For about six years I've been asking Donald Trump for an interview. It never happened until the former president came on the line today. Tomorrow on @MorningEdition we'll hear what he said, up to the moment that he hung up on me. @NPR

— Steve Inskeep (@NPRinskeep) January 11, 2022

The coronavirus vaccine mandate implemented by his company in August 2021 has saved employees’ lives, said the CEO of United Airlines noted in a company-wide email distributed Tuesday, NBC News reports.

“Prior to our vaccine requirement, tragically, more than one United employee on average *per week* was dying from COVID,” Scott Kirby wrote to United’s 85,000.  “But we’ve now gone eight straight weeks with zero COVID-related deaths among our vaccinated employees — based on United’s prior experience and the nationwide data related to COVID fatalities among the unvaccinated, that means there are approximately 8-10 United employees who are alive today because of our vaccine requirement.”

One of the first major companies in the US to mandate vaccines, United fought court challenges to its employee requirement that everyone had to be fully vaccine no later than early October, requiring the first dose to be received by August 28th.  The company made exceptions for people with strong religious convictions against vaccinations and for people who have exclusionary medical conditions. 

Real County, Texas Sheriff Nathan Johnson, a hardcore MAGA asshole who posts “Let’s Go Brandon” memes on his Facebook page, is under felony criminal investigation by the Texas Rangers for ordering his deputies to seize cash from illegal immigrants, the Texas Tribune reports.

One deputy told the Rangers “seizing currency from undocumented immigrants and the driver has been standard operating procedure for as long as he has been employed by the Real County Sheriff’s Office,” per an investigative report. After his department’s offices were raided by state law enforcement in December, Johnson wrote on his Facebook page that “especially in the last year, I have taken a strong stand against human smuggling, drug smuggling, and illegal alien traffic in our community and will continue to do so,” which kind of indicates he doesn’t see anything wrong with what he did. Cash and property can be seized by law enforcement, but it requires a long and well-documented asset forfeiture process, something the Real County Sheriff’s office cut the red tape on for at least as long as Johnson has been in charge. It’s unclear currently if any charges have been filed or will be filed against Johnson, according to the Texas Tribune’s report.

A bipartisan group of Senators, including the two DINO buttholes, New Hampshire Dem Jeanne Shaheen, and Republicans Thom Tillis, Roger Wicker, Mitt Romney, and Susan Collins is looking at taking the momentum for Electoral Count Act reform further to increase funding for the Electoral Assistance Commission, protect election officials from harassment, and raise the bar for challenging a state’s electoral college votes in Congress, per Politico. It’s still a big gap between the ECA reform-only bare minimum that Moscow Mitch offered and a full reform package like the VRA plus Freedom to Vote Act, but it’s not nothing and shows there a chance that some basic measure of MAGA-proofing elections at the state and local level could be within reach.

“The Select Committee is aware of unsupported claims that Ray Epps was an FBI informant based on the fact that he was on the FBI Wanted list and then was removed from that list without being charged. The Select Committee has interviewed Mr. Epps. Mr. Epps informed us that he was not employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on January 5th or 6th or at any other time, and that he has never been an informant for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency” – Statement from the House January 6th Select Committee.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will speak from the Atlanta University Center Consortium, a joint administrative center for the four HBCUs in the Atlanta area in their most forceful effort yet to get the two assholes in the Dem Senate caucus to carve out a filibuster exception to get significant voting rights legislation passed and fight back against the draconian restrictions being passed in red states in the wake of the 2020 election.

Rand Paul wasn’t the only ignorant Republican NIH Director Anthony Fauci had to deal with today.  He also had to listen to the insane ramblings of Republican Roger Marshall, a senator from Kansas, afterwhich Fauci is heard muttering, “What a moron” and “Jesus Christ.”

British rock star Elvis Costello tells the Telegraph his seminal hit “Oliver’s Army” has been retired from live shows over the inclusion of the line “Only takes one itchy trigger/ One more widow, one less white [n-word]”. “If I wrote that song today, maybe I’d think twice about it,” Costello says. “That’s what my [ethically Irish Catholic] grandfather was called in the British army – it’s historically a fact – but people hear that word go off like a bell and accuse me of something that I didn’t intend. On the last tour, I wrote a new verse about censorship, but what’s the point of that? So I’ve decided I’m not going to play it,” adding that radio stations are “making it worse by bleeping it for sure. Because they’re highlighting it then. Just don’t play the record!”

After seeing surveillance footage of the vandalism, a bartender at a popular Key West establishment helped identify the culprits who set fire to the landmark buoy marker that denotes the southernmost point in the United States, the Miami Herald reports.

Cameron Briody, a bartender at the iconic Irish Kevin’s bar on Duval Street in Key West, recognized one of the two men caught on video lighting the Southernmost Point buoy on fire in the early morning hours on New Year’s Day.  Briody worked with bar manager Daylin Starks to track down a name for the man, who had been drinking at the bar with a buddy earlier that evening and had left without leaving a tip for the staff.

Briody and Starks sorted through receipts from the night of the incident and identified the credit card receipts from 21-year-old Skylar Jacobson of Henrietta, Texas, who had ordered three drinks at the bar and didn’t leave a tip.   “I knew immediately that I had served him and that he had used a card, so his name would be on the slips,” Briody said in an interview.

We don’t know who Ray Epps is. We know he has something to do with the Capitol riot, but we’re not really going to bother looking into it because that would kind of spoil the fun of mocking it from the outside. Like when we wrote “Watch out for MAGA trolls to start talking about ‘Dominion’” on November 11th, 2020, we had absolutely no idea what the hell Dominion was (at that point).

Before Dominion we had Trump-era classics like “The 302s”, “CrowdStrike”, “Crossfire Hurricane”, “Tony Bobulinski”, “The Uranium”, and so on and so forth, where every MAGA troll’s comments were “YOU LIBS ARE FUCKED WHEN THE TRUTH ABOUT (insert bullshit alt-right conspiracy metonym here) IS REVEALED!!! (Hillary, Obama, Biden, Podesta, Susan Rice, etc) WILL BE SWINGING FROM A ROPE BY THE END OF THE WEEK!!! COUNT ON IT!” Got a good feeling about this Ray Epps one too.

Seems like the MAGA Reich have learned their lesson about not letting their rally crowd size expectations get hijacked by K-Pop loving TikTokers after the great Tulsa disaster of 2020. In related news, Mike Lindell is billed as the top undercard act for the Trump’s cult gathering, along with Trump-endorsed QAnon fan Arizona Gov candidate Kari Lake, “Stop the Steal” traitor Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem, anime fan MAGA dipshit Paul Gosar, white nationalist Congressman Andy Biggs, and some other assholes not important enough to mention.

A new court filing in Trump’s moronic lawsuit against Twitter, Facebook, and their respective founders says Twitter “damaged the integrity of elections” when they permanently banned his fat ass from the platform in the aftermath of the Capitol riot, Bloomberg reports. “Mr. Trump’s injuries are not only ongoing, but worsening, because they flow from the silencing of Mr. Trump’s political speech as the presumptive head of the Republican party at a time when the nation is drawing ever-closer to the 2022 elections,” said Trump’s lawyer Richard Lawson in the filing seeking an injunction against the ban, which will be rejected. Trump announced the lawsuit to great fanfare in July 2021, and barely anything has happened aside from it being moved from the federal district court in Southern Florida to Northern California, where the companies are headquartered.

Failed 2020 US presidential spoiler candidate Kanye West is following in the footsteps of his more successful predecessor Jill Stein and headed to Russia sometime later this year, Billboard reports. Kanye plans to hold a “Sunday service” and meet with the tyrannical autocrat Vladimir Putin during the trip, his associate Ameer Sudan told Billboard. Brokering the meeting are Azerbaijani billionaire Aras Agalarov and his son, pop star Emin Agalarov. Emin canceled his US tour back in 2019 to avoid being served a subpoena from then special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation regarding the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Russian government agents promising dirt on Hillary, which Agalarov had helped arrange. But you libs are just paranoid conspiracy freaks with this Russia Russia Russia nonsense.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, head of the DOJ National Security division, told lawmakers he’s decided to launch a new enforcement unit focused on domestic terror threats, ABC News reports. “We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies,” Olsen said.

Cop who can catch criminals AND Pokemon without getting fired.

Two LAPD officers have been fired after an investigation found they failed to respond to an armed robbery call while they were playing mobile game Pokemon Go in 2017, Kotaku reports. Pokemon Go is an augmented reality mobile phone game requiring players to physically be at a location in the real world to catch the fictional animals so you can use them to fight against other players’ fictional animals. Kind of like Michael Vick, except virtual. On the day in question, cops Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell, were looking for a “Snorlax”, the elusive, fat lazy Pokemon and a “Togetic” – some kind of magic flying uh, thing – when they ignored a call about an armed robbery at a nearby Macy’s.

Per the petition Lozano and Mitchell filed to appeal their firing: “For approximately the next 20 minutes, the [dash cam] captured petitioners discussing Pokémon as they drove to different locations where the virtual creatures apparently appeared on their mobile phones. On their way to the Snorlax location, Officer Mitchell alerted Officer Lozano that ‘a Togetic just popped up,’ noting it was ‘[o]n Crenshaw, just South of 50th.’ After Mitchell apparently caught the Snorlax – exclaiming, ‘Got ’em’ – petitioners agreed to ‘[g]o get the Togetic’ and drove off. When their car stopped again, the [dash cam] recorded Mitchell saying, ‘Don’t run away. Don’t run away,’ while Lozano described how he ‘buried it and ultra-balled’ the Togetic before announcing, ‘Got him.’ Mitchell advised he was ‘[s]till trying to catch it,’ adding, ‘Holy crap, man. This thing is fighting the crap out of me.’ Eventually Mitchell exclaimed, ‘Holy Crap. Finally,’ apparently in reference to capturing the Togetic, and he remarked, ‘The[ ] guys are going to be so jealous.’ Petitioners then agreed to return to the 7-Eleven (where Sergeant Gomez later met them) to end their watch. On the way, Mitchell remarked, ‘I got you a new Pokémon today, dude.'” Freaking nerds.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, in what would be pretty much the only worthwhile and courageous thing he’s ever done, is working on plans to drastically limit or outright ban stock ownership among all House members should he become Speaker. The plan is very shaky and tentative, so there’s a strong chance he won’t follow though, but the outline, per Punchbowl News, includes placing all shares in a blind trust or freezing all trading.

OPEN TEXAS! NOW!!! NO MORE MASKS!!!!! ENOUGH! pic.twitter.com/f3WbHyMky9

— Kelly Canon (@kjcanon) September 1, 2020

Arlington, Texas Republican activist Kelly Canon, 63, has been granted a permanent exception to wearing a mask AND getting vaccinated. Her tireless efforts to liberate herself from any COVID-19 safety precautions – including a reported “COVID Symposium” last month – have been rewarded by God. Want to know how she did it? The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Bud Kennedy has her secret!

Republican Wisconsin state Senator Kathy Bernier, a former election clerk, announced her retirement Friday after taking heat from her party for daring to defend the state’s election system amid the state Assembly GOP’s 2020 election “review”, led by braces-wearing former State Supreme Court Justice/fat idiot Michael Gableman, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports. “The choice to retire was a difficult one to make, but I have been contemplating this decision for some time now and I decided ‘now is the time,'” said Bernier in a statement. “As I go… I want to make it perfectly clear that no one has forced me out and politics has not played a role in my decision.”

In December Bernier warned Gableman she would literally be armed when meeting the fat white nationalist bastard. “Mr. Gableman is coming to my county and I will attend that meeting along with my concealed carry permit, to be perfectly honest, because (the election review) keeps jazzing up the people who think they know what they’re talking about, and they don’t. And so I think my advice would be to have Mr. Gableman wrap up sooner rather than later, because the longer we keep this up, the more harm… we’re going to do for Republicans.”

Having failed to get New Hampshire Gov Chris Sununu on board, Mitch McConnell ad Elaine Chao are trying to get Maryland Gov Larry Hogan to run for Senate in November, the AP reports.