A Florida federal judge on Wednesday rejected disgraced former President Trump’s legal team’s motion to prevent New York Attorney General Leticia James from appointing an independent monitor to oversee the obese would-be autocrat’s corrupt business empire, Politico reports.

US District Court Donald Middlebrooks, who last month levied sanctions against Trump lawyers for their previous acts of gross incompetence in the historically stupid failed Trump v Hillary et al lawsuit, warned the assholes they were risking it again. “This litigation has all the telltale signs of being both vexatious and frivolous,” Middlebrooks wrote in his ruling rejecting the motion.

There will be a lot of guano, bombs and meteorites dropped as people sift through the documents that will be released by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress.  Here’s one of the first:  Charlie Kirk, the CEO of Turning Point USA, invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when he was asked his age during an interview with the committee.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has informed the government that he has successfully formed a coalition that would give him enough votes in Parliament to be Prime Minister, with his conservative Likud Party holding 32 seats in the 130-seat Israeli Knesset, CNN reports.

President Joe Biden holds a press conference with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, as Zelenskyy tries to solidify American support for his nation’s fight against an invading Russian military as Republicans express doubt about further funding.

House Republicans, led by irritable spandex-wearing freak Congressman Jim Jordan, on Wednesday released their own lengthy Capitol riot “final report” to try to get out ahead of the anticipated publication of the House January 6th Select Committee’s report. Without getting into this load of shit, we can report accurately that the word “Pelosi” appears 36 times, while the word “Trump” appears 24 times, which should give you an idea of how self-serving the “report” actually is.

UPDATE 12/21/2022 3:57 PM EST: In very much related news, real House January 6th Select Committee’s final report will be released on Thursday, CBS’s Scott MacFarlane reports.

Public records indicate that far right “election integrity” Congressman Drew Ferguson voted absentee using the address of a home he moved out of in April in the May GOP primary, November general, and December Senate runoff elections in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Ferguson, who has spewed “voter integrity” bullshit in the past and in December 2020 signed onto an amicus brief supporting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s failed lawsuit trying to throw out the votes from Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and – of course – Ferguson’s own home state of Georgia (though he didn’t object on January 6th, 2021), in April moved two counties away from of Troup County to Pike County, yet continued to vote in Troup, a direct violation of state law.

President Biden on Wednesday welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the Oval Office by praising his leadership in the face of Russia’s brutal invasion of the country, saying “It is an honor to be by your side” and “the Ukrainian people continue to inspire the world.” When it was his turn to speak, Zelensky expressed deep gratitude for all the support for Ukraine’s defense, starting with Biden, the Congress, and all the “ordinary people” of the United States.

Disgraced former President Trump’s legal team are preparing to challenge New York State’s newly-enacted adult rape survivor’s law as unconstitutional following writer EJ Carroll’s expanded lawsuit against the fat fuck for attacking her in a Manhattan department store in 1995, Politico reports.

Carroll filed the lawsuit after the law allowed for a limited window rape victims to sue their attackers if the normal statute of limitations had already expired as it had for her case against Trump. So for those keeping score at home, instead of defending himself on the merits of a defense against a civil complaint, Trump is going to try to deny thousands of other New Yorkers the chance for justice against the predators who sexually violated them just so he can get away with having done it himself. He would re-inflict suffering on those victims to spare himself.

A Grant county, Wisconsin baby is safe after its family’s Amish truck inexplicably engaged in autopilot mode last week while idling outside of a residence, driving around for approximately 90 minutes before a citizen spotted the truck and rescued the infant, WKOW 27 reports.

It’s unclear if the autonomous vehicle, a cutting edge piece of Amish technology others might call a “horse,” suffered from any programming defects that caused it to engage in autopilot mode without a licensed operator, or if the baby had somehow switched it on while inside the trailer.

Wednesday marks ten years since the feared 2012 apocalypse failed to destroy humanity via a polar shift, massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, a zombie plague, an invasion of inter-dimensional aliens, a supernatural invasion of shrieking demonic entities, a deadlier form of the chicken pox, or some combination thereof. Or maybe something else like the Sun exploding. Whatever it was supposed to be didn’t happen and now we’re stuck here, still alive, writing a pointless article recalling a failed “Mayan prophecy,” most associate with the mediocre global disaster film 2012 starring John Cusack and Chiwetel Ejiofor if they remember it was a thing at all.

A billionaire Republican Party megadonor on Wednesday vowed there will be “no limitations” in
spending on weapons and supplies to help ensure victory in Ukraine, Bloomberg reports.

“The country and government is giving everything that the army asks for – everything,” said longtime GOP backer and Trump 2016 campaign advisor Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, adding “I trust that there will be an appropriate response and the results will be achieved.”

Napoleonic Florida Gov Ron DeSantis owned the libs on Tuesday by filling a newly created state appeals court seat with an outgoing Hillsborough County circuit judge who lost reelection in August after a controversial ruling earlier this year in which he denied a teenager an abortion without the consent of her parents because she wasn’t mature enough, the Miami Herald reports.

Judge Jared Smith was to turn in his badge and gavel on January 1st following his defeat in the August 23rd election to Tampa attorney Nancy Jacobs in a race heavily focused on Smith calling a pregnant 17 year-old too dumb and immature to be permitted to have an abortion without the consent of her parents, a ruling which was later overturned and found to be an abuse of judicial discretion by an appeals court. Then there was when Smith’s wife, campaigning at a MAGAchurch, told congregants that Jacobs, a Jew, “needs Jesus.” Because, definitely not in spite of his evil ways, DeSantis decided that Smith has the right stuff for the newly created Florida 6th District Court of Appeals, which we would imagine comes with a bigger paycheck and fancier judge costume.

The United States of America scored an important symbolic victory over its northern rival Canada last week as a Central Washington state-area bald eagle killed and then with its mate consumed the flesh of a Canada goose in a show of international dominance, the Tacoma News Tribune reports.

Fuck yeah.

Workers at the Grant Public Utility District’s Wanapum hydroelectric dam first sighted the national bird-on-national bird violence as the eagle flew past a surveillance camera with the goose in its clutches. The workers then stepped outside and captured pics of the majestic American and its mate perched atop a nearby lamppost as they tore into the hapless Canadian. Workers believed the goose was still alive when the eagle first flew past the camera – and the initial footage would seem to indicate that was the case, though an expert quoted by the News Tribune was somewhat skeptical. “My guess is if the goose was alive, the eagle probably would not be carrying it, because it probably would be wiggling around, and that sort of thing,” said Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Joe Buchanan, while allowing that there’s plenty of documented evidence of bald eagles preying upon smaller waterfowl like ducks and coots.

Gambian military leadership on Wednesday announced the arrest of four soldiers plotting a coup against President Adama Barrow’s administration, Reuters reports on a successful stop the steal. The army is hunting down three additional perpetrators in the attempt, according to a statement by the military’s high command. The tiny West African nation is still recovering from over two decades of rule by Gambia First patriot Yahya Jammeh who seized power in 1994.

The British government on Wednesday asked citizens not to get drunk, play sports, or take any unnecessary car trips as three labor unions representing ambulance drivers and medical technicians went on strike to demand better pay and working conditions, the Associated Press reports.

“It’s the season of parties, pre-Christmas, so do enjoy yourself but obviously don’t get so drunk that you end up with an unnecessary visit” said National Health Service chief Steve Powis, which would be reasonable advice in any situation, not just on a day when their whole goddamned emergency medical response infrastructure is going on strike because they’re not getting paid enough.

Leadership of the Kyiv-based Orthodox Church of Ukraine on Tuesday decreed that adherents can go ahead and celebrate Christmas on December 25th like most of the rest of the Christmas-tian world, deepening the rift between their sect and the Moscow-aligned Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Oh haha! Monty Python nerds can make that hilarious People’s Front of Judea joke in the comments again!), which celebrates it on the Julian calendar date on January 7th, Politico EU reports.

“We are giving people the option to celebrate on a different day,” said Kyiv church Archbishop Yevstratiy Zoria, acknowledging the divide between their church and the Moscow-based Orthodoxes, recently the subject of a serious allegations of harboring pro-Russian fifth columnists.

“… those in the pro-life community.  Also the selection of all these terrific justices, it made the reversal of Roe possible,” just a horrible excuse for a human Laura Ingraham pronounces.  “And regardless of the political benefit, which is impossible really to quantify, it was a win nearly 50 years in the making.”

In a move Republicans wish they would have thought of first, the Taliban have announced that women are now banned from seeking an education at universities and colleges in Afghanistan, Politico reports.

It’s the latest step the Taliban have enacted limiting women’s rights since gaining control in 2021 after the US withdrawal following a two-decade war and occupation, a period when women in the country enjoyed greater freedom than under the fundamentalist theocrats.

During the American occupation, girls were permitted to attend public schools and women enjoyed opportunities to get work outside their homes.  However, the Taliban have now blocked girls from attending middle school and high school, and they have severely limited the ability of women to work outside their homes.

A 97-year-old German woman who was the personal secretary to an SS officer running an extermination camp during World War II was convicted by a German court for her role in the deaths of more than 10,000 people, USA Today reports.

The judges in the trial determined that it would have been impossible for Irmgard Furchner to not have understood the information she was transcribing as stenographer for the commander of the camp, located near present-day Gdansk, Poland.  Although her defense team argued that she was ignorant about the mass murder of people, Furchner said in her closing statement that she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been at Stutthof, the name of the camp, at the time.

The Itzehoe state court in northern Germany ruled that Furchner was an accessory in the murders of 10,505 people and sentenced her to a two-year sentence, but suspended prison time.