“Here’s Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa telling you that protecting Ukraine’s sacred borders is much more important than, say, saving Americans in Des Moines from overdosing on drugs,” Fox host and human speculum Tucker Carlson bloviates.  “Watch.”

I watched, and Ernst didn’t say anything about choosing to defend Ukraine over helping people in Iowa.  In fact, Ernst was only asked about foreign policy, not domestic issues, in an interview on CNN, so Carlson must have imagined the other issue being discussed.

“Those are our leaders,” Carlson gripes as he reads from a teleprompter.  “Totally ignorant.  Just reading the script. [Carlson read that off the teleprompter.]  It would be nice for someone in the press corps, ’cause it’s their job, to ask the obvious follow up, which would be, ‘Why exactly, Senator Ernst, would you believe it’s so vital to send more lethal aid to Ukraine and to, quote, go ahead and impose more sanctions on Russia?  Why?’  How would she answer that question?  We’ll never know the answer because no one in the media would ever ask her.  Reporters are the most bovine of the herd animals.  If the other kids say it’s a good idea, they say that it is.”

A court hearing over MAGA lawyer John Eastman’s subpoena from the House January 6th Select Committee didn’t go so great for the fascist prick Monday, as the lawyer representing Eastman’s former employer Chapman University said they’re perfectly fine with the subpoena to turn over 19,000 emails on its server relating to Eastman representing Trump, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff reports. Per Isikoff, Chpaman’s lawyer told the court that any use of the university’s email server for that purpose was “improper, unauthorized and I liken to contraband.”

The Wisconsin District 4 Court of Appeals overturned a Waukesha County judge’s ruling banning absentee ballot drop boxes statewide Monday, ruling they can be used by voters in the February 15th primary election, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports. The loss is sure to anger the fat Orange God Emperor, who was already melting down about ballot drop boxes in the state on Monday. The case is unlikely to be over however, and it is expected to be taken up by the state Supreme Court before the November 2022 election. There is currently a 4-3 conservative majority on the court, however one justice, Brian Hagedorn, has somewhat often sided with the three liberals on key decisions against MAGA power grabs, particularly surrounding the 2020 election.

Fox has canceled Jeanine Pirro’s weekend night show, but not because of the numerous times she appeared drunk on air, or broadcast misinformation, or slandered people.  Nah, according to Newsweek, Grudje Jerdine is taking a seat at the table for The Five, Fox’s weekday show that will certainly mess up her Happy Hour rotation.

The loudmouthed biological ebulliometer will take the spot vacated by punk correspondent Jesse Watters, who will fill the 7 p.m. ET hour that was vacated by Martha MacCallum months ago, giving Fox a weekday lineup from 7 to midnight of angry testosterone spewing people who want to undermine the Constitution.

As he tried desperately to get a response to a question from President Joe Biden, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy, a nepotism hire because of his dad, morning host Steve Doocy, and a man not known for asking intelligent questions, yells, “Do you think inflation is a political liability in the midterms?” Sitting at the dais, Biden talks quietly and sarcastically into a hot mic. “Nah, it’s a great asset. More inflation,” Biden says. “What a stupid son of a bitch.”

Three Baltimore City firefighters were killed Monday afternoon when a portion of the vacant building in which they were fighting a blaze collapsed, trapping them and a fourth firefighter underneath, the Baltimore Sun reports.  The fourth firefighter is in critical condition.

The rowhouse, in the city’s New Southwest/Mount Clare neighborhood, is one of more than 16,000 vacant buildings in the city of Baltimore.  It had been inspected earlier this year and found to be secure and sound, meaning there was no apparent structural dangers and the house was boarded up securely.  This same property was the scene of a 2015 fire that injured three firefighters.

The dead include Lt. Paul Butrim, firefighter/paramedic Kelsey Sadler, and EMT/firefighter Kenny Lacayo. EMT/firefighter John McMaster remains in the hospital.  “Baltimore owes them the deepest gratitude and respect,” Mayor Brandon M. Scott said in a statement.

My office is now getting calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we're not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia's "reasonable" positions.

— Tom Malinowski (@Malinowski) January 24, 2022

That’s New Jersey Dem Congressman Tom Malinowski, reporting that his Fox News-watching constituents seem to really see the kind of danger Ukraine poses to Putin’s Russia. And they’re not alone in the “give peace a chance” and “flower power” right wing hippie bullshit.

On a day when they opened about 3% down, financial markets enjoyed a massive recovery in the afternoon as fears of widespread inflation and action by the Federal Reserve ebbed.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose nearly 100 points after falling more than 1,000 during intraday trading.  S&P and NASDAQ also saw a similar rebound, with all three indices finishing in the black for the day, much to the chagrin of premature disaster celebrators like his poster, who can no long reply to comments because he’s banned (again), but feel free to leave comments he’ll read when he tries to access the account. 

A Gerogia judge has approved Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s request for a “special grand jury” to be impaneled to investigate the infamous “Find me 11,780” votes call Trump placed to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, CNN’s Zachary Cohen reports reports.

Willis had argued the step was necessary as a “significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony,” in a letter to Christopher S. Brasher, chief judge of Fulton County’s Superior Court, citing Raffensperger’s comments to rodent-faced Chuck Todd. “If she wants to interview me, there’s a process for that,” said Raffensperger in an October 2021 “Meet the Press” appearance.

https://twitter.com/EricTrump/status/1485700519448432646

California dairy farmer and Trump Media and Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes told Fox Business News on Monday that content on the hotly-anticipated right wing social network app Truth Social will be auto-moderated by an artificial intelligence engine when it launches next month.

“We want to be very family-friendly, we want this to be a very safe place, and we are focused on making sure any illegal content is not on the site. [Auto-moderation API service] Hive has a great track record in this, and they have been good to work with. They are very helpful for our team and because of their experience, I think they’re helping to craft the right spot for us… We want to be the most family-friendly site,” said the man who spent the latter years of his career in public service constantly bitching about censorship on mainstream social media platforms whilst also suing users and the platforms for making fun of him with fake accounts, one of which was his “cow”.

Nunes lost every single one of those lawsuits, and had to pay attorney’s fees for the defendants.

In the wake of the January 6th insurrection, the US Capitol Police intelligence unit have been examining the public social media profiles of staff and donors of members of Congress to keep an eye out for potential future threats, leading to predictable outrage from those associated with such threats, Politico reports. “Whatever they think that sounds like for security, it sounds dangerously close – if not already over the line – to spying on members of Congress, their staff, their constituents and their supporters,” said South Dakota GOP Congressman Kelly Armstrong, a drama queen who neglects to consider the fact that these are public profiles and there’s no “hacking” or other malfeasance involved. “Anybody involved with implementing this without making it known to the actual members of Congress should resign or be fired immediately,” the Man-Karen continued.

Several Republican members of Congress are credibly accused of giving “recon” tours to suspects later arrested for the Capitol riot. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s friend was arrested for breaking into Capitol. But yeah, looking at Facebook profiles to identify potential threats is “spying”.

The fanboys who were excited by the 2021 Myanmar military coup d’etat (not to be confused with the 1958, 1962, 1988, 2003, and 2008 Myanmar military coups d’etat) because they thought it would somehow inspire a similar military uprising to reinstall their messianic President Trump would probably be a little less enthusiastic if they saw the above image of the new military junta in the small West African country Burkina Faso happening here in the United States, something tells us.

Call it a hunch, but if everything about that picture were the same except for it being a Fox News studio in NYC instead of the Burkinese state TV headquarters then your average Trump fanboy would probably not be happy at all to see it. We’re not exactly sure what it is here, it’s just a feeling we can’t shake – even if all coups to remove supposedly illegitimate presidents and all military fatigues are more or less the same thing. Might be the berets. It’s a little weird they don’t match.

In his continuing quest to cancel voting of all types, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s attempt to terminate the ability of House members to vote on bills via proxy on the House floor has been defeated as the Supreme Court refuses to hear his complaint, NBC News reports.

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, the Democratic-led House passed rules that would allow members to cast a vote via another House member being their designated representative.  The provision allows members who are isolated because of a close contact or a positive Covid test to do their jobs.

McCarthy wanted to void the proxy vote so that he could find temporary moments when he might hold a majority of the members physically on the floor to further obstruct the functioning of the government, because Republicans just want to watch the Constitution burn.

Brandon Straka, the former Democrat hairdresser-turned-MAGA activist was sentenced to pay a $5,000 fine and serve 3 months home confinement plus 3 years of probation by a federal judge for his participation in the Capitol riot on Monday, the Huffington Post reports on the outcome of a plea deal that reportedly involved extensive cooperation with federal prosecutors. Straka’s case is somewhat unique as he’s among the few Trump allies who’s both on the radar of the House January 6th Select Committee investigators for his involvement with organizing the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse and also faced the justice system as one of the thousands of regular rank-and-file MAGA terrorist assholes who breached the Capitol during the riot.

The first day of jury selection in the lawsuit failed Republican Alaskan governor, failed vice presidential candidate, failed reality television show, failed mother and failed wife Sarah Palin has brought against the New York Times has been postponed after she tested positive for Covid, Politico reports.

Having boasted that she’s not vaccinated, Palin has repeated urged her intellectually-challenged admirers to resist entreaties to get the coronavirus vaccine despite their spectacular success at preventing serious illness in the vaccinated.  She once said she would get vaccinated “over [her] dead body,” and she looks on her way to fulfilling that risk.

Palin’s lawyer said Palin got “confused” at a location at the court where she could get tested and ended up leaving to go to an urgent care provider where a PCR test confirmed she was infected.  She will likely seek treatment at a communist medical provider in New York City, not in the wilderness hospitals of Alaska or the socialist providers of Canada, where she frequently sought medical care before getting a job.

We should not be the ones to judge or criticize another center-left news site considering National Zero’s small stature and overall lack of quality, but we’re going to do it anyway since no one else seems to be acknowledging the full picture of Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Minyares firing the University of Virginia’s General Counsel Tim Heaphy, who was on leave from the post as he’s currently working as the House January 6th Select Committee’s top investigator.

Sure, at first glance it looks like petty, partisan retaliation against someone investigating the Trump Regime. And maybe it is. As you can see, Minyares’s office is denying it, which is usually an indication that a Republican is lying. The problem however is that Talking Points Memo is leaving out how Minyares covered his tracks by firing about 30 other people working at the UVA general counsel’s office, plus the general counsel of state-run George Mason University and his staff, which is a pretty smart way to hide a sneak attack on the effectiveness of the January 6th committee.

Or maybe Minyares was just going to fire them anyway, since they were appointed by his Democratic predecessor, former Attorney General Mark Herring. We don’t have to like it. We do have to frame it properly however, or not frame it at all – which is what we did yesterday when we passed on reporting this, because to us it was a non-story. We looked over the original Washington Post report and concluded that, even though they put Heaphy’s involvement in the January 6th investigation in the headline, it’s pretty clear that this is retaliation against Democrats for being Democrats. Victor’s justice, elections have consequences, fuck your feelings, so on and so forth.

Talking Points Memo and all the other lefty websites reporting this without giving the full picture are doing readers a disservice with this cheap ass Gateway Pundit-level lying by omission bullshit. We – as in the center-left political media – are supposed to be better than them. Start acting like it.

“Some RINO Republicans in Wisconsin are working hand in hand with others to have drop boxes again placed in Wisconsin. These fools are playing right into the Democrats’ hand. Drop boxes are only good for Democrats and cheating, not good for Republicans,” says the Former Guy.

Interesting how “cheating” was almost an afterthought, like Trump nearly forgot to include the pretense that drop boxes invite “fraud” in a rant that otherwise acknowledges the reality of the situation, that anything that makes it easier to vote makes it more likely that Republicans will lose elections legitimately. At least he didn’t try that “They aren’t COVID sanitized” again like he did back in 2020. The situation over ballot drop boxes in Wisconsin is a mess, and naturally the fat idiot doesn’t understand it. A Waukesha County judge recently banned them statewide because, despite the fact they’ve been used in elections for decades in the state, absentee ballot drop boxes are technically illegal under Wisconsin law. It was only because the Wisconsin Election Commission’s authority superseded the law that drop boxes were permitted and even then the commission was operating under tenuous emergency rules out of the reach of the GOP-dominated state legislature.

Lawmakers had been pushing the Commission to formally adopt the rules on ballot drop boxes so they could promptly kill them off. It’s dense and not all that easy to understand, but the point is that Trump is so fucking impulsive that he doesn’t even try before ripping into the “RINOs” that are actually doing his bidding. Like the house is on fire and Trump is screaming at these guys while not even looking close enough to see that they’re carrying molotovs, not fire extinguishers.

Will it ultimately be Hunter’s lucrative and shady AF business dealings in Ukraine that gets us into a war with Russia?

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 24, 2022

Failed Alabama Senate candidate and Republican scumbag Roy Moore faces trial in a defamation lawsuit filed by a woman who accused Moore of molesting her decades ago, AL.com reports. The suit alleges that Moore, a twice impeached and removed former Alabama state Supreme Court Justice and wearer of sequined US flag-patterned cowboy suits, defamed Leigh Corfman “repeatedly and in all forms of media, calling her a liar and questioning her motivation for publicly disclosing that Mr. Moore sexually abused her in 1979 when she was a 14-year-old high school freshman and he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney.” In 2017, weeks before Moore lost to Doug Jones in the special election to replace then-Attorney General Jeff “Keebler Man” Sessions, Corfman told the Washington Post that Moore had molested her after meeting Corfman in an courthouse, a crime that, along with the numerous other incidents, including being banned from a mall, should be water under the bridge because Moore was a Democrat at the time.