Congress again kicked the can down the road, as the Senate voted 69-28 to pass the stop-gap funding bill that will fund the federal government through February 18, 2022, when a new financial cliff will lie ahead.

The bill will go to President Biden for his signature.  The passage of the bill averts a government shutdown, a threat made by Republicans who wanted to protest Biden’s vaccination mandates.

The National Republican Senate Campaign Committee won’t be putting out a legislative agenda for the 2022 Midterms, as leader Moscow Mitch McConnell thinks the idea is a tactical mistake and prefers to simply make it about opposing Democrats instead, Axios reports. This echoes the 2020 Republican National Convention’s official platform resolution, in which they infamously simply resolved that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda” because they really had nothing to sell to voters besides fear.

The US Department of Transportation received more than 90,000 complaints from travelers about airlines withholding refunds in 2020–up from 1,600 the year before–as the airline industry suffered one of its most unsteady year due to the coronavirus pandemic, CBS News reports.

As a result of the numerous cancellations of flights, US airlines still owe their customers near $20 billion dollars in refunds for cancelled flights, refunded rebooking fees and incentives.  The airlines may be holding on to cash because of the uncertainty being caused by the continuing circulation of the coronavirus.

“There has never been a year like last year for complaints about refunds,” Bill McGee, aviation adviser at Consumer Reports Advocacy, told CBS MoneyWatch. “The airlines obviously made some conscious decisions not to do the right thing and give refunds — even when they were required to by law.”

The gift that is QAnon lawyer Lin Wood’s batfuckery continues to giveth, as he for some insane reason posted on Telegram a 2014 email exchange in which Fox News host Tucker Carlson asking Hunter Biden to write a letter of recommendation to Georgetown for his son Buckley Carlson.

Now while “tuckercarlson@gmail.com” is almost too goddamned obvious an address for the bow-tied far right host, and this whole exchange would be easy enough to fake, this seems awfully specific of a situation for someone to just simply make up. Indeed, QAnon researcher and author Mike Rothschild is saying as much. “People have been asking me if this is real, and I have no reason to suspect it’s not. Say what you want about Lin Wood’s rampage, but he hasn’t posted anything fake that I know of so far” and “the timing for Buckley Carlson applying for colleges fits, since he was born in 1997. And Tuck was just a weekend Fox and Friends guy in 2014, not the infotainment conspiracy machine he is now” tweeted Rothschild (still love that a Q watcher has that last name).

Saying “We have the tools to protect ourselves and battle this virus, and I’m laying out a plan to do just that this winter,” President Joe Biden laid out his plans for addressing the coronavirus and the new omicron variant during the coming months in an editorial in USA Today.

“We are going to fight COVID-19 not with shutdowns or lockdowns – but with more widespread vaccinations, boosters, testing and more,” Biden writes.  “We will beat it back with science and speed, not chaos and confusion – just as we did in the spring and again with the more powerful delta variant in the summer and fall.”

Biden stated that the Administration will continue to push for wider adoption of vaccines and already-vaccinated people taking boosters.  He also said his administration would add additional “Surge Response Teams,” teams of medical professionals who can quickly be sent to areas of high infections to help local providers and public health officials.

Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, comfortable at home and clad in a hideous argyle sweater, probably thought he was in for a softball interview with MAGA shock jock Stewie Peters, and though Stewie’s tone grew increasingly hostile over the course of the 38-minute hit, Meadows handled it well enough, seizing opportunities to make Kevin McCarthy’s life just a little more miserable by throwing the minority leader under the bus to Stewie’s audience a few times, including blaming him (as well as Lindsey Graham, Jared Kushner, and former 2020 Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien) a few times for the lackluster 2022 endorsements Trump has made.

At 30:45 in the video Stewie uses this subject to segue into China connections, and that’s where things quickly go to shit for Meadows in the interview. Referencing a report in the National File, Peters says “Back on November 19th, this show discovered a really concerning report” regarding Meadows’ “very close connections with Chinese communists through the ridiculously named Humpty Dumpty Institute as well as the CCP-tied Taihe Institute. What were you doing with these Chinese communists, exactly?” Meadows was taken aback, but powered through with some convoluted explanation about “Humpty Dumpty”. “In terms of any connection with China, actually, I was actually on the China commission, holding China accountable during that time,” responded Meadows. “I can tell you that there’s anyone who believes that China is our number-one threat, it’s me. And I will continue to believe that.” Stewie didn’t press it further, probably due to time constraints, but in the “just asking questions” world, having asked the question is enough to cast a cloud over one suspected of disloyalty to the MAGA Reich.

“The Scottsdale Police Department has concluded its investigation into the allegations of Scottsdale Unified School Board Member Jann-Michael Greenberg in regard to information contained on a Google Drive. It was determined that the drive contained open source and/or public documents. Therefore, it has been determined that no criminal conduct has been committed at this time that would be under the jurisdiction of the Scottsdale Police Department.”

“The Scottsdale portion Of this investigation is now closed. Scottsdale Investigators have met with the FBI, Arizona Attorney General’s Office, and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, briefed them, and provided them with a copy of our investigation for review in determining if any criminal acts might fall under their respective jurisdictions. The Scottsdale Unified School District is still conducting an internal investigation based on its policies” says the Scottsdale Arizona Police Dept.

Greenberg’s (or Greenburg’s – sources differ on the exact spelling of his name) dossier compiling data on anti-mask and anti-critical race theory MAGA freaks constantly disrupting Scottsdale Unified School District board meetings caused an absolute shit fit among the MAGA media. Headlines like “AZ State Rep. Joseph Chaplik To Hold Press Conference With Parents Targeted By Greenburg Dossier – Will Call For Jann-Michael Greenburg’s Resignation” and “Scottsdale School Board Member Publicized Parents’ Social Security Numbers, Divorce Proceedings, Financial Records In Effort To Track Outspoken Parents” show up across the fanboy sites. Perhaps the dumbest reaction is Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich asking the FBI to investigate Greenberg, like he isn’t the fucking top law enforcement official in the state and has no power to convene a grand jury himself. Greenberg was replaced as the president of the board after a contentious vote on November 12th, however he still remains a member.

That’s so freaking pathetic. A legitimate news site would never ask its readers for donations.

Speaking to Politico about Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ new book, House Capitol riot Committee member Congressman Adam Schiff says “It’s… very possible that by discussing the events of Jan. 6 in his book, if he does that, he’s waiving any claim of privilege. So, it’d be very difficult for him to maintain ‘I can’t speak about events to you, but I can speak about them in my book'”, to which other Democratic members of the committee concurred.

“If he did that, it’s a waiver legally” said Congresswoman Zoe Logfren. “You can’t assert a privilege that you have waived by virtue of your other actions,” adds Congressman Jaime Raskin about Meadows’ memoir “The Chief’s Chief”, the release of which is particularly poorly timed as its street date next Tuesday comes the same week Meadows is scheduled to sit down with the committee.

However, Meadows did on Wednesday say the stuff he wrote in his own book is “fake news”, which means he could use that to bolster his claim to executive privilege. If he says “Mr. Chairman, I cannot answer that as I claim it privileged under fake news”, it could work. Might as well try, right?

By a 222-212 vote, with Adam Kinzinger the only Republican to cross the aisle to vote with the Democratic caucus, the House passed a short term spending bill that would fund the federal government through February 18, 2022, the Washington Post reports.

The bill, which would avert a government shutdown effective Friday at midnight, will have a harder time passing the Senate, where GOP Senators vow to hold up its passage in protest to vaccine mandates supported by President Joe Biden.  Far right Republicans claim vaccine mandates are unconstitutional and threaten Americans’ rights and jobs, even though vaccine mandates for other diseases have been in place for decades.

“We have seen in the course of this pandemic, Democrats being very comfortable with being petty tyrants and decreeing that you must obey their medical mandates,” said Senator Ted Cruz (R-Quintana Roo). 

Sidney “Kraken” Powell, Lin Wood, Howard Kleinhendler, and the scrubs on their team have been ordered by a Michigan federal judge to cough up $175,249 ($21,964 to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson plus $153,285 to the City of Detroit) in legal fees after their failed lawsuit attempting to overturn the 2020 election in the state.

“MyPillow is dropping its lawsuit against Dominion. But the legal dispute between a bedding manufacturer and a voting machine company over whether the election was rigged will go on as a counterclaim in a related lawsuit.”  —Brad Heath of Reuters.

Mike Lindell’s MyPillow company filed a $1.6 billion countersuit against Dominion in April after the voting systems company had sued Mike Lindell and MyPillow.  The lawsuit faced multiple hurdles–say nothing of its viability in court–including having MyPillow’s lawyers withdraw from the suit in June.

Wyoming, Montana, tribal, and federal officials have agreed to cut Yellowstone National Park’s grazing wildlife workforce by 600 to 900, the Associated Press reports. The grazing department, whose light landscaping duties and simplistic performance rituals to entertain visitors provide a valuable service, was nevertheless targeted by administrators for downsizing due to a large number of redundancies. Unpaid federal contractors will be deployed to select individual grazing unit employees for termination at random and remove them from the premises. These contractors are then permitted to consume the flesh of the former grazers and/or use their skin for clothing.

Romana Didulo, the single, childless, destitute fifty something year old Filipino immigrant turned QAnon cult figure/self-proclaimed reigning monarch of Canada with tens of thousands of followers of Telegram, famous for ordering the executions of millions of Canadians complying with COVID-19 safety measures, was taken into custody by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s National Security Division at her home in Victoria, British Colombia on Saturday, GlobalNews.ca reports.

Didulo was held for for several hours in a psychiatric facility, after which she was released and promptly spoke with her fans in a video posted on Telegram. “If ever I was to disappear next time, you know that I would be with the national integrated national-security enforcement team,” Didulo said, holding up a business card from the Mounties who had detained her.

“The reason I AMs do not see ALL intergalactic alliance of worlds of Light beings Ships land on land on Earth is because of their very high energetic vibrational frequencies (of both the ships and the occupants of those Ships). IF they showed up all at once – planet Earth’s energetic fields will be distorted and will be destroyed. Children, women, and men who have lower energetic vibrational frequencies compared with the arriving intergalactic alliance of worlds of Light beings will not be able to cope… Those Plasmas…that have been documented in British Columbia Canada – they are not just Plasma…They are Star Ships of the many Intergalactic alliance of worlds of Light beings protecting Planet Earth ?” Didulo added in another message.

The director of nursing at a Columbia, South Carolina rehabilitation center has been indicted by a grand jury for creating fraudulent vaccination verification cards for a family member, The State reports.

The lawyer for 53-year-old Tammy McDonald, who reportedly is vaccinated, said that McDonald only made “one or two” of the vaccination cards to help a relative who has “anti-vaccination beliefs” skirt vaccine mandates at the University of South Carolina.  The lawyer pointed out that McDonald did not receive any financial compensation for the cards.

Besides charges of forging the vaccination cards, McDonald also faces charges of lying to FBI and US Health and Human Services investigators.  She was indicted by a grand jury last week and pleaded not guilty to charges Thursday morning at an arraignment hearing.  She was released on $10,000 bond and she will be required to inform any future employer in health care of the charges she faces if she continues to work as a nurse or in health care.

California Congresswoman Norma Torres rips Republicans’ games on the debt ceiling, eliciting a chorus of boos from the MAGA section of the seats, including a distinctive “LET’S GO BRANDON!” from none other than the unfaithful Jew space laser conspiracy theorist psychopath herself.

U.S. astronauts Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron replaced a damaged antenna on the International Space Station during a spacewalk Thursday morning, a project that was delayed by NASA due to threats from orbiting space debris, the Associated Press reports.

Three weeks ago, Russia tested an anti-satellite weapons system by destroying one of its old satellites, dispersing thousands of bits of metal space junk in unplanned orbits and endangering the safety of orbiting platforms and astronauts.  NASA postponed the spacewalk 24 hours to allow a patch of debris to bypass the space station.  The antenna that was replaced stopped working in September, but astronauts noted the instrument had more than 20 holes in it, some recent and some older.

On his fourth spacewalk, the 61-year-old Mashburn became the oldest person to conduct a spacewalk.  Both Mashburn and Barron arrived at the space station via the SpaceX launch last month, and they are scheduled for a six month mission on the ISS.

“How do [Republicans] explain to the public that they’re shutting down government because they don’t want people to get vaccinated?” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says of the GOP, which is threatening a government shutdown.  “Why don’t you go ask them.  This is so silly.  This is so silly we have people anti-science, anti-vaccination saying they’re going to shut down government over that and you’re asking me what’s our message.  Our message is that we have to respect governance and we have to respect science, and that’s what we are going and we will pass this legislation.”