An estimated half a million Russians have fled their homeland after President Vladimir Putin announced in October conscriptions into the Russian military to fight his war in Ukraine, and as many 22,000 of them have made their way to America’s southern border to seek asylum, CNN reports.

This past January, more than 4,500 Russian citizens requested asylum at the US border with Mexico, significantly less than the nearly 8,000 applicants from December.  Many are people fleeing potential military conscription, while others are people who were part of the anti-war movement scared for their safety as Putin cracks down on dissent.

Federal prosecutors filed a motion to confiscate $650 from the prison commissary account of James Alex Fields Jr., the man convicted of running into a group of counterprotesters in Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer, CBS News reports, saying he owes more than $80,000 in fines and restitution, and he’s made no efforts to pay it.

The larger issue for Justice Department officials, though, is the list of donors to Fields’ fund–a list kept under seal by the judge but reported to include the names of leaders of the white nationalist movement that was protesting the removal of a statue of secessionist Robert E. Lee.  Officials say Fields has been fundraising from these people and exchanging correspondence with them, leading to more than $750 in donations given to his commissary account.

A metal alloy plant outside Cleveland exploded Monday morning, injuring more than a dozen people, including at least one critically, about two and a half weeks after a train derailment led to major chemical contamination in a small town in east Ohio, NBC News reports.

In the late morning, the I Schumann & Co. metal alloy plant in Oakwood Village exploded; as of 7 p.m. ET, firefighters had the fire under control but the plant was still on fire, the local fire chief said.  The plant was the site of a similar blast in 2006.

The husband of Los Angeles Auxillary Bishop David O’Connell’s housekeeper has been charged with the shooting death over the weekend of the Catholic cleric known as a “peacemaker” within the immigrant and poor communities, the Washington Post reports.

LA County Sheriff’s Department deputies arrested Carlos Medina, 65, who had also done handyman work around the bishop’s home in the Hacienda Heights neighborhood, about 15 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.  Medina reportedly had been acting strangely lately and saying O’Connell owed him money.

The Orange God Emperor said quite a lot of crazy shit in his speech, none of it all that new or surprising, particularly about Russia and Ukraine – check Aaron Rupar’s clip thread for more – but the one thing he signaled appears to be a possible renewed pressure campaign on Republican governors, “and that includes Florida,” to ramp up voter suppression ahead of the 2024 election.

The board of directors of the non-profit Project Veritas issued a statement outlining the reasons it suspended and ultimately fired James O’Keefe.  Among those listed:

• “$14,000 on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor
• “$60,000 in losses by putting together dance events such as Project Veritas Experience
• “Over $150,000 in Black Cars in the last 18 months
• “Thousands of dollars spent on DJ and other equipment for personal use
• “Hundreds of other acts of personal inurement.”

The board also noted that O’Keefe tried to fire the group’s Chief Financial Officer, something he didn’t have the authority to do without board approval, and he told various people that a board member approved it; that board member denies any such approval.

A fifth patient has been designated cured of HIV after he’s gone four years without a sign of the virus in his system following a stem cell transplant from a donor with an HIV-resistant mutation in their DNA, ABC News reports.

While the treatment has been successful, its widespread application is unlikely due to cost and risk to the patients.  The patient with HIV must undergo treatment to completely obliterate their immune system so that the stem cells can essentially rebuild the patient’s immunity from scratch.

The stem cell treatment is a treatment of last resort for some types of cancer, but in each of the cases for HIV patients, the donors had an HIV-resistant mutation found in just 1% of people that deletes a protein called CCR5 that the virus uses to penetrate cells, allowing it to multiple.

An internal Kremlin planning memo dating from fall 2021 leaked and obtained by Yahoo News outlines an extensively detailed plan for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s regime to take control of and eventually annex the entirety of neighboring former Soviet state Belarus by 2030.

It’s not like Belarus is all that independent from Russia now as it is, given dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s constant subservience to Putin. Contrast this with Ukraine under Zelensky, fighting valiantly against the same imperial hubris. Almost like there’s some sort of parable that applies here, that wolves don’t care whether you’re on your feet or your knees, they’ll still come for you.

There’s a very solid chance disgraced former President Trump is going to say something pretty fucking stupid or outrageous about Biden’s visit to Ukraine, so we may as well run this (supposedly )live interview with Solomon instead of having to choose a clip from it after the fact.

The New Mexico state Supreme Court last week rejected an appeal to reconsider their November ruling upholding “Cowboys for Trump” assclown Couy Griffin’s removal from his seat on the Otero County Commission under the 14th Amendment following his conviction on a misdemeanor charge over his participation in the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection, the AP reports.

“The fight is far from over,” said Griffin, the first American elected official since literally 1869 to have been removed and permanently barred from holding elected office for having engaged in an act of insurrection or rebellion against the government of the United States.

Libertarians don't have much respect for any American presidency, but we can at least respect the way some of them ended.

Happy #PresidentsDay! pic.twitter.com/JAwCw7amXc

— Libertarian Party NH (@LPNH) February 20, 2023

Florida Governor Ron “Ronnie Meatballs” DeSantis will likely not appear at dick-grabber Matt Schlapp’s fanboy convention CPAC next weekend, avoiding a possible in-person meeting and confrontation with keynote speaker fat former President Trump, the Floridian Press reports.

It’s not 100% definite yet, per a source, but DeSantis skipping CPAC would mark notable absence given both Trump and future 2024 GOP primary loser Nimrata Haley will take the stage.

A 6.3 earthquake has hit the already-ravaged region of southern Turkey and northern Syria, where two major quakes of slightly greater magnitude struck two weeks ago, killing more than 44,000 people, Al Jazeera reports.

MAGA “investigative journalist” James O’Keefe on Monday tendered his resignation to the board of Project Veritas, the propaganda outlet he founded, just under two weeks after the board placed him on leave for unspecified transgressions, possibly pissing away the organization’s funds so O’Keefe could moonlight as a stage actor in off-off-off-Broadway productions.

A cold-shocked and lethargic four foot-long alligator was pulled from the lake at the southern end of Prospect Park in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on Sunday, the New York Post reports.

Park officials, who took the beast to an animal hospital after capturing it at around 8:30 AM on Sunday, said the gator had to be an unwanted pet that grew too large and was dumped in the lake by its owner. Which is kind of the “no shit” conclusion seeing as how alligators aren’t known to swim from their native habitats in the southeast and then crawl through miles of densely populated urban landscape to in order to relocate to a muddy duck pond in the middle of winter.

Just days after US Secretary of Defense visited the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to reassure them of the US commitment to their defense as Russian and Belarusian troops undertake war games on their borders, Republican Florida Governor and guy who obviously never reads more than his horoscope in the newspaper Ron DeSantis asserted there’s no need to fear further aggression by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Well, I think it’s important to point out, I mean, y’know, the fear of kind’ve Russia, ah, going in to NATO countries and all that and steamrolling, y’know, that has not even come close to happening,” DeSantis said in with his characteristic junior high speaking style. “I think they’ve shown themselves to be a third-rate military power. Ah, I think they’ve suffered tremendous, tremendous losses. Uh, I got to think the people in Russia, ah, are probably disapproving about what’s going on–I don’t think they can speak up about it for obvious reasons–so I think Russia has been really, really wounded here, umm, and I don’t that they are the same threat to our country, even though they’re hostile, I don’t think they’re on the same level as a China.”

Cowardly weasel Kevin McCarthy has bowed to his master Tucker Carlson and given the demented Fox News host’s team exclusive access all 41,000 hours of Capitol security camera footage from January 6th to pick apart and use to “expose” whatever story he wants to make up, Axios reports.

“If there was ever a question that’s in the public’s interest to know, it’s what actually happened on January 6. By definition, this video will reveal it. It’s impossible for me to understand why any honest person would be bothered by that,” Carlson told Axios without mentioning that he also called fat former President Trump a “demonic force, a destroyer” for inciting the insurrection in a private text message to his fellow propagandists while thousands of Fox News fans were attacking the Capitol.

We need a national divorce.

We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.

Everyone I talk to says this.

From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are…

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 20, 2023

Yeah, we know we’ve had a lot of Marjorie Taylor Greene tweets lately, but when a member of Congress makes an explicit call to tear up the Constitution and dismantle the United States of America, you’d think that would lead to an automatic eviction from the House or a least a stern admonishment from the leadership of the Party and the House.

President’s Day 2023.

Zelenskyy can’t even wear a tie as he greets the President of the United States.

He gladly takes our money in sweat shirts and t-shirts, but Biden is dressed up.

So insulting.

America Last!!!

pic.twitter.com/TrRQQ2FgEF

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) February 20, 2023

Later she wrote that Biden should be impeached for not spending President’s Day in the toxic train wreck fire site in East Palestine, Ohio because Ukraine isn’t a NATO member.

President Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday, spending more than five hours in the capital meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and honoring the war dead, just shy of the one year anniversary of Russia’s murderous invasion of the country, the Associated Press reports.

The White House said the Kremlin was notified of Biden’s visit ahead of time, per CNN.