What a great day for American political media, as overvalued and overhyped but still top-notch investigative reporting outfit Vice News files for bankruptcy while former The Hill publisher Jimmy Finkelstein’s innovative new venture The Messenger makes its auspicious debut with a lot of the old the pre-Nexstar-sale Hill stanbys you love such as Juan Williams and Kevin Brock columns, HarrisX polls, and hard-hitting “exclusives” with headlines like “Britney Spears Is ‘Talking to’ Estranged Family Members, But ‘There Are Still Trust Issues.'” There’s even an interview with fat former President Trump where they ask all the tough, incisive questions like “Have you paid any attention to ChatGPT or artificial intelligence?” and “Do you think it should be regulated better?”
Even better: There’s no Disqus comments! That’s right! You can’t even make your own entertainment by pestering the mods and the MAGA trolls who no doubt would’ve been welcomed at The Messenger. It’s like we have two Hills now but nowhere to get banned from. Aren’t we so lucky?
Kenyan President William Ruto apologized to the country on Sunday for that mass cult suicide in which as many as 800 people were starved to death so they could meet Jesus, the BBC reports.
“I am taking responsibility that, as the president, these (Shakahola murders) should not have happened. For that, I truly say, I’m sorry,” said Ruto while adding that his sudden weight loss was just a result of keeping fit after a lot of stress eating during his 2022 campaign.
The opposition Move Forward and Pheu Thai parties, campaigning on reforms of Thailand’s military and monarchy, kicked ass in national election on Sunday, possibly spelling the end of the reign of conservative coup-installed Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, the Associated Press reports.
Nothing like a shitty businessman who has himself defaulted on loans giving the same fiscal advice to the world’s largest economy. Trump also mocked AOC’s fiancee’s appearance in another post, calling Riley Roberts “bad looking” for some stupid reason. This was after he posted screenshot after screenshot of EJ Carroll’s tweets, making for a productive day on Truth Social.
Country singer Maren Morris was awarded GLAAD’s Excellence in Media Award at Saturday’s ceremony, she could help but mark the occasion by remembering how then-Fox host Tucker Carlson helped her efforts to promote LGBTQ equality. Calling Morris a “lunatic” and a “fake country singer” according to Yahoo Entertainment, Carlson targeted the singer for her support of the LGBTQ community, and she turned Carlson’s insults into a line of “lunatic country music person” t-shirts that raised more than $150,000 for LGBTQ charities.
“Fine, maybe I felt a little badass taking Tucker Carlson’s calling me a lunatic for standing up to transphobia, turning it into a T-shirt and raising $150,000 for LGBTQ+ charities, yeah,” Morris said accepting the award. “That made me feel a little cool, but I don’t want to gloat. I would never insult the recently unemployed.”
The Mexican Foreign Minister shot back at Senator John Kennedy for insulting Mexico’s standard of living, calling the Louisiana Republican and Foghorn Leghorn tribute politician “a profoundly ignorant man,” the Guardian reports.
At a Senate committee hearing last week, Kennedy demanded the Drug Enforcement Administration force Mexico to deal with drug cartels, going on a xenophobic screed saying Mexicans “would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback [Steakhouse]” if the United States was not their next-door neighbor providing economic opportunities. Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard was not off in his assessment of Kennedy, given that the Oxford-educated Senator prefers to play a folksy, backwoods politician to cater to his base.
In another slap, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador urged the 37 million Americans of Mexican and Latino descent “not to vote for people with this very arrogant, very offensive and very foolish mentality.”
The commander of the mercenary Wagner Forces fighting alongside Russian army troops in Ukraine offered to provide the Ukrainian military information about the location and strength of Russian forces in exchange to easing up on attacks on exhausted Wagner troops around Bakhmut, the Washington Post reports.
Yevgeniy Prigozhin made the offer in January through contacts he’s maintained through the war within the Ukrainian military intelligence ministry. The Ukrainians did not pursue the offer, which Ukrainian officials say was made multiple times, partly because they did not believe Prigozhin would provide actionable information.
Some ex-cons just can’t make it on the outside, but it usually takes more than a few hours to figure that out. Released from the Harford County (Maryland) Detention Center earlier on Friday, 38-year-old Michael D. Stevens II apparently decided he’d seen enough, so he stole a five-ton 923-A six-wheel military utility truck and led police on a 20-mile chase before being apprehended and returning to the Harford County Detention Center for Friday night.
As NBC News notes, Stevens drove into Baltimore City despite police using multiple techniques to try to stop the truck and he abandoned the vehicle in the Canton neighborhood. Stevens’ joyride ended in no injuries, but a lot of damage; he was charged with motor vehicle theft, two counts of first-degree assault, two counts of second-degree assault and failing to obey a lawful order. Officials didn’t release what Stevens was initially jailed for, but we’re not guessing it was bank fraud.
A 13-year-old boy who saw a man sneak out of nearby woods and try to kidnap the boy’s eight-year-old sister this week used his slingshot to strike the man in the face and chest, forcing him to flee, ABC News reports.
The unidentified girl was searching for mushrooms in the family’s yard when a man snuck out of a patch of trees, putting his hand over her mouth and trying to pick her up by the waist. She was able to break free, at which time her brother started firing rocks at the man. The man fled, but was caught at a nearby gas station and was identified partly through the injuries the projectiles caused.
“The [Turkish state media] Anadolu Agency has stopped updating Turkey’s election returns. And Erdoğan’s party is objecting to results in hundreds of places where it is way behind. These are among the indications that the opposition is doing well—much better perhaps than [Anadolu Agency] has so far let on,” reports Duke University international economics Professor Timur Kuran.
Copied Kuran’s tweet verbatim as to not mince his words on how the Turkish presidential election is going, which sounds not great. Turkish journalist Murat Yetkin corroborates the story, telling the Fox Haber (Murdoch-owned Fox News channel in Turkey) he’s been told that Erdogan commanded the Anadolu Agency and other state-owned broadcaster Turkish Radio and Television Corporation to “keep the difference between him and [leading opposition candidate Kemal] Kılıçdaroğlu at around 10 percent” in their reporting on the returns until he makes a statement.
The fat bastard also made clear his bitterness over being forced to cancel his Iowa event while his sworn enemy stuck around in the Cornhole State, writing “Rob DeSanctimonious and his poll numbers are dropping like a rock – I would almost be inclined to say, these are record ‘falls.’ The question: Is ‘Rob’ just young, inexperienced and naive or, more troubling, is he a fool who has no idea what he is doing. We already have one of those in office, we don’t need another one. MAGA!” Zero points for “Rob,” which seems like it was a typo that Trump decided he liked and stuck with it.
Again and again and again we have to preface these stories by saying it’s still early, we’re only a few months into the 118th Congress and there’s always the possibility that Republicans will find something legitimately politically damaging to Joe Biden and bring him down to Trump’s level with swing voters. They were able to make it happen with Hillary, maybe they can do it to Joe.
But saying they can’t find their supposedly devastating whistleblower and then implying he or she’s been “Bidencided” probably isn’t going to get the job done. It’s an okay consolation prize for them to still be able to “just ask questions” about this fail. However at this point we might have to even start considering the possibility that Democrats are actually even actively fucking with them, that a fake whistleblower sent these tips anonymously to get Comer, Grassley, and RonAnon to hype up this bullshit story and look like jackasses to waste their time. Dems have been ruthlessly effective at undermining Team MAGA when working above water, who’s to say the story isn’t the same below?
MAGA Florida Congressman Byron Donalds on Sunday ranted about Dems tying immigration reform to border security, basically saying that Dems should pass a border security bill and Biden should sign it – and then the GOP will work with them on fixing immigration and protecting the Dreamers.
“Secure the border first! Let’s get it done! Let’s finish building the wall [blah blah blah] and when we have that done, then we can talk about all the immigration policies [as if any Democrat is going to believe these fucking snakes for a second that they would actually do that]. But the left wants to bring out young kids who came here through no fault of their own, quote unquote, and use that as a poker chip to say we don’t need to secure the border. That’s insane,” said Donalds. In summary he is, in pretty much the cuntiest way possible, saying the GOP should not have to engage in the most fundamental practice of legislative democracy: compromise, which has become a profanity on the right (especially in the adjective, as “compromised” is synonymous with “traitor”).
But just play this out and pretend for a second somehow Dems would drop immigration reform in exchange for a “clean” border security bill that Biden would sign and then enough Republicans would actually then separately honor the deal and pass immigration reform separately. The fans would be demanding their heads on pikes for voting with the Dems. A compromise reform/border bill would actually give them much more cover to say “we got a lot in return for a small concession.”
Which is why it’ll never happen, because their base is incapable of understanding such nuance. And let’s be honest, Republicans are much happier with gaps in border security than they ever would be with a 50 ft high concrete rampart from the Gulf Coast to San Diego. They can’t keep campaigning on pretending to fix the border after they actually fix it. Maybe a cycle or two to tout it as an achievement but after that then what? How can they bus migrants to Chicago and New York or fly them to Martha’s Vineyard if there are no more migrants? Replacement theory is less scary when there are no replacements coming. They want this to be a shitshow. They love every minute of it.
The Russian Ministry of Defense on Sunday announced two army colonels had been killed in action on the front lines in the contested eastern city of Bakhmut in recent days, Politico EU reports.
“The commander of the 4th motorized rifle brigade, Colonel Vyacheslav Makarov, personally led the battle from the front. While repulsing of a third attack, the brigade commander was seriously wounded and died during the evacuation from the battlefield,” said the ministry in a statement, also adding that deputy army corps commender Colonel Yevgeny Brovko was canceled in action too.
It took a month, but on Friday a team of German flight engineers were able to unfuck the antenna on the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer probe, the Associated Press reports.
The probe, currently en route the survey, Callisto, Ganymede, and – of course – Europa, required some good old-fashioned physical shaking to get the 52-foot antenna unfolded. Literally. They had to jolt the entire craft remotely to get a stuck pin loose enough to get out of the antenna’s way.
Calling into a QAnon meeting after his rally was canceled because he didn’t have his trademark Sharpie to change the weather, Donald Trump told disgraced former general Michael Flynn that he will bring Flynn back to Washington if his reelection campaign is successful. “We love ‘im. He’s a leader. And you just stay, wealthy and healthy and well and everything. I want ya to have great lives in general. You just have to stay healthy because we’re bringing you back. We’re gonna bring you back.”
Trump Media, the company that runs Truth Social, took an $8 million loan from a bank in the Caribbean with sketchy Russian connections that promotes itself as a top payment processor for porn sites in a deal that will give the bank an unknown ownership share of the company, the Washington Post reports.
The money came from two entities through loans set up in late 2021 and early 2022. Two million dollars came from Paxum Bank; the remaining $6 million from ES Family Trust, whose trustee is also a director Paxum Bank. One of the co-owners of Paxum Bank is a relative of an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Disgraced former President Trump’s Saturday rally in Iowa has been canceled due to a tornado warning, according to the fat bastard himself. What a chickenshit.
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We seem to remember Elon Musk saying a lot of shit about combatting censorship and allowing for free speech on Twitter when he bought the platform like six months ago. Can’t remember exactly what it was, but it doesn’t seem like he’s really fulfilling that promise. It’s almost like the whole “The Twitter Files” thing, which had been billed as a documented example of government suppression of free speech that he won’t ever abide now that he’s in charge, was just a fake circlejerk put on for the entertainment of his largely MAGA fanbase and he’s actually going to let it happen for real in Turkey.
FBI agents on Thursday raided a condo unit in the Trump Tower III building in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida owned by a shell company controlled by Russian scumbags Oleg Patsulya and Agunda Makeeva, the Miami Herald reports. The purpose of the search warrant was unclear.
An FBI spokesperson told the Herald that the Miami field office “was conducting court-ordered law enforcement activity in the vicinity of that location” but did not provide any further details about the investigation. Eyewitness video of the search confirmed the unit number which matches property records as owned by MIC-USA LLC, which matches state corporate records as controlled by Oleg Patsulya and Agunda Makeeva. Patsulya’s wife wouldn’t tell the Herald anything.
The Trump Towers at Sunny Isles is a Trump-licensed property, as in one somebody else built but he marketed and lent his name to without him having to do any work, so it’s not especially likely at this point that there’s going to be any connection to criminal activity by the Orange God Emperor. The two names don’t come up in any news articles published prior to Saturday either. Still, there’s always the possibility this metastasizes into something ugly for the Trump Regime in exile, and it’s always nice to be able report on the FBI kicking some Russian criminal ass, Trump-allied or not.
