Russian military sources on Saturday confirmed the Deputy Chief of the 8th Army, Major General Vladimir Frolov, was killed in action in Ukraine, the eighth general to be cancelled by Ukrainian defenders since the invasion began on February 24th, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The only reason they confirmed it was because Frolov was buried in St Petersburg on Saturday but did not offer any other details as to when or how he was canceled. The Journal reports the 8th Army was deployed in Eastern Ukraine, near the besieged Azov port city of Mariupol.

Total RINO Nebraska State Senator Julie Slama obviously wants some socialist queer Demo-rat libtard to win the Nebraska Governor’s mansion in November. Otherwise she wouldn’t be falsely accusing patriot Charles Herbster of sticking his hand up her skirt. She’s not his type. She is – it’s just a terrible thing that people can make statements like that, especially about a fellow Republican. She was asking for it anyway, being dressed like that. She should’ve just laid back and enjoyed it.

On a phone call intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence An unnamed Russian soldier told his wife that the Russian army intentionally fired artillery from the breakaway Donetsk region into a town inside Russia, an attack blamed on Ukrainian troops, the Daily Beast reports.

When a female voice on the call expressed concern over the attack on the town of Klimovo in Bryansk Oblast, Russia, the male soldier responded with “That was ours fucking stuff up. It’s necessary. They do that to provoke the [Ukrainians]. And that’s why they hit it. We talked to the bosses and they said that’s how it is. The same shit was happening in the Chechen War, they blew up apartments in Moscow, as if it were terrorists. It was really the FSB.” The soldier was referring to the 1999 series of bombings of apartment buildings officially blamed on Chechen terrorists but widely believed to have been false flag attacks by Russian security services.

The Orange God Emperor enjoys “endorsing against candidates… just to see their numbers go down” unnamed sources told the Washington Post in a Saturday report surveying the landscape of what goes into his picks after the not entirely safe GOP Senate nomination bets on Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and JD Vance in Ohio. “I’m the king of endorsements,” the Fat Bastard said.

Per the Post, Oz’s most formidable rival, amoral plutocrat turned MAGA nationalist David McCormick, was doomed long before he even entered the race when he badmouthed the Donald in a January 26, 2021 interview with Bloomberg News Editor-at-Large Erik Schatzker in which he said “history will look very unfavorably” on the Capitol riot (less than three weeks earlier). When asked by Schatzker what were his thoughts on the Biden Administration so far, McCormick said he “really appreciated President Biden’s tone in terms of his responsibility to serve the whole country,” which is like, he might as well have set a MAGA hat on fire and then pissed on it. That is just NOT okay if you want to be hugged and kissed by the Orange Messiah.

Texas Governor Low Energy Greg caused an estimated $240 million worth of produce to spoil when he mandated additional inspections of trucks crossing into the state from Mexico before reversing the policy Friday, CNN reports. The figure, cited by Fresh Produce Association of the Americas President Lance Jungmeyer, will cause price spikes to be felt hardest in purchases of strawberries, avocados, and asparagus for consumers in the Northeast and Midwest as early as this weekend.

Nice going Greg. Not as bad as the bullshit Texas National Guard border mission which caused as many as nine suicides among the troops involuntarily deployed to watch out for Mexicans.

The Bidens made more than $600,000 in 2021 and paid an effective tax rate of 24.6%, while the Second Couple paid an effective tax rate of 31.6% on income of $1.6 million according to the tax returns released by the White House Friday, CNN reports.

According to their returns, the Bidens gave more than $17,000, or 2.85% of the annual income, to charities.  Most of their income came from Joe’s federal salary, but they also had other income include $60,000 in profits from two Chapter S corporations, and Social Security and pension payments.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff made in excess of $1.6 million, giving about $22,000 (1.3%) to charity. 

• Republicans want Congressional hearings on Hunter Biden, but think the Saudis giving a three billion dollars combined to Kushner and Mnuchin isn’t suspicious at all, even as Trump dangles a 2024 run.  
• Greg Abbott’s truck inspection scam was designed to do one thing:  exacerbate supply chain issues.  It was a cynical political move and had nothing to do with public safety, and it likely cut off at the knees his chances at a White House run.
• If Marge wants to prevent children being “groomed” for sex, she should look to shut down child “beauty” pageants, which are just excuses to dress up six and seven year old girls like teenage streetwalkers.  If she can’t find the pageants, I’m sure Gaetz and Cawthorn have them on their calendars.
• Besides investigating how highly-classified information ended up at Mar-a-Lago in Trump’s possession should be invested.  Also needing to be investigated:  if any representatives of foreign governments who visited Mar-a-Lago and may have been shown the documents by Trump.  Or a housekeeper. 
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume LXV”

The Miami Herald reports that the Florida Department of Education rejected 54 of 132 textbooks submitted to them by publishers because the books covered “prohibited topics” or “unsolicited strategies.”

In a very Stalin-esque voice, the agency said the books addressed subjects “impermissible with either Florida’s new standards or contained prohibited topics — the most in Florida’s history.”  This includes topics like gender identification, sexual relations or items that accurately portrayed the actions of white people relating to slavery and racism, which critics mistakenly equates to critical race theory.

“Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” the statement said.  Most of the canceled books were for kindergarten through fifth grade.

https://youtu.be/arjgAaHpdBU

Shocking to hear someone like Alex Jones toot his own kazoo, isn’t it?  Of course it isn’t!  And in this episode, Jones claims that international leaders like Tucker Carlson, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orbán and Bolsonaro have all credited Jones with influencing their outlook, which means the world is already terminal.

After a pause caused by a February court directive, the Biden Administration will begin selling new fossil fuel drilling licenses for federal lands that will charge 50% more for royalties on products extracted from those wells, CNN reports.

In February, Trump-appointed federal judge James Cain ruled that the administration could no longer use a metric which measures how much damage to the environment would be done by fossil fuels extracted from a site to determine the “social cost of carbon.”  The administration had been using the measurement to prioritize various programs as they impacted climate change.

The sale of the leases for 173 parcels covering 144,000 acres will be  80% smaller than originally planned by the administration due to Cain’s ruling.  The administration could not complete their impact assessments without the metric Cain shot down, and after consulting with Native tribes and local governments, decided to forgo leasing those lands. 

NEW!

President Donald J. Trump announces his endorsement of J.D. Vance pic.twitter.com/KVLpipj1bg

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) April 15, 2022

Texas Governor Low Energy Greg Abbott repealed his order mandating additional inspections by state troopers for trucks crossing into the state from Mexico on Friday, the AP reports. The order, which caused massive backups and drew protests from Mexican truckers, had already been lifted or eased at several crossings before Abbott pulled the plug entirely on Friday.

US Defense officials confirmed the sinking of the Russian warship Moskva was the result of a Ukrainian missile strike and not an onboard munitions accident as Russian sources claimed initially, the Washington Post reports. Russia has already threatened severe retaliation for the “accident”.

Wishing you peace and blessings this Passover. pic.twitter.com/LBFpqk159D

— MI House Republicans (@MI_Republicans) April 15, 2022

Speaking Shouting at a fundraiser for Republican Nebraska gubernatorial candidate and accused sexual harasser Charles Herbster, Junior attempts to claim that the FBI doesn’t investigate terrorists because they’re spending all their time investigating “a meth head” for a “fake assassination attempt” of the governor of Michigan or “a grandmother [who] took a selfie somewhere within 1,500 miles of Washington, DC”–an apparent reference to the FBI using social media feeds to track down the domestic terrorists who attacked Congress on January 6th.

He seems upset that the FBI is also investigating a coke head for various civil/corporate crimes as well as crimes against the United States of America.

Note:  YouTube is being wonky with videos shot by cell phones in portrait mode, not providing an embeddable code for the video, so you’ll have to go to the link to see the video yourself.

Powered by a jump in vehicle production, the US saw a third monthly gain in factory output that more than doubled expectations, coming in at 0.9% for March while forecasts were at 0.4%, the Reuters reports.

Factory output was 5.5% than March 2020, another indicator of strong economic growth in the United States.  A significant portion of the jump in output came from the automotive industry, which had been battling a shortage in semiconductor chips used in vehicles, which caused some factories to temporarily shut down.

Production capacity figures hit a three-year high of 78.3%, meaning that US manufacturers are using more of their production capacity because of higher demand in the market.

The board of directors of social media giant Twitter has adopted a so-called “poison pill” provision that would be triggered if Elon Musk obtains ownership of 15% of the company’s stock in an effort to wrest ownership, the Associated Press reports.

Musk has filed an offer with the Securities and Exchange Commission offering to pay shareholders $54.20–the “420” said to be a reference to cannabis, which Musk enjoys–per share so he could take the company private, a move conservatives tout as saving “free speech” but in fact just gives one person control of what will be allowed.

With 9% of outstanding shares, Musk’s potential future acquisition would trigger a move that would require any individual shareholder looking to buy a majority of stock to pay shareholders a premium price or allow shareholders additional time to reacquire the shares.

A Russian court has threatened to fine internet behemoths Google and Wikipedia for distributing (what it deems) “fake” news about the war in Ukraine and the Russian military, offenses put into law by President Vladimir Putin last month, Reuters reports.

In an effort to counter negative news coverage on Russia’s all-out attack on Ukraine and the subsequent embarrassing losses of the Russian military, Putin directed the Russian Duma to craft a law that gave him the power to arrest anyone who said anything negative about the invasion and war.

Both Wikipedia and Google distribute links to reputable news sites that report the reality on the ground, not Putin-approved propaganda on state-owned television.  This fact is the reason such media companies get in trouble with authoritarian leaders like Putin and Republicans.

After Maria Bartiromo completely botches the rational for Mexican truckers protesting an overreaching directive by Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott–falsely claiming Mexican truckers are protesting because Abbott is trafficking immigrants to Washington, DC, Abbott’s lapdog Ken Paxton continues the false deification of Abbott.  In the process, Paxton explicitly admits that Abbott’s intention is to cause economic “pressure”–that is, hardships for American families–to push his political agenda.

“Yes, this is genius by the governor,” Paxton exalts.  “We basically have a tacit agreement between the Biden Administration and the cartels, and the way it works is, cartels know they can transport humans and drugs across out border and the Biden Administration will pick up those people and move them around the country.  [Editor’s note:  Abbott used money from Texas taxpayers to traffick immigrants to DC.]. It’s, it’sa, it’s a tacit agreement.  The cartels know the deal, and they’re profiting greatly.  The governor has figured out that we can stop trade along the border, slow it down, and it will create pressure on Mexico and some of their governors to work out a deal to help us with border security, so he is doing what the administration won’t do, which is protecting the citizens of Texas, protecting the citizens of this country from drugs and from human trafficking.”

Justice Department: “A former train engineer at the Port of Los Angeles was sentenced today to 36 months in federal prison for intentionally running a locomotive at full speed off the end of railroad tracks near a United States Navy hospital ship that was deployed to provide medical relief during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eduardo Moreno, 46, of San Pedro, was sentenced by United States District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez, who also ordered him to pay $755,880 in restitution. Moreno pleaded guilty in December 2021 to one count of committing a terrorist attack and other violence against railroad carriers and mass transportation systems.”

“On March 31, 2020, Moreno drove a train at high speed, did not slow down near the end of the railroad track, and intentionally derailed the train off the tracks near the United States Naval Ship Mercy – a hospital ship then docked in the Port of Los Angeles. No one was injured in the incident, and the Mercy was not harmed or damaged. The incident resulted in the train leaking a substantial amount – approximately 2,000 gallons – of diesel fuel, which required clean up by fire and other hazardous materials personnel. Clean-up crews recovered approximately 400 gallons of fuel from the fuel tank and the ground adjacent to the derailment, according to court documents. Moreno caused $755,880 in damage because of the derailment. In his first interview with the Los Angeles Port Police, Moreno acknowledged that he ‘did it,’ saying that he was suspicious of the Mercy and believed it had an alternate purpose related to COVID-19 or a government takeover, according to an affidavit filed with a criminal complaint in this case. Moreno stated that he acted alone and had not pre-planned the attempted attack. While admitting to intentionally derailing and crashing the train, he said he knew it would bring media attention and ‘people could see for themselves,’ referring to the Mercy, according to the affidavit.”