Nearly 6 in 10 respondents to an ABC News/Ipsos poll say fat former President Trump should face prosecution for his role in inciting the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection.

The employees of a suburban Baltimore Apple store have voted to unionize as members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, becoming the first Apple employees in the US to unionize, the Baltimore Sun reports.

The workers at Towson Town Center voted 65-33 to unionize, making Apple the latest large corporation to have workers unionize.   Internet monolith Amazon had a warehouse in New York vote to unionize last month, and retailers Starbucks and REI have also had locations vote to join a union.

“I applaud the courage displayed by CORE [Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, the union organizers] members at the Apple store in Towson for achieving this historic victory,” said Robert Martinez Jr., president of the Machinists international union, in a statement. “They made a huge sacrifice for thousands of Apple employees across the nation who had all eyes on this election. I ask Apple CEO Tim Cook to respect the election results and fast-track a first contract for the dedicated [International Association of Machinists] CORE Apple employees in Towson. This victory shows the growing demand for unions at Apple stores and different industries across our nation.”

Barbra Seville, a popular Phoenix drag performer, announced in a Facebook post that she’s performed for Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake at Lake’s home with Lake’s children in the audience, an apparent contradiction given Lake’s comments condemning things like “drag queen story time” for children.

“Now that @karilake Kari [Lake] has waded in to the war on drag queens, know she is a complete hypocrite,” Seville posted. “I’ve performed for Kari’s birthday, I’ve performed in her home (with children present,) and I’ve performed for her at some of the seediest bars in Phoenix.  She’s come to my parties and has been asked to leave because door people thought she was too intoxicated to remain on premises.”

The Texas Republican convention, already a shitshow with Congressman Dan Crenshaw nearly being assaulted by Proud Boys and Senator John Cornyn being booed mercilessly over a modest gun reform bill, took a further dark turn Saturday when delegates refused to vote down a homophobic screed from the party’s official platform, the Texas Tribune’s Sewell Chan reports.

“Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice. We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin, and we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values. No one should be granted special legal status based on their LGBTQ+ identification” reads official party plank #143.

Delegate David Gebhart was laughed and booed down when he said the item “does no benefit to the party… We are the Republican Party of Texas, not the Westboro Baptist Church”, per Chan. “People appreciate calling a spade a spade,” said delegate Nate Criswell. A third delegate then mentioned something about dildos and fisting before she was cut off. A voice vote to amend the item then failed. Don Jr’s going to be even more disappointed now.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approved the recommendation that children five years and younger get a reduced dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, allowing millions of children to get increased protection, CNN reports.

The recommendation the use of either the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech formulations for children over the age of six months.  While children normally do not contract the virus, the ones who do have a significantly higher risk of complications and death than older children.

“Together, with science leading the charge, we have taken  another important step forward in our nation’s fight against COVID-19. We know millions of parents and caregivers are eager to get their young children vaccinated, and with today’s decision, they can,” Walensky said in a statement. “I encourage parents and caregivers with questions to talk to their doctor, nurse, or local pharmacist to learn more about the benefits of vaccinations and the importance of protecting their children by getting them vaccinated.”   

A federal appeals court rejected a 2020 Trump Administration determination that the active ingredient in the weedkiller Roundup was not harmful to humans, reopening thousands of claims from users who developed cancer after using the product, the Associated Press reports.

The active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, has been linked to an increased risk of contracting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  However, in 2020, two years after pharmaceutical giant Bayer bought Monsanto, the original manufacturer, the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency unexpectedly released a report claiming that all the scientific evidence that links glyphosate to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was erroneous and the product was perfectly safe.

Judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the Trump EPA finding  “was not supported by substantial evidence.″  The court also found that the EPA shirked its responsibility to follow up on evidence that Roundup, the most-used herbicide in the world, did not impact animal species as it was supposed to examine under the Endangered Species Act. 

It feels like just yesterday – maybe even more recently than that – when the “BREAKING NEWS” chyrons flashed across right wing TV news networks alerting Americans to the news their president had stumbled a little bit after interrupting his bike ride to speak to reporters in Delaware. Americans from coast to coast, of all races and creeds still remember that moment and prompt each other with the seminal question: “Where were you when you found out that Biden fell off his bike?”

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump
The Unselect Committee of political thugs & scoundrels is trying to use disinformation and outright lies to RAILROAD people into the arms of the Justice Department. They are doing everything within their power to criminalize politics, an absolute no no! I watched this lowlife Raskin yesterday making things and statements up, from out of nowhere. Pure fiction! The Dems play very dirty, but Republican leadership should never have allowed this Kangaroo Court to happen. A USA embarrassment!

4,595 1,403 Jun 18, 2022, 09:02

Trump’s right, Kevin McCarthy really fucked this up for him. McCarthy was offered multiple chances to have some say in the investigation, first by helping tank the first commission proposal in the Senate, then by putting Jims Jordan and Banks on the Select Committee and pulling out completely when Pelosi rejected them, which in retrospect was pretty stupid. Oh and he also said the House GOP were going to do their own parallel investigation of the Capitol riot, never did.

So now this “Kangaroo Court” has been doing some not-insignificant damage to Trump politically, emboldening his rivals, and it’s only halfway done. McCarthy pissed away his chance to blunt the damage, thinking that walking away and screaming the committee is “illegitimate” is somehow more effective than the damning video testimony. The best part is maybe McCarthy and his clown car actually secretly want these hearings to derail Trump 2024 and Donald doesn’t realize it yet.

Jesse Powell, a crypto chode CEO and founder of an exchange called Kraken, has had a hell of a week after on Wednesday the New York Times reported he’s on record saying some really incel-ish shit on an internal Slack channel. “If you can identify as a sex, can you identify as a race or ethnicity?”, “who can refer to another person as the N word”, and that questions about women’s intelligence relative to men’s are “not as settled as one might have initially thought.” were among the MAGA bullshit Powell wrote to employees in the chat feed while he’s supposed to be working and making money for his company’s investors and the retail investors on the crypto exchange.

On Friday Powell appeared on the Fox Business Network twice to cry how he’s the real victim. “The woke activist movement just ignores the fact that we have a business to run, and we have a bigger mission than somebody’s individual personal preferences being met,” Powell said in his first interview with Fox Business on Friday. “The New York Times hit piece completely cherry-picked little snippets of text out of weeks’ worth of conversations and reconstructed their own sentences in this hit piece. A complete misrepresentation of what actually happened. Obviously I don’t think women are any less intelligent than men,” Powell said in the second appearance.

The “Powell” and “Kraken” convergence with infamous MAGA lawyer Sidney “Kraken” Powell is just icing on the cake of watching this asshole freak out over the views he’s supposed to be proud of being exposed amid the crypto industry going up in flames. The crash these clowns are experiencing is a minor but not totally insignificant factor in the overall rough economic picture, a smaller scale version of the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage shitshow that nearly destroyed the global economy when it fully metastasized. This time however, it’s much harder to feel bad for people taking a beating on digital monopoly money as opposed to those suckered into adjustable rate mortgages on McMansions out in some exurban hinterland. Bitcoin isn’t a roof over your head.

The Otero County, New Mexico commissioners gave in to a court order Friday and certified the results of the June 7th primary election, by a vote of 2 to 1, the Washington Post reports. The “no” vote was of course “Cowboys for Trump” dickhead Couy Griffin, who was probably in a bad mood after getting sentenced to two weeks in jail for entering restricted grounds during the Capitol riot.

• If Democrats were as craven as Republicans in pushing false Constitutional concepts, Al Gore would have been the 43rd President of the United States, and according to their own statements, Republicans would have supported that ploy.
• Herschel Walker:  four children with four different mothers.  Another “family values” conservative demanding to maintain the sanctity of marriage.  Like Britney Spears.  And Donald Trump.  And Bill O’Reilly.  And Newt Gingrich.  And Roger Ailes.  And Bill Cosby.  
• The fact that Trump flags greatly outnumbered American flags among the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th shows you what it was truly about.
• Imagine if the police at the Capitol on January 6th had used the “I thought my safety was in danger” excuse to open fire on the crowd of domestic terrorists storming the Capitol.  More than most street cops who kill unarmed people, those officers legitimately feared for their safety, yet only one shot was fired, and that was done to protect members of Congress.

“I hope some states will take the lead on this,” For Trump Administration Secretary of Energy and Man in Smart Glasses Rick Perry says.  “If the federal government’s gonna make it so hard to get a permit for a, a small modular reactor, then the states needin’ to take this in tear [sic] hand.  For instance, Texas, we own our own grid.  We need to step forward, usin’ the 10th Amendment and say, ‘Wa, Washington, yer not gonna do this, we’re gonna take care of this ourselves and go forward with it.”

The rest of the nation–and Mexico–ask, “What could possibly go wrong given that the power grid Rick Perry talks about is in decrepit condition to the point that scores of people died during a cold spell?  And who wouldn’t want a state government that doesn’t believe in government regulation to oversee the operation of a nuclear power plant?”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his deputy Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling will testify Tuesday to the House January 6th Select Committee, Georgia Public Broadcasting reports. The two men, who took a lot of shit from Trump fans and the Donald himself, most famously the call in which the Orange Tyrant commanded Raffensperger to “Find 11,780 votes” just days before the Georgia Senate runoff and the Capitol riot.

OPINION: Online porn should be banned and it's long overdue https://t.co/X3pQSmeHVd

— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 16, 2022

An unknown number of SpaceX employees have been fired from the company for circulating a letter criticizing owner Elon Musk’s behavior, including his social media commentary and his alleged sexual harassment of female air crew, Florida Today reports.

While he’s being hailed as a “free speech” advocate because he objects to censorship on Twitter during his pending takeover, Musk doesn’t carry over his free-wheeling approach to other people’s opinions in his own domain.  Musk’s management team sought out and fired the people who circulated the letter as they asked fellow employees to sign on to it.

“The letter, solicitations and general process made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said. “We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism.”

Fat former President Trump on Friday once again claimed he would consider pardoning his fans convicted of crimes committed at his command during the January 6th insurrection and once again we need to point out he could’ve fucking done it before he left office but did not.

As we’ve written twice before, because the scope of presidential pardons is not settled law, and a person need not be even accused of a federal crime, let alone prosecuted and convicted to be pardoned (like Richard Nixon in 1974, draft dodgers let off the hook by Jimmy Carter in 1977, and Steve Bannon in 2021), the fact is that Trump had two weeks to pardon most, if not all of the Capitol rioters and didn’t. The 58 who were arrested between January 6th and 19th could 100% have been pardoned as could the 100 or 200 more who had been identified but not yet arrested.

Whether or not the remainder, the ones who took longer to be identified by federal investigators and then cuffed by FBI agents after Biden had been inaugurated could have been granted a blanket pardon is an open question, but we’re not bearish on that. Either the answer is yes, or Merrick Garland would’ve faced an absolute clusterfuck slog of a fight getting it through the courts that maybe slightly more likely than not would have ultimately prevailed, but would have constrained Biden and every subsequent president’s pardon power so why bother. But that question is academic. What is not is that a low three figure number of Capitol rioters arrested or positively identified by federal law enforcement by the morning of January 20th, 2021 who could have definitely been pardoned were not. At least two of them even lobbied for it and still got locked up anyway because Trump didn’t give a shit about them. Why should they believe him now?

Professional wrestling executive Vince McMahon, the CEO of WWE and the husband of former Trump administration official Linda McMahon, has temporarily handed over the reins of the company to his daughter after allegations surfaced that he paid a former female employee $3 million to keep her quiet after a lengthy affair, Reuters reports.

In the course of an internal investigation of that payment, the WWE, a public company, also found multiple other payments to other female employees who supposedly had relationships with McMahon or the head of talent relations, John Laurinaitis.  It is unclear if the relationships were consensual.

The WWE appointed an outside legal counsel to investigate the payments.  The corporation, which attracts large audiences due to its violence and sexual degradation of women, wants to have a public appearance of caring.

The House January 6th Select Committee said Friday they’re cooperating with the Justice Department’s requests for transcripts of testimony, NBC News reports. The committee is “engaged in a cooperative process to address the needs of the Department of Justice. We are not inclined to share the details of that publicly. We believe accountability is important and won’t be an obstacle to the department’s prosecutions,” per a statement to NBC. The signal of cooperation follows a letter from the Department to the committee saying they hadn’t coughed up evidence the grand jury needs to continue investigating the coup attempt. “It is now readily apparent that the interviews the Select Committee conducted are not just potentially relevant to our overall criminal investigations, but are likely relevant to specific prosecutions that have already commenced,” DOJ officials wrote.

Said the fat Orange God Emperor to his worshippers on Friday at some bullshit “Faith and Freedom Conference” in Nashville about the clips of his minions being deposed by House January 6th select Committee hearings: “Out of the nine hours they’ll put up a five second clip where they got a little tired. They’re ripped completely out of context these statements in many cases to create an impression that is the exact opposite of the truth, so that what you’re seeing is a complete and total lie, it’s a complete and total fraud,” before presumably continuing railing against the hearings which supposedly he nor none of his fans have been watching or were affected by.

He looks fucking pissed. Like he’s always pretty angry but there’s definitely more than a little extra malice in his diseased and hateful brain here, like these hearings really are getting to him, even though they were supposed to be a flop, according to the cult. Never mind that “out of context” is the lamest excuse in the book – as if “in context” would be any better for him – or that he’s suggesting his staff and family committed perjury when they sat for depositions.

Senior Texas Republican Senator and conservative blasphemer for even discussing common-sense gun control John Cornyn got a steady undercurrent of boos as he addressed the Texas Republican Convention.  As he finished his address, shown below, the boos grew louder.