Petulant Republican Florida Congressman and future Frankenstein’s forehead donor Matt Gaetz tells CNN host Michael Smerconish the deal he made to install Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy requires McCarthy to present cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicaid even if it threatens to force the US to default on its debt rather than raise the debt ceiling.  Gaetz claims he has “twice” the number of Republicans to vote against the proposal–meaning he has eight votes, given the GOP has just a four-vote majority.

Democratic Governor Jay Inslee signed a statewide ban on assault-style semiautomatic rifles throughout Washington, making the state at least the tenth to prohibit the “manufacture, importation, distribution and sale” of the guns, CNN reports.  The ban includes the AR-15 model and its copycats, and dozens of other semiautomatic rifles.

The legislation passed the state house by a 56 to 42 vote and the state senate by a vote of 28 to 21, largely along Party lines.  It reads in part:  “The legislature finds and declares that gun violence is a threat to the public health and safety of Washingtonians.  Assault weapons are civilian versions of weapons created for the military and are designed to kill humans quickly and efficiently.”

Eight other states–California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York–have similar bans on specific semi-automatic weapons.  Hawaii has a ban on semiautomatic pistols, but not rifles.

Taliban forces reported killing the ISIS leader suspected of planning the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 American troops and more than 170 Afghan civilians during the final days of the US military presence in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reports.

The Taliban says its forces killed the leader of Islamic State-Khorasan, also known as ISIS-K, the name of the fundamentalist force operating in Afghanistan.  US intelligence recently confirmed the kill, but will not release the combatant’s name to protect their sources and methods.  American officials say the individual had been planning operations in Afghanistan and intended to plan a future operation attacking the West.

Per MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has refused an invitation to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject of ethical lapses of justices, including millions of dollars in unreported gifts from a Texas billionaire to Clarence Thomas.

UPDATE 8:07 p.m. ET:  You can read Roberts’ letter here.

Weasel-faced Senator Ted Cruz during a private phone call on January 2, 2021 told batshit conspiracy freak Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that he and other Republicans were planning to appoint a “commission” to decide the winner of the 2020 election: Trump. Now Cruz pretty obviously never sincerely believed the election had been stolen from Trump but still wanted to gin up fake evidence to justify overturning the result and reinstall the Orange God Emperor.

UPDATE 4/25/2023 6:33 PM EDT: Ari Melber reports that rogue former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg – the source of this recording – has been asked by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith for copies. Which might just sort of probably be a pretty big fucking deal.

As if he needed to make it clear, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders told the AP on Tuesday he’s not running for president in 2024 and gave his endorsement to President Joe Biden for reelection.

Still it’s fun to rub it in the faces of all the fucking sandbaggers who wanted Bernie to win the nomination in 2020 and lose badly to Trump. Now they have to put their chips on RFK Jr.

Asked if she was aware of anything that happened in the discovery process of the Dominion Voting Machine lawsuit that would have led to the firing of her former boss, one-time Tucker Carlson producer and former Fox cable network employee Abby Grossberg gave a definitive “no.”  But she said Carlson believed he had more power than he actually did.

“And as the texts came out, it revealed my suspicions:  he [Carlson] was looking for ratings bait, purely,” Grossberg said in an interview with MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, asking if Grossberg thought Carlson believed what he said on the air.  “And also was looking for power.  It was a combination of ratings and power and manipulating the audience.  And manipulated also the political system.  There was an aspect of ‘I can pick who the House Speaker is,’ ‘I can pick who the President of the United States is,’ or “–who the Republican candidate is going to be.'”

Grossberg went on to discuss how Carlson and his crew kept a photo of former Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wearing a bathing suit on the office wall; how Carlson planned to pin the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol on the FBI by focusing on Roy Epps; and how it took her more than a week to accept Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election as the rest of Fox aired conspiracy theories they themselves mocked.

Republican-led state opens sweeping investigation into woke investing group https://t.co/nqhiZjZpVc

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 25, 2023

The good guys are winning against the bad guys when you frame politics and government with all the moral complexity of a Saturday morning action cartoon show, like Fox News does. The bad guys have this new secret weapon in this week’s episode but don’t worry because Super Jeff Landry has this new patriotic investigation where he’ll get to the bottom of the case and the libs will go back to their evil dungeon to plot their next evil plan.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents – 64 percent – to an NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist survey say they don’t want disgraced former President Trump to win the 2024 election, a number that rises to 70 percent if he’s convicted of a crime before the election (unlikely, but not impossible, especially in the Manhattan case). The numbers flip almost entirely among Republican respondents: 71 percent say they want him back, 63 percent say they want him back even if convicted of a crime.

Thaaaat’s… really not a good number for Trump. You can say Biden’s approvals are weak, and they are, but it would take an awful lot of non-MAGA voters to stay home on election day and an all out surge from the cult to squeak the fat bastard in the electoral college again.

Maybelline Cosmetics will soon be in the crosshairs of yet another MAGA cancel campaign after partnering with trans model Dylan Mulvaney of Bud Light fame, CBS News reports on more reactionary thrashing from the perpetually offended culture war losers of middle America.

CBS’s article is just “one Twitter user wrote” and then “Another Twitter user wrote,” but despite the lame sourcing is probably right to bring this up so we can anticipate dozens of Fox News segments starring “moms” who are actually right wing activists talking about how they threw out all of their Maybelline shit and are only using “patriotic” cosmetics. Then there’s the too easy and predictable memes springing from the brand’s tagline “Maybe she’s born with it” because haha trans women were born with… Well you get it. Big Maybelline MAGA boycott incoming.

Who didn’t see this one coming? Probably not that asshole Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just hours ago tweeted “It’s pretty funny that AOC celebrates Tucker being de-platformed while also bowing down to her party that won’t host a single presidential primary debate to allow anyone or any minority a chance against the old white man she supports. I laugh at her hypocrisy,” while obviously under the assumption that her old white man was going to debate his GOP primary opponents.

And maybe he will. This could be Trump just flexing his flab over the party, making outlandish demands simply to watch them bow to his petty whims and then his supplicants will have to beg and plead but eventually will talk him into showing up. Then again it also looks like him building up his own justification for not participating. It’s not like he has to polish off his debate skills ahead of having to face Biden since there’s almost no fucking chance that’ll happen.

A survey of Wisconsin by GOP-aligned pollster Public Opinion Strategies finds President Biden leading disgraced former President Trump in a 2024 matchup at 47 to 43 percent, with a memo accompanying the survey warning that “supporting Trump in ’24 has already been ruled out by a significant majority of voters in Wisconsin,” the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.

Now of course it’s early and “the only poll that matters is on election day” more than a year and a half from now but this is the first rematch in modern history. As such, barring major outside events weighing on the race, these numbers are not going to shift much. We’re also coming off an 11-point statewide win for liberal state Supreme Court Justice-elect Janet Protasiewicz (holy shit, spelled that right on the first try). Biden is not going to win Wisconsin by 11 percent, but the judge’s victory does not augur badly for him in the Cheesehead state either.

In today’s edition of “Republicans trying to change the rules of a democratic process because they didn’t like the outcome” is Louisiana state Representative Paul Hollis’s new bill H212 which would lower the number of signatures required for a recall election after some bullshit astroturf campaign to remove New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell failed miserably, WDSU reports.

Louisiana recall petitions currently require a 20 percent of registered voters in a jurisdiction to sign on before it can be effected. Hollis seeks to change that to 20 percent of how many voters actually cast ballots in that official’s last election, claiming the reason the Cantrell recall failed was because too many people had died or moved away before the voter rolls were purged.

The recall failed last month when the canvassers only roped in about 27,000 votes, well short of the roughly 45,000 needed, but would have succeeded if the requirement had been 20 percent of the total votes in the 2021 election. Interesting how Louisiana MAGA assholes want to lower the threshold for recall petition drives while the GOP in Missouri and Ohio want to make them higher for ballot measures, like there’s too much democracy for them in some places but not enough in others.

A committee in the Democratic majority Pennsylvania state House on Monday advanced a bill to finally allow the pre-processing of mail-in ballots received before election day, a step forward in squashing the “Red Mirage” that gave Trump and his minions room to claim the 2020 election was “stolen” as it took days to count the ballots in the decisive state, VoteBeat.org reports.

The bill still has a ways to go before it reaches Governor Josh Shapiro’s desk as the Dems have only a one-vote majority in the state House and Republicans still control the state Senate, but it’s further along than past efforts have gotten. Movement to address the problem hit a brick wall in 2020 as Republicans demanded all sorts of bullshit concessions in exchange for allowing the pre-canvassing of ballots received prior to election day. Michigan killed off the Red Mirage last year, while Wisconsin state Senate Republicans fucked off even though the GOP majority state Assembly passed a bill.

A new Morning Consult survey finds disgraced former President Trump leading pudding-fingered Florida Governor Ron DeSantis 54 to 25 percent among Republican primary voters, the largest lead yet found for the twice-impeached tub of shit, with the rest of the field at 12 percent.

The question was actually “the candidate with the best chance of beating Joe Biden in 2024” but that’s a reasonable proxy for which candidate they respondents prefer. There’s a fairly wide delta by college education in the sample, with 60 percent of non-college grad respondents preferring Trump and only 40 percent of grads saying the same. DeSantis still trails at 36 percent among grads.

Just nine days after extremist Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the bench to replace dead scumbag Antonin Scalia in 2017, Brian Duffy, the chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, a law firm with cases before the court bought a log cabin on 40 acres of desolate Colorado mountaintop property co-owned by the judge for $1.825 million, Politico reports.

Gorsuch, who owned a 20 percent stake in the property, reported his profits from the sale as between $250,000 and $500,000 at the time on a disclosure form as required, but of course left blank who actually bought the property. Probably because it was a guy whose firm has argued at least 22 cases since Gorsuch’s confirmation. This is (quantifiably, at least) more fucked up than Clarence Thomas’s scumbaggery with Harlan Crow, as the only time Clarence came close to something he should have recused himself from was a 2004 appeal brought by Harlan’s sex trafficker brother Trammell over some copyright claim from an architect. The appeal was turned down but it isn’t clear whether Clarence tried to argue for the court to take it up.

Three people described by ABC News as “dressed in black, wearing helmets and outer tactical vests,” so we feel comfortable with calling them Antifa, were arrested after brawling with and pepper spraying members of an anti-LGBT group called “Protect Texas Kids” outside of a drag show being hosted by Fort Brewery and Pizza in Fort Worth, Texas on Sunday. The three likely “Antifa” members – all described as armed – then resisted arrest when cops tried to break it up.

A secret grand jury has been impaneled in Michigan to investigate a number of Trump minions in the state for their plot to tamper with election machines in a failed effort to prove the 2020 election was somehow “hacked” and stolen from the fat former president, the Detroit News reports.

Among those targeted in the investigation – led by special prosecutor DJ Hilson, who was appointed by Attorney General Dana Nessel last year – are loser Republican AG candidate Matt DePerno, racist traitor Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, former state Representative Daire Rendon, and “Cyber Ninjas” dickhead Doug Logan, who is probably also under investigation in Georgia for the same crime.

Every generation has a moment where they have had to stand up for democracy. To stand up for their fundamental freedoms. I believe this is ours.

That’s why I’m running for reelection as President of the United States. Join us. Let’s finish the job. https://t.co/V9Mzpw8Sqy pic.twitter.com/Y4NXR6B8ly

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 25, 2023