The Metro Nashville Council on Monday voted unanimously to reappoint Democrat state Representative Justin Jones to his seat in the state House, just four days after state Republicans expelled him for leading an anti-gun protest at the state Capitol following the massacre at the Covenant Presbyterian School two weeks ago, the Tennessee Holler reports.

Jones cannot be re-expelled for the fake offense as the Tennessee state Constitution explicitly states that a member cannot be punished twice for the same infraction. Jones’s colleague Justin Pearson is expected to be reappointed by the Memphis city council later this week.

“Don’t be fooled, the House GOP is coming to the safest big city in America for a political stunt. This hearing won’t engage in actual efforts to increase public safety, such as supporting national gun legislation and shutting down the iron pipeline.  The Manhattan D.A.’s Office welcomes public safety conversations. We have them every day with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners. In fact, we’ll start:

“Just-released NYPD data show shootings and homicides are down in New York City for the first quarter of this year, with progress in Manhattan helping to drive the overall citywide decrease. Virtually every major crime category is lower in Manhattan now than it was last year (as of 4/2/23): murders are down 14%, shootings are down 17%, burglaries are down 21%, and robberies are down 8% [emphasis in original].

“In D.A. Bragg’s first year in office, New York City had one of the lowest murder rates of major cities in the United States (5.2) – nearly three times lower than Columbus, Ohio (15.4). If Chairman Jordan truly cared about public safety, he could take a short drive to Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Akron, or Toledo in his home state, instead of using taxpayer dollars to travel hundreds of miles out of his way.” —Statement from New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg on the dog-and-pony show Ohio Republican Congressman intends to bring to New York City to deflect attention from Donald Trump’s multiple legal issues.

“Today, Secretary Blinken made a determination that Evan Gershkovich is wrongfully detained by Russia. Journalism is not a crime. We condemn the Kremlin’s continued repression of independent voices in Russia, and its ongoing war against the truth. The U.S. government will provide all appropriate support to Mr. Gershkovich and his family. We call for the Russian Federation to immediately release Mr. Gershkovich. We also call on Russia to release wrongfully detained U.S. citizen Paul Whelan,” says a State Department press release on the bullshit arrest of Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent Evan Gershkovich on fake espionage charges a day after the paper published his story accurately describing the country’s economy as being in shambles.

“We write regarding the April 6, 2023 report by ProPublica entitled ‘Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire.’ The report describes conduct by a sitting Justice that he did not disclose to the public and that is plainly inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any person in a position of public trust. The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has legislative jurisdiction over Federal courts and judges, has a role to play in ensuring that the nation’s highest court does not have the federal judiciary’s lowest ethical standards. You have a role to play as well, both in investigating how such conduct could take place at the Court under your watch, and in ensuring that such conduct does not happen again. We urge you to immediately open such an investigation and take all needed action to prevent further misconduct.”

“This is not the first time that members of this Committee have written you regarding concerns over the Supreme Court’s ethical standards. Eleven years ago, several members of the Committee, including the current Chair, sent you the attached letter urging the Court to adopt a resolution stating that the Justices of the Court abide by the Judicial Conference’s Code of Conduct for United States Judges-a Code that binds every other judge in the federal judiciary. You responded that the Court ‘does not plan to adopt the Code of Conduct for United States Judges through a formal resolution,’ and referenced your 2011 Year-End Report, in which you said ‘the Court has had no reason to adopt the Code of Conduct as its definitive source of ethical guidance.’ We submit that the Court has compelling reasons to do so, and urge prompt adoption of the Code of Conduct. While last month’s revision to the Judicial Conference’s guidance on judicial financial disclosures was a modest step in the right direction, further action is needed,” writes Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after the ProPublica report on Clarence Thomas’s luxury trips paid for by his Hitler-loving billionaire pal Harlan Crow.

[UPDATE 6:23 p.m. ET:  The 5th District has instructed the plaintiffs in the Texas case trying to revoke authorization to mifepristone to have responses to them by Tuesday midnight local time.]

The Biden Administration’s Justice Department has filed a request for the court to keep mifepristone on the market with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, seeking an injunction on the order from a far-right activist judge that would cease distribution of the drug across the United States, CNBC reports.

The Administration sought the court’s intervention by noon on Thursday to prevent the order from North Texas District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, from taking effect.  Critics say Kacsmaryk’s decision ignores scientific data about the safety of the medication and leans heavily on questionable legal theories and misinformation.

Hours after Kacsmaryk’s ruling, a federal district judge in Washington State, Tim Rice, an Obama appointee, issued a conflicting order requiring the FDA to keep the drug on the market.  An appeals court ruling would decide the fate of the drug’s availability for the immediate future.

Decrying the move by a federal judge with “no scientific training,” more than 200 pharmaceutical and medical research companies signed a joint statement warning that the decision by an extremist activist judge in Texas could upend safe medical care, NBC News reports.

The statement criticizes the decision by North Texas District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to order a national ban on the abortion drug mifepristone, a medication used safely in the United States for 23 years to abort a fetus and for other medical issues.  Statistically, mifepristone is safer to use than Tylenol, and the FDA approved its sale over the counter earlier this year.

“The decision ignores decades of scientific evidence and legal precedent,” the statement reads. “Judge Kacsmaryk’s act of judicial interference has set a precedent for diminishing FDA’s authority over drug approvals, and in so doing, creates uncertainty for the entire biopharma industry.”

Deja Taylor, the mother of the six-year-old student who brought a gun to Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia and shot his teacher, has been charged with felony child neglect and a misdemeanor count of recklessly leaving a firearm that endangers a child, WVEC 13 News Now in Hampton, Virginia reports.

The unemployment rate for Black Americans reached 5 percent in March, its lowest level since 1972 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it by ethnicity, the Washington Post reports.

It’s also lower than the previous record low of 5.3 percent in 2019 that fat former President Trump and his fanboys claimed was the greatest accomplishment for race relations by any president ever.

The Palins of the Rockies are at it again.  Republican Colorado Congresswoman and woman who really has to reevaluate her parenting skills Lauren Boebert recently acknowledged her 18-year-old expectant father-son Tyler was responsible for a car accident last September that injured a friend, nearly costing the passenger his thumb.

According to Denver independent news source Westword, Tyler Boebert was driving his father’s SUV when he flipped it into a creekbed around 11:30 p.m. on September 20, 2022.  A passenger in the vehicle, Tyler’s 19-year-old friend Noble D’Amato, was injured with multiple concussions and a hand injury so severe he almost lost his thumb.  D’Amato was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia (a cannabis grinder) and a count of unlawful possession of a schedule IV controlled substance, namely unprescribed Xanax.  Tyler Boebert was originally cited for careless driving and was issued a court appearance date; he pleaded down to operating a defective vehicle with a headlight problem, essentially a traffic ticket.  He was ordered to complete a driver safety course and is scheduled to appear before a judge Monday (today). 

Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said two of the people killed in a mass shooting at a Louisville bank were “close” friends of his, NBC News reports.  At least four people were killed by the shooter, with at least ten confirmed injured.  The shooter was killed by police responding to the scene.

“This is awful,” Beshear said during a press conference after the shooting. “I have a very close friend that didn’t make it tonight. And I have another close friend who did not either, and one who’s at the hospital but I hope is going to make it through.”

Mass shootings are becoming so common in the United States, virtually every corner of the population is one or two degrees away from knowing people who died or survived an incident.  Beshear is the latest public figure to announce a connection to a mass shooter.  In Nashville, a local television anchor announced on air that her child was in lockdown at a nearby school at the time of a shooting at Covenant School.  Another local reporter disclosed that she was a school shooting survivor while reporting on the Nashville shooter.  During Friday’s shooting at Delaware’s Christinana Mall, a Baltimore traffic reporter related her experience with her family, who were all in the mall at the time of the shooting.

Jumping on the lame MAGA boycott of Bud Light over their trans ad campaign, Republican Texas Congressidiot Dan Crenshaw inadvertently revealed he still spends money on their parent company’s products by showing his fridge filled with Karbach, a brand owned by Anheuser-Busch.

Disgraced former President Trump’s lawyers on Monday appealed last month’s ruling ordering former Vice President Mike Pence to testify to the federal grand jury investigating his failed attempt to violently overturn the results of the free and fair 2020 election, Bloomberg’s Zoe Tillman reports.

Last week Pence announced he wouldn’t fight the order to testify as it shielded him from having to answer certain questions that might have related to his duties as an officer of the legislative branch but requires him to cough up what happened in conversations between him and fat Donald in the lead-up to January 6th, 2021 – exchanges that would ordinarily be subject to executive privilege.

Right wing anti-vaxxer Christopher Key, famous for his piss-drinking COVID cure evangelism, has been shut out of the gates of the Trump Kingdom even after shelling out an $11,000 winning bid for dinner with Don Jr at some auction, the Daily Beast reports. Handlers caught wind of Key’s plan to use the dinner as an opportunity to confront Don Sr over the “bioweapon” COVID vaccine. “I believe that they went and did the research, and they found out who I was, and the last thing they wanted me to do was to sit down with Donald Trump Jr and his father,” Key told the Daily Beast, adding he was “going to go after both of them about the bioweapon.”

Cops in Louisville, Kentucky say at least five people are dead, plus the gunman, and six injured after some asshole opened fire in a bank building in the city’s downtown Monday, ABC News reports.

Rural Buckingham County, Virginia now has zero public employees to process voter registrations or candidate paperwork after the registrar, deputy registrar, and two part-time staffers quit over non-stop accusations and bullshit from MAGA voters and the elections board, NBC News reports.

“There were people saying that they had heard all these rumors – that the attorney general was going to indict me. Mentally, I just – I couldn’t take it anymore,” said now-former registrar Lindsey Taylor, who quit along with her two staff members last month following the MAGA takeover of Buckingham’s Board of Elections in January, which only has two Republican members now after the lone Democrat quit recently too. The deputy registrar left the job in February.

Buckingham County Republican Committee Chairwoman Ramona Christian can claim credit for the exodus, having accused Taylor of not signing up too many non-partisans and not enough right wingers to serve as poll observers in the midterms, alleging a Dem’s nine-vote win in a school board race being fraudulent because of absentee ballots, and just generally ascribing minor administrative and procedural issues as being some kind of evil socialist plot during a public meeting in early January. “Why do we have all these infractions? Why don’t you know the law?” another local Republican said at the meeting. “I am putting you on notice – for treason!”

On Sunday the former AG told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that Trump “had no claim to those documents, especially the classified documents. They belonged to the government. And so, I think he was jerking the government around. But the government is investigating the extent to which games were played and there was obstruction in keeping documents from them. And I think that’s a serious potential case. I think they probably have some very good evidence there,” leading to this meltdown.

“The House Judiciary Committee will hold a field hearing on Monday, April 17, 2023, at 9:00 am ET in New York City, New York. The hearing, ‘Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan,’ will examine how Manhattan. District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s pro-crime, anti-victim policies have led to an increase in violent crime and a dangerous community for New York City residents,” says a press release from the House Judiciary Committee about yet another moronic Jim Jordan stunt.

Interested to see who the witnesses are, and if they aren’t Fox News contributors or GOP activists or something like that which would call their motivations for appearing into question.

“A video clip has been circulating that shows a recent meeting when a young boy asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama if he could give him a hug. His Holiness wishes to apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused. His Holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras. He regrets the incident,” says the Dalai Lama’s office in a statement.

Problem is however that, per the BBC, it wasn’t simply a “hug” that the 87 year-old Señor Lama asked for but he told the boy “suck my tongue” in public, on camera, as the kid received a blessing from the 14th reincarnation of of Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

Cops in Northern Ireland have reportedly disrupted a plot by Irish Republican dissidents to set off bombs during a visit by President Biden this week commemorating the 1998 Good Friday agreement which ended the decades-long civil conflict called “The Troubles,” Fox News reports.

“The belief is that the New IRA was planning some sort of attack to coincide with Biden’s visit, similar to the mortar attack on the cops in Strabane last November,” a source said, adding that members of the New IRA were “looking for parts to make a bomb” to set off in the city of Derry.