Napoleonic Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Tuesday told a reporter the video showing empty bookshelves in a local school was fake, and that he doesn’t want to ban books and blah blah blah but hey he does actually want to ban books that indoctrinate children instead of educating them.

Obviously feeling badly about that little misunderstanding that happened last week when those Papuan separatists set a plane on fire and took its Kiwi pilot hostage deep in some godforsaken jungle, Namia Gwijangge, chief of the east Indonesian district of Nduga, who was actually there on the plane when it happened, said he was sorry about the whole thing, the AP reports.

The little mix-up occurred last week when Kiwi pilot Phil Mehrtens flew Gwijangge and four other officials to the small town of Paro to pick up a group of construction workers who had been threatened by the separatists. Immediately upon landing the rebels set the plane on fire and dragged Mehrtens away, but leaving Gwijangge and the others alone due to their Papuan ethnicity.

“Our plan to evacuate the workers angered the rebels, who responded by setting fire to the plane and seizing the pilot,” said Gwijangge. “We deeply regret this incident.” The rebels on Tuesday sent out videos of Mehrtens, claiming they would keep him safe as long as he agreed that Papua be granted independence. “Indonesia must recognize Papua is independent,” Mehrtens said in one of the videos published on Tuesday, apparently with enough enthusiasm to stay alive.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday that the last three flying objects shot down over North American airspace were commercial or otherwise benign in nature, according to assessments from the US intel community, NBC News reports.

Today, we begin to collectively heal from the horrific events which transpired, tomorrow we work.

My official statement regarding the Michigan State University shooting is below:

Fuck your thoughts and prayers. pic.twitter.com/iHCOxOmDA3

— Rep. Ranjeev Puri (@RanjeevPuri) February 14, 2023

In related news, a Michigan State student posted a video on TikTok late last night describing her experience and how this is the second mass school shooting she’s been through, as she was a student at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14th, 2012, when incel freak Adam Lanza slaughtered 20 students and six teachers before ending his own life.

Disgraced former President Trump has been talking to his minions about making changes to federal capital punishment, specifically making it gorier by reviving the use of firing squads, hangings, and even the guillotine, and televising the executions live, Rolling Stone reports on an insight into an innovative policy platform for his third campaign for a presidential popular vote loss.

Trump is reportedly even considering a new campaign video post devoted to the plan, the culmination of a long-held bloodlust. “In conversations I’d been in the room for, President Trump would explicitly say that he’d love a country that was totally an ‘eye for an eye’ – that’s a direct quote – criminal justice system, and he’d talk about how the ‘right’ way to do it is to line up criminals and drug dealers before a firing squad,” a former Trump White House official told Rolling Stone.

I. AM. RUNNING.

You heard it here first! I am officially launching my campaign to unseat Lauren Boebert and restore dignity to #CO03 representation.

We lost by a mere 546 votes in '22 — the closest race in the country — and know we can make that up in '24. pic.twitter.com/LqxO43l9f8

— Adam Frisch for CD-3 (@AdamForColorado) February 14, 2023

Now that we’re in a world where Dem challengers to obnoxious high-profile Republican incumbents regularly raise tens of millions only to get crushed by double digits, maybe the guy who has an actual track record of taking it very, very fucking close should get some more of that. Just saying.

Officials have identified the shooter who killed three and injured at least five during a shooting spree at two Michigan State University buildings as 43-year-old Anthony McRae, the Associated Press reports, noting that investigators have not identified a motive.

“We have absolutely no idea what the motive was,” said Chris Rozman, deputy chief of campus police.  Rozman said officers from MSU, local police and state law enforcement were involved in the search that ended when McRae canceled himself after being confronted by police.

Democrats in Wisconsin are not-so-secretly helping out MAGA psychopath State Assembly Representative Janel Brandtjen in her race against a marginally-less insane Republican in a primary ahead of a special election for a Milwaukee-area state senate seat, the New York Times reports.

The strategy, subject of volumes of “Dems are playing with fire!” circlejerking in the mainstream media before the 2022 midterms but very little “We were wrong, it actually fucking worked out” after the fact, consists of the standard mailers and TV ads for Brandtjen playing up her far right extremist bonafides to the GOP primary voters who love that kind of shit so much they ignore the fine print saying the advertising was paid for by Democrats. More than $166,000 has been spent for Brandtjen so far in the race, and $0 of it actually paid for by Brandtjen’s campaign.

The McCarthynflation index rose 0.5% in January, reflecting a loss of confidence in Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on his ability to control rising consumer prices, CNBC reports.

Republican campaign marketers had promised a steep decline in consumer prices, with many predicting a negative one million percent decrease once the red wave came and pro-inflation President Joe Biden was forced to resign, but McCarthynflation proved stubborn despite efforts to investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop and Twitter suppressing Americans’ First Amendment rights.

“I would put them in a pile and keep them as momentous [sic]. Nothing wrong with that, but sounds to me that the Injustice Department views these as DOCUMENTS – They are not! These people are just out looking for trouble! Should be checking Biden’s unsecured classified docs instead. How about the 1,850 Boxes sent to Delaware. That’s the mother load! Or separately, how about revealing who spied on my campaign, stuffed the ballot boxes, or paid off the FBI? That’s what people want to hear!” the twice-impeached loser ex-president continued in a second post.

Well sounds like the FBI didn’t plant any classified documents at Mar-a-Lago or he never used his brain to automatically declassify them or they weren’t subject to executive privilege or whatever.

“You don’t shoot things down over American airspace. We’ve never done that before. And we’ve done it four times in the last eight days,” Marco Rubio quoted by Punchbowl Monday.

“It was a mistake to not shoot down that Chinese spy balloon when it was over a sparsely populated area. This is not some hot air balloon, it has a large payload of sensors roughly the size of two city buses and the ability to maneuver independently,” Marco Rubio on Twitter, February 3rd.

Get excited! Time for a new generation.

Let’s do this! 👊 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/BD5k4WY1CP

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 14, 2023

Former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador Nimrata “Nikki” Haley on Tuesday officially launched her campaign to run for president for about ten months or so, telling fans to “get excited” for her to bring a fresh-ish face to the Republican 2024 primary until sometime in later this year, maybe early 2024. “I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” Haley said in her campaign launch video, signaling a person of a different ethnicity running in the GOP primary until the money runs out and the numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire make it even clearer.

Indian tax authorities raided the BBC’s offices in Mumbai and New Delhi on Monday, weeks after the network aired a documentary about autocrat Narendra Modi’s role in a 2002 pogrom in which over a thousand of Indian Muslims were slaughtered by Hindu nationalists, the New York Times reports.

Last month dozens of students at a Muslim university in New Delhi were arrested over a planned screening of India: The Modi Question, which features a British intel report blaming Modi for having encouraged the violence while serving as state minister in the western Gujarat state.

Vice Former Guy Mike Pence is planning to fight the grand jury subpoena from Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith to testify on fat former President Trump’s efforts to force him to overturn the results of the 2020 election during the January 6th, 2021 joint session, Politico reports.

Per sources, Pence’s objection isn’t on executive privilege grounds, but an argument that as president of the Senate he’s shielded from certain Justice Department demands. The big fan man-baby Trump also reportedly plans to contest the subpoena to Pence on executive privilege grounds.

One of the two bald Republican Scotts in the Senate–this one from South Carolina–has committed to participate in a presidential forum in his home state, an early bellwether for Party nominations and an event that signals his White House ambitions.

Politico reports South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott will join former Republican South Carolina Governor and Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, for “Vision ‘24,” a forum in slated for March hosted by the conservative Palmetto Family Council.

Scott’s got serious financial backing already for a presidential run:  he’s already got more than $20 million in cash in his Senatorial reelection fund–more than any other Senator–that can be used for a presidential run, plus two PACs he’s affiliated with have a combined $16 million.

UPDATE:  12:35 a.m. ET:  Police report the suspect is dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

UPDATE 11:59 p.m. ET:  Three people are dead in the shooting with five wounded, police said in an update to an earlier briefing.

Original story:  Correcting previous reports, Michigan State University police say that while five victims of an at-large shooter were taken to hospitals, some with life-threatening injuries, no fatalities have as yet been reported, according to ABC News.

MSU Police and Public Safety Interim Deputy Chief Chris Rozman said officers responded to a call of shots fired at Berkey Hall–which houses the school’s College of Social Science, the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, and the Department of Sociology–around 8:18 p.m where they found “several” victims.  Minutes later, another 9-1-1 call reported victims at the school’s student union building.

Initial reports stated that there had been at least one fatality and that the shooting was reported at a student fitness center on campus.  Police have not found or identified the shooter and continue to tell people on campus to shelter in place.

Teen girls in the United States are twice as likely as boys to experience persistent, long-term sadness, with one in three teen girls reporting that they “seriously considered” or attempted suicide, a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found, according to the New York Times.

The study also found that one in five children who identify as LGBTQ has seriously considered or attempted suicide in the previous twelve months.  The levels of sadness and suicide attempts were the highest among all teens in the past ten years, a sign that the pandemic has had significant adverse effects on the development and social interaction of children.

For both girls and LGBTQ teens, many reported feelings of despair and social isolation, with one in seven girls and one in five LGBTQ teens saying they felt coerced to have sex or they were physically forced to have sex in the previous year.

The National Suicide Prevention Hotline in the United States is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 1-800-273-8255 or 988. Please call or text if you need to talk to someone.

Expanding Democrats’ massive advantage in the state senate, New Jersey Republican Samuel Thompson announced that he was leaving the GOP to run as a Democrat in his upcoming reelection campaign because Republicans suggested another candidate for the seat after questioning the 87-year-old’s fitness for office, NBC News reports.

“The betrayal by so many of my friends — that was too much for me.  I am not leaving my Party. My Party leadership has left me,” Thompson said in an interview after Middlesex County Republican Chairman Rob Bengivenga told him he was supporting a challenger for the seat.  Thompson’s transparty move increases the Democrats’ majority in the state senate to 26 seats in the 40-seat chamber.

After the College Board thoroughly debunked his claim that he strongarmed them to change its African Studies Advanced Placement course, Republican Florida Governor and dollar store Napoleon Ron DeSantis now threatens to pull all AP courses from Florida schools in favor of a vendor that will include racial propaganda conservatives favor.  DeSantis put on an ultimately comical tough-guy performance claiming the College Board African Studies AP course was full of hatred towards white people–which DeSantis intentionally conflates with the academic study of critical race theory, only to have the College Board note that the final version of the curriculum was finalized before DeSantis held his press conferences to coddle the Republican base.  (Yes, the video is glitchy, but the audio, message and dog whistle are very clear.)

One of just eleven states that refused to expand Medicaid coverage as part of the Affordable Care Act, Mississippi has experienced a 900% increase in the number of infants born with congenital syphilis with at least one child dying of the disease, NBC News reports.

In 2016, just 10 cases of congenital syphilis in newborns were reported to state health officials; in 2021, the number of cases jumped to more than 100.  Mothers pass congenital syphilis to their children should they themselves be infected, but the disease can be stopped by treating the pregnant patient with penicillin shots within three months of giving birth.

Most prenatal maternity care treatment plans would identify and treat patients who test positive for the disease as part of their normal program, but in chronically poor Mississippi, there are few OB/GYNs or even trained pregnancy coaches staffing health care facilities to care for and educate pregnant patients.  The lack of care hits poor minority families worst:  of the cases of congenital syphilis, more than 70% have happened with Black patients, although they account for only 42% of live births in the state.