• Republicans tackling the nation’s big problems like teenage menstrual cycles and Super Bowl entertainers.  All around the world, they’re laughing at how unserious they are.
• Hannity, Carlson and Ingraham–as well as their lesser-known outrage artists on Newsmax and OAN–are simply characters created by entertainers, the way the “Stephen Colbert” character on the Colbert Report was separate from the actor.  The difference is, the actors and the audience are on different pages about the authenticity of the performer.  In these cases, the audience is not in on the joke.  
• Congrats to Rush Limbaugh on the second anniversary of being drink- and drug-free.  Some people go to great lengths to remain sober, and Limbaugh is fully committed.
• I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the identification of overflying high-altitude balloons was a problem caused by the creation of Space Force.  My guess: It’s the same old song.  The Trump Administration screwed up and never established a definitive altitude when the Air Force stops operating and Space Force takes over, and the balloons fell in that interim altitude.  

I’m not going to transcribe her comments because it’s nonsense, but the fact that Tucker Carlson, recently revealed to apparently not believe a single word he says on television, booked Tara Reade, the discredited woman who accused Joe Biden of sexual harassment on his program to discuss the Ukrainian war and how Russia is the actual victim–being bullied by NATO, you see–shows that Carlson only wants to push buttons, not report actual news or reality.

Amid growing political pressure to ask for help Ohio Gov Mike DeWine on Friday announced that FEMA officials will deploy to the small town of East Palestine, two weeks after a train derailment spilled burning toxic chemicals into the nearby environment and sickening locals, KDKA reports.

In 2002 Warner Bros released a direct-to-DVD collection of short animated films titled The Animatrix, intuitively named as the shorts were all set in universe of The Matrix films which at the time was building up hype toward the debut of the 2003 sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. Two of the shorts, The Second Renaissance Parts I and II, told the story of how mankind came to be enslaved within the series’ eponymous virtual prison world.

The person who uploaded them to YouTube split each into two parts, so click here for the second half of Part I and then here for Part II’s beginning and then here for the end if you want to keep watching. It’s not clear why the story is titled “The Second Renaissance” but like all things the Matrix you don’t need to buy into all the inscrutable Eastern mysticism-inspired psychobabble and manufactured gravitas to get something out of it (naming the killer house servant robot B166ER was actually pretty slick though). The story it tells is both terrifying and provocative on its face and it holds up pretty goddamn well two decades later, both in production value and its relevance.

In cooperation with Syrian forces, US military units staged a raid Thursday that killed Hamza al-Homsi, a senior commander in ISIS, a terrorist organization Donald Trump claimed he “100%” defeated, CNN reports.

It’s the second major elimination of an ISIS leader in less than a week by American forces:  US Central Command announced February 10th the death of Ibrahim Al Qahtani, described as “an ISIS official associated with planning ISIS detention center attacks,” locations where Syrians are holding more than 10,000 former ISIS fighters.

In the al-Homsi operation, all four soldiers and the military dog where hurt when an explosion erupted as the soldiers approached al-Homsi to potentially capture him.  Officials have not said if a booby trap was set off, if al-Homsi detonated a suicide vest, or if some other explosive caused the blast.  One soldier later returned to active duty; the other three and the dog are being treated at an Iraqi hospital, but may be moved to a facility in Germany for additional medical treatment. 47

After spending two weeks claiming he never even suggested safety net programs Social Security and Medicare should be sunsetted, one of the two bald Republican Senators named Scott released a revised version of his disastrous plan that removed the part he said didn’t exist.

The Tampa Bay Times reports Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott declared on Friday that there should be “specific exceptions for Social Security, Medicare, national security, veterans’ benefits, and other essential services” to the 5-year sunset requirements for all laws he laid out in his “Rescue America” plan on which he led the Senate electoral campaign that lost one net seat in the midterms.

Six people have been shot dead in the Mississippi town of Arkabutla, population according to the 2020 Census: 285 (now likely less).  The Associated Press reports the male suspect is in custody and officials believe he acted alone.

According to CNN, the shooter was taken into custody by Tate County deputies after shooting people in multiple locations, including a store and a nearby residence.  Two other victims were found in another nearby house, with two others found outside that house.  This would be the 72nd mass shooting in the US so far in 2023; it’s only the 48th day of the year.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation confimed that its computer system has been hacked by an outside intruder, though the hack has been contained and is now being investigated, Reuters reports.  The breach appears to have hit the FBI’s New York office, specifically a system used by law enforcement in child sexual exploitation cases.

While this case seems to involve criminals interested in or who gained access through material being investigated by the FBI, other hacking efforts have been directed at federal cyber infrastructure by foreign governments.  A 2020 attack by Russian hackers allegedly working for the Kremlin gained access to systems in multiple branches of government.

A flight from Auckland, New Zealand to New York City’s JFK airport on Friday turned around over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, eight hours into the flight, due to a power outage at the terminal which would have forced the plane itself (but not the passengers) to be stuck on the ground in NYC for several days while the schedule got fixed, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A spokesman for former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday said that FBI agents “completed a thorough and unrestricted search of Advancing American Freedom’s office for several hours and found no new documents with classified markings. One binder with approximately three previously redacted documents was taken.” The binder that was taken reportedly concerned Pence’s 2020 debate prep, so it’s not clear why the FBI would’ve taken that unless maybe they wanted to figure out what kind of men’s haircare product might accidentally attract flies.

We’re still sifting through this monster motion for summary judgment from Dominion in their defamation lawsuit against Fox News and need to get a big lowlight reel together, but this one deserves its own update: In discovery Dominion’s lawyers learned that fat former President Trump had dialed in to right wing asshole Lou Dobbs’s now-canceled Fox Business News show on the evening of January 6th, 2021 but didn’t get on air as Fox News executives blocked it.

“The afternoon of January 6, after the Capitol came under attack, then President Trump dialed into Lou Dobbs show attempting to get on air. But Fox executives vetoed that decision. Why? Not because of a lack of newsworthiness. January 6 was an important event by any measure. President Trump not only was the sitting President, he was the key figure that day. But Fox refused to allow President Trump on air that evening because it would be irresponsible to put him on the air and could impact a lot of people in a negative way. The same is true of statements Fox chose to air about Dominion. Not only did the charges severely impact Dominion and its employees, they were based on verifiable falsehoods that any accurate and disinterested reporting would have mentioned. Fox chose to spread lies instead of telling the truth. The neutral report privilege provides no comfort to Fox on these facts,” wrote Dominion’s lawyers on page 171 of the filing (but page 184 of the PDF).

Nice of them to add that in, even though it’s not something directly material to their case against Fox News. Seems like it should’ve been more of a House January 6th Select committee thing, seeing as how they published text messages between Sean Hannity and the White House from that day.

The Radical Left’s worst nightmare. 😂🇺🇸 #Trump2024 pic.twitter.com/9YySdABvFY

— Kimberly Guilfoyle (@kimguilfoyle) February 17, 2023

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s team have subpoenaed at least four current and former MAGA Arizona state lawmakers for testimony and documents relevant to disgraced former President Trump’s failed effort to overturn his loss in the state in 2020, the Arizona Mirror reports.

Federal grand jury subpoenas were issued to state Senate President Warren Petersen, state Senator Sonny Borrelli, former state Senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita, and state House Speaker Ben Toma, and possibly more, for their testimony and for records of all email and text communications with Rudy, the Kraken, Lin Wood, former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, and a lengthy list of other minions from within a period before, during, and after election day.

As Republicans push to weaken child labor safety laws in states where they have a political majority, a company that cleans and services machinery in food processing plants has been fined more $1.5 million for using children as young as 13-years-old to clean dangerous equipment, including those with blades, the Washington Post reports.

The US Department of Labor cited Packers Sanitation Services for using 102 children to spray dangerous chemicals on factory equipment, including machines with “razor sharp blades” and “head splitters”–equipment used to automatically butcher and process meat–to clean them as part of their normal business practices.

Republican legislators in states like Ohio and Iowa have introduced proposals that would lower the ages of children eligible to work, extend the hours they are eligible to work to help employers, and/or reduce the safety considerations on the jobs such children would take.  An estimated 300,000 to 500,000 children under the age of 18 work in the American agriculture industry alone, with some Republican-led states allowing employers to require children under the age of 16 to work up to 12 hour days.

.@GenDonBolduc spent his life serving our country as a combat veteran.

He is a true patriot and I am thankful for both his and Sharon’s endorsement and friendship.

Here we go New Hampshire! #FITN #LFOD pic.twitter.com/8D2nIDrobP

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 17, 2023

Are we missing something here? Not going to pretend to we’re experts on the dirtscape of quadrennial New Hampshire GOP presidential politics, so if there’s some more significance to Don Bolduc other than that he was a Trump-endorsed QAnon dipshit who managed to lose the 2022 Senate election by 9 points while the incumbent Republican governor on the same ballot won by 13 please let us know. If Bolduc is actually some monster power player in the state party who nobody fucks with and this really is a big clinch for Haley then we’ll happily issue a correction.

And sure, the simpler take could be that if GOP primary voters nominated this guy for Senate last year then his endorsement should carry weight, but probably the only reason enough of them voted for Bolduc in the 2022 Senate primary was because Trump had endorsed him. So now he just looks like a disloyal “RINO” for betraying the Orange God Emperor and Haley’s hitched her wagon to a guy who won the primary by 1.2 percent and then cost them a winnable Senate seat. Savvy genius.

Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko on Friday rushed to Moscow to personally apologize to his boss, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, a day after Lukashenko fucked up and invited US President Joe Biden to Minsk to help broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, the Daily Beast reports.

“Thank you for agreeing to come,” Putin told Lukashenko during their televised metting. “How could I not agree?” Lukashenko replied. Putin mentioned he’d seen Lukashenko’s invite to Biden during a Thursday press conference. “Of course you did… It probably upset you?” Lukashenko quivered. Putin then assured him he wasn’t upset. Publicly at least, as Lukashenko was likely dangled upside down by his ankles out of an open 12th story window for the transgression during a later private chat.

“Florida Governor DeSantis just received the kiss of death. George Soros has endorsed DeSantis for 2024. This could not be worse for DeSantis. When the devil likes you, you might be doing something wrong,” LGBT-owned and operated far right fake news site the Gateway Pundit reported Thursday.

Further down, underneath a web ad box with links reading “Urologist: Plenty of Men With An Enlarged Prostate Do Not Know About This Simple Solution” and “A Simple Trick Helps Solve Vision Problems, Throw Away Your Glasses Now!” beneath an illustration of an enlarged prostate and a stock photo of an eye, respectively, the article then quotes a story from another far right fake news site called “Conservative Tree House,” which in turn sourced from far right mostly fake news site the Washington Examiner whose reporters actually quoted Soros from an appearance at the Munich Security Conference on Wednesday. It’s not clear why the Gateway Pundit didn’t just source the Examiner or better yet find a video of Soros’s speech to quote from directly.

Anyway, Soros told the crowd in Munich he believes the Florida Governor will end up being the Republican 2024 nominee, calling Ronnie Meatball “shrewd, ruthless, and ambitious.” At no point did the Global Champion of Democracy and Honorary Founding Father of National Zero actually tell his fans that they should vote for DeSantis, making the characterization of it as an “endorsement” a stretch at best. The readers of the Gateway Pundit, with their typical perspicacity, saw the “endorsement” as sabotage. “Soros may also be trying to make sure that DeSantis doesn’t win. He’s evil, not stupid,” wrote the top commenter when sorted by “best.”

Maybe if the people of East Palestine Ohio pretend they’re Palestinians from the Middle East the Biden administration will actually pay some attention to them and send them aid.

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 17, 2023

What a mastermind of jocularity this guy is. See how he so deftly uses the common occurrence of “Palestine” in the town where that train derailed and the bottom half of the modern apartheid state of Israel to weave into an acerbic takedown of the Biden Administration? Gosh, if only we had half the comedic talent he holds in his pinky toe. We would be global social media stars like him.

And Catturd. Have you guys seen some of Catturd’s material? Just wow. The guy is brilliant. He wields his pen with such wondrous ease, slicing the RINOs and libtards to shreds with his tweets.

Two MAGA Idaho state lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a bill making it a misdemeanor offense to administer or distribute a vaccine “developed using messenger ribonucleic acid technology for use in an individual or any other mammal in this state,” meaning Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaxes, with one of them claiming the shots were never actually approved by the FDA, KTVB reports.

When a Dem state House member told one of the co-sponsors, GOP state Senator Tammy Nichols, that the vaccines have in fact already been approved by the FDA, Nichols responded by saying the process “may not have been done like we thought it should’ve been done,” whatever that means. “I think there is a lot of information that comes out with concerns to blood clots and heart issues,” Nichols added, again simply rambling without specificity as to what her fucking malfunction is.

It’s not clear if the Nichols or the other co-sponsor, state House Representative Judy Boyle, ever addressed why they only pegged the “crime” as a misdemeanor and not a capital offense. After all, if injecting a patient with an mRNA vaccine is murder, then it would be poetic justice for the person administering it to die by lethal injection. Bullshit jokes aside, it does legitimately raise the question of how serious these potato heads are. We would have to assume that by introducing the bill they mean business and it isn’t simply performative nonsense, so why not show the paranoid MAGA freaks in the voter base they mean business and at least make it a felony?

The “This ChiCom balloon attack never would have happened if Trump was still president!” bullshit two weeks ago died another death Friday as the Wall Street Journal reports that in the summer of 2020 a small circle of intel officials at the Pentagon assessed that at least three incursions of US airspace by objects they suspected then but are now certain were ChiCom spy balloons.

The assessment wasn’t conclusive and thus not shared with the Trump White House, but fuck it. The fanboys would never give Biden the benefit of the doubt, so why should we? Trump is supposed to be this omniscient superbeing always winning at 12D chess against the ChiComs, which makes this yet another catastrophic failure by his administration to protect America from its enemies.