In an earlier unhinged rant, Trump also wrote “Who sends a Billion Dollar blimp, with the most sophisticated equipment in the World, and large enough to hold ten cars or 3 large buses, into a complex pattern over the United States, without it quite possibly being manned, such as the ‘manned spacecraft?’ China should have been called to ask. If ‘no,’ shoot it down, if ‘yes,’ negotiate the greatest deal EVER!” apparently hinting that Biden murdered ChiCom balloon pilots.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced all members of the Senate will be permitted to participate in a briefing by national security officials on the fourth acknowledged incursion by a Chinese surveillance balloon into American airspace, Politico reports.  “Republican critics were breathless, political, and premature. President Biden and his team were calm, calculating and effective,” Schumer said.

The Biden Administration ordered the military to shoot down the balloon, which the Pentagon opted to do after it drifted over the ocean so it could crash with minimum risk to human safety.  In the first combat kill in the fighter jet’s history, an F-22 Raptor brought down the balloon off the coast of the Carolinas in relatively shallow waters, allowing the US military the opportunity to salvage the wreckage.

With tens of thousands of people suffering without electricity thanks to a crappy power grid, Texas continues its descent into third-world state as 250 residents caused a melee over food being thrown out by an Austin grocery store, CNN reports.

People descended on the dumpsters behind a H-E-B Grocery store after someone posted “free food” was available at the supermarket.  The food, in fact, had spoiled because of the power outage caused by the winter storm that the Texas power grid couldn’t handle.  The spoiled food filled two dumpsters and at least a dozen shopping carts.

As rumor of the free food spread online, cars lined up and caused gridlock in the neighborhood.  Police responded to find hundreds of people fighting and battling each other for the goods.  Police and grocery store company officials warn the people who took the food to throw it away because it is unfit for consumption given how long it went without refrigeration.  But, yehaw, Texans, do what you want as you battle to become New Florida.

And to be clear, when we say he’s “still got it” we mean he’s still got the fucking weasely, sniveling disregard for any sort of logical and moral consistency whatsoever that we all know and hate.

Disgraced former President Trump was very upset and annoyed Sunday morning after the Pentagon disclosed that at least three ChiCom balloons had entered US airspace during his maladministration.

This unhinged rant raises some questions we’d like MAGA trolls to address: If the ChiComs had too much respect for “TRUMP” then why did they rig the 2020 election against him with those bamboo ballots and hacked thermostats? Isn’t “FAKE DISINFORMATION” a double negative too? And why isn’t Donald on the same page with Tom Cotton, who said it happened but was Obama’s fault?

Marco Rubio is clearly pissed the Pentagon pointed out that ChiCom spy balloons entered US airspace at three times during his Orange God Emperor’s reign, trying to argue that it only happened “briefly” during those four years. As is the usual MAGA way, they can ignore all the little details and qualifiers that challenge their version of their story, but when the shoe is on the other foot they get incredibly frustrated when their “but actuallys” are ignored by everyone else.

The Koch Brother who’s still alive is gearing up to oppose disgraced former President Trump’s bid for a second term in the White House, aiming to turn “the page on the past” and support another GOP primary candidate for 2024, according to an internal memo obtained by the New York Times.

It’ll be the first time the Koch Network, described by the Times as “an array of political and advocacy groups backed by hundreds of ultrawealthy conservatives,” will actually directly support a candidate in a Republican presidential primary. To that we say good fucking luck as it’s just going to bolster Donald’s “renegade” status with his fans against the Moscow Mitch side of the party.

A DC federal judge on Friday tossed disgraced former President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post, ruling that the fat orange bastard had failed to meet the minimal standard of “actual malice” in his March 2020 complaint over the Post’s coverage of his 2016 campaign’s connections with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s regime, Bloomberg reports.

Weird how all these lawsuits keep getting tossed. Almost like the “liberal media” outlets reporting on Trump’s criminal connections to Russia used factual information in their coverage.

Tennessee’s MAGA Gov Billy Lee last week axed $8.3 million in AIDS funding because treating people suffering from the virus is against the disease is against the bible or something, NBC reports.

“China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and protest against the US’s use of force to attack civilian unmanned airships. The Chinese side has repeatedly informed the US side after verification that the airship is for civilian use and entered the US due to force majeure, which was completely accidental. China clearly requires the US to handle it properly in a calm, professional and restrained manner. A spokesperson for the US Department of Defense also stated that the balloon will not pose a military or personal threat to ground personnel. Under such circumstances, the U.S. insists on using force, obviously overreacting and seriously violating international practice. China will resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of relevant companies, while reserving the right to make further necessary reactions.”  —The Chinese government official statement said (via Google translate) reacting to the Biden Administration ordering the military to bring down a surveillance balloon floating over the US.  The Pentagon is sending ships to salvage the platform, shot down off the coast of the Carolinas in water less than fifty feet deep.

Citing an exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming book by Defense Secretary pro tem Christopher Miller, the conservative diaper bin the Daily Caller reports–somehow gleefully–that former White House denizen Melania Trump joined her hubby and the leadership of the American military to oversee the assassination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019.

With the National Counterterrorism Center at the time, Miller reports Melania basically just showed up in the doorway of the Situation Room while the operation was going on.  Then-Defense Secretary Marc Esper gave up his seat next to her ostensible husband so she could… um… counsel him.  The fawning story in the Daily Caller notes that Melania, allegedly an Einstein visa recipient, gave Don some good advice after the killing by drone.  Photos of the event taken by the official White House photographer do not show the former Third Lady in the room; instead, the White House distributed an obviously posed image of a stern-posing Trump flanked by his aides like Mike Pence, who would later be suggested by Trump for lynching, and military leaders.

The Daily Caller loses in the fawning-est department to the suck-ups at the Gateway Pundit, who titled their report on this “WHAT A GREAT WOMAN: Book Reveals First Lady Melania Trump Played A Key Role In Situation Room During Operation That Killed ISIS Leader Al-Baghdadi.”  And no, that is not a parody; it’s real.

In their Saturday press release on the successful downing of you know what, the Pentagon went just slightly out of the way to let it be known that ChiCom balloons floated over the United States at least three times while fat former President Trump was occupying the White House.

“Long before the shoot down, U.S. officials took steps to protect against the balloon’s collection of sensitive information, mitigating its intelligence value to the Chinese. The senior defense official said the recovery of the balloon will enable U.S. analysts to examine sensitive Chinese equipment. ‘I would also note that while we took all necessary steps to protect against the PRC surveillance balloon’s collection of sensitive information, the surveillance balloon’s overflight of U.S. territory was of intelligence value to us,’ the official said. ‘I can’t go into more detail, but we were able to study and scrutinize the balloon and its equipment, which has been valuable.’ The balloon did not pose a military or physical threat. Still its intrusion into American airspace over several days was an unacceptable violation of U.S. sovereignty. The official said Chinese balloons briefly transited the continental United States at least three times during the prior administration,” the Defense Department wrote in their press release, quoting an anonymous US military official.

People in a mile-wide radius around a train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio remain under an evacuation order nearly a full day after a 50-car derailment set cars carrying chemicals ablaze, causing people in the area to experience burns on their skin and eyes, the Washington Post reports.

Firefighters initially attempted to fight the fire that ensured from the accident at the town, located along the Pennsylvania border about an hour from Akron.  Emergency response units from five states–Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia.  However, after authorities learned one of the burning cars carried vinyl chloride, an explosive, highly dangerous chemical, officials pulled back the fire crews and evacuated the area, putting a shelter-in-place order in for the rest of the residents.

Early Saturday, East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway issued a proclamation stating that the town “has been or is immediately threatened by a natural/man-made/technological hazard and or nuclear or conventional attack, and; at approximately 9:00 pm on Friday February 3, 2023 Norfolk Southern had a train derailment with hazardous materials.”

This never happened under Trump!  Frigid temperatures and high winds across the Northeast at Mount Washington, New Hampshire combined to set a new record wind chill for the United States on Friday night:  minus 108° F, according to CNN.

Temperatures of minus 46° F, matched with wind gusts in excess of 120 miles per hour, brought on the feeling of a temperature colder than the average temperature on Mars.  The prior wind chill record on Mount Washington was minus 102.7° F, set in 2004.  The previous record in the entire United States was minus 104° F set in Alaska in 1989.

This isn’t as much fun as it used to be. It’s not to say that I’m not enjoying it and am giving up on this site. Fuck no, not at all. I still love doing this. Hell maybe I love it even more than I did a year ago. What’s changed is the drive behind it. It’s become more clinical, more professional-ish, more of delivering the news and less of entertaining the audience here. I’m getting older, more experienced, things surprise me less and less, my technique for parsing out info from upstream is more honed (except for the first article of the day, that one is usually shit), and I’ve been staying ahead of the other site (and the other other site) on most of the storylines that matter the most to me.

However, I don’t think it’s just me taking the job more seriously. Or even that the total volume of the news feels like it’s been stuck at a 10 since last May or so (it has, even after the midterms). Something else shifted in the overall vibe far beyond just me personally. It’s hard to nail down but there’s this feeling I get like all the color has been drained from the picture somehow.

THE BALLOON IS DOWN! FUCK YEAH! SCORE ONE FOR AMERICA! EFFORTS TO SECURE THE WRECKAGE OFF THE COAST OF SOUTH CAROLINA ARE UNDERWAY!

Biden Administration officials are finalizing plans Saturday to shoot down the ChiCom spy balloon as soon as it crosses over the East Coast into the Atlantic Ocean, the AP reports.

It should be any minute as of 12:55 PM EST on Saturday, as the fucker was spotted near Lancaster, South Carolina in the past hour. The military plans to try to recover the wreckage from the ocean once the balloon is downed. And for all the MAGA bitching about it taking too long, it’s been clarified that this thing is massive, probably weighing hundreds of tons. A very large balloon with a gondola the size of three city buses hanging under it. Nobody wants that falling on them, no matter how much shit the fanboys talk. The military is right to wait until it’s over water to shoot it down.

UPDATE 2/4/2023 1:51 PM: The FAA ordered a ground stop for three airports in the Carolinas Saturday afternoon as the military sets the balloon in its targeting sights.

A new bill proposed this week by two Republican Tennessee state House members would rename a stretch of Nashville’s 5th Avenue that in 2021 was named John Lewis Way in honor of the late great civil rights leader and congressman to “President Donald Trump Blvd” in honor of the still-living racist and twice-impeached failure who lost the 2020 election, WKRN reports.

It’s just a short stretch, only 0.2 miles, raising the question of why the fuck the Republicans couldn’t just find another, longer street to rename. The portion is adjacent to the state Capitol, but wouldn’t change the mailing address, which since 2018 is 600 Martin Luther King Blvd. Both the MLK and John Lewis streets were named by the local Dem-run Metro Nashville Council. After the Lewis street was dedicated in 2021, state Republicans retaliated by naming the street in front of the council’s offices President Ronald Reagan Way and another street after former Senator Lamar Alexander.

Of course we can’t have nice things. A mildly funny trolling war has to turn ugly and they have to erase John Lewis’s name from part of the street where he organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters and replace it with a vile racist who we’re not sure has ever even visited Nashville.

Pakistani government officials on Saturday confirmed to AFP they had blocked access to Wikipedia inside the country following days of warnings over “blasphemous content” going unheeded. Malahat Obaid, a spokesman for the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, told AFP the ubiquitous online encyclopedia had been cut off after its US-based administrators “failed to respond to our repeated correspondence over removal of the blasphemous content and meet the deadline.”

Thing is the Pakistani government never actually publicly specified what the “blasphemous content” was and it’s hard to see this as anything other than a pretext to block far more than just visual depictions of the Prophet Mohammed or an outline of Salman Rushdie’s the Satanic Verses.

When it comes down to it, preventing their people from reading Wikipedia articles about 1971 Bangladeshi war of independence from Pakistan, or the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, or the US Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama Bin Laden or other shit that makes the Pakistani state – and not Islam – look bad really screams out like an admission of failure. Why bother with a competing vision when just shutting off knowledge sourced from the outside world will do the job faster?

US military officials told Politico on Friday there’s been a second ChiCom spy balloon spotted off the Pacific coast of the Central American country of Costa Rica. “We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America. We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,” said chief Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Patrick Ryder. It’s not clear if Costa Rican opposition lawmakers are also screaming at President Rodrigo Chavez to shoot the balloon down immediately or if that’s only the kind of bullshit that US President Joe Biden has to deal with.