Fat former President Trump mistook a photo of rape accuser EJ Carroll for that of his second ex-wife Marla Maples during a deposition in Carroll’s defamation suit against him, potentially seriously undermining his already stupid “she’s not my type” defense, the Washington Post reports.

“That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,” the fat idiot said to Carroll lawyer Roberta Kaplan showing him a photo of him with Carroll in the 1990s during the deposition, to which Trump’s marginally less mentally incompetent lawyer Alina Habba quickly corrected him that it was in fact Carroll.

As we’ve written before, of course the now-79 year old Carroll is not going to be Donald’s type given her age nowadays, but that’s how entropy works. Ivana Trump sure as shit wasn’t his “type” anymore either before she passed away at 75 or whatever last year. Carroll looked different in 1995.

Very different, and nobody really seemed to want to acknowledge that in 2019 when she first came forward, even those who believed her and wanted to see her nail Donald to the wall, probably out of unease with how to frankly discuss a woman’s looks – particularly an alleged rape victim – ceding the ground to Trump and his fanboys. The fact is the “defense” was always complete bullshit and still the orange dumbass managed to undermine it in a sworn deposition.

Defying first-time-elected Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, the Democratically-led New York state senate judiciary committee rejected her nominee to lead the state’s supreme court amid concerns that his judicial record is too conservative, Reuters reports.

The senate judiciary committee voted 10-9 to withhold the nomination Hector LaSalle, the chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, from a vote on the floor of the senate, killing his opportunity.  Seven members of the committee did not vote and another was not present at the meeting.

A prosecutor for 15 years before becoming a judge, liberal groups has criticized LaSalle’s decisions, saying they favor police, prosecutors and anti-abortion groups, as well as putting employer rights over those of workers.  Hochul claims that she could sue to have a vote on the floor of the senate, although that route is still unclear.

Researchers announced Mosaico, the only vaccine for HIV in late-stage clinical trials, has failed, a stunning defeat in the effort to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS around the globe, NBC News reports.

Developed in a private-public partnership between the US government and Flemish pharmaceutical company Janssen, the effort united scientists and government programs to develop and test the drug, which was in a trial involving 3,900 men from eight European countries who have sex with men and trans people, the group most likely to contract HIV.

Initial reviews appeared to show Mosaico reducing the rate of HIV transmission.  However, a review of the data in the latest clinical test by an independent medical research firm found the drug did not significantly impact the rate of HIV transmission.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern abruptly announced her resignation, effective February 7th, during a speech at her party’s annual meeting on Thursday, the New Zealand Herald reports.

“I’m leaving, because with such a privileged role comes responsibility. The responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple,” said the third ever female Kiwi prime minister to the Labour Party caucus meeting. While we at NZ have a deep affinity for the other NZ given our shared abbreviation, we’re not exactly clued in on the political situation on the ground. If Ardern’s exit is for the best, we support it. NZ 💙 NZ always.

Republican Congressman Greg Steube was hospitalized Wednesday after falling off the roof of his home somewhere in the Sarasota area, Florida Politics publisher Peter Schorsch reports. No word on Stuebe’s condition yet, but you know thoughts and prayers and all that shit for him.

MSNBC contributor Marisa Kabas says she spoke with a Brazilian drag queen by the name of Eula Rochard, who told Kabas that the member of the Anti-drag queen story hour party Congressman George Santos is “Kitara” on the right hand side of that photo. Not much else to add here.

Ruslan Obiang Nsue, the Hunter Biden of Equatorial Guinea, has been arrested on charges he sold a plane owned by the state airline and pocketed the cash, the BBC reports. We call Nsue the “Hunter Biden of Equatorial Guinea” around here because that little rascal is always getting in to some sort of hijinks and his dad is President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue. In a hilarious twist, Nsue’s half-brother, Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue was the one who ordered the arrest.

So to recap, the President is Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son is Veep Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, other son Ruslan Obiang Nsue is the fuckup ex-state airline director, and thank Christ for copy and paste as we would never have been able to type those names from memory.

90s-era sitcom star Ben Savage on Wednesday officially filed for the Democratic nomination for the 2024 race in California’s 30th district, currently held by Congressman Adam Schiff.

Savage lost a 2022 West Hollywood city council race, but what’s US politics without failing upward sometimes? It’s also sort of newsworthy that the star of Boy Meets World is apparently confident that Schiff will run to replace senile Senator Dianne Feinstein, at least enough to file the paperwork.

Just throwing this out there: How many homes in Florida actually have natural gas hookups? If not, how many of them even bother to hook up propane instead? Is it even a thing there?

A three-judge panel on the Arizona Court of Appeals on Tuesday denied state GOP Chairhag “Chemtrails” Kelli Ward’s attempt to ban mail-in voting in the state, rejecting the crazy asshole’s argument that the practice violates constitutional requirment for a secret ballot, KAWC reports.

Ward’s lawyer had argued the requirement “that secrecy in voting shall be preserved” was impossible to meet if there isn’t an election official present to observe the voter casting a ballot, which doesn’t make any fucking sense but they still tried to sell it anyway. Judge Cynthia Bailey disagreed, ruling that the safeguards in place in the no-excuse early voting system Arizonans have enjoyed since 1991 were more than suffice. Chemtrails Kelli vowed to appeal to the state Supreme Court as if she hadn’t already wasted enough taxpayer time on this stupid bullshit.

Independent journalist Murray Waas reports Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is looking closely at disgraced former President Trump’s handling of documents related to the Russia investigation and the 2016 election, specifically the failed last minute attempt to declassify them before he left office, as a possible motive for Trump’s theft of the papers.

This tracks with a New York Times report from October in which Trump at some point in 2021 ordered his minions to tell the National Archives they could have other, unrelated documents back if they would give him whatever he thought would “exonerate” him in the Russia scandal.

At least one person has been called in to testify to Smith’s grand jury on this specific line of inquiry, according to Waas, who also reports disgraced former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is seen as a prime target to flip against the Orange God Emperor. “It was very clear from what they asked that their emphasis was on Trump and Meadows,” a source told Waas.

There’s an absolute shit ton of news to get caught up on this morning, requiring a consolidation better than that lame and unserious rundown from Monday. Alright ramblers, let’s get ramblin’:

Fat former President Trump is planning to return to Twitter following Elon Musk’s reinstatement of his account and is working on ideas for his big first new tweet in two years, NBC News reports.

The batshit House GOP plan to abolish the IRS and replace income tax with a national sales tax was reportedly a condition of the Freedom Caucasians’ support for Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, a plan so bad even Conservative anti-tax nerd Grover Norquist said “This is a political gift to Biden and the Democrats. I think that this is the first significant problem created for the Republican Party by the 20 people who thought that there was no downside to the approach they took.”

The Manhattan DA is looking seriously at prosecuting fat former President Trump over the 2016 Stormy Daniels hush money payment, the New York Times reports. The statute of limitations has been tolled due to COVID and continues to toll every minute Trump is not in the state of New York, so prosecutors can take their time building the case, according to the Daily Beast’s Joe Pagliery.

Ronna Not-Romney claims she has the votes to secure her fourth term as RNC chair over MAGA lawyer Harmeet Dhillon and allegedly former crackhead Mike Lindell. So confident is Ronna that she’s skipping a debate with Lindell and Dhillon, a choice you will not be surprised to learn came just months after Ronna criticized now-Arizona Gov Katie Hobbs for refusing to debate Kari Lake.

A new tracking survey by Morning Consult finds disgraced former President Trump leading the Republican 2024 primary field at 48 percent, damn close to a majority and ensuring that short little bastard Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (in second at 31 percent) would need to consolidate the support of every single also-ran like Vice Former Guy Mike Pence (third place at 8 percent), Liz Cheney (3 percent), Nimrata Haley and Ted Cruz (both 2 percent), plus all the one percenters including Mike Pompeo, Tim Scott, Kristi Noem, and Low Energy Greg to take the nomination.

DeSantis wouldn’t have to worry about taking his predecessor, former Florida Governor and current Senate minority loser Rick Scott’s support as Rick scored a stunning 0 percent in the survey.

Newly sworn-in Republican Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen hit the ground running on pointless and counterproductive “election integrity” measures on his first full day in office Tuesday and acted on a campaign promise by immediately announcing the state would be withdrawing from the interstate Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the Associated Press reports.

“I made a promise to the people of Alabama that ending our state’s relationship with the ERIC organization would be my first official act as Secretary of State. Providing the private information of Alabama citizens, including underage minors, to an out of state organization is troubling to me and to people that I heard from as I traveled the state for the last 20 months,” said Allen in a statement.

What Allen left out however is that the whole point of ERIC is to prevent voter fraud by providing states with a single national database of registrations to ensure no one casts a ballot in more than one state in a single presidential or midterm contest, like those asshole MAGA snowbirds in The Villages, Florida were caught doing in the 2020 presidential election. It need not be stated this move is the polar opposite of a commitment to “election integrity,” and even Allen’s predecessor said as much. “[ERIC] helps identify duplicate registrations. It helps identify dual participation in elections. That’s a concern [and] there’s no other way that any state in the union can do that independently of ERIC,” now-former Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill told NPR last year.

Allen should’ve at least come up with a better excuse than the lame “sharing private information” bullshit (as if it’s not the whole point of the system) if he couldn’t be bothered to take the lead on reforming ERIC’s cybersecurity practices he’s supposedly so goddamned worried about. But hey, “if it is ‘broke’ then don’t fix it, just break it some more” is the GOP way these days.

The rest of this “explanation” is purportedly forthcoming given this post’s “Page 1” but it’s been 23 minutes and there’s no “Page 2” yet. Trump’s lawyers must be pretty busy looking over that one.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, fresh off her Tuesday arrest at a coal mine protest in Germany, is headed to Davos, Switzerland in what’s sure to be a contentious meeting on Thursday with International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol, Reuters reports.

The news might cause some serious headaches for MAGA conspiracy theorists as Thunberg can’t exactly be a puppet of the Davos global elite if she’s headed there to annoy the shit out of the Davos global elite. Now of course they could dismiss the whole thing as staged, but that would require them to follow through with the purpose for which both the globalist energy industry establishment and the teenage rabble rouser are colluding. Such a hypothesis is probably out of reach for the limited capacities of most Truth Social users and likely to be too convoluted to be worth the time and energy for the few who are. Barring the “it’s all a show” go-to, the fanboys need a hero and a villain for their usual simplistic binary narrative and it’s hard to see how Thunberg and the IEA fit neatly enough into their worldview. Energy industry good, Davos bad, Nordic white girl activist good, climate change propagandist bad. It just doesn’t shake out neatly for the fanboys.

Safe to say this is quite a pickle for the perpetually paranoid and angry MAGAmerican media complex. We’re excited to see if they have the sand in them to take this one on or if they just skip it.

Apparently hedging his illustrated child-friendly propaganda empire against the possibility that disgraced former President Trump won’t win the 2024 Republican nomination, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has gone ahead and published “The Kids Guide to Ron DeSantis.”

It’s a rare and prestigious honor for the Napoleonic Florida Governor, as so far only Donald Trump and Joe Biden are the only other living politicians to be given their own junior Huckabooks. MAGA parents excited by the $1 special offer to introduce their kids to the angry little bastard who “may be our next Commander-in-Chief” should take caution however, as they’ll be roped into a $20 per month subscription which is impossible to cancel, according to the Huffington Post.

The floor leader of the Michigan state House GOP last month personally flew to Florida to hand deliver a letter, signed by at least a quarter of the members of his caucus, to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis urging the diminutive autocrat to run for President in 2024, Politico reports.

Michigan state Rep Bryan Posthumus, yeah, that’s really his name, delivered a letter calling the demented little conspiracy freak “uniquely and exceptionally qualified to provide the leadership and competence that is, unfortunately, missing” in the White House, and that they “stand ready and willing to help [DeSantis] win Michigan in 2024.” The letter marks a pretty notable break from the Orange Tyrant, according to former Michigan Republican Party executive director Jason Roe.

“I think it is very significant that elected Republicans are so overtly looking for an alternative in 2024. It shows a seriousness about winning, at the risk of poking the Trump bear. I think we will see more of this in the coming months,” said Roe, who was browbeaten into quitting his party post in 2021 for refusing to believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Ukraine’s interior minister is among at least 18 top officials and civilians dead in a helicopter crash in a Kyiv suburb on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports. Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi, his deputy Yevhen Yenin and State Secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Yurii Lubkovych were among the dead, according to Ukrainian National Police Chief Ihor Klymenko.

It’s not clear if the chopper was brought down by enemy fire or if it crashed on its own. No fighting has been reported recently in the area, however. Nine of the dead were on board the aircraft, while the other nine were on the ground, according to officials. An investigation is underway.

Rejoice libtards. You win. There isn’t going to be a “Freedom Phone 2” as the Daily Beast reports the company has collapsed amid infighting, bricked phones, money embezzled to fund a video game shopping spree, and other such failures for a “revolution” that turned out to be just a lousy $120 Chinese Android model modified to be more freedom-y and justify its $500 price tag.