Fox personality and Trump advisor Sean Hannity invited a former colleague and fellow Trump advisor Paul Manafort (and apparently Manafort’s new toupee) onto his hour-long Trump salad tossing spectacular.  Manafort, who received a pardon from Trump after his conviction for myriad financial crimes, was asked by Hannity to conclude Robert Mueller was in cognitive decline while undertaking the investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election and Trump’s role in it.  Hannity–who’s not a doctor and is barely a human being–apparently has diagnosed Mueller’s mental issues–“the same kind of cognitive decline Joe Biden has.”

Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy stated that he will refuse to voluntarily cooperate with the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress, claiming the bipartisan “committee is not conducting a legitimate investigation.”

“As a representative and the leader of the minority party, it is with neither regret nor satisfaction that I have concluded to not participate with this select committee’s abuse of power that stains this institution today and will harm it going forward,” McCarthy huffs in a statement.

Likely next stop for the J6 Committee:  a subpoena.

The monthly federal budget deficit for December 2021 was just $21 billion–the lowest it has been since December 2019 and 85% lower than it was the prior December–as the US Treasury collected significantly more in taxes as employment increased, Reuters reports.

Receipts to the Treasury grew 41% to a monthly record of $487 billion, while outlays grew 4% to a record $508 billion.  For the calendar quarter–the first quarter of the federal budget year–receipts up 31% to a record $1.052 trillion and outlays up 4% to a record $1.430 trillion, lowering the quarterly deficit by 38% over the previous year.

With hospitals in some areas hitting maximum capacity and health care workers overwhelmed as a new wave of coronavirus sweeps the nation, President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered federal medical teams to be deployed to hospitals in five states, USA Today reports.

Medical teams will go to hospitals in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Rhode Island, Michigan and New Mexico to help alleviate the overworked hospital workers, who have been dealing with record levels of infections despite the availability of multiple vaccines that significantly reduce the impact of the virus.

An analysis by USA Today of data from the Department of Health and Human Services found that one in five US hospitals have reported “critical staff shortages.”

Team effort by KPNX’s Braham Reznik (camera) and Arizona Republic’s Richard Ruelas.

Wow, you might think, those shelves behind the scowling Joe Biden sure do show how depleted store stocks have been since he took office.  How dare he do such a bad job making sure companies get their products to the stores, Fox wants you to think.  But the photo isn’t from the United States.  It’s not even from the time Biden’s been president.  It’s actually….

Democracy Docket has a great explanation of a tactic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will use to get around the filibuster:

“BREAKING: Senator Schumer announces plan to push through filibuster and proceed with voting rights legislation using a procedure known as “messages between the Houses” in a caucus memo.  When the House and Senate pass different versions of the same bill, the bill must go through reconciliation in order for the chambers to approve the same bill text. Messages between the Houses is a form of reconciliation.

“Here’s what happens: when chambers disagree on bill text, they can send the bill back and forth to each other with revisions until a final text is agreed upon. Once the bill has been sent between chambers 3 times, the motion to proceed CANNOT be filibustered in the Senate.  Democrats in the House will take a bill that has already undergone messages between the Houses 3 times, substitute the bill’s language for the #FreedomToVoteAct and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, pass the legislation and quickly send it to the Senate. #JLVRAA

Kyle Chapman, the 46-year-old Idaho resident known as “Based Stickman” in white nationalist circles, has been arrested by federal authorities for felony battery against a health care worker after an incident at a hospital where he was being treated for pneumonia, the Idaho Statesman reports.

Chapman was hospitalized at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise when he grabbed a hospital employee against their will.  Hospital staff also said Chapman was abusive, calling workers sexist and racist slurs.  The U.S. Marshal’s Greater Idaho Fugitive Task Force arrested Chapman without incident, and he is being held on $100,000 bail.

A member of the Proud Boys who founded a paramilitary unit for the group and later found an alt-right, white nationalist group known as the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights, Chapman came to national attention when he was arrested after using a club studded with lead to beat counter-protesters during a 2017 march in support of Donald Trump.  He is currently on probation for an unspecified incident that happened in Texas.

Houston area school administrators and elected officials are calling on a Harris county school board member to resign after he compared his district’s high school graduation rate favorably to Houston’s school district based on the percentage of Black teachers, KHOU reports. “[Cypress-Fairbanks] has what? 13% black teachers?” said Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District Board Member Scott Henry during a work session Monday about an equity audit report. “Houston ISD is 36%. Their dropout rate is 4%. I don’t want to be 4%. I don’t want to be HISD. I want to be a shining example. I want to be the district standard,” said the plainly racist asshole.

Henry tried to say you stupid libs are getting all twisted out of shape in a Facebook post: “I was defending our school district against attacks from an out-of-state political organization that claimed our schools were failing our students because we did not one pre-determined diversity metric… This political organization claimed that one metric – the percent of black teachers in our schools – determined the quality of education our students receive. I was simply refuting that by pointing out the fact there is no one metric that determines education quality – there are a number of important metrics that should also be taken into account.” As if there’s any question what this shitbag thinks just take a look at his website. You’ll find a lot of not the Cathode Ray Tube-kind of CRT stuff.

There’s a non-zero chance that Anheuser-Busch will end up regretting this. Like it sounds good on paper and companies do packaged instant wins all the time. It very well could end up that the winner finds the golden can while enjoying a Bud Heavy on a weeknight, safely at home watching an NHL or NBA game in a recliner. But what happens when a bunch of hunters somewhere in West Texas are already shitfaced and the one who finds it isn’t the one who actually bought the case? That going to be resolved peaceably when they’re all armed with rifles and crossbows? Is it going to end well if it’s found at a party in a rough neighborhood in Los Angeles or Chicago when people are already drunk and ornery? They better pray they don’t end up accidentally causing a bloodbath.

Former Trump White House Press Secretary Kayleigh “Binder Barbie” McEnany will be appearing via video conference to House Jan 6th Committee members on Wednesday, CBS’s Ellis Kim reports.

The House January 6th Select committee has asked Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to cooperate with the investigation, terrible right wing political news site The Hill reports.

Reverend Rusty Chatfield, whose son, Republican former Michigan state House Speaker Lee Chatfield, is in serious trouble after being accused of a decade plus-long sexually abusive relationship with a female former student at the Christian school Rusty founded and Lee taught at – a woman who is now married to Rusty’s other son Aaron. “We are in certain circumstances, as all of you know, which I’m not going to refer to specifically…we are in the spotlight,” says Reverend Rusty in the fiery sermon of a man who knows deep down in his sinful heart that he’s fucked.

“You can’t believe everything you read in the newspaper, on the internet… You should know what I’m talking about… truth will come forward. Parts of things are true but parts are not true. The enemy is always lying, exaggerating, distorting. Some truth and some no truth.” Really fucked. Remember all of this disgrace happened at a school he founded, in a church he ran, in his family.

Michigan politics writer Zach Gorchow has an excellent breakdown of the scandal here.

Infamous irregular foam reseller Mike Lindell told a right-wing streaming service that he has enough evidence to imprison more than 300 million Americans–or 90% of the entire population of the United States, be they man, woman, senior citizen or child.

“Everything you’re going to see over these next seven months to get rid of the machines, you’re gonna see a Supreme Court case coming out, all these great things, everybody–by the way you can find them on Frank Speech.com.  I’ll put that lil, put that out there–there are so many–I’m more optimistic today than I have been yesterday or the day before that.  I’m on the incline like this.  Why?  Because it’s so amazing, all the things we have, we have all the pieces to the puzzle, and you talk about evidence, we have enough evidence to put everybody in prison for life, three hundred and some million people, ah, we had that all the way back to November, December, but what we had were these other things that had to happen which was all evil revealing itself.  I mean, evil was poppin’ up like pocket gophers, they put their heads up, it’s Whack-a-Mole, right.  I-I-I mean, it’s everywhere.  That all had to be revealed so we can fix it.

“You wanna talk about defending democracy,” Republican Florida Senator (and guy who has seen his career aspirations vanish in the last six years) Marco Rubio says on the floor of the Senate.  “Let’s talk about the Americans–real people!–who are afraid to donate to a political campaign, to put a bumper sticker on their car to tell people who they voted for.  They’re afraid because they don’t want to get canceled, they don’t want to get boycotted, they don’t want to get harassed, so they’re afraid–they don’t want to get smeared.”

Little Marco fails to mention that what he’s talking about is the limitation of First Amendment rights for people who disagree with Marco’s fictitious donor’s views:  he wants to (ahem) cancel the right of people to peacefully demonstrate their opinion and reaction to his donor’s faulty choices.  If his donor can’t tolerate people who hold opposing political views, perhaps they shouldn’t boast about supporting a candidate who favors a Party leader who sought to undermine the Constitution.

Three former Minneapolis police officers who participated in the call that led to the death of George Floyd will not be offered plea deals from federal prosecutors charging them with violating Floyd’s civil rights, ABC News reports.

Federal prosecutor LeeAnn Bell told the court during a hearing Wednesday that the defendants had rejected an earlier approach from the government relating to a pre-trial plea deal, and prosecutors do not intend to offer another deal.

J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao face federal civil rights charges in relation to the murder of Floyd by fellow former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of three murder charges last year.  The three stood by while Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes and they refused to provide medical assistance to Floyd. 

Michael Protzman aka “Negative48” is leading his brainwashed QAnon subcult captives on a little side trip from their still ongoing Dallas vigil for JFK Jr to return to go check out the Trump rally in Florence, Arizona on Saturday, Vice reports. Protzman, whose “Negative48” nom de guerre comes from a MAGAfied version of the ancient Jewish numerological system called Gematria (“Evil” is E[5] + V[22] + I[9] + L[12] = 48, hence “Negative” 48… Yeah, we know), has told his thralls there will be a special performance by a band consisting of Whitney Houston, Prince, Michael Jackson, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, and Tupac Shakur – among others – on stage at the Trump rally.

So Protzman is really big on the whole “these dead celebrities aren’t really dead” kick and despite his similar guarantees to his fans about a November Rolling Stones concert that didn’t materialize – let alone the Kennedys thing – they’re apparently all in on this one too. What’s disconcerting here is how QAnon cultists are incorporating classical pre-Trump global conspiracy shit into their modern belief system. “Elvis is still alive” has been around probably almost as long as Elvis Presley has been dead and somehow (by way of JFK Jr) it made its way into the Q universe. Cirsten Weldon, the QAnon podcaster who died of COVID-19 last week, recently claimed Kobe Bryant was secretly still alive and was in witness protection while he was woking to takedown LeBron James for sex crimes or whatever. Kind of makes one wonder why the freaks aren’t going around claiming Cirsten Weldon and the other dead Q influencers like Doug Kuzma and Robert David Steele are secretly still alive.

Unhinged as the whole dead celebrity thing is, it’s relatively harmless compared to the QAnon embrace of the other old school conspiracy mainstay: aliens. Specifically the evil reptilian ones, something Protzman’s equally dangerous Canadian counterpart, Queen Romana knows a thing or two about, and the delusion that caused a California QAnoner to murder his two children, believing they had reptilian ancestry from their mother’s side. That sick fuck faces the death penalty.

https://twitter.com/WarrenDavidson/status/1481216313196437504

Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are complaining that the Democratic majority in the Senate are ignoring objections from home-state Senators when confirming President Joe Biden’s judicial picks–due to the fact that Republicans rejected the “blue slip” tradition while they ran the Senate during the Trump Administration.

As Roll Call reports, Tennessee Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty declined to sign the “blue slips,” essentially an endorsement of the nominee by the Senators of the state the nominee would service.  Prior to 2017, such an omission would stop a nomination dead in its tracks and the Senate would not continue with the nomination.

However, when he was Senate Majority Leader from 2017 to 2021, McConnell ignored objections from Democratic Senators to judicial nominees in their states and pushed through Trump nominees in 17 of 18 cases when Democratic Senators withheld “blue slip” endorsements. 

Matt Gaetz ex-girlfriend gave testimony to a federal grand jury in Florida on Wednesday in his sex trafficking investigation, NBC News reports. Which is weird because all of the fanboys said he’s not in trouble anymore after that one blackmail dumbass pleaded guilty which exonerated Gaetz. Like they didn’t really explain how a guy with knowledge of the investigation sort of tried to blackmail Gaetz’s dad over it meant the investigation itself was fake news, but the MAGA trolls kept insisting on it. Almost like they wanted it to be true even though they knew it wasn’t.