The military technology coming out of Israel is just jaw dropping.

Very impressive!

Congratulations to our friends in Israel!

Looks like Jewish space lasers are real and they kick ass!

(Relax and take a joke, everyone!) https://t.co/AsEqm6MB2t

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 14, 2022

Center-left French President Emmanuel Macron leads far right challenger Marine Le Pen 54 to 46 in a YouGov/DataPraxis poll ahead of the April 24th runoff showing the incumbent drawing wide support from voters who backed the other first round candidates, including 55% of those who voted for third place far leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Le Pen meanwhile picks up about 90% of racist extremist Eric Zemmour’s voters and 45% of Mélenchon’s fans, which we guess are kind of like those Bernie assholes who went full MAGA out of resentment for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Oligarch in training Elon Musk has lost his position as the largest individual shareholder of Twitter after the Vanguard Group increased its share of the company’s stock to own more than 10% of the social media giant, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Musk holds 9.1% of outstanding Twitter stock, and he made an offer to buy out all shares for $54.20 per share, about a 20% premium of the stock’s price at the start of trading Friday.  Musk’s offer excited conservative pundits who wish to create their very own obnoxiously rich, above-the-law oligarch in the United States, believing that having a social media platform owned by a single, temperamental individual is a way to ensure their “free speech” rights.

Vanguard has been a long-time Twitter shareholder, hanging on the stock as a value proposition rather than viewing ownership as a way to meddle in the operations of the company.

In text messages sent to Trump Administration Chief of Staff Mark Meadows by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Congressman Chip Roy of Texas demonstrate initial support for the Trump campaign to challenge the results of the 2020 election only to back away after seeing what an uncontrollable shitshow it became by the January 6th certification in Congress, CNN reports.

Both Lee and Roy told Meadows they supported any legal and Constitutional manners to slow the declaration of a winner in the days following the November election, but as efforts became more legally tenuous and publicly slapstick, they backed away.

After texts sent in November encourage Trump to challenge the vote counts in battleground states, the texts in January change tone, becoming more ominous as Trump and his minions launched an effort to gather supporters in DC on January 6th to disrupt the Electoral College certification.

On state-owned Russian television, a sweater-clad analyst says that Russia should “drop one bomb”–an allusion to a nuclear weapon–on Kyiv as punishment for sinking the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet…. ’cause Ukraine should just sit back and enjoy the invasion, he believes.

Businesses on both sides of the Rio Grande are losing hundreds of millions of dollars in trade due to protests by truckers angry about Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s directive to conduct a extensive search of each truck that crosses at border ports of call, the Washington Post reports.

Business leaders in Texas are pleading with Abbott to lift the restrictions to allow the end of the protests, where truckers on the Mexican side of the border block lanes to limit traffic and which has cause miles-long backups on both sides of the port.  Many of those trucks on the Mexican side are carrying fresh produce to processors in Texas; their cargos are spoiling after sitting in lines for days.

“This has directly impacted our business since late last week. We would typically be receiving 10 to 12 loads of watermelon per day from Mexico, as well as different kinds of herbs and greens. Since the middle of last week, we have received zero of those shipments of watermelon,” Bret Erickson, senior vice president of business affairs for Little Bear Produce, a grower-packer-shipper located in Texas, said.  Erickson said the inspections have already cost his company “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“After Twitter kicked Trump, MTG, and @TheBabylonBee off, Elon Musk and I are basically the only interesting accounts left,” Gaetz said.

“I’m not in a position to buy Twitter at this time, so I’m glad Elon made a move.”https://t.co/9ocwEPTJKr

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) April 15, 2022

President Joe Biden will decide shortly if he will dispatch a senior administration representative on an official visit to Kyiv to show solidarity with the Ukrainian people, the New York Times reports.

Given that the Ukrainian capital is essentially under siege by the Russian army, neither Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris would likely make the journey.  A more likely envoy would be Secretary of State Anthony Blinken or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Many Western leaders have visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who made a visit to Kyiv earlier this week.

What… What is this place? What hubris hath created a gas station and convenience store the size of St Peter’s square? Whom would openly defy God and nature with such brazenness?

Ukrainian officials seized 30 plots of land, 23 houses, 32 apartments, 26 cars and one yacht that Ukrainian oligarch and Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk, a member of the nation’s parliament, the Washington Post reports.

With paltry (for an oligarch) net worth of $460 million, Medvedchuk has been a domestic supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin, promoting his agenda inside the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s legislature.

In total, officials seized more than 140 pieces of property from Medvedchuk.  He had been put under house arrest for treason in February, but he fled and was captured earlier this week.

A jury was unconvinced that a man was compelled to attack the Capitol with other domestic terrorists because Donald Trump insisted he stop the certification of the 2020 election, and they convicted him on six federal counts, Reuters reports.

Dustin Thompson, 38, attempted to use an unusual legal argument that he was not responsible for his actions because he thought he was essentially brainwashed and was acting at the direction of the President of the United States.  Thompson said that he would never had undertaken such action if it wasn’t for Trump imploring his supporters to reinstate him through violent action.

“Besides being ordered by the president to go to the Capitol, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Thompson told the jury, according to CNN. “I was caught up in the moment.”

Fearful that Donald Trump’s alleged endorsement of fabulist and racist attractor JD Vance will upset the Republican Senate primary, leaders of the state GOP are working to abort his endorsement, Politico reports.

State party leaders believe that a Vance nomination would lose the chance to hold the seat, which is currently held by Republican Rob Portman, who is not seeking reelection.  A divisive figure in state politics, Vance is a political dilettante who is know for writing a fictionalized version of life in Appalachia.

“JD Vance will still lose even with President Trump’s endorsement. JD Vance is widely known by Republican Primary voters for his Never-Trumper comments and his calling Trump supporters ‘racists,’” Titus Bond, the president of polling company Remington Research Group, wrote in a memo to Party leaders. “Since he is already known to Ohioans as a self-proclaimed ‘Never Trumper’ and voters will forcefully be reminded of that, Vance will still lose even with President Trump’s endorsement.”

Russian warship, what are you sinking?

— Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) April 14, 2022

A comet twice the width of Rhode Island and traveling at 22,000 miles per hour is headed into the heart of our solar system, scheduled to hit its closest approach to the Sun in 2031, NBC News reports.

Comet C/2014 UN_271, known as Bernardinelli–Bernstein, will travel about one billion miles away from the Sun when it hits its perihelion point in nine years, and it will keep well distant to Earth, so there is no danger to humankind.   The comet will be about as distant to the Sun as Saturn at its perihelion.

The comet’s solid nucleus is about 85 miles wide and made up of ice, dirt and rock.  It’s possible that a state-sponsored space agency or a private company could launch a mission for a rendezvous with the rock, but no such plans have been announced.

The Ohio Republicans’ fourth attempt to pass a highly gerrymandered redistricting map has been rejected by the state’s Supreme Court, which found the map did not meet the fairness requirements previously outlined by the court, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports.

In the 4-3 decision, one Republican member of the bench, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, sided with all three Democrats to overturn the map and send the issue back to the state’s redistricting committee.  The judges found that the map violated efforts to fairly assign districts based on the citizenry’s historic 54% Republican-46% Democratic split in voters in the state.

The jurists stated that too many of the districts laid out in the Republican-drawn map were toss-up districts taken from previously strong-Democratic areas.  The panel recommended the commission refer to maps constructed by paid consultants who put out more equitable maps.

The USS The Sullivans, a World War II destroyer named after five brother killed when their Navy ship was destroyed by the Japanese, sunk at its dock in Buffalo, New York after suffering a hull breach, The Buffalo News reports.

Converted into a museum ship in 1977, The Sullivans is the only ship in the US Navy fleet named for more than one person.  It was declared a national landmark in 1986.  Conservators have attempted to raise $1 million to facilitate maintenance and repairs, and experts noted last year that the ship was at risk of sinking because of structural weakness.

Donald Trump continues to choose celebrity over experience and integrity in his endorsements:  NBC News reports that the twice-impeached philanderer will endorse novelist J.D. Vance in the upcoming GOP Ohio Senate primary.

Vance is running third in a five-horse race–it’s a figure of speech  not meant to imply Marjorie Taylor Greene is galloping for the seat–and hasn’t gained traction among Republican voters.  Vance has made a series of boneheaded comments, such as a commercial literally begging racists for their votes.

Earlier this week, Trump endorsed Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, a disgraced TeeVee doctor whom many MAGAts feel is not sufficiently radical (and perhaps white?) enough.

It’s been a more disastrous than normal month for Devin Nunes.  He lost one defamation suit.  He’s overseeing a highly-mocked roll out of Donald Trump’s social media platform.  He’s ridiculed for claiming Truth Social has more interactions than Twitter.  And now, he’s lost another defamation suit, Reuters reports.

Upholding a lower court ruling, three-judge federal panel dismissed the former congressman’s defamation suit against CNN for claiming he was involved in the Trump administration scheme to get damaging information from Ukraine about Joe and Hunter Biden.  The opinion stated Nunes waited to long to claim he was defamed by the CNN reports and seek a correction, and he could not prove he deserved “special damages” for financial losses.

Nunes is upset that CNN linked him to the plot reportedly organized by Nosferatu cosplayer Rudy Giuliani, convicted felon Lev Parnas, TheShill reporter John Solomon (who failed to acknowledge in his reporting that he was in the room advising the group on strategy, then writing up the bogus reports as “news” to claim objectivity) and Fox’s favorite conspiracy couple, Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing.  Another person involved in the planning:  Nunes’s former House top aide Derek Harvey, who Nunes would like people to believe didn’t fill his boss in on the discussions.