Category: Uncategorized

Following the swearing in of new Wisconsin state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz on Tuesday and with it the court’s ideological makeup flipping from a 4-3 MAGA majority to a 4-3 liberal one, a group of lefty Cheeseheads on Wednesday promptly filed a complaint seeking the drawing of new state-level legislative maps to undo the draconian gerrymanders that, for example, gave the GOP a 63 – 36 majority in the state Assembly in 2018 after Dems won the statewide popular vote 53 to 45 percent in that Blue Wave year which saw GOP Gov Scott Walker’s defeat.

“Wisconsin’s legislative districts are unconstitutional in numerous ways, ranging from an outright assault on Wisconsin voters in retaliation for how they vote. and what they believe, to the most basic violation of the Wisconsin Constitution’s express requirements for district configurations. The current districts are invalid, the representatives and senators elected from them unconstitutionally hold office, and this Court’s urgent action is required to ensure that not one more Wisconsin election is held using state legislative districts that brazenly flout the language of Wisconsin’s Constitution and the rights of its residents,” opens Clarke et al v Wisconsin Elections Commission et al.

With the country unsettled from an ongoing coup that ousted a democratically elected leader, the State Department ordered a partial evacuation of non-emergency American personnel and families from the embassy in Niger, the Washington Post reports.  State Department officials had previously recommended all Americans leave the country.

The Pentagon has suspended cooperation agreements with the Nigerien military, a key partner to US forces in the region, while the military-led coup plays out.  The actions were announced to get as many Americans out of the region in case a full withdrawal becomes necessary later.

Matt Gaetz reportedly likes to commit crimes, from child sex trafficking to illegal drugs to money laundering.  Hell, he’s even been known to do some raunchy things that aren’t technically crimes, but still unsavory nonetheless.

Straying far afield from the intent of the laws into an overtly corrupt purpose (which itself is a crime for a public official), Gaetz lays out a convoluted plan to use the power of the House to undertake a clearly partisan plan to attack senior administration leaders and then use a trick to grant Trump an effective pardon by having him testify to a Republican-run House committee, citing Congress’s ability to issue immunity under 18 U.S. Code § 6002.

Beginning with “I don’t want to embarrass him any further,” California Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell goes on to embarrass House Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy while recounting how McCarthy threatened to “kick the shit out of” Swalwell for calling him a “pussy” after the House voted to censure Democratic colleague Adam Schiff–only to have McCarthy retreat when confronted by Swalwell, repeating his comment, days later.

Federal authorities served a search warrant on former WWE chair Vince McMahon on July 17th, apparently as part of an ongoing investigation into the Trump ally’s management of the entertainment company when he used more than $10 million of the company’s money to pay off people making sexual harassment complaints.

Yahoo Sports reports McMahon paid four women more than $12 million over a sixteen-year period to settle sexual abuse, harassment and other employment issues without reporting the settlements properly through financial statements.  Similar allegations led to prison sentences for people like Allan Weiselberg and Michael Cohen.

The WWE conducted an internal investigation into the allegations, but did not release its findings.  However, McMahon was invited to continue on the company’s board.  Although he resigned as CEO, he continues to serve as the company’s executive chairman.

A one-time history major from a tony New England liberal arts college, Jesse Watters gained fame by being an ambush reporter for now-disgraced sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly.  He’s been elevated to a prime-time slot thanks to the “bro” culture Fox wants to attract among younger demographics (as in, those not getting Social Security).  But that jump to fame doesn’t come with a commiserate jump in intelligence:  here, Watters continues his crusade to turn a new Republican administration–he believes to be led by Donald Trump–into a Brownshirt-esque campaign of violence, revenge and score-settling, apparently unaware that what he’s calling for is the same destruction of the Constitution Donald Trump is facing charges for trying to enact.  And note that he casually admits the conservative justices on the Supreme Court are controlled by political interests, not the law.

The lawyer last night was on CNN, cleaned their clocks.  The guy said, they’re trying to speed this trial up; we need maybe nine months to a year.  This isn’t getting done before the election, and anyway, it’s gonna get appealed and it’s gonna go to SCOTUS and SCOTUS is gonna knock it down.  What the Republicans need to do is time the impeachment because THAT’S the main draw.  If you put up impeachment with the Trump trials, I don’t think the Democrats wanna stomach that.

A right-wing influencer who founded the now-defunct Rise Above Movement white nationalist group is being extradited from Romania to California to face charges for his role in organizing violent responses to 2017 protests against fascism and Confederate imagery, the Guardian reports.

Robert Rundo will face charges in a federal court in Los Angeles along with two co-defendants, Robert Boman and Tyler Laube, for training and organizing RAM into a militant group formed to commit violence against groups they objected to.  As protests against Donald Trump’s nascent administration and public memorials honoring slaveholders swept the country, Rundo aimed his members at the demonstrations in Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley.  The trio face charges of violating multiple anti-riot statutes; Boman and Laube face additional charges for actually participating in the riots.  In 2019, RAM co-founder Benjamin Daley and two other members were convicted for their actions during the 2017 Charlottesville riot that left Heather Heyer dead.

Rundo is no stranger to extradition:  in 2018, he was returned to the United States by El Salvador after trying to travel to Ukraine.  Later that same year, he surfaced in London, where he claims he was turned away from a flight to Ukraine at Heathrow after his name appeared on a US no-fly list.  After the original charges were dismissed by a judge in 2019, Rundo fled the United States to Romania prior to the charges being reinstated on appeal.

Republican Oversight Committee chair James Comer was quick to jump in front of television cameras on propaganda outlets friendly to his Trump-supporting messaging on Monday night to promote lies he supposedly got from the testimony of one-time Hunter Biden associate Devon Archer, asserting the accounts he heard in the session conclusively prove the need for an impeachment investigation.

There’s one problem:  multiple sources tell the Daily Beast that Comer didn’t attend the closed-door hearing, nor did he participate remotely in the session.  Still, when a Newsmax host prefaced a question with, “You were in the room,” Comer did not correct the statement.  It was one of at least four television appearances Comer made after the session in which he let the audience believe he was part of the hearing and had heard the testimony himself.

“A few Republicans were disappointed that Chairman Comer didn’t show up to the Archer transcribed interview,” a senior GOP source commented.  “It was like following a general into battle, but the general decided to stay home instead of fight.  Especially when there are other members who would love to have interviewed Archer but aren’t on the Oversight Committee and not allowed in the room.”

During a June lunch at the White House, former President Barack Obama declared his support for President Joe Biden’s reelection bid, saying he would do anything to help the effort, while advising Biden to be wary of Donald Trump’s institutional support among the conservative propaganda ecosystem, the Washington Post reports.

As the pair met for one of their periodic meetings, the two Democrats discussed Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party and the GOP’s associated media system, an advantage Obama warned Biden not to underestimate.   Sources close to Biden welcomed Obama’s early offering of support after the 2020 race, when Obama withheld support during the open Democratic primary until Biden secured the Party nomination.

When will the investigation begin on the effort by Hollywood actors to overturn the Presidential Election of 2016?

pic.twitter.com/TSNcCEidOR

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) August 2, 2023

Let’s just say it:  Republicans are stupid, particularly when they deploy their standard “whataboutism” defense.  Here’s Florida Republican Senator and waste of a seat in the state’s Congressional delegation Marco Rubio demands a federal investigation into political activity of private citizens–the real weaponization of government Jim Jordan claims to be hunting.  Of course, Rubio aims his wrath at celebrities because “Hollywood” is the watchword for conservatives who want to bitch about perceived immorality while they’re supporting the politically desperate antics of a thrice-married admitted adulterer and corrupt reality television star, Donald Trump.  The inherent hypocrisy of Rubio–a United States Senator–apparently authentically calling for an investigation into private citizens using their First Amendment rights to lobby representatives to reject election results in 2016 while his House compatriots hunt for evidence of weaponization of government demonstrates the GOP is a joke.

Multiple media outlets report police and fire department resources in Washington, DC responded to the Rayburn Senate Office Building after an unverified report of an active shooter circulated.  Staffers were evacuated from the building, but after a preliminary police search, no danger was identified.  WUSA CBS-9 in Washington reports no gunfire has been reported, but officials are asking people in the building to shelter in place and request people stay away of the area.

Lost in the immediate frenzy of defending the Constitution from a cabal of power-hungry cultists determined to have their leader illegally installed into the highest office in the nation, we admit we left a number of juicy stories in the past months to wallow.  One was the lawsuit against one of Donald Trump’s unpaid lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, and a lawsuit alleging he forced a female employee to gratify him sexually–oh, and little things like he was selling presidential pardons for $2 million each.

Well, that lawsuit continues its way through the courts, and Business Insider summarizes some of the evidence Noelle Dunphy provided the court, including transcripts of (thankfully only) audio tapes she made of Giuliani as part of their daily operations, including tapes made of him doing Rudy’s version of sexy talk:  “Come here, big tits. Come here, big tits. Your tits belong to me. Give them to me (indiscernible). I want to claim my tits. I want to claim my tits. I want to claim my tits. These are my tits.”

A little late to the party, former vice president and Chalk-American Mike Pence continued his attacks on Donald Trump following yet another indictment for the disgraced former president but doing so in his weak, cooked-spaghetti manner.  Speaking at what appears to be a tractor showcase in Indianapolis Wednesday, Pence said,  “I want people to know I had no right to overturn the election, and that on that day, President Trump asked me to put him over the Constitution, but I chose the Constitution, and I always will.  And I, ah, I really do believe that, um, anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.  And anyone who asks someone else to put themselves over the Constitution should never be President of the United States again.”  Noting that he “dismissed [fraudulent legal theories] out of hand,” Pence went on to say, “Sadly, the president was surrounded by a group of crackpot lawyers that kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear.”

Just hours after learning he had been indicted on four counts related to his attempt to subvert the Constitution of the United States, Donald Trump invited two executives from Fox’s cable propaganda network to dine with him at his golf club in Bedminister, New Jersey.

According to the New York Times, Trump had dinner with Jay Wallace and Suzanne Scott, Fox’s president and chief executive respectively, on Tuesday.  Sources say Trump’s internal advisor at the network, Sean Hannity, was also supposed to attend but stayed in New York to lie about the four criminal indictments that were handed down earlier in the day.

While no details about what Trump ranted about or what burnt food was served during the dinner, Fox executives are wooing Trump to appear on the network’s planned presidential debate, something the childish Trump had hinted he would skip because he demands complete fealty and Fox’s interviews with his opponents have made him made.

Robert Bowers, a 50-year-old white nationalist, was sentenced to death for the murder of 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest anti-Semetic attack in American history, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.  Bowers’s murder victims ranged in age from 54 to 97-years-old, and he wounded seven; many of his victims were Holocaust survivors.

“Well, one of the reasons I’m running for president, Harris, is to re-constitutionalize the federal government, and these agencies that have become weaponized–the FBI, the DOJ–against political opponents,”  Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis–who is accursed of starting a private military force and using taxpayer money for his political efforts in Florida–says on the GOP’s mainstream-ish propaganda network.  “That’s a result of them not being held constitutionally accountable for many, many years, so when I’m president, we will bring accountability.  We will end weaponization and that regards to new leadership at the FBI, at the DOJ.  We’re gonna take power out of DC.  We’re gonna return it to the American people.”

Just a reminder that DeSantis has used government authority in Florida to criminalize even discussing an individual’s choice for health care, matrimony, and political dissent, not to mention using taxpayer money to kidnap through deception to promote his political ambitions.

Federal prosecutors handling Trump henchman Walt Nauta’s case in Florida filed a motion Wednesday requesting a hearing to review if his attorney, Stanley Woodward, Jr., is conflicted because prosecutors intend to call at least three of his other clients as witnesses in the case, a new court filing shows.

The filing shows Woodward–a lawyer it took more than two weeks for Nauta to find and retain due to the complications of a national security case where the top-line defendant is an itinerate liar, rapist and national security risk–is also representing two people referred to as Witness 1 and Witness 2, as well as the person referred to as Trump Employee 4, who has been identified in respectable media as Yuscil Taveras, the Mar-a-Lago IT director.

Prosecutors have requested a Garcia hearing, a court procedure in which the judge and prosecutors ensure that the defendant is advised of his lawyer’s potential conflict.  In at least one other case involving the Trump plot to overturn the 2020 election, Trump-supporting lawyers did not fulfill their duties to faithfully represent their clients’ best interest:  Georgia attorney Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow, representing a number of the state’s fake electors, neglected to inform some of her clients about cooperation offers from prosecutors that would have resulted in reduced or dismissed charges in a suspected effort to promote Trump’s false election claims.

Payroll processing company ADP reported private companies increased their staff by 324,000 new hired in August, according to Reuters, far more than the number predicted by pundits for business hiring in the month.  ADP reports private wages have increased 6.2% over the previous twelve months, with people who changed jobs seeing a 10.2% wage increase.  The official jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be released Friday.

Donald Trump is expected to appear in person for his arraignment in Washington, DC on Thursday on four additional federal charges stemming from his effort to undermine the certified results of the 2020 election, MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin reports.  The judge will set bail and conditions for Trump’s pre-trial release, which will likely include limitations on his ability to contact other witnesses and co-conspirators as listed in his indictment.

Citing an “erosion of governance” illustrated by the unnecessary risk to the US economy caused by Republicans craving performance art, credit bureau Fitch downgraded the US credit rating from AAA to AA+ on Tuesday, NBC News reports.

“In Fitch’s view, there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years, including on fiscal and debt matters,” the rating agency said in a statement.  Besides the lack of stability in government because of Republican immaturity, Fitch cites increasing federal debt–largely driven by GOP policies lowering taxes while increasing debt and deficits–and a risk of the US falling into recession as other reasons.

Overall, Fitch notes that the US economy has strong underpinnings, but the periodic instability of the federal government–driven by anti-responsibility conservatives who do not believe in fiscal conservatism in paying accrued bills, in the vein of the titular leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump–is largely driving the rating downgrade.