“China spy??? HELLO?!?!” says the current top comment on the Gateway Pundit article “29-Year-Old Woman Arrested After Posing As Student At New Jersey High School,” posted Friday morning. We had meant to cover this one a few days ago but actual political news got in the way.

Not particularly long story short: Hyejeong Shin was arrested this month on one count of providing a false government document with the intent to verify one’s identity or age after spending four days pretending to be a 14 year-old freshman at New Brunswick High School. It’s not clear exactly how Shin was caught, but girls at the school said the woman was texting them to hang out and “started acting weird with them” after they didn’t show up, a student told WCBS New York.

Shin’s intent was also unclear. At worst it would seem to be a kidnapping/sex-trafficking recruitment scheme, at best just a weirdo who wanted some high school friends. Of course when you ignore those more prosaic possibilities, as well as that TikTok probably does the job of gathering data on American teenagers much more efficiently than any one single “spy” in a New Jersey public high school would have, or that Hyejeong Shin isn’t even a Chinese name, but a Korean one (there’s a K-pop star with the exact same name), it sure does sound like a Chinese Communist spy operation.

A Russian court on Friday sentenced former prominent Orthodox monk Nikolai Romanov to seven years in the gulag for “inciting hatred” over promoting COVID-19 conspiracy theories and urging his followers to defy government lockdowns meant to contain the virus, the AP reports.

Weird how the kind of shit Russian trolls stirred in the United States during the worst of the pandemic isn’t cool with the Putin regime inside Russia itself. Granted the American MAGA freaks didn’t need much help given the President of the United States at the time was encouraging them to defy state-level lockdowns and masking orders, but the Russian propaganda definitely didn’t hurt their suicidal cause either. Then again Romanov did say Putin was a “traitor to the Motherland” and a puppet of a Satanic “world government,” so maybe that was the bigger issue than the COVID denialism. This won’t be Romanov’s first time in the clink, as the 67 year-old former Soviet cop did 13 years for robbery and murder and only joined the church after his release.

Putative Republican National Committee Leader Ronna Not-Romney McDaniel and her advisers considered but ultimately decided against having disgraced former President Trump endorse her bid for a fourth term in her figurehead position leading the party, the Washington Post reports.

As the Health and Human Services Inspector General reportedly undertakes an investigation into the Food and Drug Administration’s response to the baby food shortage that struck the US in May 2022, the senior FDA official responsible for Food Policy and Response announced his resignation, ABC News reports.

Appointed to the post in December 2018, Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy and Response Frank Yiannas announced his departure would be effective at the end of February.  In his position, Yiannas should have led a response to the emerging shortage of powdered baby formula, which was accelerated after Abbott Labs shut down a Michigan factory that was a major manufacturer of formula.  Instead, as Yiannas testified before Congress that he was ignorant of the growing problem and cut out of the loop of information despite the FDA staff releasing an internal report about the problems facing the Sturgis, Michigan plant in October 2021.

“Yeah, I’m not sure why the report wasn’t shared with me and how it didn’t get escalated,” Yiannas, Walmart’s VP for Food Safety prior to joining the Trump Administration, said in a May Congressional hearing. “As you’ve heard the commissioner state, I know there’s going to be a review, and we’re going to try to get to the bottom of it.”

Five former Memphis police officers have been charged with murder in the death of an unarmed motorist, with the lawyer for the victim’s family saying the three-minute bodycam recording is reminiscent of the infamous video of Rodney King’s beating on the side of a Los Angeles highway.  The defendants and the victim are all Black.  According to Reuters, the graphic video will be released to the public tomorrow.

Police pulled 29-year-old Tyre Nichols over January 7th, during which time Nichols stepped out of the car.  For some reason, the interaction caused Nichols to try to flee on foot, with officers in pursuit.  Prosecutors have not gotten specific about what specifically happened next, saying only “There was another altercation at a nearby location at which the serious injuries were experienced by Mr. Nichols.”

And you think the wealth disparity is excessive today….  An ancient Egyptian mummy wrapped in gold leaf and sealed in a sarcophagus highlights one of the most complete and undisturbed burial sites found in recent times, the BBC reports.

The announcement of the discovery in Saqqara, Egypt was part of a larger complex of three burial sites. The gold-leaf mummy, believed to be the corpse of a wealthy man named Hekashepes, does not appear to have been a member of Egypt’s ruling family.  In the same burial complex, dating from the 25th to the 22nd centuries BCE, archeologists found another tomb of a a priest, inspector and supervisor of nobles named Khnumdjedef.  A third chamber appears to have at least two corpses:  one of a judge and writer named Fetek and the last of Meri, a senior palace official known as “the secret keeper.”

In other Mummy’s Day news, a different mummy, that of a teenage boy buried between 330 BCE and 30 BCE contained 49 protective amulets and jewels, wrapped with the body in the belief they would protect the dead’s spirit and provide them with resources in the afterlife.  According to CNN, the remains were first discovered in 1916, and they’ve been in storage in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which has hundreds of mummies stacking up, perhaps literally, that have never been examined.  As part of a current project to catalog and identify the mummies, the museum scans each set of remains.  The images for this corpse showed metal and gemstones on and around the corpse’s chest.  The corpse also wears a golden funeral mask, a rare find given most ancient Egyptian tombs have been ransacked by grave robbers.

See Matt talk. See Matt babble.  See Matt make an ass out of himself as usual.  Portable drive-in movie theater screen and Florida Man Matt Gaetz reprises a debunked talking point from the Reagan era:  that federal benefits recipients are lazy [he really wants to use the word former Energy Secretary and glasses model Rick Perry used to call his ranch] leeches who don’t work.  “I actually think we should have work requirements.  If we imposed work requirements on SNAP and on Medicaid expansion for abled-bodied adults that would [garbled] the ability to save one trillion dollars.”

Well, here we go again.  Matty doesn’t mention–because he ignores the fact–that 84% of SNAP married couples with children have at least one parent working a full 40 hours per week.  Of all SNAP recipients, 78% have one adult in the household working full time, including single-parent homes.  So what this comes down to is that for 78% of SNAP recipients, taxpayers are subsidizing the minimum wage their employers are paying them to make sure a full-time worker makes a wage that can sustain a family of four.  Maybe raising the minimum wage to a living wage would be a better solution than subsidizing underpaying employers instead of promoting corporate socialism, eh, Matt?

Never let it be said Republicans have no hobbies–hypocrisy’s a hobby, innit?–because they continually find ways to demonstrate their rank hypocrisy.  In this case, it’s about how they demand transparency from everyone… but themselves.

According to the Washington Post, Arizona Republicans in the legislature have voted to omit the state’s legislators from the state’s open-records act, apparently in a knee-jerk reaction to the release of thousands of pages of documents from legislators detailing their efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the state’s elections.

State senators will have their text messages, even those regarding official state business, exempted.  Legislators from both chambers will have their and their staffs’ emails and other documents destroyed within 90 days, a practice that has been deemed illegal in most states and may come into play in future obstruction of justice trials.

Thanks to Meowwolf for the tip. 

With more hand gestures than a Soul Train line dancer during the disco era, a hyped Junior has struggled through the first few days of his nascent video podcast on Rumble.  The self-declared fantastic businessman apparently didn’t think about reserving broadband space to accommodate the dozens of people tuning in.  Perhaps it’s better, as well, to maybe invest in cameras that don’t make you look like you’re part of an AOL educational video from 1994.  But we should feel a bit of schadenfreude that Junior couldn’t attract enthusiasm for his talk show debut from any cable network–not even Newsmax!–that he had to create a streaming channel on the ninth most popular video sharing service.

Rush Limbaugh’s dinner partner in Hell, Roger Ailes, continues to cost his former employer, the Murdoch-owned Fox propaganda network, hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal problems thanks to his habit of sexually harassing women who worked for him, per NBC News.  And remember:  Ailes has been dead for six years.

The latest to accuse the serial scumbag is former Fox host Laura Luhn, one of the many blonde white women who have stood in front of the network’s cameras.  (Apparently, Ailes had “a type.”). Luhn included in her suit Fox News, its former parent company, 21st Century Fox, and former network executive Bill Shine, who served as Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Donald Trump.

“Ailes’s abuse of Luhn was among the worst he inflicted on his many victims,” the lawsuit says of Luhn’s 15-year career at Fox. “He physically forced Luhn to perform oral sex on him regularly. And he constantly reminded Luhn that he ‘owned’ her, that she was his ‘sex slave,’ and that she was forbidden from telling anyone about the abuse or he would make her pay dearly.”

Capitol Police officer Howard Liebengood, and DC cops Kyle DeFreytag, Gunther Hashida, and Jeffrey Smith, took their own lives in 2021 in the days and months after the MAGA terrorist attack on the Capitol and this piece of shit, whoever she is, says “Perhaps they were involved, or they were so distraught over what they saw these two police forces treat American citizens on public property, perhaps that is one reason why maybe some of them took their own lives.” Fucking incredible.

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.

In what could be a surprisingly large hit to the Russian economy, Swedish furniture company Ikea announced it will source wood for its products from the Baltic state, Germany and Poland as well as from its home country, eliminating sources from Russia and Belarus, Reuters reports.

Ikea is one of the globe’s largest wood purchasers, using 20 million cubic meters of wood for its ready-for-assembly flat-pack furniture, packaging, accessories and print material.  Russia processes 212 million cubic meters of wood annually, with half of that exported as either raw material or finished products like veneer, making wood Russia’s fifth most valuable export product.  Russia accounts for 6% of raw wood supply in the world annually; Belarus adds an additional 5%.  (Of course, not all their exports go to Ikea.)

“We have managed to replace those (Russia and Belarus) volumes in other countries on a very hot wood market,” said Ulf Johansson, Global Wood Supply and Forestry Manager at parent company Inter IKEA.

A large contingent of Capitol Police officers will join the family of fallen officer Brian Sicknick, who died the day after the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, for Friday’s sentencing hearing for the man who sprayed Sicknick with bear repellant, an act that likely contributed to the officer’s death, Politico reports.

Thirty-three-year-old Julian Khater of New Jersey pleaded guilty to two felony charges for assaulting law enforcement officers with a dangerous weapon causing bodily injury.  Khater was filmed deploying bear spray directly into the faces of Sicknick and fellow Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who had been injured earlier in the attack.  Sicknick withdrew from the front line after the attack, was sent to a local hospital, and suffered a series of stokes caused by blot clots, leading to his death.

Sicknick’s longtime partner, Sandra Garza, and his family have written letters imploring U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan to impose the maximum sentence on Khater.  The union representing Capitol Police officers and prosecutors have also supported the highest sentence available, 90 months.

Here’s why you should always support your local journalism, folks:  the local Patch correspondent in Glen Cove, New York learned of a 2011 Facebook post freshman Republican New York Congressman and walking credibility problem George Santos made in which the self-proclaimed “Jew-ish” gay man appeared to salute Adolf Hitler via text.

I’m not going to lift the screenshot here–please visit the Patch story linked above so they get at least some pennies in advertising revenue to stay afloat–but Patch received the text from a former friend of Santos who was taken aback by Santos’s claim of Jewish (or Jew-ish) heritage because he remembered this specific post:

“hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh hiiiiiiiiiiiitlerrrrrrrrrrr (hight hitler) lolololololololololololol sombody kill her!! the jews and black mostly lolllolol!!! Dum” a Facebook account with Santos’s name and photo commented to a post made by the source’s friend.  It’s unclear what the original post concerned, what state of mind Santos was in when he posted it, what name he was officially using, or if he was married to a woman at the time of the posting, which might be a joke in very poor taste.

US military officials on Thursday announced the death of Somalian ISIS leader Bilal al-Sudani and ten other terrorist scumbags in a successful operation, during which the only injury suffered on the American side happened when a military dog bit a soldier, the Associated Press reports.

“One American involved in the operation was bitten by a military dog, but was not seriously injured, according to an administration official,” is literally what the AP wrote in their article about the raid, a seemingly extraneous detail which leaves us with the tantalizing possibility that at least some of the terrorists were bitten and seriously injured by the dog. Maybe even al-Sudani himself.

“N-N-N-N-Nice doggie… G-G-G-Good boy… Here here, h-h-have some yummy goat meat,” we imagine al-Sudani to have said as the vicious, growling German Shepard cornered him. “Eat up! Every doggie likes go-AGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!” his last words as he was mauled to death.

“The State Bar of California’s Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona announced today the filing of a Notice of Disciplinary Charges against attorney John Charles Eastman. The 11 charges arise from allegations that Eastman engaged in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states. Specific charges allege that Eastman made false and misleading statements regarding purported election fraud, including statements on January 6, 2020, at a rally in Washington, D.C., that contributed to provoking a crowd to assault and breach the Capitol to intimidate then-Vice President Pence and prevent the electoral count from proceeding. The Office of Chief Trial Counsel (OCTC) intends to seek Eastman’s disbarment before the State Bar Court,” says a statement from the State Bar of California officially putting scumbag MAGA lawyer John Eastman on notice.

To think this histrionic douchebag used to be a Democrat. What makes this even funnier is that DirecTV simply replaced Newsmax in its lineup with another low budget right wing propaganda channel, this one called “The First TV,” featuring a show starring sexual pervert Bill O’Reilly.

“While we are glad AT&T DirecTV is adding a conservative commentary channel, it is a pathetic attempt to deal with millions of angry viewers who still want NEWSMAX for our top-rated shows, personalities, and in-depth news coverage. You can’t replace a Cadillac with a Honda,” said Newsmax in a gloriously butthurt statement Thursday on their being replaced with The First.

In a previously undisclosed branch of his probe, John Durham, the special prosecutor appointed by Republican Attorney General Bill Barr to poke holes in Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s disruption of the 2016 election and its assistance to Donald Trump’s campaign, started in 2019 to follow a trail of money streaming to Trump from Italy, but abandoned the investigation without resolution or indictments, the New York Times reports.

The fact that Durham’s investigation identified questionable actions by Trump that spurred a DOJ inquiry was not released by the Durham team, and the NY Times account details a number of other problems with the Durham probe, largely regarded as an attempt to deflect attention from Trump’s malfeasance and feed some meat to rabid conspiracy theories from the far right of the Republican Party.

Durham and Barr would meet at least weekly at Barr’s office over the course of the probe, sometimes supplementing those discussions with other meetings over dinner or a glass of scotch at a local establishment, an unusually close relationship for two people who were supposed to be acting independently of one another.  The NY Times reports that Barr pushed Durham to find holes in Mueller’s report, but Durham could find none of any significance.

Failed anti-Deep State special counsel John Durham, still working on a “report” more than two years after he was supposed to deliver it in time to be an “October surprise” in the 2020 election, attempted to get a grand jury to subpoena the email inbox of an employee of pro-democracy billionaire philanthropist George Soros, based on the contents of a Russian intel agency memo shared with the US from a Dutch intel hacking operation, the New York Times reports.

Durham apparently believed the Soros employee, Open Society Foundations Executive Vice President Leonard Benardo had in 2016 email exchanges with Dem Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz spoke about how then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had purposely slow-walked her investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Durham got this from one of the Russian memos – claiming that they had hacked and obtained the Soros exec’s emails saying as such – and twice asked a federal judge for a court order authorize the subpoena on Benardo, an American citizen. When that failed, he still kept trying to get a grand jury subpoena, which also didn’t work.

The Times piece is absolutely sprawling and while National Zero a fairly strict policy of not milking an upstream report for multiple articles like fucking Raw Story does all the time, this one definitely needs to be broken up. Jack has another piece on this Times report coming up soon.