Republican Wyoming Senator and physician John Barrasso told CNN’s Manu Raju he hasn’t heard back from the El Tortugo Grande after texting him to check in Thursday morning following the tumble he took down the stairs at Trump’s former and current Waldorf Astoria hotel on Wednesday night.

Thursday is the second hearing for spandex-wearing grapple freak Congressman Jim Jordan’s lame “Weaponization” select subcommittee investigation into how everything’s so unfair against MAGA.

On deck as “expert” witnesses are douchebag bloggers Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testifying on the “Twitter Files” bullshit story most people forgot about amid real news happening.

Far right former Trump Administration Acting Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli announced Thursday he’s forming a PAC backing Ron DeSantis in the 2024 primary, the New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher reports on a stinging betrayal of the Orange God Emperor.

“I have been speaking to many grassroots conservative activists around the country who are very enthusiastic for Governor DeSantis to run for President in 2024. The energy is there, grassroots conservatives see the Governor as a leader and a fighter with a winning conservative track record who will lead the Republican Party to victory in 2024. Based on those conversations, I am most confident that we will build an unmatched grassroots political army for Governor DeSantis to help carry him to the White House,” said Cuccinelli in a press release celebrating his new scam.

The politically-motivated Left failed miserably in their attempt to destroy me. They’re now trying to falsely discredit me by saying I admitted I lied.

That is FALSE. I would NEVER lie. Lying requires INTENTIONALLY making a false statement.

I never did that, nor did I stipulate…

— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) March 9, 2023

Ellis’s long and boring explanation includes no mention that she signed an affidavit admitting that her “misconduct caused actual harm by undermining the American public’s confidence in the
presidential election” and was in a “reckless” mental state while she and Rudy went on their failed crusade to overturn the results of the 2020 election. She admitted it, end of story.

Republican Tennessee Lt Gov Randy McNally got pretty hot for a 20 year-old gay man’s nearly nude Instagram photos in comments that surfaced this week, writing “you can turn a rainy day into rainbows and sunshine!” on a pic of the young man’s ass and “great picture! Best wishes for continued health and happiness,” on another when the guy wasn’t wearing undies, WKRN reports.

The man, identified by WKRN as only “Franklyn,” told the channel McNally had friended him on Facebook in 2020. “To me, I’m not a stranger to compliments, so I don’t really read into them because I just think that’s wrong to assume somebody’s hitting on you just because they’re nice to you,” Franklyn said. “He did not say he wanted to date me or have sex or anything like that.” Franklyn however did have some choice words about recent anti-LGBT bills passed by the state’s MAGA regime. “I just hope that he knows I love him and LGBTQ+ loves him and would love him even more if he would open his heart and treat everyone else the way he wants to be treated because the way I want to be treated is to be accepted and be able to be myself and not be taken to police.”

McNally’s office skipped the usual go-to of “my account was hacked,” instead saying “Trying to imply something sinister or inappropriate about a great-grandfather’s use of social media says more about the mind of the left-wing operative making the implication than it does about Randy McNally. As anyone in Tennessee politics knows, Lt. Governor McNally is a prolific social media commenter. He takes great pains to view every post he can and frequently posts encouraging things to many of his followers. Does he always use the proper emoji at the proper time? Maybe not. But he enjoys interacting with constituents and Tennesseans of all religions, backgrounds and orientations on social media. He has no intention of stopping” in a statement to WKRN.

Footage only recently surfaced in the case against Capitol rioter Richard Avirett revealed that a number of insurrectionists entered and trashed the office of Republican Idaho Senator Jim Risch during the MAGA rampage, something which Risch would not acknowledge to NBC News this week.

“I don’t do interviews on Jan. 6, but thanks,” Risch said to a reported asking for comment on the newly released footage. “Thanks for asking,” he added when asked again, probably knowing full well that simply acknowledging that he was targeted by the kind of assholes who voted for him could be the top of a slippery slope that ends with him being primaried by some MAGA psychopath.

Holy shit. Yeah, this is real. From an Axios “exclusive” on the twice-impeached former president’s upcoming book “Letters To Trump,” which features 150 private letters sent to him from 40+ years of his disgraceful business and political careers, including from Oprah Winfrey, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Princess Diana, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Mario Cuomo, Arnold Palmer, Jay Leno, Liza Minnelli, Regis Philbin and other personalities. Trump’s in-house “Winning Team Publishing” is selling the book for $99, or $399 for a signed copy.

Politico legal correspondent Josh Gerstein questions whether the book can be published at all, citing the “JD Salinger case holding that copyright in letters rests with writer not recipient.”

Rivers Edge, Pennsylvania volunteer firefighter Gisele Fetterman was spotted in gear at the scene of a three-alarm fire in East Pittsburgh early Tuesday, People Magazine reports. It’s not clear if Fetterman – wife of Senator John Fetterman – actually entered the building while it was ablaze, but showing up at all early on a Tuesday is more than we can say of other male Senators’ wives.

Especially South Carolina Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott. They don’t have wives.

Fox News on Wednesday tried to breathe new life into the Biden documents “scandal” by reporting that in early November 2022 a Biden attorney named Patrick Moore had given nine boxes of files dating from the Obama Administration to the National Archives for review after the original discovery of classified documents at Biden’s office at the Penn Center think tank in DC.

Missing from the Fox News report is anything about these documents being classified – which is probably why no mainstream media outlets appear to have picked this up. It’s not even on The Hill. Only Fox, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail have covered it as of 6:21 AM on Thursday. Nobody else cares at this point, hence the all caps screaming and calling a federal prosecutor a Nazi. The icing on the cake is Trump’s reliance on a network he’s not happy with at all these days.

Cops in Malaysia on Thursday arrested former Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin on corruption charges over alleged abuse and money laundering linked to government contracts, the AP reports.

Muhyiddin’s far right Islamic opposition fanboys were naturally enraged by the arrest, calling it politically motivated as it comes ahead of state elections. Current Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said they should stop bitching and just deal with it. “If you said all cases are politically motivated, then how are we going to arrest people for big corruption cases?” said Anwar.

Japanese lawmaker Yoshikazu Higashitani, aka “GaaSyy,” faces expulsion from his seat in the upper House of Councillors of the Japanese Diet after failing to show up to work and apologize to the for fucking off to the United Arab Emirates for the past seven months, Kyodo News reports.

Higashitani, an entertainment news YouTuber who goes by “GaaSyy,” was elected last June to the seat under the single-issue “NHK Party,” a party that despite its name hates Japanese public broadcaster NHK. Higashitani stopped showing up to work the next month and returned to his home in the UAE amid questions he ripped off voters by promising them a meeting with K-Pop group BTS.

The Republic of Georgia’s ruling Dream Party on Thursday caved after days of violent street protests and withdrew a Russian and DeSantis-style bill requiring nongovernmental groups and independent media outlets to register as “foreign agents,” the Washington Post reports.

NBC News reports Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized after falling at a private dinner being held at a Washington hotel Wednesday night.

“This evening, Leader McConnell tripped at a local hotel during a private dinner. He has been admitted to the hospital where he is receiving treatment,” a spokesman for the 81-year-old Senator for Kentucky said.  Additional details of his condition were unavailable.

Large-scale Russian missile attacks have been reported around Ukraine, appearing to target residential buildings and infrastructure, knocking power out to tens of thousands of people, the BBC reports.

In the port city of Odessa, a “mass missile” attack struck a power station, knocking out electricity to much of the city.  Other strikes were reported in the western, central and northern areas of the country.

The Michigan state House of Representatives voted Wednesday to repeal the state’s anti-union “right to work” law which prevented unions from collecting service fees from non-union workers who benefited from union negotiations and oversight, the Detroit Free-Press reports.

With new majorities in both chambers of the legislature, won during the midterm elections, and Democrat Gretchen Whitmer in the governor’s chair, Democrats are rolling back many of the anti-labor laws put in place by the Republicans over the past decade. “It has done nothing but hurt hardworking Michiganders,” Democratic legislator Regina Weiss, the bill’s primary sponsor, said. “It has allowed people who don’t pay union dues to take advantage of union benefits.”

Giuliani digestive aroma connoisseur and one of the few lawyers Donald Trump apparently paid Jenna Ellis was censured by a Colorado judge Wednesday for making multiple “misrepresentations” regarding the 2020 elections that constituted misconduct, Colorado Newsline reports.

Among the ten false statements Ellis was accused of making was one on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show on November 20th, 2020:  “We have affidavits from witnesses, we have voter intimidation, we have the ballots that were manipulated, we have all kinds of statistics that show that this was a coordinated effort in all of these states to transfer votes either from Trump to Biden, to manipulate the ballots, to count them in secret.”  That was, and continues to be, a lie.

Conservative astroturf organization FreedomWorks has laid off 40% of its staff Tuesday as the advocacy group struggles to find donors after a disappointing midterm performance, with 20 of the group’s 50 employees, including executive vice president Noah Wall, let go, Politico reports.

“It’s heartbreaking but we have to learn the lessons from what went wrong in 2022 and we can’t pretend that there weren’t systematic problems to miss that red wave,” FreedomWorks president Adam Brandon said.  The cuts came mainly through the group’s Regulatory Action Center, which tried to bully legislators to cut regulations, and the social media outreach department saw the biggest cuts, with Brandon saying the group’s social media outreach was less effective because of new algorithms used by the media companies.

Fearful of setting a precedent that could lead to future accusations against American soldiers, the Pentagon is blocking a move by the Biden Administration to share evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the New York Times reports.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, has been investigating multiple allegations of war crimes conducted by Russian soldiers and mercenaries in overtaken Ukrainian territories.  Sources within the US intel and diplomatic communities report the US has information that supports those charges currently under investigation.  The final decision will fall to President Biden who, as Donald Trump would declare, as complete and utter authority to declassify anything he wants ’cause he’s President.

Officials say a group of ten to twelve men attempted to steal $32 million being off-loaded from a plane at a Chilean airport, coming in with guns blazing but turned back after security guards fought back with overwhelming firepower, Al Jazeera reports.

As crews at Arturo Merino Benitez International Airport in the capital of Santiago were unloading the cash from a LATAM airline jet, which arrived from Miami, the robbers drove onto the scene.  Guards from the armored car company and from airport security countered the attack before the robbers could get the cash.

The attempt is not without precedent:  robberies in 2017 and 2020 saw $18 million and $15 million, respectively, stolen from the same airport using similar tactics.

A measure Matt Gaetz demanded to be brought to the House floor for a vote as part of his deal to buy his support for Kevin McCarthy’s speakership was defeated in a huge bipartisan slap in the face to the nihilistic conservatives.  Roll Call reports the measure that would force President Joe Biden to withdraw all US troops from Syria within 180 days was defeated by a 103-321 vote.

“If Joe Biden wants to keep us in Syria’s war, then he must explain to the American people why, what the goal is, and what winning looks like,” Gaetz said on the floor in an attempt to rally support. “America First means actually putting the people of our country first — not the interests of the Military Industrial Complex.”

A group of around 900 US military, mainly Special Forces, are located in northern Syria to support operations a group of Kurdish, Arab and other tribal groups called the Syrian Democratic Forces fighting local ISIS groups.