Santa Claus stuns with cringeworthy national anthem rendition https://t.co/HEFFfLrTwA

— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 22, 2022

In two newly-released transcripts of her interviews with the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson detailed an effort by Trump supporters to influence her testimony with money and job offers in a ham-handed persuasion campaign.  In her testimony, Hutchinson also implied that her first attorney, paid by Donald Trump’s PAC, was leaking information to the media.

As the Associated Press reports, Hutchinson testified that two Trump aides, Alex Cannon and Justin Clark, offered to provide her financial assistance and help in her job search during conversations preceding her testimony.  She also received a call from Ben Williamson, an aide to Hutchinson’s former boss Mark Meadows, who said to her, “Well, Mark wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal and he knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss. You know, he knows that we’re all on the same team and we’re all a family.”

New York State Attorney General Leticia James’s office is “looking into” douchebag Long Island Republican Congressman-elect George Santos for unspecified crimes, NBC News reports. It’s not illegal to lie to voters about graduating college, working at two major banks, being the grandson of Holocaust survivors, a practicing Jew, being gay, owning several mansions, or any of that sort of stuff. That’s on the voters to punish him for in 2024, if he in fact even makes it that far.

There are however plenty of questions about shit like his financial situation that he is not being totally upfront about, specifically about where the $700,000 he loaned his campaign came from and why he listed himself as the local agent for a company in Florida when he’s supposed to be residing in New York state, where he just got elected to represent in Congress. Those are worth a look.

“I have one question for the Senators who want to pass this $1.7 trillion omnibus bill,” Congresswoman Lauren Boebert says earnestly into her propped-up cell phone.  “Why do you want to sexualize our children?”

Wait…what?  Boebert goes on to list a number of programs that assist LGBTQ children who are frequently attacked, ostracized and ridiculed through social programs available in the community and in schools.  In the video that you can see here, Boebert targets LGBTQ kids in a way these programs intend to counter.

Put aside the fact that the amount of money called out by Boebert is literally 0.0009% of the total spending in the bill; the bill itself funds the overall operation of the federal government, from defense through social programs.  What Boebert is doing is politicizing LGBTQ children’s safety and health; that’s a fact, not the lie Boebert tells about the funding bill. 

The US Senate on Thursday passed the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package 68 to 29, with 18 Republicans and all Dems voting yes, sending the bill to the House where it is expected to pass along party lines later in the day. Packed in along with the funding of government until September 30, 2023 is the Electoral Count Act reform and billions in military aid for Ukraine.

Republican Kansas Senator Roger Marshall, an election conspirator who attempted to under the Constitution January 6th, sure knows how to prioritize issues.  After being called out by Fox Business host Neil Cavuto for not attending the historic speech given by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to a joint session of Congress, Marshall said it “was disrespectful to the Border Patrol officers.”

Emblematic of a Party chock full of people who have a problem walking while chewing gum, Marshall attempts to posit an unrealistic either-or scenario:  either we can assist Ukraine in defending itself against Russian invaders, or we fund border security.  Without basis, Marshall claims we can’t do both, even though he professed his support for Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the top 1% that skyrocketed federal deficits.  It seems Marshall doesn’t support duly elected governments anywhere in the world.

The US House on Thursday voted 222 to 201 to pass HR 9640, the Presidential Tax Filing and Audit Transparency Act of 2022, a name self-explanatory enough for us to go ahead and skip the details on its provisions. Among the 222 were all Dems present or voting by proxy plus five Republicans.

All the nays were GOP members, naturally. Weird how a bill that on paper means accountability for both sides is (mostly) opposed by only one of them. Like don’t they want the IRS to do a deep dive into Joe Biden’s taxes to find out if he made money off that Burisma thing through his son, Hunter? Isn’t that what their whole investigation is about after all? What do they have to lose by supporting full transparency for Presidents? Yeah these questions are rhetorical sarcasm but it would be nice to get something resembling some sort of answer, even if it’s complete bullshit.

Tennessee Capitol rioter Edward Kelley, who had been out bail awaiting trial on charges of assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, civil disorder, destruction of government property, and other offenses in the January 6th MAGA insurrection is not out on bail anymore following his subsequent arrest earlier this month on charges he plotted to assassinate FBI agents who had investigated Kelley’s role in the riot, CBS News’s Scott MacFarlane reports.

White Nationalist conspiracy freak shitbag Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has settled her divorce with her poor cuck husband, finally freeing him after years of infidelity, Insider reports.

In a September 2022 interview with the House January 6th Select Committee, former Trump White House assistant Cassidy Hutchinson told investigators that shitweasel MAGA lawyer Stefan Passantino (very douchey sounding name too) told her specifically not to talk about the infamous episode in which the Orange God Emperor allegedly tried to grab the steering wheel of his SUV when Secret Service agents told him they weren’t driving him to the Capitol.

“I told Stefan that day about the incident that happened in the Beast, which I should refer to it as the Presidential limo, because that was one. And I remember saying to Stefan, ‘Tony Ornato and I were very close at the White House. Tony told me this incident happened.’ And I didn’t go into extremely graphic detail telling Stefan about it. I tried to kind of make it more casual than my conversation with Tony really was, but I think I said something to I said something to Stefan like, ‘Yeah, I had this conversation with Tony Ornato when we got back from the rally that day, and he told me that the President tried to wrap his hands around Bobby’s neck and strangle him because he wouldn’t take him to the Capitol.’ And Stefan said, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ I remember he, like, sat back in his chair, and he’s like, ‘No, no, no. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to talk about that,'” Hutchinson told the committee according to the transcript, which annoyingly has not been OCR’d into copyable text.

The interview of course was after Hutchinson famously revealed the fat fuck’s post-Ellipse rally meltdown in her testimony in June 2022. This follow-up interview was focused on Passantino’s attempts to tamper with her testimony earlier this year, which we’re going to go ahead and guess is a disbarment-level offense if not also a crime. Passantino seems to think so too as he reportedly took a leave of absence from his firm on Wednesday, a day after his tampering was first reported.

“Today, Public Policy Polling released a survey of Arizonans, showing that headed into the 2024 election, Senator Sinema is broadly unpopular and trails Rep. Ruben Gallego significantly in a three-way race. The poll shows Gallego at 40% and Republican Kari Lake at 41%, with Sinema in a distant third at 13%. As PPP’s memo (below) explains, the survey of over 650 Arizona voters shows ‘Ruben Gallego is considerably more popular in the state than Kyrsten Sinema and would be a top tier Senate candidate regardless of what she decides to do in 2024.’ While Sinema has no realistic path to victory in a 3-way race, Gallego would start effectively tied with the Republican. The only potential spoiler here is Sinema in her potential 3rd party run,” says a press release from Ruben Gallego’s campaign – which he still hasn’t officially launched as a 2024 Senate run yet.

Neither has Kari Lake (because she still thinks she’s going to be governor) but we would have to believe the 2024 Republican Senate nomination is hers if she wants it. In the two way races Gallego is tied with Lake at 48 to 47 percent while Lake leads Sinema by a wider 42 to 39 percent.

But looking at the three-way race it almost seems like it could actually end up with Sinema being the spoiler for Lake rather than for Gallego. Remember that Lake was undeniably if marginally favored going into the gubernatorial race against Hobbs. The few polls that didn’t have them tied put Lake in the lead by single digits, which tells us she’ll be overrated again in 2024 (and definitely even fucking crazier). So if the right-leaning suburban “moderate” types who didn’t actually like Lake but voted for her in 2022 anyway because they like Democrats even less are the ones Sinema is trying to appeal to here then it’s hard to see how that’s a disadvantage for Gallego.

“The evil of the left isn’t just in politics, but in your everyday life. Look what they are doing to children. To companies that create children’s toys, books, films, and shows. Look what they are doing in your public school system and libraries. Look what they are doing to your family”

– The current top comment on a Dennis Prager op-ed in American Greatness titled “Why Many Conservatives Won’t Be with Their Children or Grandchildren This Christmas,” posted Thursday.

“Parent after parent calls my radio show, often close to tears, sometimes actually sobbing, pouring their heart out to me about being alone on holidays despite having children and grandchildren,” writes Prager in the piece, which you will be not at all shocked to learn does not actually get into any examples of what causes such tragic rifts. Which is understandable, because if Prager said that these adult kids don’t want their children around grandparents who believe COVID vaccines have Jewish mind-control nanobots in them, that Hillary Clinton regularly sacrifices child sex slaves in Satanic rituals, that Black people are genetically inferior to whites, that Trump was chosen by God and thus infallible, or other such hateful shit then it would kind of undermine his assertion that these MAGA-brained seniors are the real victims here. And we can’t have that now, can we?

During her February 2022 deposition with the House January 6th Select Committee, Florida supermarket empire heiress and MAGA terrorist backer Julie Facinelli repeatedly invoked the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments when asked why she believed the First and Fourteenth Amendments applied to her declining to answer questions with Committee investigators. She got it right at least on the Fifth Amendment, which sure shows up quite a bit in these interview transcripts.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday told CNN’s Manu Raju that there’s no deal yet to move forward on a vote for the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill but he hopes to have it together before the noon, which would probably be a good idea to have it done before Christmas.

Twenty-eight Republicans, apparently including Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (Q-Colo.) who voted nay by proxy, voted against the overwhelmingly popular Respect for Child Survivors Act, a bill that got 385 bipartisan votes to pass.  The bill, which has already passed the Senate, provides funding for additional training for FBI agents who handle child sexual assault, recognizing that victims of sexual assault need multidisciplinary care to address their trauma and get justice.

Apparently Boebert and her boorish compatriots objected to something, something funding the FBI after they meddled in the 2020 election and the 2016 one too but they’re not concerned with that because President Trump won that one so we need to concentrate on the important stuff like stopping LGBTQ grooming but not victims of sexual assault.  For the children.

Kudos to the Trump tax experts at the New York Times for digging into the information released by the House Ways and Means Committee and solving a mystery:  After declaring negative net income in the previous three years, how did Donald Trump’s income skyrocket to $24 million?

For background:  Trump declared negative income in 2015, 2016 and 2017, and paid minimal federal taxes–just $750 those last two years–before showing $24 million in income in 2018 and $4.4 million in 2019.  In 2020–his last year in the White House, Trump reported a $4.7 million negative income for the year.

Turns out, he can thank his late father for his one year of reported positive income.  In 2018, Trump got a windfall from the sale of a property his father acquired and handed down to his children.  Between January 2016 and April 2017, Trump got more than $5 million in revenue from the Starrett City development.  He sold the 4% share his father bought in the development, netting a $14 million windfall, accounting for the rise in his income for the year.

According to pool reports from CNN’s Kristin Wilson, Newsy’s Nathaniel Reed reports that only 86 Republicans out of the 213 in the House caucus showed up for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to a special joint session of Congress.  The man risked his life, leaving his nation for the first time since the invasion, to fly to the United States so he can express his gratitude and appreciation for our support, as well as plead for additional help to continue the fight.  But these 127 assholes had to get back to their districts and press the flesh with some donors.

Starting out with a greeting like a cheerleader on ecstasy before realizing she’s wearing her “smart gerl” glasses, alleged former prostitute and woman who literally spent most of the speech on her phone Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (Q-Colo.) asserts Congress won’t approve any additional money for Ukraine unless it gets a full accounting of every dollar spent…which is a revamp of the “if I can balance my checkbook, why can’t Congress…” idiocy she’s famous for.

But always the Mean Girl, Boebs has to get a zinger in, saying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy just wants to defend his nation’s border and protect its people, something she wishes the current administration would do–’cause a nation at war, defending itself from an invading army deploying jets and tanks is exactly the same as a wave of migrants fleeing dangerous home nations.  Sheesh.

Scheduled for a 7:30 p.m. ET start, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses Congress Wednesday relating Ukraine’s continued fight against the Putin-ordered invasion of his country and the importance of continued American support.

Preparing for a flurry of subpoenas and demands for testimony as a Republican-led House promises various wild goose chases, Hunter Biden has retained Abbe Lowell, a lawyer with experience handing Congressional inquiries, to join his legal team, NBC News reports.

Lowell represented Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner when Kushner was called to testify before the Mueller special investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.  He has also represented President Bill Clinton, former Democratic Senator John Edwards and Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey.

Chris Clark of the firm Latham & Watkins is representing Hunter Biden in an ongoing investigation into Biden’s tax filings.  Lowell will handle Congressional inquiries and requests.  Republican Kentucky Congressman James Comer, who will become chair of the House Oversight Committee, said last month that the activities of Hunter Biden and other Biden family members that “compromise U.S. national security and President Biden’s ability to lead with impartiality.”  Strangely, Comer had no such concerns about Donald Trump’s international property management company run by his children, his daughter’s international trademarks or his son-in-law’s $2 billion donation to an investment fund from the Saudis.