“The first thing we do if we want to inspire and change the world, Ukraine included, is make sure we stay free,” Belgrade’s host who’s just gross and Fox personality (?) Tucker Carlson claims as he continues to promote authoritarianism and bigotry.  “And with that concern in mind, you should be very worried by your leaders response to what’s happening in Ukraine, the growing dictatorship there, and that’s the word for it.  What’s another word for it?  If you have ideas, send it to us.”

I got a word for it:  a lie.  The only dictatorship taking over Ukraine is the one by Putin’s tanks, and Tuck’ums accepts Putins dictatorship because he really hates democracy and letting people have a say in the government he must answer to.

https://youtu.be/atRCIu4Dcc0

The embattled government of Ukraine has outright rejected a demand by the Kremlin to abandon the strategic city of Mariupol, where hundreds of thousands of residents are holding out against a Russian invasion, Reuters reports.

Russian leaders offered to allow the civilians to leave Mariupol if Ukraine stopped defending the city and turned it over to the Russians.  Russian troops have been instructing Ukrainian civilians to leave their homes, and reportedly were relocating refugees deep in Russia, with little hope of returning to Ukraine anytime soon.

“There can be no question of any surrender” in Mariupol, said Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, despite the residents running short of food, water, medical supplies and ammunition.

Brazilian dipshit President Jair Bolsonaro, aka the Trump of the Tropics, has fired his Pence of the Tropics, and announced Monday he’s dropping Vice President Hamilton Mourao from the reelection campaign ticket, Reuters reports. Bolsonaro did not name his replacement, but said the pick would be announced next month. “I need a vice president that does not have the ambition of sitting in my chair,” said Bolsonaro indicating he’s just as unhappy with his Numero Dois as the Orange Fat Bastard is with Pence. The question of a new running mate is more or less a formality at this point as Bolsonaro is pretty much fucked anyway as he’s badly trailing his opponent, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in polls ahead of the October election.

https://youtu.be/835d3IqO2jY

“What we know 100% with certainty is that while I was with my boys for the entirety of last week, then my ex-wife was in Washington, DC and, and as early as tomorrow morning, you’re gonna see a story break with details about the political operatives who are behind this,” Missouri Senate candidate Republican Eric Greitens claims with a smile.  “You’re gonna be able to connect the dots directly to Mitch McConnell.  You’re gonna be able to connect the dots directly to the RINO swamp who always does this.  This is their game.  They work to push out false allegations.  They know that the mainstream media will follow them and they attack American First conservatives.”

And why is it that whenever a loathsome Republican who did a despicable thing–beat his spouse, embezzle money, sell out to Russia–they go on Bannon’s show where they’re coddled and offered support for their sins?

Pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda says 9,861 Russian soldiers have been killed in action and 16,153 injured in Ukraine since the start of the attack last month, Wall Street Journal Foreign-Affairs Correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov reports. The last official figure was 498 on March 2.

Associates of “Cowboys for Trump” founder and Otero County, New Mexico Commissioner Couy Griffin tell CBS News Congressional Correspondent Scott MacFarlane their lead desperado plans to ride the horse he has parked inside a trailer outside of the DC Federal Courthouse to Arlington National Cemetery after the one-day bench trial on the misdemeanors Griffin was charged with over his involvement in the Capitol riot ends on Monday. “Win or lose” writes MacFarlane.

And maybe this should have been the actual main point of any coverage of the Couy Griffin trial instead of the horse, but there had been some interest in the testimony after the judge ruled the defense could question the Secret Service about the whereabouts of Vice Former Guy Mike Pence during the Capitol riot. Sure enough a Secret Service inspector testified on Monday that Pence had been secured at a loading dock under the Senate side of the Capitol during the insurrection after his motorcade had been surrounded outside the east side of the building. Pence remained there until 7pm when he returned to oversee the joint session’s resumption after the rioters had been cleared from the building, per the inspector’s testimony. Mini-mystery of January 6th solved.

If you hit a woman or a child, you belong in handcuffs, not the United States Senate. It’s time for Eric Greitens to leave this race https://t.co/RgCow67dDW

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) March 21, 2022

Nice to see Hawley drawing a line in the sand for his would-be future best bud and fellow Gateway Stater in the US Senate. Hitting a woman or child is indeed absolutely abhorrent. If it was just tying up a woman, blindfolding her, taking pictures of her naked, spitting water into her mouth, threatening to destroy her if she went public about the affair, then forcing her to perform oral sex on him before leaving, and then shoving her to the ground a few days later, plus all the charity fraud shit Hawley decided to stop investigating in his last few weeks as Missouri Attorney General before he was sworn into the US Senate, then he’d probably still be on board with Greitens 2022.

A stolen diary that belonged to Ashley Biden, President Joe Biden’s daughter, was passed around a Republican fundraiser, attended by Donald Trump, Jr., in the weeks before the November 2020 election, new revelations disclose about the effort of far-right muckrakers to defame the daughter of a presidential candidate, the New York Times reports.

Project Veritas, the criminal enterprise run by convicted miscreant James O’Keefe that specializes in doctored videos to make political headlines that are never corrected on conservative media, claims to have obtained the diary from its legitimate owner, which appears to be a lie.

For its part, Project Veritas has claimed protection under the journalism shield doctrine that protects journalists from various types of prosecutions.  Unfortunately for the group, theft of property is not a protected act.

The diary was passed around a fundraiser at the house of a major GOP donor in Florida who wanted to get it in the hands of Project Veritas and who did not have Ashley Biden’s permission to possess the book.  Federal prosecutors claim that Project Veritas, James O’Keefe and others on the group’s staff were actively involved in not just stealing the diary, but also circulating it to get press coverage.

Former Missouri Governor and current GOP primary Senate candidate Eric Greitens, already known to be a complete piece of shit, was emotionally and physically abusive to his ex-wife and children in the months leading up to his divorce, Sheena Greitens wrote in an affidavit filed recently in a child custody dispute obtained by the Associated Press. “Prior to our divorce, during an argument in late April 2018, Eric knocked me down and confiscated my cell phone, wallet and keys so that I was unable to call for help or extricate myself and our children from our home. I became afraid for my safety and that of our children at our home,” and his “behavior included physical violence toward our children, such as cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face at the dinner table in front of me and yanking him around by his hair,” wrote Sheena in the affidavit.

Greitens, who resigned in June 2018 after he tied up his hairstylist who he was banging on the side, blindfolded her, took pictures of her naked, spit water into her mouth, threatened to destroy her if she went public, then forced her to perform oral sex on him before leaving, is considered the frontrunner in the race to replace retiring Republican US Senator Roy Blunt. Trump likes him too.

The chairwoman of the Taylor County, Georgia Republican Party and her husband were arrested by the FBI earlier this month on misdemeanor charges related to their unlawfully entering the Capitol during the MAGA insurrection on January 6th, 2021 the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Mandy Robinson-Hand and her husband Charles Hand III, were cuffed on March 10th for their participation in the failed attempt to keep the Trump Regime in power. “The Georgia Republican Party has repeatedly condemned political violence, including any violence that took place on January 6, 2021. We have repeatedly urged, and will continue to urge, that political protest be peaceful and orderly,” a Georgia state GOP spokesman told the Journal-Constitution and at least that guy was smart enough to leave out the “legitimate political discourse” line from his boilerplate. It’s the second arrest on Mandy Robinson-Hand’s record, as she was sentenced to five years in prison in 2009 after being convicted of heroin distribution, but was released after four months – almost certainly because she ratted someone else out to law enforcement.

Kremlin officials summoned the US Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan and told him bilateral relations are “on the verge of breaking” after President Biden’s correct assessment of Putin as a war criminal for his murderous assault on Ukraine, Axios reports. Russian officials said Biden’s words were really mean and “unworthy of a statesman of such a high rank,” adding that any “hostile actions taken against Russia would receive a decisive and firm rebuff,” per Axios.

Former Guy mocked his usually loyal lap dog Lindsey Graham as a “progressive” in a speech to donors on Friday at Mar-a-Lago in response to a book preview which recounted Graham threatening the 25th Amendment against Trump during the Capitol riot, Insider reports. “There are a couple of senators. And we have our progressive senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham. He’s a progressive, but he’s our progressive,” Trump said to crowd at the Palm Beach County GOP Lincoln Day dinner, which may or may not have been a dog whistle for “homosexual.” Friday’s burn marks the second known public episode of the Donald ripping his dainty South Carolinian sycophant in as many months. In a February Newsmax interview the fat bastard called Lindsey a “RINO” for daring to say the Capitol rioters should not be pardoned.

Election officials in Texas’s third most-populous county, Tarrant, rejected a total of 815 ballots in the March 1st primary election, of which 3 were cast in the Republican primary and 812 for the Democratic primary, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports on the mindless extra ID requirements snagging voters just as they were intended to in the first statewide election since the SB1 voter suppression law was signed by Governor Low Energy Greg in October 2021. “Those interviewed for this story said they could not provide a definitive reason for the discrepancy between the parties,” writes the Star-Telegram in their report, illustrating how standard tropes of journalism are ill-equipped to appropriately describe the fuckery afoot in Texas.

Two Pennsylvania state troopers and a man they were trying to help were killed on I-95 in Philadelphia when a driver trying to get around an emergency scene struck them as he drove on the shoulder of the highway, NBC News reports.

The highway was closed down between Broad Street and the Walt Whitman Bridge, shutting off eight lanes in both directions a major roadway during rush hour as police investigated the accident.

Two officers were attempting to assist a man who was walking along the interstate, and they were trying to get him into their police car when a driver traveling down the shoulder of the roadway to avoid the back-up hit the trio, killing them.  The driver stayed on scene.

A Chinese Eastern Airlines flight 5735, a Boeing 737 with 123 passengers and nine crew on board, crashed in southern China, killing everyone on board in the first air disaster of 2022, the Associated Press reports.

The crash occurred near the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region.  The flight was traveling from Kunming in the southwestern province of Yunnan to the industrial center of Guangzhou along the east coast.

The plane, delivered to the airline in 2015, was traveling at 455 knots (523 mph) at 30,000 feet when it went into a dive, before crashing about a minute and a half later.  Chinese authorities have grounded all similar 737-800 aircraft while investigating the crash.

Ukrainian Holocaust survivor Boris Romantschenko, 96, who lived through internment at the Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps was killed in his home by Russian troops Friday, The Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation reports. The translation of the statement is spotty, but it seems that Romantschenko’s apartment building in Kharkiv was hit by a missile fired by Russian forces. Romantschenko was the Vice President of the International Committee Buchenwald-Dora and Commands for Ukraine and described as a passionate advocate for remembrance by the foundation. “The construction of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal!” he declared at a gathering at the Buchenwald site in 2012.