Praised by American conservative leaders for his toughness, Russian President Vladimir Putin has grabbed onto another favorite pastime of the US Republican Party:  deficit spending.  Thanks to continuing stress brought on by sanctions and boycotts of its petroleum products by the European Union and other countries, Russia’s federal tax revenue from its top import was nearly cut in half in January, a rough start to the year for the nation’s economy, Reuters reports.

Russia counts on about 9 trillion rubles (roughly $130 billion) in annual tax revenue from its petroleum and natural gas industry to fund its government; Russia’s overall GDP in 2021 was $1.8 trillion.  Russia collected just over 400 billion rubles in gas tax revenues in January, well below the previous year and economic predictions.  EU sanctions, including a cap on prices paid for Russian products including gas, designed to cripple Russia’s ability to continue its invasion of Ukraine.

Moron House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer got annoyed Tuesday morning when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked why he thought there might have been bioweapons on the ChiCom spy balloon.

Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Jerome Powell on Tuesday said he sees inflation going down like it was a 200 ft wide ChiCom spy balloon getting blasted out of the sky by an F-16, the AP reports.

“These are the very early stages of disinflation. It has a long way to go,” Powell said, while not actually making any stupid puns comparing economic inflation to that of the ChiCom balloon.

This one’s gotta be burning Donald up pretty badly if he can’t just let it go and move on to something else to get worked up about. The problem here is that the pre-2021 balloon sightings were detailed in an April 2022 report from the Air Force, long before this new ChiCom balloon shitshow and Trump can’t bury it like he did other shit while he was in office. Or Sharpie over his fuckups.

Brazilian federal police on Tuesday arrested the military police commander who had been responsible for overseeing security in the capital city of Brasilia on the day thousands of fans of defeated far right former President Jair Bolsonaro rampaged through the country’s congress, supreme court, presidential palace, and other important buildings last month, Reuters reports.

Colonel Jorge Eduardo Naime is just the latest in a string of suspected pro-Bolsonaro traitors who either overtly or by inaction allowed the mayhem to be wrought on the capital by the angry sore losers just over a week after returning leftist President Luiz Lula had been sworn in.

Ukrainian officials on Tuesday released what they said drone footage of Russian Wagner Group mercenaries dragging their wounded commander away from the action near Bakhmut in the Donbas and then beating the absolute shit out of him with shovels, the Guardian reports.

Hosting some sort of dystopian “TRUTH” roundtable on Tuesday, deeply uncharismatic Florida Governor Ron DeSantis brought on Libby Locke, an attorney he called “an extraordinaire when it comes to first amendment defamation.” What DeSantis left apparently left out is that Locke is currently representing Dominion Voting Systems in their defamation lawsuits against Mike Lindell, Rudy Giuliani the Kraken, the Murdochs, Newsmax, OANN, and others over their 2020 election conspiracy bullshit, possibly portending a massive uproar among the Trump faithful.

DeSantis hosting Dominion lawyer Libby Locke! He is showing his true colors! https://t.co/5ICPghzj0J

— Mike Lindell (@realMikeLindell) February 7, 2023

Another guest is that smug little MAGA hat prick, Nick Sandmann, with apparently the whole point being the new momentum for a platform to make it easier to sue media outlets for defamation, which is certainly what Dominion is paying Locke to do. But don’t let that stop the Trump fanboys from making this into a grave insult to the MAGA reich by DeSantis. By all means, give him hell, boys.

Texas state Senate Business and Commerce Committee Chair Charles Schwertner (R-Georgetown) was still in Travis County jail as of 8:34 AM CST on Tuesday morning, six hours after he was arrested and booked at 2:12 AM CST on a charge of driving while intoxicated, the Texas Tribune reports, adding there’s a little over two hours left before Schwertner is due to preside over an important hearing on the state’s electrical grid, currently struggling yet again due to recent ice storms.

“A Florida woman who was driving an old, repurposed school bus is in custody after a pursuit with St Tammany Parish Sheriff’s deputies Tuesday (Feb 7) morning. Just before 6 a.m. Tuesday, STPSO deputies received a call from employees of a gas station in the 2200 block of Florida Street in Mandeville after a woman came into the store carrying a blowtorch and said she was looking for the local Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) Office. She was driving a school bus covered in graffiti. The bus had a Virginia license plate. STPSO Deputies located the bus on US Highway 190 near Wal-mart and a pursuit ensued and continued into downtown Covington, where the driver crashed the bus into a fence at St Scholastica Academy.”

“The driver, Jarvis Natalie Jade (DOB 10/14/1985) was taken into custody. It is believed she has been living in the bus at a local state for the past month. Last month, a male that was also believed to have been living in the bus with Jade was arrested on domestic abuse charges at the state park. There were no other occupants on the bus at the time, and the blow torch was recovered from inside the bus. Covington Police Department assisted with the pursuit, and Fire District 4 assisted at the gas station on Florida Street. The incident is still under investigation and felony charges are pending,” says a Tuesday press release from the St Tammany Parish, Louisiana Sheriff’s office.

The sheriff’s report doesn’t mention it, but photos of the crash scene show the bus had “SEX TRAFFICKING AWARENESS” painted on the side of it, so given that and the blowtorch in the gas station, we’re comfortable calling this a QAnon-related incident.

Free speech crusader Elon Musk suspended the official public Twitter account of Republican Montana Senator Steve Daines on Tuesday, apparently over Daines’s profile picture of he and his wife posing with a mountain goat or some kind of ungulate they had shot while out hunting.

“Violating our rules against graphic violence or adult content in profile images. You may not include graphic violence or adult content in your profile photo or profile header image. We consider graphic violence to be any form of gory media related to death, serious injury, violence, or surgical procedures. We consider adult content to be any media that is pornographic and/or may be intended to cause sexual arousal,” said the message to Daines on the suspension. The block appears to be one of those hostage situations where Daines will have to acknowledge the violation and change the profile pic before being allowed back on, rather than a permanent ban.

When Biden starts talking about unity at the SOTU just remember he’s also putting up fencing around The Capitol because that’s how he really feels about the citizens he’s supposed to represent. What a joke. pic.twitter.com/0A2VII6dGh

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 7, 2023

Right wing “influencer” Donald Trump Jr was plainly frustrated and annoyed Tuesday over fencing temporarily erected around the Capitol to prevent another January 6th-style attack by MAGA marauders during the State of The Union address and attempted to frame it as an act of cowardice.

Naturally Don Jr did not mention, and – let’s be honest – is almost certainly unaware as he doesn’t read up on such things, the decision to erect the fencing was not made by Joe Biden, but the three-member Capitol Police Board, who voted 2-1 in favor of it. The lone “no” vote was by Kevin McCarthy’s newly-appointed House Sergeant at Arms, William McFarland. The two yeses were the Capitol Architect Brett Blanton and the Senate Sergeant at Arms Karen Gibson.

The official death toll from a series of massive earthquakes in southern Turkey that also shook neighboring Syria on Monday rose past 5,000 with still thousands more trapped under rubble from collapsed buildings and aftershocks continuing into Tuesday, CBS News reports.

OPINION: Jill Biden for president? It's more real than you think https://t.co/KQM1hz3N3k

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 7, 2023

No, he didn’t shoot another guy (that we know of).  The man then-Vice President and eternal Lord of the Underworld Dick Cheney shot in the face while quail hunting in Texas in 2006, Harry Whittington, has died Saturday at the age of 95, Politico reports.  According to unconfirmed reports by this reporter, he supposedly apologized for any inconvenience his death may cause the former Veep.

While at a recreational killing site in Texas, Whittington jumped unexpectedly in front of Cheney’s shotgun barrel as Cheney fired at fleeing birds, peppering Whittington with birdshot in his face, arms and chest.  Or so the official story was.  We’re really never going to know exactly what happened because the local Texas lawmen weren’t allowed to interview Cheney for more than 24 hours after the shooting was reported, perhaps because the cantankerous warmonger had to sober up.

For his trouble and large amounts of donations, Whittington received a lifetime of scars… and a heart attack a few days after the shooting as a pellet migrated through his chest.  After all that, Whittington apologized to Cheney.  (Yeah, you read that right:  the buckshot recipient apologized to the buckshooter.)   “My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this week.”

Representatives and Senators invite guests to the State of the Union address with an eye on messaging, as do presidents.  Some–like civil rights leaders and heroic public servants–are meant to inspire.  Others, like now-dead conservative talk show hosts, are meant to inflame.  According to Roll Call, here are some of the guests in the gallery scheduled for Tuesday’s speech:

• Roya Rahmani, Afghanistan’s first female ambassador to the United States, guest of Texas Republican Congressman and Foreign Affairs Committee chair Mike McCaul.
• Michael Brown Sr., the guest of Missouri Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush, is the father of Michael Brown Jr., killed by a police officer in 2015 and an early impetus for the Black Lives Matter movement.
• Democratic Senator Edward J. Markey invited abortion rights activist Kate Dineen who had to travel from Massachusetts to Maryland to obtain an abortion after her child suffered a debilitating stroke in utero at 33 weeks. 
  Read More ▶ “So who ya bringing? Some of the guests members of Congress invited to Tuesday’s State of the Union address”

Welp, George Santos is caught in another lie:  Via MSNBC, WNBC in New York reports that after a thorough search of police records dating from January 2019, only one report contains any record of Santos–or Anthony Devolder.  And that record was from a 2021 incident where he claimed his neighbor threw garbage at him–and missed.  (The merits of that complaint are unknown.)

Santos has claimed at various times that he was once mugged in broad daylight in Manhattan and the mugger took…. his shoes.  (According to MSNBC’s reporting, no police record reflects a mugging where shoes were stolen from the victim’s feet.). He also claimed that he was the target of an assassination attempt.

Now the former one might be dismissed as unreported because of the jaded “Well, the police won’t do anything” attitude, but an assassination attempt?  First, someone had to thwart the assassination attempt otherwise it would have been an assassination.  Second, someone, presumably law enforcement, would have had to tell Santos about it.  And third, it’s George Santos.  Santos also claimed that he had a “police escort” due to the threats.  You guessed it:  the NYPD could find no record of any such detail.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the DC Federal District Court, hearing a criminal case about anti-choice activists blocking access to an abortion clinic on Monday, questioned whether the Supreme Court’s controversial Dobbs decision addressed all Constitutional rights for abortion, leading to the possibility of a challenge to re-assert the right, Politico reports.

A Clinton appointee, Kollar-Kotelly told lawyers to prepare arguments concerning the possibility that Dobbs only addressed the legal arguments against abortion as raised in Roe v. Wade, but failed to fully revoke the right to choose because the right is included in other parts of the Constitution, specifically in Kollar-Kotelly’s view in the 13th Amendment.

The question is addressable by this court because one of the defendants claims an included conspiracy charge is now moot because the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision removed the Constitution right to an abortion.  “There is no longer a federal constitutional interest to protect, and Congress lacks jurisdiction,” the defendant’s attorneys wrote in their motion to dismiss the charge. “The Dobbs court did not indicate that there is no longer a constitutional right to abortion; the court has made clear there never was.”

A report written by the Air Force in April 2022 described the flight of a Chinese balloon that circumnavigated the globe, floating by the Hawaiian islands and transiting Florida in 2019 without any alarm raised by the Trump Administration, CNN reports.  The existence of a report from that era shows the American national security apparatus was aware of the Chinese balloon program prior to this month’s intrusion into US airspace.

The report was part of an intelligence assessment of Chinese intelligence capability, parts of which were provided to CNN.  The assessment notes that China was developing a balloon program that could operate between altitudes of 65,000 and 350,000 feet, the edge of space (or actual space, depending on what definition you use).  The 2019 circumnavigation of the globe reportedly was done largely around 65,000 feet.

For a conservative who says he couldn’t care less about Hollywood and celebrities and the arts because it’s all run by Liberal Elites (which is not the name of the top R&B band in Sewell County, Kansas), Fox host and prep school Latin teacher all the girls find creepy Tucker Carlson apparently hate-watches an awful lot of awards shows to find out who’s popular, like English pop star Sam Smith, who’s everything Carlson hates:  Gay, genderqueer, popular and talented.  Smith’s over-the-top performance infuriates (and likely titillated) Carlson, a fact you can tell by the amount of his girlish laughter. “Tonight’s transgender Satanism brought to you by Pfizer.  [Laugh] Inject it into your bodies!  [Chortle],” Carlson emotes after his guest’s voice breaks into something out of the Land of Misfit Toys.

Soon, humans will be superfluous even for conversations:  Google has announced its challenger to the groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot tool introduced by OpenAI late last year, CNN reports.

Called “Bard,” Google’s version will also be able to assemble credible dialogue and idea formation based on the available information it compiles and analyzes.  Google made Bard a priority after ChatGPT received widespread praise for its ability to create a variety of text, from essays, to song lyrics, to news stories.  The fact that ChatGPT’s introduction pushed OpenAI’s market value to $29 billion also likely influenced Google’s decision; the stock price of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has fallen about 40% since ChatGPT’s introduction in November.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said in a statement. “It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.”