Election officials in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania last week, which was in January 2023, recounted ballots from not the November 2022 election, but the November 2020 election in an effort to “expose” non-existent fraud or errors which cost Trump reelection, the New York Times reports.

Again, this was the 2020 election they recounted. 797 days after November 3rd, 2020, as the Times notes. Nearly 60,000 ballots over three days and an estimated 560 work hours to count them. Trump won the county by 40 percent, 41,462 votes to Biden’s 16,971. The recount found 15 fewer votes for Biden and seven fewer votes for Trump. Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen, the lady who once had to cancel a campaign event because she’d been bitten by a bat, gained four votes.

“This is just one piece of the puzzle. We’re not done,” said “Audit the Vote Pennsylvania” volunteer Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer who pushed for the recount. DiSalvo did not say what the rest of the “puzzle” is supposed to look like when Trump lost the state by over 80,000 votes in 2020.

Cops in Italy on Monday scored a major arrest by nailing wanted Sicilian mafia boss Messina Denaro after three decades of the old bastard evading the law, the Associated Press reports. The Carabinieri caught up with Denaro, 60, as he visited an upscale medical clinic in Palermo seeking treatment for an unspecified ailment. Denaro was convicted in 1992 of two bombings in Sicily that murdered top anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, Falcone’s wife and several of their bodyguards. He’s also suspected of murdering the young son of an informant.

The technological troglodytes of the nation, Wyoming Republicans have introduced a resolution in the legislature that would urge individuals and companies to abandon “the misadventure of electric vehicles” and support the fossil fuel industry, Engadget reports.

The non-binding legislation, Senate Joint Resolution 4, calls for phasing out sales of new electric vehicles by 2035 and encourages business and citizens to shun electric vehicles when making purchasing decisions.  The move, the legislation asserts is to support “the oil and gas industry in Wyoming [which] has created countless jobs and has contributed revenues to the state of Wyoming throughout the state’s history.”

“One might even say tongue-in-cheek, but obviously it’s a very serious issue that deserves some public discussion,” one of the resolution’s co-sponsors Brian Boner told the Cowboy State Daily (Yes, that’s the actual name of a legitimate outlet) when asked about the spirit of the bill. “I’m interested in making sure that the solutions that some folks want to the so-called climate crisis are actually practical in real life.  I just don’t appreciate when other states try to force technology that isn’t ready.”

In what will undoubtedly become an exercise in futility, two Democratic New York Congressman are calling on state Republicans and national Party leadership to cooperate in ongoing investigations into George Santos’s ongoing deception that brought him into Congress, NBC News reports.

After it was reported that Santos lied about his work history, his education, his religion, his heritage and his sexuality, both here in the United States and in Brazil, Congressmen Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres called on Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy, fellow member of Congress Republican Elise Stefanik and GOP leaders from New York State and Nassau County to fully cooperate with all investigations, including one ordered by the House Ethics Committee.

In a letter to McCarthy, Stefanik and the head of a SuperPAC affiliated with McCarthy, the Congressional Leadership Fund’s president Dan Conston, the pair stated, “Speaker McCarthy has long been a forceful advocate for transparency in our election process. On November 5, 2020, Mr. McCarthy tweeted, ‘Americans demand TRANSPARENCY in our election process now!’  We agree. We therefore hope that you will lead by example and be transparent about your knowledge of Mr. Santos’s web of lies. The American people deserve nothing less than the complete truth.”

Texas man confesses to decapitating newlywed 'undocumented' wife: report https://t.co/s0TdOzRby7

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 15, 2023

What the hell difference does it make if she was “undocumented”? Are they trying to imply she somehow deserved to get gruesomely murdered by her white ginger Texan husband?

The Pennsylvania GOP is spending at least $100,000 to hire DC-based Public Opinion Strategies to conduct research into why the 2022 midterms were such a shitshow for them, Politico reports.

On one level it makes sense that they’d want to do a deep dive and figure out where they fucked up, running all sorts of focus groups and pinpoint exactly what makes independent voters in a crucial swing state tick. On another level, the answer’s pretty goddamned obvious why they lost the gubernatorial and US Senate races, failed to flip a single US House district, and lost their majority in the state House: Republican voters. And disgraced former President Trump too, to an extent.

It was Republican voters who picked New Jersey man Mehmet Oz to be the US Senate nominee after Trump endorsed the TV quack. He won against Glenn Youngkin-esque rival David McCormick by only about 900 votes in the primary. There’s a case to be made that QAnon maniac Kathy Barnette split some of the MAGA vote and Oz would’ve won more comfortably without her in the race, but there’s almost no question David McCormick would’ve won if Trump had stayed out of it.

The same can be said of Doug Mastriano. Trump endorsed the bald conspiracy freak just days before the primary election while Doug was surging in polls, so the weight of his influence is debatable at best there. Either way, Republican primary voters still ultimately picked both of those clowns and both ultimately failed against their Dem opponents who clearly both had better appeal to independents. The party can piss away as much money as they want on “post-mortem” findings, none of that is going to solve the problem of a right wing base that will happily nominate losers.

Asked by a suddenly ballsy Chuck Todd to reconcile why he’s concerned by Hunter Biden but not Jared Kushner getting a $2 billion loan from the Qataris, piece of shit Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson got frustrated and annoyed, stammering out that “Part of the problem and this is pretty obvious to everyone watching this is you don’t invite me on to interview me, you invite me on to argue with me,” evidently victimized yet again by the liberal-biased media.

R’Bonney Gabriel, an Asian American model from Houston, was named Miss Universe in a spectacle (?) that didn’t even include representatives from the majority of nations divided by arbitrary borders on this globe, let alone a single representative from another terrestrial or extraterrestrial species–yeah, go ahead and deny that human privilege doesn’t exist–so the whole Universe thing is really overblown.  I mean which one in the Multiverse is she the Miss of, anyway, and yeah, maybe I need to check the label on the gummies before I grab a handful.

[22 minutes later] So anyway, Gabriel represented the United States in the outdated pageant that featured women from 84 countries, CNN reports.  Reports that Donald Trump tried to barge into the contestants’ dressing room at the New Orleans Convention Center were quickly shot down when it was pointed out these contestants were all over the age of 18.  [That last part isn’t true.  But you know that ’cause you’re smart.  Okay.  Just checking.  Damn gummies.]

Breaking an undeclared ceiling on the types of military aid the West was providing, the United Kingdom announced that it will become the first nation to send modern battle tanks to Ukraine to help them repel the Russian invasion, the New York Times reports.

A week after the US announced it would deliver Bradley Fighting Vehicles to Ukraine, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his “ambition” to provide the main battle tank of the British military, the Challenger II, a third-generation battle tank that plays the role of the American M1 Abrams battle tank.

In a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the two leaders discussed ongoing international effort to aid Ukraine, including Poland’s offer to provide a company of Leopard tanks, and unshockingly, Sunak didn’t do anything impeachable in his call with the Ukrainian president.

https://youtu.be/HuNwYkCLoIo

Take Trumpism and mix it with the included packet of election denialism.  Sprinkle in QAnon conspiracy theories, and bake it in a dry Arizona hate heat. Garnish with the Russian-produced meme du jour, and you’ve got the putrid stew that is the Maricopa County, Arizona Republican Party meeting.  As the officials on stage try to explain the voting system that will be used, members object loudly with a couple seemingly shouting claims of fraud, something Kari Lake would be very proud of.

Democratic Oregon Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici and her husband, Michael Simon, were struck by a car while crossing a street in Portland, with Bonamici needing hospitalization to treat her injuries, NBC News reports.

Bonamici and Simon were crossing the street at a corner after leaving an event when a turning car traveling at low speed struck them.  Bonamici was briefly hospitalized for a concussion and a laceration to her head; she’s since been discharged.  Her husband was treated for minor injuries at the scene.  The couple are recovering at home, and Bonamici has canceled two townhall meetings she had scheduled this week.

A former roommate of Republican Congressman George Santos told Patch.com that Santos wore a pricey Burberry scarf to a January 5th, 2021 MAGA rally in DC, a scarf the former roommate said he’s “100 percent” certain was stolen the previous year while they were living together.

Santos, then a failed House candidate who had been defeated by now former Dem Long Island Congressman Tom Suozzi, was among the MAGA personalities gave a speech to the crowd at Freedom Plaza near the White House as the fanboys warmed themselves up up to storm the Capitol the next day. The lying, thieving prick is clearly wearing the distinctive Burberry check-patterned scarf on video, which the former roommate says he’s sure was the one swiped as it’s a lighter shade on the background than the standard camel color for the iconic fashion house.

Trump-loyal federal investigators failed to find an additional six classified documents stores at then-former Vice President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware between January 2017 and January 2021, the New York Times reports on something that might have helped Donald get reelected if he had just been smarter and ordered his minions to investigate it.

Think of it: Trump got impeached for trying to force Ukraine to open a fake investigation into Hunter Biden when all along he could have just had John Solomon and Rudy go to the National Archives and try to find out if anything that crossed the former Vice President’s desk might be missing. It would’ve been “But her emails” all over again, but way more straightforward. Libs would have heart attacks if Trump and his scumbags had made this their “October Surprise” in 2020.

A Conroe, Texas-based brewery on Friday announced the cancelation of a far-right fanfest organized by an extremist publishing company and headlined by MAGA vigilante shitweasel Kyle Rittenhouse that had been scheduled for January 26th, the Texas Tribune reports.

“Southern Star Brewery is an apolitical organization, but we feel that this event doesn’t reflect our own values and we could not in good faith continue to rent our space for the event on 1/26. We don’t do rallies, we make beer for people who like beer,” Southern Star wrote on Twitter on Friday. The “Rally Against Censorship,” organized by Defiance Press, which published COVID conspiracy books and a biography of racist Arizona MAGA Sheriff Joe Arpaio, was also set to include a Texas secessionist leader on its list of speakers. Defiance say they’re looking for a new venue to host the show rather than refund the $275 “VIP” tickets to fanboys who paid extra to meet Kyle Rittenhouse.

Imagine censoring a censorship rally… #gowokegobroke https://t.co/IYXsljGxej

— Kyle Rittenhouse (@ThisIsKyleR) January 13, 2023

Rittenhouse naturally felt like he was the victim, yet again.

An anonymous Republican donor who in 2020 used a credit card to contribute $1,000 to lying shitbag Congressman George Santos’s first failed House campaign tells Talking Points Memo they were hit with another $15,000 in unauthorized charges during Santos’s second bid in 2022.

“It’s just wrong on so many levels,” the donor said, adding that some of that additional money somehow went to the campaign of QAnon freak Tina Forte who lost to AOC. The donor contacted Republican fundraising platform WinRed to try to get the charges reversed, and got no help. “I contacted WinRed donor support because that was listed as the merchant on my Amex statement. That was a whole months-long process because they couldn’t find these transactions even though they were listed as the merchant. They had no record of them in their system,” said the donor, who ultimately filed a fraud complaint with American Express to get the charges reversed.

Former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev on Saturday called on Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to ritually disembowel himself with a katana blade for what Medvedev called “subservience” to the United States following Kishida’s visit to Washington, Reuters reports.

Medvedev, who served as a puppet president of Russia for a 2008 – 2012 interregnum during which Putin acted as Prime Minister before handing the presidency back to Vlad and then serving as Prime Minister himself until 2020, seemed particularly pissed over Kishida’s joint statement with Biden condemning any Russian use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Medvedev called it a betrayal of “the memory of hundreds of thousands of Japanese who were burned in the nuclear fire of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” and that Kishida showed himself to be “just a service attendant for the Americans,” for which he should commit a gruesome and painful ritual suicide.

A MAGA insurrectionist who in early January 2021 took his young son on a three day road trip to the Trump-backed coup attempt was arrested earlier this month on three misdemeanor charges in connection to his illegal trespass along with thousands of other rioters, Insider reports.

Patrick William O’Brien, 54, of Great Falls, Montana, who drove 39 hours over three days prior to the insurrection, was not hit with any sort of child endangerment charges for taking the boy, age unknown, into the Capitol for approximately 30 minutes, but he fucking should have been considering five people were killed there and hundreds injured. The boy was spotted in surveillance footage stealing a mousepad from a security desk in one of the Capitol lobbies, according to Insider.

Apparently nobody told him that Biden documents special counsel Robert K Hur is “deep state” and was involved in the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigations early in the Trump Administration.

• I imagine his business card reads, “Steve Bannon:  Fascism Exporter.”
• Speaker pro tem McCarthy knows that if he expels George Santos, the voters in the NY 3rd will elect a Democrat, cutting his thin majority margin even more.  Short of a Santos conviction, McCarthy will do nothing.  Such is the moral compass of the GOP.
• Gas stoves are the incandescent bulbs of toilet flushes.
• Yes, Merrick Garland should appoint a special counsel to investigate the government documents found in Biden’s possession.  It’s how proper government functions properly, which was not what happened in the Trump administration.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CIV”