DC City Council Chair Phil Mendelson on Monday announced he was withdrawing the proposed changes to the district’s criminal code that Congress was poised to reject.

“The undersigned attorneys file this ethics complaint against Mr. Stefan C. Passantino, a member of the Bar of the District of Columbia and former member of President Donald J. Trump’s Office of White House Counsel. In that capacity, Mr. Passantino was charged with overseeing compliance and ethics, policing conflicts of interest, and approving and enforcing ethics requirements.”

“In August 2018, Mr. Passantino left the White House and joined the law firm of Michael, Best & Friedrich LLP and worked from the firm’s office in Washington, D.C. While there, he represented Ms. Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, in connection with her testimony before and interactions with the House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol (‘the Committee’). We file this complaint because the testimony Ms. Hutchinson provided to the Committee, and other publicly available information, reveal numerous serious ethical breaches by Mr. Passantino,” says the intro to a 22 page complaint filed to the DC Bar by Lawyers Defending American Democracy on Monday.

The group also filed complaints against Passantino the Bars in New York and Georgia over the same attempted tampering of Hutchinson’s testimony in 2022. This would be Lawyers Defending American Democracy’s third potentially successful takedown of a MAGA lawyer as fascist shitbag John Eastman and failed Trump Justice Department palace coup plotter former Acting Associate AG Jeffrey Clark both now face possible disbarment after the group filed complaints against them.

BidenCash criminal market releases over 2M credit card numbers free for the taking https://t.co/Wxq5k4QvJz

— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 6, 2023

FoxNews.com reporters on Monday gifted dark web stolen credit card repository “Biden Cash” with a significant boost in brand awareness as the probably Russian-backed cybercriminal organization celebrated one year in business of trafficking in illicitly-obtained personal financial data. The report at least leaves it ambiguous as to whether the use of the Biden’s name and likeness for the site’s branding was authorized by his campaign, instead relying on the reader to grasp an otherwise unsubtle implication of “Biden soft on cybercrime! Biden coming for your wallet! Biden bad!”

“Biden Cash” follows “Trump University,” “Trump Airlines,” “Trump Taj Mahal,” “Trump Tower,” and other entities in a rich tradition of fraudulent concerns named for a US President. The several known incarnations of “Obama Fried Chicken” were legitimate but racially-coded establishments.

The FBI on Sunday announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the safe return of four American citizens kidnapped in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, just after they had crossed the border from the Brownsville, Texas in a white minivan with North Carolina plates on Friday, ABC News reports.

“Shortly after crossing into Mexico, unidentified gunmen shot the passengers of the vehicle. The gunmen herded the four US citizens into another vehicle and fled the scene with them,” said the US Embassy in Mexico in a statement. The identities of the Americans were not made public.

“The Russian military has continued to respond to heavy armoured vehicle losses by deploying 60-year-old T-62 main battle tanks (MBT). There is a realistic possibility that even units of the 1st Guards Tank Army (1 GTA), supposedly Russia’s premier tank force, will be re-equipped with T-62s to make up for previous losses. 1 GTA had previously been due to receive the next-generation T-14 Armata MBT from 2021. In recent days, Russian BTR-50 armoured personnel carriers, first fielded in 1954, have also been identified deployed in Ukraine for the first time.”

“Since summer 2022, approximately 800 T-62s have been taken from storage and some have received upgraded sighting systems which will highly likely improve their effectiveness at night. However, both these vintage vehicle types will present many vulnerabilities on the modern battlefield, including the absence of modern explosive reactive armour,” says a UK Intel Assessment.

Although Donald Trump has been permitted to use Twitter since oligarch Elon Musk reinstated him last November, he’s resisted the urge to tweet on the popular platform, choosing to use his struggling Tooth Decal Truck Recall Truth Social, that hasn’t stopped him from cleaning up some old, messy posts, like the one where he claimed Mike Pence wasn’t courageous enough to overturn the 2020 election.  Which, incidentally, Trump deleted sometime Sunday.  The TrumpTwitterArchive, which actually archived all Trump tweets in a searchable fashion, notes the above tweet–which we had screenshotted–is gone.

If he had actually read the New York Times reporting on the proposed Georgia laws that could end up leaving Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis vulnerable to removal by the state legislature then he would know that no action would come in time to prevent him from being indicted or even facing trial. “If the proposals the legislature is considering are successful, the new oversight commission could be in place by early next year. If Mr Trump were to be indicted, experts say his case would not necessarily be resolved by then,” it says. Not very boldly, fairly, or fast.

“I am so sick of things like this. We do still have Freedom of Speech. That freedom doesn’t have stipulations that everyone has to like what you say or agree with it. We are allowing that freedom to disappear every time this happens” – The current top comment on the Fox News article “Texas Tech suspends men’s basketball coach Mark Adams for ‘racially insensitive comment’ toward player.”

It’s not clear exactly what Adams said, but according to the school he referenced some Bible verse on “slaves serving their masters” to a player – presumably Black – while trying to get that player “to be more receptive to coaching.” So it was probably pretty insensitive if not actually straight up racist. The kind of thing that the freedom to say while making probably high six figures coaching a nationally-competitive Division I men’s college basketball program is disappearing.

Asked by Chuck Todd how Fox News is supposed to regain trust with viewers after their deliberate lying was exposed by the Dominion lawsuit, supposedly “moderate” Republican New Hampshire Governor Chis Sununu said “Oh, I don’t think it’s just Fox. I’ll put them in there, but all of media, all of television media, everyone has to own a little bit of the lack of trust,” and so on and so forth.

Sununu also told Chuck Todd he would “support the Republican nominee” when asked if he would support fat former President Trump should he win the 2024 GOP primary. Wasn’t this guy supposed to be the voice of the new generation of the GOP or some sort of MSM bullshit like that?

During an interview on Fox News Sunday formerly fat former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on basically called his former boss, fat former President Trump, a “RINO” in response to a question from anchor Martha MacCallum about the federal deficit. “Would a President Pompeo do a better job managing the deficit and debt than a President Trump did?” asked MacCallum, to which Pompeo blah blah blahed saying he would do a better job at managing it than all prior presidents.

MacCallum then asked Pompeo if he was saying “President Trump wasn’t a true conservative.” Pompeo simply said “$6 trillion more in debt” and left it there. Someone’s in trouble on Truth Social.

The idea that bloggers criticizing a politician should register with the government is insane. it is an embarrassment that it is a Republican state legislator in Florida who introduced a bill to that effect. He should withdraw it immediately.

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) March 5, 2023

Whoa. Newt Gingrich is the voice of reason against the DeSantis regime’s proposed crackdown on a free press – if only probably because he realizes that doing so would create a permission structure for New York or California to require the same of MAGA bloggers in those states? Color us marginally impressed that this life-long scumbag would publicly voice such a fucking obvious conclusion and invite all the rote “Welcome to the resistance” sarcasm this token tweet deserves.

Leaked audio of a November 16, 2020 Zoom call obtained by the New York Times reveals Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and other execs and anchors lamenting the infamous early Arizona call for Biden which threw fat then-President Trump’s election night plans to declare victory prematurely into turmoil and set off a temporary exodus of viewers from the right wing propaganda network.

“Listen, it’s one of the sad realities: If we hadn’t called Arizona, those three or four days following Election Day, our ratings would have been bigger. The mystery would have been still hanging out there,” said Scott as the execs mulled letting viewer sensitivity override the realities projected by the network’s sophisticated decision desk system they had used since 2012. “In a Trump environment, the game is just very, very different,” added Fox anchor Martha MacCallum.

Republican former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan avoided a crushing defeat in the 2024 GOP presidential primary on Sunday by announcing he won’t run for the nomination, CNN reports

“I have long said that I care more about ensuring a future for the Republican Party than securing my own future in the Republican Party. That is why I will not be seeking the Republican nomination for president,” Hogan tweeted as he snatched non-participation from the jaws of defeat.

When asked on a recent phone call by Donald Trump to endorse him in the 2024 Republican primary for president, former Trump White House spokesliar and current Republican Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined, according to a report by the New York Times.

The lack of renewed support for his fourth White House run isn’t limited to a woman who once called Trump’s migrant family separation policy “very biblical” even though hundreds of children have still not been reunited with their parents.  Major conservative advocacy group The Club for Growth appears to have moved on from Trump:  its board of directors just held a unanimous vote of confidence for David McIntosh, who has been in a public feud with Trump, after McIntosh did not invite Trump to a donor retreat just south of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago unauthorized document storage facility.  McIntosh invited Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis instead.

Russian units have taken territory in the suburbs of the strategic Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, in the Donbas region, with Russian “regular army” units and forces from the mercenary Wagner Group attacking defenders, the BBC reports.

According to a British military assessment, the Ukrainian military is sending elite units of its military to the region to defend the city, the first target in an expected Russian push to gain ground as its ineffective winter offense grinds on.  The city, which had a pre-invasion population of 70,000 people, was attacked multiple times from multiple directions, according to the Ukrainian military, but the defenders held their positions.

The suspect in attacks on two power transformers in Santa Clara County, California in December 2022 and January had explosives at his home when police searched it after his arrest Wednesday, KGO ABC-7 San Francisco reports.

Officials say 36-year-old San Jose resident Peter Karasev planted explosives at two Bay Area transformers, resulting in outages to thousands of customers each time.  He has been charged with multiple charges, including two counts of exploding a destructive device, and two counts of destroying an electrical line.

Police also found a meth lab in the home, calling it “inactive;” Karasev said he used meth when he couldn’t get Adderall.   Officials in hazmat outfits had to wait until the police bomb disposal unit cleared the house before going in and removing the meth lab.

Medellin cartel leader Pablo Escobar’s legacy continues to negatively impact his home country thirty years after his death, as the nation deals with a bloat of hippos spawned by four animals the drug kingpin imported for his private zoo in the 1980s, CNN reports.

Colombia is shipping 60 hippos to India and ten to Mexico from the 140-160 hippos that inhabit the rivers around Medellin, the descendants of the one male and three females Escobar obtained.  The bloat has become a tourist attraction in the region, so the Colombian government opted to keep a number of animals rather than translocated the entire group or euthanize the hippos.

The reason the animals are being sent to India and Mexico, where they are not native species, and not back to Africa, the species’ native habitat, is to prevent the migration of pathogens the Colombian hippos may carry to the place of origin, where they could devastate the native bloats.  Officials in all three countries–India, Mexico and Colombia–will undertake efforts to study how to control the reproduction of the animals so they don’t become an invasive species.

Oklahoma businesses are readying for a boost from Texans fleeing the stresses of an authoritarian government in their home state as the legislature readies a ballot amendment to legalize recreational kush sales in the Sooner State, the Associated Press reports.

Conservative Oklahoma, where it’s still a fine-able offense to swear in public, made medical cannabis use legal in 2018, which has created a saturated market in the state, where cannabis is widely used.  A ballot initiative this Tuesday will let voters decide the recreational use issue, which observers believe will pass.

Because Texas doesn’t allow gambling outside three Native American-run locations, Texans regularly travel to Oklahoma for high-end casinos at border towns.  Those towns are now readying for cannabis tourism.  Frightened by its continued loss of sinful revenue to neighboring states, Texas is considering a November ballot initiative of its own that would increase the number of casino licenses and open them to commercial enterprises.

https://youtu.be/ixHF-UNQXdQ

It’s day three of CPAC 2023 and here comes twice-impeached disgraced former President Trump’s big campaign speech and straw poll to his loyal cult! Should be a hell of an embarrassment!

The Texas Republican Party on Saturday voted to censure censure Congressman Tony Gonzales over his support for new gun safety measures in the wake of the Uvalde massacre which killed 21 students and teachers at an elementary school in Gonzales’s district, Axios reports.

Unlike with most of the other stupid, circlejerky censures in recent years by various state and local Republican Parties – such as the Arizona GOP’s censure of Cindy McCain and the Alaska GOP’s for Moscow Mitch – this one will have actual consequences for Gonzales as it formally empowers the state party to endorse a primary challenger to punish the “RINO” for defying their death cult beliefs.

UPDATE 3/4/2023 3:11 PM EST: Updated article from “probably will censure” to “did censure.”