This summer get your kids outdoors enjoy all that America has to offer… don’t waste your money on overpriced bullshit and junk food at Disney World.

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 5, 2022

On a wholly unrelated note, the Trump International Hotel and Tower’s room service menu offers Rice Krispies for $12, chocolate chip cookie (that’s singular, not plural) for $9, and plain vanilla yogurt for $12 – add $5 for fruit and granola. The Trump Las Vegas Hotel’s restaurant sells buffalo wings for $19 a plate and kids’ chicken fingers for $13. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich is $10.

“Overpriced bullshit” could mean a lot of different things, but a $50 doormat or a $35 set of two pint glasses could very well qualify as such. Disney meanwhile sells a doormat and a set of four slightly smaller than pint glasses at $35 each. It’s still bullshit, but it’s certainly a better value.

Hillbilly Republican Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance, currently running in third in the GOP primary by significant margin, makes an appeal to the Republican base of bigots, xenophobes and racists to try to bolster his run.

Michigan Congressman Fred Upton, among the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol insurrection in January 2021, announced his retirement on Tuesday: AP.

A new study from center-left think tank Third Way finds that murder rates overall in the 25 states won by Trump had a murder rate 40% higher than in the 25 states won by President Joe Biden in 2020, Yahoo News reports. Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri were the top five most homicidal states, while Wyoming and South Dakota saw a staggering 91.7% and 68% increase, respectively in murders committed between 2019 and 2020 (the most recent year for which complete data were available). That’s a MAGA murder-rama! A real Red Wave… of blood!

Of course this will never get reported on Fox News or mentioned by any Republican politician. It’s easier for Trump to spew shit like “We’re seeing murders in our cities, all Democrat-run. People are afraid to go out,” at his March 26th rally in Georgia than deal with facts and figures. Or “America’s most beautiful cities are indeed being ruined by liberal policies: There’s a direct line between death and decay and liberal policies,” like Congressman Dan Crenshaw did on Fox News in December. “From coast to coast, crime is exploding in Democrat-run cities. American citizens are under siege,” warned frigid Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner in January. So on and so forth. The bottom line is you’re more likely to be a murder victim if you live in a Red State than in a Blue one.

Brevet First Lady and vacuous fashion designer Ivanka Trump will testify Tuesday before the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress that sought to undermine the Constitution, NBC News reports.

Ivanka Trump was reportedly at the White House on the day of the attack, which was preceded by a speech by her father encouraging people to storm the Capitol.  Ivanka allegedly attempted to get her father, who was fixated with television coverage of the attack, to speak to disband the terrorists.

Ivanka’s husband–former White House staffer and person Donald Trump said would reform the government, fix the Veterans Administration hospital system, defeat the opioid epidemic and achieve Middle East peace–testified via video call last week.  It is unknown if Ivanka will grace the committee with her presence or if they’re just going to have to gawk at her via teleconference.

The European Union has moved to ban the import of Russian coal, a significant source of cash for the beleaguered Russian economy and a significant portion of the energy supply used by European nations, in a major move to further cripple Putin’s regime, the New York Times reports.

Further sanctions would ban Russian ships from ports in EU nations, which would largely halt trade into Russia and drastically limiting the products available to Russian consumers.  Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, also announced severe restrictions on road transports coming from Russia.

The EU will move to ban Russian oil, a more precarious action given the reliance on Russian energy by Western European nations.

In an Zoom call last summer with scholars and academics, Donald Trump admitted that he lost the 2020 election, a statement that undermines any claim he’s made about fighting for the integrity of the election and making his legal position less tenable in investigations of the January 6th domestic terrorist attack.

In a story written for The Atlantic, Julian E. Zelizer, a history and public-affairs professor at Princeton University and the author of a one of the first academic studies of the Trump administration, The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment, writes that Trump unexpectedly joined a Zoom call with historians in an attempt to pathetically convince them that his term as president wasn’t as disastrous as it really was.

But in the midst of his various excuses for why things imploded during what academics rated one of the worst presidencies in US history, Trump made the statement “when I didn’t win the election.”  That shocking admission–at the time, at odds with his public statement that he had won the election but it was stolen from him–shows that he understood he was not victorious, and sets him up for potential criminal charges.

A New York State appeals court has temporarily reversed a lower MAGA judge’s ruling tossing out the state’s extreme gerrymander killing off several GOP-leaning House seats, WCBS reports.

Right wing media dipshits Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, realizing belatedly they probably kind of fucked up when they published their February 23 interview with their Orange God Emperor at Mar-a-Lago including the one comment about Putin’s strategy – which did not age well at all – have come up with a brilliant solution to the political liability they helped create for the Donald!

Here’s the original version, via Archive.is:

And the new, updated version:

That’s pretty savvy! Who else would’ve thought of retroactively explaining that Trump was just being sarcastic when he praised the geopolitical strategies of a mass murderer? Genius! It’s just like when Trump said he was just being sarcastic the day after he made that “inject disinfectants directly into the lungs” comment back in April 2020. That totally worked too!

Former Trump White House aide Matt Mowers, running in the GOP primary for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, cast mail-in ballots in the Republican primaries in both the Granite State and his native New Jersey, the Associated Press reports. Mowers, who at the time served as New Hampshire director of Chris Christie’s 2016 presidential campaign, mailed in a ballot in the February 2016 primary, and then again from his parents’ house in New Jersey four months later, a violation of federal law that prohibits casting two ballots “for an election to the same candidacy or office.”

There’s no chance Mowers could end up being prosecuted, seeing as how the statute of limitations expired nearly a year ago. It does however make him look like a complete asshole in the middle of the GOP’s “voter integrity” crusade and could be trouble in his heated primary with another Trump minion who accused Mowers of being a “RINO” for accepting a donation from one of the few Republicans who opposed the batshit “legitimate political discourse” resolution back in February.

Keeping track of all these states primary election is getting to be a complete pain in the ass, so we might as well publish a list of the ones that actually matter to keep handy.

Please let us know anything we missed, but forgive us if the Libertarian Party primary for Governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas isn’t exactly knocking our socks off.

Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are pro-pedophile.

They just voted for #KBJ.

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 5, 2022

Is this sort of shit even newsworthy anymore? Has sporkfoot jumped the shark? Is it possible to keep chasing the dragon of MAGA rage heroin endlessly? Do her fans say “Oh cool, she called them pro-pedo because KBJ is pro-pedo… Libs owned again” and then start making evidence boards and “researching” all of Collins, Romney, and Murkowski’s supposed connections to child sex trafficking, or do they just distracted by a ping telling them they were invited to join a fireteam in Call of Duty and then forget about it half a day later because of some other made-up outrage?

The Russian embassy in Dublin, running low on oil for heat and hot water as delivery companies refuse to do business with them, have sent a letter to the country’s Foreign Affairs ministry begging them to intervene “into this clearly discriminatory case”, the Irish Mirror reports. The issue might be with the ability to pay, as the Bank of Ireland has cut off the embassy’s accounts.

“The embassy is struggling because no one wants to do business with them as a result of what’s happening in Ukraine. It’s not only some oil companies they’re having issues with, it’s banks too and many more businesses,” a source told the Mirror, with a second confirming they’re screwed, saying, “The Department of Foreign Affairs wouldn’t be stepping in to get anyone anything.”

NYC Trump and QAnon fan Samuel Fisher, who ran a “LuxLife Dating Coach” business on Facebook before he threw it all away by entering the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, was sentenced to three in a half years in prison on Monday on New York State weapons charges after he was found to have an illegaly modified semi-automatic AR-15 style rifle, a ghost gun pistol, and other outlawed firearms in his Upper West Side Manhattan apartment, Bloomberg reports. Fisher still faces charges in DC on having illegally entered the Capitol during the insurrection. The NYPD were tipped off by DC police over Fisher’s arsenal when the fucking idiot bragged about it on Facebook along with his pro-Trump posts. “The defendant chose to arm himself to the teeth with a large variety of dangerous weapons. The fact that he didn’t take action doesn’t take away from the seriousness of the offense,” Judge Robert Mandelbaum said before handing down the sentence.

After it looked like it was on its last legs on the last day of the legislative session, the Georgia House passed a bill allowing athletic associations to ban transgender girls from participating in sports in the final minutes, reports the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Greg Bluestein.

The House acted after a video message from Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp three hours before, saying that “fairness” in school sports was one of his priority to get passed before the end.  The legislators then typed up a four page bill that allows sports associations, including the state’s governing bodies for school sports, to ban transgender girls from participating in sports.

The final vote on the bill was 98-71, largely along Party lines, with a number of members absent.  It will go to Kemp’s desk for his signature this week.

Researchers paid regular Fox propaganda network viewers to watch CNN, and the change in network caused them to change their views on issues covered by the networks, The Wrap reports.

David E. Broockman of the University of California, Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale took a group of Fox viewers and paid them to watch seven hours of CNN programming per week during the month of September 2020, in addition to their Fox programming.  They held a control group, who continued to only watch Fox, separate.

At the end of the month, the researchers found that the group paid to watch CNN just one hour per day had started adopting more views closer to reality.  The group was 5 points more likely to believe that Long Covid existed, and they were 7 percentage points more likely to favor voting by mail.

I 😍 My Clients!!! Customer Service is my first priority. I stop everything to give 100% to everyone who trusts me. Honored to serve you in buying and selling DFW. https://t.co/eBklpzbA78 pic.twitter.com/vEEpvF3gRK

— Jenna Ryan 🇺🇸 (@dotjenna) April 5, 2022

“If we had not used her, we would have made much less for our home,” is about as inorganic and robotic of a sentence as one can get. Jenna should stick to Christian pop and complaining about being politically persecuted because they wouldn’t let her have a phone in jail during her 60 day bid – which she wasn’t supposed to serve at all because of her white skin and blonde hair.

In a rare feat of bipartisanship, Senators reached an agreement to provide $10 billion in Covid aid for health care needs and therapeutics by reallocating funds remaining from previous spending bills, Reuters reports.

The deal was the compromise on a $25 billion package in US and international health care funding to help fight future outbreaks of coronavirus and research treatments.  Chuck Schumer noted that the $5 billion set aside for foreign assistance was taken out of the bill, to his disappointment.

Saying “We found zero evidence of any kind of protective effects,” a team of researchers released a report that found households that possessed a gun were 50% more like to have a homicide than homes without a weapon, the Associated Press reports.

The study is based on data from California on handgun ownership and other publicly-available information about emergency service calls and causes of death.  California is the only state that provides this type of data to the public.  Though the datasets have shortfalls–it only looks at handgun-caused deaths without looking at deaths by long gun, for example–they offer the largest population study possible.

It looked at 600,000 people who came to live with someone who owned a handgun, either through moving in with someone who owned a handgun or someone in the house came to possess a handgun.  The study found that compared to a group that did not have guns in their homes, households with gun owners experienced 50% more firearms deaths than those that don’t.