Florida continues its campaign to be the taint of the nation: a man is suing the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office for improperly including his photo and name four times on its weekly “Wheel of Fugitives” feature, a ripoff of a popular television game show when he wasn’t actually a fugitive, costing the man his job.  The Associated Press reports David Gay was driving into his first day on a new job when his intended boss called him to tell him not to show up; the boss had seen Gay’s photo on the previous night’s “Wheel of Fugitives,” like the one in the clip shown above as an example of the programming, hosted by Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey himself. The company, the man said, no longer wanted to employ Gay because he was featured on the segment.

Gay had previously been “in the system,” having received a deferred adjudication decision on an unspecified charge; “deferred adjudication” is similar to a “probation before judgment” decision in other states in which the judge can impose restrictions and requirements on a defendant which, once complete, lifts any probation and leaves the individual’s record largely clean.  However, Gay was in custody the first time he was featured on the Sheriff’s “Let’s joke about crime” gag, and he was participating in the court’s program when he was featured another two times; his last appearance on the segment was aired on the day he was sentenced by a Florida court to probation, which is not what a fugitive does.  He was also jailed temporarily in relation to a domestic violence charge that appears to be a case of mistaken identity with his father, of the same name.  Gay seeks $50,000 in damages from the Sheriff’s office.

Firefighters needed 6,000 gallons of water–about half the amount in an average household pool–to quench a fire caused by a Tesla’s batteries that started to explode while traveling down a California highway on Saturday spontaneously, NBC News reports, adding to the car maker’s problems that go beyond the highway.

As CEO Elon Musk faces legal scrutiny for allegedly misleading statements to manipulate the stock price, Tesla has seen a series of vehicle failures that lead people to question their status in the automotive industry.  A similar Tesla battery fire in Pennsylvania late last year took 12,000 gallons to extinguish, as the vehicle’s batteries exploded in succession.  Thankfully, no one was seriously injured in either of the Pennsylvania and California fires.

In addition to the disturbing issue of vehicle explosions, Tesla is facing increased competition:  in response to Tesla reducing the price of its Model Y by as much as 20% to allow purchasers to take advantage of federal rebates for electric cars and to move inventory of the pre-exploded vehicles, Ford announced it will cut prices on its all-electric Mustang Mach-E by between $600 to $5,900, depending on the trim level.

Justice Department Assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte on Monday formally and politely told spandex-wearing grapple freak Congressman Jim Jordan to fuck off in response to Jordan’s request for information about the ongoing probe of President Biden’s accidental retention of classified government documents dating to his time as Vice President in the Obama Adminsitration.

“Your letter also requests non-public information that is central to the ongoing Special Counsel investigation. The Department’s longstanding policy is to maintain the confidentiality of such information regarding open matters. This policy protects the American people’s interest in the evenhanded, dispassionate, and effective administration of justice. Disclosing non-public information about ongoing investigations could violate statutory requirements or court orders, reveal road maps of our investigations, and interfere with the Department’s ability to gather facts, interview witnesses, and bring criminal prosecutions where warranted. Maintaining confidentiality also safeguards the legal rights, personal safety, and privacy interests of individuals implicated by, or who assist in, our investigations,” wrote Uriarte to Jordan, who likely wants to wrestle someone now.

To the surprise of none, it turns out disgraced former Brazilian dictator Jair Bolsonaro was full of shit about his plans to head back home and face the music this month, as the Financial Times reports the would-be autocrat applied for a six-month tourist visa on Friday. Bolsonaro faces multiple criminal investigations in Brazil, the newest of them being into his level of involvement in the Brasilia Capitol riot earlier this month in which his fans rampaged through federal government buildings more than a week after returning President Luiz Ignacio Lula had been sworn into office.

Bolsonaro, whose 30 day grace period following the automatic expiry of his A-1 foreign diplomat and head of state visa expires this week, would probably do well to just go find another country to cool his heels given the unlikelihood of the Biden Administration approving the visa.

Supermarket tabloid douchebag David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified on Monday to a Manhattan grand jury investigating fat former President Trump’s illegal hush money payoff to pornstar Stormy Daniels just days before the 2016 election, the New York Times reports.

Pecker was reportedly key to the $130,000 “catch and kill” payment made in late October 2016 to keep the pornstar quiet about a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. The new grand jury and Pecker’s testimony are significant signs of movement in the newly-revived investigation into the payoff which had been stalled for various reasons over the five years since it was first reported.

Three golf courses owned by Russian oligarchs but bearing the name of fat former President Trump will host events for the Saudi blood money-funded LIV golf tour in 2023. The events on May 26-28th at the Trump National Washington DC course (actually in Northern Virginia, 15 miles from the district’s limits), August 11-13th at the Trump National Bedminster in New Jersey, and October 20-22nd at the Trump National Doral in Florida, will come as the twice-impeached 2020 election loser faces zero questions from his 2024 Republican primary opponents on why he’s taking money from a murderous, non-Christian foreign dictator in the middle of a presidential campaign.

You had one job, Boogaloos. Fox News was counting on you to fuck shit up so they could reap the ratings as leftist protestors took the blame. Now they have to answer to their viewers, who had been giddily anticipating an apocalyptic bloodbath, by admitting the protests were “mostly peaceful.”

The Memphis Police Department relieved of duty a sixth officer on the scene of the beating of unarmed motorist Tyre Nichols, which led to his death three days later, WATN reports.

Preston Hemphill, hired by the department in 2018, has been taken off duty but not fired.  Hemphill, who is white, was on the scene but it is unclear if he did or did not participate in the beating of Nichols, captured by body cam and surveillance camera footage.  An unidentified officer pulled Nichols from the car and tased him, according to the body cam footage; it’s unknown if this was Hemphill.

Five other officers, all Black, have been fired and indicted on murder charges for beating Nichols, who was also Black, so badly he died three days later.

Weeks after a Virginia elementary school teacher was shot by a six-year-old student after administrators dismissed reports that he brought a handgun to school, a Texas teacher has been suspended after taking to social media to complain about a similar complaint made about one of his students he feels his administration didn’t properly and safely address, the Shreveport Times reports.

Patrick Durbin, a sixth-grade social studies and three-sport coach in Waskom Independent School District, was told by two other students on January 18th at 2:30 p.m. local time that a sixth-grade student had threatened to shoot him.  He informed his school principal who removed the student from class and brought him to the school office.  Following school, Durbin went to the high school campus for basketball team training, where he found the student practicing with a sports team despite making the threat earlier in the day; he had not been informed that the student would continue his normal day after threatening to shoot a teacher.

Durbin asked another coach to remove the student while he stayed in the coaches’ office, and he called a friend on the Waskom Police force, who informed him the school never contacted the police about the threat of violence. 

“RINO” former Michigan Congressman Peter Meijer tells the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins that other Republicans have told him they just hope fat former President Trump dies, and soon, so the party can move forward without being stuck with the Orange Warlord for another rough election cycle – or worse – a “catastrophic” third-party run against Biden and the GOP nominee.

“You have a lot of folks who are just wishing for [Trump’s] mortal demise… I’ve heard from a lot of people who will go onstage and put on the red hat, and then give me a call the next day and say, ‘I can’t wait until this guy dies.’ And it’s like, Good Lord,” said Meijer, terming the Republican strategy for dealing with Trump as “actuarial arbitrage,” adding that “There’s no capacity [to say], ‘All right, let’s clean the slate and figure out what we stand for and build from there.'”

Newly-retired Ohio Senator Rob Portman believes that if Trump loses the 2024 primary he’ll exit politics without launching a third party campaign. “I think at the end of the day, he’s unlikely to want to put himself in that position when he could be more of a Republican senior statesman who talks about the policies that were enacted in his administration,” Portman told Coppins, who then “involuntarily” laughed. “Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part,” Portman admitted in response.

A close ally of disgraced former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was charged with with accepting an illegal campaign contribution during her failed 2020 primary bid against now-former Congressbro Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina’s 11th District, Politico reports.

Lynda Bennett, who Meadows aggressively campaigned to take over after he resigned in March 2020 to work directly for fat former President Trump, is accused of illegally accepting a $25,000 campaign contribution from a family member. Politico speculates that Bennett may have already taken a plea deal over the charge given the nature of the indictment paperwork filed by federal prosecutors. Meadows and Cawthorn remain free men despite their own separate legal travails.

UPDATE 1/30/23 10:55 AM EST: Bennett has pleaded guilty to the campaign finance felony.

One of the four The Villages, Florida residents caught voting in more than one state in the 2020 election has cut a pre-trial intervention deal with a Sumpter County court that will see him serve no jail time, let him buy his way out of 50 hours of community service at the rate of $10 an hour, and not even be stuck with a conviction on his record, Villages-News.com reports.

John Rider, 61, of both New York and The Villages, was arrested on December 3rd, 2021 as he stepped off a cruise ship in Cape Canaveral on a felony charge of casting more than one ballot in an election. Though he was a registered independent at the time, media outlets were able to find pro-Trump posts on his Facebook profile. Rider one of four Villagers caught voting twice in different states in the 2020 election (thanks to ERIC, the interstate voter record exchange system that Alabama withdrew from this month because MAGA). Three of the four were confirmed to be Trump fans, with the other’s affinity unknown. Two remain to be adjudicated, while Joan Halstead, the first of the four to be arrested, ended up being sentenced to take a civics class.

UPDATE 1/30/23 9:51 AM EST: Trump later compared himself to the “late, great” Al Capone in a bizarre follow-up post, writing “Because of the Weaponization, Targeting, and Unprecedented Harassment, I believe that I have more lawyers working for me on this Corrupt Law Enforcement induced Bull… than any human being in the history of our Country, including even the late great gangster, Alphonse Capone! This is all being done for POLITICAL REASONS in that I am leading everybody, Republicans & Democrats, by big numbers in the Polls. The Disinformation Specialists are at it again, full time. The Fake News is their TOOL!”

While the new Republican House majority will turn into an endless circlejerk about laptops and “weaponization” of federal law enforcement because the fat former president stole classified documents and the FBI sent agents to recover them, the Dem Senate majority of the 118th Congress will work on getting stuff that actually matters done for Americans. Central to that effort is new Senate Health Committee chairman Bernie Sanders, who has the plutocrats of the Kafka-esque healthcare system pissing themselves over his new powers, Axios reports.

“I have no doubt there will be tough hearings with people from industry being forced to testify, subpoenaed to testify, etc,” a pharma cartel insider said. “And I think that’s going to be a real challenge.” Sanders says they’re right to be scared. “We’re working on a strategy right now that will be very aggressive,” the lefty Senator told Axios of the coming subpoenas and hearings.

Newly public internal messages between “Cyber Ninjas” founder Doug Logan and other MAGA activists who spearheaded the ultimately failed 2021 Maricopa County, Arizona “audit” clusterfuck unsurprisingly reveal a disorganized and incompetently run effort to prove the 2020 election was stolen from disgraced former President Trump, with Logan telling another right wing entrepreneur involved in the effort that he needed to start reading up on Arizona election law just as their agreement with the Arizona state Senate was being finalized, USA Today reports.

“It’s on my list to read through the Arizona election laws. I guess I should move that up on the list,” Logan wrote to Gene Kern, a VP from a company called Wake TSI, which had previously performed smaller 2020 election audits in Pennsylvania and New Mexico. “Yep. I hate reading law,” Kern replied.

In another message, an “audit” worker texted Logan to say the ballot counters should try to look extra busy during a visit to the shitshow by MAGA politicians from other states looking to launch their own similar fake efforts. “Please load me up with some people for Friday and Saturday so our visitors can see spinning,” the worker wrote. Out-of-state visitors to the “audit” have been known to include QAnon freak 2022 Pennsylvania governor loser Doug Mastriano and failed Wisconsin 2020 election “review” czar former State Supreme Court Justice Mike Gableman.

Logan was ruined in the end however after the “audit” failed to prove fraud and actually netted about 200 more votes for Joe Biden, though grievous financial mismanagement appears to have been inevitable even if they had managed to fake a Trump win. “I run a business that in a typical year grosses about $850k. On a good year I have $175k in profits on top of my salary of $125k. I have paid out $225k-$250k more than I have even fund raised. That’s all of last year’s profits, all of my savings, and any money we made this year from my AppSec business. ALL of this has been put into the audit,” Logan wrote in a text message to an unspecified recipient in November 2021.

A suicide bomber, martyring himself in the name of Allah, ran into a house of Allah, detonating an explosive vest killing himself and at least 30 of his fellow Allah-worshippers in Peshawar, Pakistan on Monday, CNN reports. The mosque hit lies inside a police compound.

“The brutal killing of Muslims prostrating before Allah is against the teachings of the Quran,” Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a statement, adding that “targeting the House of Allah is proof that the attackers have nothing to do with Islam. Terrorists want to create fear by targeting those who perform the duty of defending Pakistan.”

In a call during his last months as UK’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson says he had a phone call in which he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about the likely unfavorable outcome a Russian incursion into Ukraine would have, to which Putin replied that he could strike London with a missile quickly, the BBC reports.

In February 2022, Johnson said he had a “very long” call with Putin and told him a Russian invasion of Ukraine would end in “utter catastrophe.”  Johnson outlined what he considered to be the likely path of sanctions and countermeasures world leaders would take that would impact Russian and Putin.

After the Kansas City [deroggatory name for Native American tribal leader] won the AFC Championship on a last-minute field goal made possible after an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on a Cincinnati Bengals defender, the slate for Super Bowl LVII has been set for the contest on February 12th in Arizona.

Kansas City will take on the patriotically-named Philadelphia Eagles, from the birthplace of our nation and the NFC Championship game winner, in a 31-7 defeat of the San Francisco Librul 49ers from Nancy Pelosi-ville.

“First a very quick question:  Who has more power:  Joe Biden or George Santos?” nasally carnival barker Marc Levin queries House Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy in his coy, flirty way, prompting Kev to giggle playfully.  “Well, right now I think it is the president, Joe Biden, unfortunately.”  Because our nation would be better off with a fraud in charge, right?  Oh, wait… we already know how that worked out.

Donald Trump appears to be sharpening his long knives this night, taking aim at his rivals and perceived enemies, one day after being energized by groups of cultists in New Hampshire and South Carolina.  As the earlier post (above right) on his failing social media app shows, Trump sees Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as his chief early rival, and he plans to knock the already undersized DeSantis down a few notches.

Going after Karl Rove, seen as a supporter for DeSantis for recognizing his surprisingly strong reelection performance, Trump hopes to show that he’s now the new Republican establishment, touting an outlandish victory percentage without mentioning (1) he’s lying; (2) his endorsed candidates who weren’t incumbents or Red State successors lost every statewide race except the JD Vance race; and (3) the GOP he claims to lead had a historically bad performance in the midterms.

Note, however, the framing of Trump’s screed against DeSantis merits examination–and before anyone even suggests it, this is not a defense of the Florida fool; it’s an exam of Trump’s techniques.  The “revelations about Ron DeSanctimonious” Trump mentions are his own creation:  we covered the video of his comments on his plane here.  Trump’s talking about what he talked about like someone else said it.  Psychiatrically, that’s a problem, but it’s also his version of Fox’s “some people say.”  His notes about “shutting down Florida and its beaches”–one of the few coronavirus protections DeSantis did enforce before flipping to complete anti-science positions–will be the point Trump hammers him on throughout the campaign.  Florida lives and dies by tourism; Trump will hammer home the pain.