Speaking to the crowd at that insane Faith and Freedom conference on Saturday, Florida state Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis – a guy who would have the title of “comptroller” or similar in another state but Florida just has to go with “CFO” – said his state’s taxpayers should help foot disgraced former President Trump’s legal bills, Meidas Touch reports on some culty bullshit.

“Imagine if we could fix the double standard of justice at the federal level. If we could fix the double standard of justice that doesn’t lock up a Hunter Biden but does everything possible to prosecute a President Donald Trump. So, here’s where I’m going with this. I think we need to set up a new legal defense fund for any Florida presidential candidate to use when they are targeted by politically motivated prosecutors,” said Patronis, who then went on to explain how to make it happen.

“We need to fund this. Our state right now is in the best fiscal health we’ve ever been in the history of the state, so it wouldn’t hurt to take a little bit of our budget surplus, set it aside. We can use this to protect any Floridian who wants to defend themselves and make sure these politically motivated prosecutors don’t magically appear during election cycle,” Patronis continued, of course making it technically about “any” Florida presidential candidate so it would pass legal muster.

In a pre-recorded interview that aired on CNN Sunday, lying piece of shit Republican Long Island Congressman George Santos told CNN’s Manu Raju he was not ruling out a plea deal with prosecutors on the dozens of felonies he’s been charged with, which is different from saying he’s completely innocent and that all the charges against him are a Deep State conspiracy.

Orange Man is going to get mad. Very mad over this, especially the part where Zelensky said Trump doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about when he stupidly claims he could end the war in 24 hours. Zelensky then said “we are not ready to give our freedom to this fucking terrorist Putin.”

A new New York Times/Siena College poll finds President Biden leading disgraced former President Trump 47 to 45 percent in Wisconsin in the 2024 election… Oh and Trump leads in every other swing state, 52 to 41 percent in Nevada, 49 to 43 percent in Georgia, 49 to 44 percent in Arizona, 48 to 43 percent in Michigan, and 48 to 44 percent in Pennsylvania. The poll also found Biden leading Trump with voters under 30 by 1 percent in the six swing states surveyed, which is soooo devastating.

The only explanation the Times can muster for the disparity is “in a remarkable sign of a gradual racial realignment between the two parties, the more diverse the swing state, the farther Mr Biden was behind, and he led only in the whitest of the six,” which we’re not sure really cuts it.

Wisconsin, really? What the fuck? The actual tipping point state for 2020 is the only one Biden leads in and by a margin significantly wider than his win there that year? We would’ve ignored this poll out of discouragement if not for the Chesseheads being the outlier. It’s obviously not great news for Biden, but that finding is just friggin weird and calls the whole thing into question.

All that said, if you do want to credit this polling of registered voters – one that does not include Robert F Kennedy Jr as an option – a year out from the election, you should check out the crosstab on likelihood of voting vs choice: 58 percent of those who said they support Biden were “almost certain” to vote while 51 percent of Trump fans said the same, which works out to a bare 51 to 49 percent lead for Biden. On the opposite end of the spectrum, among those “Not at all likely” to vote, Trump leads by a staggering 72 to 28 percent. How’s that for MAGA “enthusiasm”?

An ultra-conservative member of Israel’s Cabinet was suspended Sunday after speculating to the media that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might use a nuclear weapon to destroy Gaza, Politico reports. Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, a member of the ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) Party, said in a radio interview that the use of nuclear weapons “was a possibility” in Gaza because there are “no non-combatants in Gaza.”  Eliyahu later claimed he was speaking metaphorically, even though he was specifically asked about the use of nuclear weapons non-metaphorically.

A report Saturday in the Washington Post stated more than 400,000 non-combatant civilians are still trapped in northern Gaza unable to leave the combat zone because of restrictions by Israel, Egypt and Hamas.  Israel has faced increased international pressure to conduct military operations in a disciplined method to limit civilian casualties in densely populated Gaza City.  The leader of Israel’s opposition coalition, Yair Lipid, called for Eliyahu’s immediate removal, calling it a “shocking and crazy statement by an irresponsible minister.”

This is your annual reminder that clock-switching is fucking bullshit and should be done away with entirely after next March when we “spring forward.” That should be the end of it. The United States has already extended daylight saving time (or daylight savings time if you’re a douchebag) repeatedly, with the most recent expansion in 2007 adding a week at the end from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November, and moving up from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March. Congress came tantalizingly close to making it year-round in 2022 with the Senate passing the bill almost accidentally, only for Nancy Pelosi to fuck off on it for reasons we do not understand. Very lame of her. It’s time for Congress to try again, because this is fucking stupid.

Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Main Streamiest of Main Stream Media outlets the Washington Post, has named William Lewis, the one-time CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal to be the CEO and Publisher of WaPo, the paper announced Saturday night.

Lewis was head of WSJ from 2014 to 2020, when he left to run a non-partisan company working to get news to young people on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.  Prior to joining WSJ, Lewis spent his entire career in journalism within Rupert Murdoch’s British empire, working as a reporter at the Daily Telegraph before moving to News Corp.

“As I’ve gotten to know Will, I’ve been drawn to his love of journalism and passion for driving financial success,” Bezos said in an e-mailed statement to staff announcing the appointment. “Will embodies the tenacity, energy and vision needed for this role. He believes that together we will build the right future for The Post. I agree.”

For some reason, a Virginia judge has ruled that the lawsuits brought by the Newport News elementary teacher shot by a six year-old-boy who brought his parent’s semi-automatic handgun to school can continue with her lawsuits against the school district and administrators, CNN reports.  And it’s not “For some reason,” like, “Why did the judge rule this way?”  It’s for “Why did the judge have to rule on this at all?”

The $40 million case brought by Abigail Zwerner centers on the fact that the school and the administration had been alerted to many warning signs about the student’s history of violent acts and threats.  The school board, however, attempted to argue that getting shot by a first-grade student is all part of the job for a Virginia teacher, so the case should fall under Virginia’s worker’s compensation laws.  The judge disagreed:  “The danger of being shot by a student is not one that is peculiar or unique to the job of a first-grade teacher in a class,” Circuit Court Judge Matthew Hoffman said.

Two fires in the mountains of North Carolina have forced authorities to call for evacuations of some communities, with a 200-acre blaze breaking out near Hendersonville and an uncontrolled 675-acre fire burning at Collette Ridge, which apparently started more than a week ago, WNCN CBS-17 in Raleigh reports.  Multiple other fires were burning across the state as around 90% of the state is currently experiencing below-normal rainfall and half the state is technically in a drought.  We guess the Republican-dominated forgot to budget to rake the forests.

Hundreds of demonstrators surrounded Israeli dictator Benjamin Netanyahu’s home in Jerusalem on Saturday to demand he resign immediately and face criminal charges for the failures which led to the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack which killed more than a thousand civilians and soldiers with hundreds more taken into captivity in the Gaza strip, Reuters reports. The protest came on the same day a poll found an overwhelming majority – more than three quarters – of respondents agreeing that the on-and-off prime minister of more than two decades should fuck off for good.

“What the mainstream media is saying about the indiscriminate fire and the actors – I mean you literally have paid actors who are pretending to be killed” said far right Republican Florida Congressman Cory Mills to the “Faith and Freedom” conference in Kissimmee, Florida on Saturday.

It was 2:30 AM on November 4, 2020 when Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States took the podium in the East Room of the White House to triumphantly declare victory in his reelection bid against Democrat former Vice President Joe Biden after a long and grueling campaign marred by an ongoing pandemic and civil unrest. It took about 30 seconds into the speech for Trump to start bitching and complaining, variously going back-and-forth between confidently claiming he had won and complaining about a massive conspiracy against him underway at the time.

This outcome was still up in the air at this point as it took approximately 83 more hours from this moment for the major networks to call the electoral college for Joe Biden, but you can tell he already knew he was doomed – and this was when the long-prophesied MAGApocalypse began.

Often in 2021 and 2022 we would write some version of “not a single day has gone by since the 2020 election that we haven’t in some way covered something related to Trump and his minions’ inability to accept that they lost.” Thaaaat’s probably not true by now in 2023. Surely there’s been a day or two here or there when we didn’t pick up a story about the Capitol insurrection or the criminal cases or some stupid election conspiracy theory or whatever. It’s still been by far the dominant story here for the last three years and will continue to be so for at least another 366 days.

Independent exile outlet the Moscow Times reports that Russian state media outlet TASS’s general director Sergei Mikhailov was quietly fired in July for failing to cover the Wagner mercenary group’s failed mutiny against the Putin Regime in a way favorable enough to the Kremlin goons – and for allegedly having fled the capital as the rebellious mercs surged north before abruptly breaking off.

Mikhailov claimed to the Times he stayed in Moscow, saying “I was in my office during the mutiny and only left work in the morning.” A source called bullshit on that, but said that Mikhailov was already out of town for the weekend when the mutiny broke out. Whatever the case may’ve been, Mikhailov should avoid tall buildings. Accidents happen. And they’ve been happening a lot lately.