The Minnesota Department of Health has confirmed the second known case of the omicron variant of the coronavirus:  a fully-vaccinated adult male who had not traveled out of state, but spent time last month in New York City, Reuters reports.  The first case was identified in California Wednesday.

Because the individual has not traveled overseas, the contact tracing of the individual suggests that the omicron variant is already established in the United States and infections will increase due to community spread.  Information on how the patient traveled to New York and what he did there was not available.

The man started to experience mild symptoms on November 22nd and was tested on November 24th.  His symptoms have since resolved.

Liberty University sign language professor William Atwell was arrested on November 20th by Liberty University Police on charges of sexual battery and abduction of a student, something which took 11 days for a reporter for a Lynchburg, Virginia-area ABC affiliate to notice in online court records – and fully 66 days after the assault took place on September 15th, 2021.

It took until Wednesday, after the arrest became public for the watch-from-the-corner guy’s former school to acknowledge it in a statement: “Liberty University takes nothing more seriously than claims that a faculty member has had inappropriate sexual contact with one of our students, something for which there is zero tolerance. We are treating this matter with the utmost seriousness, care, and concern. With the student’s consent, the university turned the matter over to the appropriate legal authorities and the faculty member in question was arrested. The faculty member has also been suspended by the university pending the outcome of this matter. To protect the integrity of investigation and the privacy of the student, we will limit further comment.”

It is not known precisely when – or even if – Atwell was ever removed from teaching classes in the two months between the incident and the arrest or when it was first reported. Liberty University is facing multiple ongoing lawsuits related to its mishandling and coverups of sexual assault and misconduct on campus, most notably cases in which female students were punished for reporting rapes and assaults, and most recently on November 24th when a student says that her case was “swept under the rug” by the “Christian” school after she became pregnant by a male student who drugged and raped her. Jerry Falwell Jr is also suing his former employer for defamation.

Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss – mother and daughter – are suing the Gateway Pundit for defamation, alleging a “campaign of lies” which forced Freeman from her home after MAGA terrorists twice came to place her under “citizen’s arrest”, the New York Times reports.

Gateway Pundit “article” from August 14, 2021

Multiple investigations by the Georgia Secretary of State cleared Moss and Freeman of any wrongdoing. On Wednesday they were profiled by Reuters as part of an ongoing series on threats to election workers nationwide over the year since Trump lost and his fans couldn’t handle it.

WOSU: “Five members of the Ohio Republican Party’s state central committee are suing the party, saying there are millions of dollars of missing money and that chairman Bob Paduchik won’t explain what happened to it. The suit comes as the party considers whether it will eventually endorse candidates in May’s contested primary for governor and the crowded race to replace U.S. Senator Rob Portman. Mark Bainbridge, one of the five suing the Ohio GOP, said his group has documented $3 million in unexplained missing funds going back to former chair Jane Timken, now a U.S. Senate candidate. Bainbridge said the group wants an audit, for the party to stop contributing to the re-election campaigns of Gov. Mike DeWine and other candidates, and for Paduchik to resign. ‘It has nothing to do with the politics in the Republican Party. We are just trying to bring accountability and integrity and good financial reporting and governance to the Ohio Republican Party,’ he said”

The attack ads from the Club for Growth aimed at taking down Republican Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance using Vance’s own words badmouthing Trump in 2016 against him have angered the fat bastard former president, Politico reports. Though the intent of playing video clips showing Vance calling Trump an “idiot,” “noxious”, “offensive”, among other shit the weasel definitely regrets now was meant to paint Vance as insufficiently loyal to the Orange God Emperor in contrast to his opponents, Donald reportedly believes they were actually effective attacks on him and could drive down his popularity in Ohio, a state he won by 8 points in 2020. Trump called Club for Growth president David McIntosh to order him to pull the ads, a command that was ignored when McIntosh dumped another $500,000 buy into the Anti-Vance campaign in hopes of sealing victory in the contested primary for current frontrunner and Jew guy Josh Mandel.

Politico speculates Trump’s anger “illustrates how he views the 2022 midterm election: as a tool to bolster and measure his own political standing ahead of a potential 2024 bid. The former president has been endorsing Republican candidates across the country and using their successes to trumpet his popularity within the party. And when he believes he hasn’t gotten enough credit he’s lashed out: After Republican Glenn Youngkin’s upset win in last month’s Virginia gubernatorial race, the former president steamed that he wasn’t getting enough recognition.”

“Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it. He created all kinds of fear, saying it could affect the entire population when it couldn’t. He’s using the exact same playbook with COVID, ignoring therapy, pushing a vaccine” says Ron Johnson to Brian Kilmeade on Omicron, completely ignoring the fact that there is no vaccine for AIDS and the only treatments are therapeutic.

Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows writes in his new book the same lame minimizing of the Capitol riot that Republicans have been pushing for almost eleven months now, claiming just a “handful of fanatics” were responsible for the chaos, and that Trump himself was “speaking metaphorically” when he told the crowd “we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you” toward the Capitol to disrupt the electoral college vote count session, the Guardian reports.

Meadows wrote that it was an “ad-lib” and that Trump “knew as well as anyone that we couldn’t organize a trip like that on such short notice” yet he said it “metaphorically” to the crowd anyway, using “we” at least four different times in the speech. Complaining that no one wants to focus on the Trump fans present who didn’t get arrested for breaching the Capitol or assaulting police officers, Meadows writes “No one would [focus] on the actions of… those supporters of President Trump who came [to Washington on 6 January] without hate in their hearts or any bad intentions. Instead, they would laser in on the actions of a handful of fanatics across town.”

As of December 2, 2021, more than 700 Trump fans have been charged with crimes committed during the January 6th Capitol riot and the FBI is still seeking information on dozens more.

A desperate scene unfolded in the Northern Danish city of Aalborg on Wednesday night, as a sudden snowfall forced six shoppers and over two dozen employees were forced to sleep overnight inside an IKEA store, Ekstra Bladet reports. The shoppers and employees reportedly survived the ordeal by consuming the food-like malformations stored in the nightmarish death maze’s cafeteria before sleeping in the store’s cavernous mattress showroom. “There was some music playing and they could not turn off the light, so we lay almost with a searchlight against us all night” customer Erik Baangsgard told Ekstra Bladet after finally making it home from the Swedish box of horrors.

The possible overturning or Roe v Wade is a “big flare-up” and could “derail what could be a 2010-level victory next year for the party and the movement… Republicans and operatives in the party, I don’t think they’re ready. They better get ready before this decision comes out” says one longtime Republican Party operative anonymously quoted by Axios.

Asked by NewsMax host (and frustrated used furniture salesman) Rob Schmitt what he thought of Donald Trump’s characterization of his book being “fake news,” former Trump White House Chief of Staff (and guy who really wants you to buy the Buick) Mark Meadows confirmed it. “Well, it is fake news,” Meadows confirms before trying to downplay one of the most scandalous events in his book: that Trump knew he had coronavirus three days before his first debate against eventual president Joe Biden.

Symone Sanders, chief spokesperson and senior advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris, will leave her White House post at the end of the year, according to CNN.  Sanders had worked for Biden for three years, going back to the presidential campaign.

“Symone has served honorably for three years,” the source told CNN. “The President and vice president are grateful for Symone’s service and advocacy for this White House. She is a valued member, a team player, and she will be missed. We are grateful to have her working through the end of the year.”

Sanders’ resignation is the second to hit Harris’s office in two weeks.  In mid-November, communications director Ashley Etienne announced a December departure.  The shake-up comes as reports of unrest between the VP’s office and the West Wing stir in the media.

In the midst of a fight against a global coronavirus pandemic, President Joe Biden has recommitted American resources to fight HIV/AIDS, with a goal of reducing new infections by 75% by 2025 and 90% by 2030, Reuters reports.

Biden’s proposal would increase research funding, improve access to healthcare, and work to reduce racial disparities in access to care.  “President Biden is honoring that commitment by releasing the new national HIV/AIDS strategy on World AIDS Day and providing a framework and a direction for the administration’s policies, research, programs and planning,” a senior administration official said.

More than 36 million people have died of HIV/AIDS worldwide, including more than 700,000 in the United States, since the disease was identified in 1981.

In a move that will please gun control advocates, Oakland County (Michigan) Prosecutor Karen McDonald said she will charge the parents of 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley, the 15-year-old student who killed four and wounded 7 during a shooting spree at Oxford High School, the Washington Post reports.

Ethan’s father purchased the handgun used in Tuesday’s attack on Friday, just four days before.  McDonald said while investigators have yet to determine how Ethan got his father’s gun, the father had the obligation to keep the gun secure.  “Those who do not do that should and will be held accountable,” she said. “We have to do better.”

Fox News host (and singer of “My Ding-a-ling” in the shower) Sean Hannity blows smoke up Junior’s hole by lying about Daddy’s record on energy.  “He got us to energy independence.  [Fact check:  the US is not and has not been “energy independent” in decades.  The US still imports coal and oil, and occasionally, the US produces more oil than we import–but we still import the oil.]  We didn’t import a single barrel of oil from Saudi Arabia, the Middle East.  {Fact check:  We imported an average of 681 thousand barrels of oil per day from Saudi Arabia during the Trump Administration.  And incidentally, during the Trump Administration, oil imports from Russia doubled.]

Declaring “[s]ocial media platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate content disseminated on their platforms,” a federal district judge has refused to allow Texas to go forward with its efforts requiring social media services to provide platforms for people who violate their terms of service.

The case, Netchoice v. Paxton, centers on Texas law HB 20, which explicitly bars social media services from deleting content and suspending or banning users who violate the company’s TOS.  Judge Robert Pitman, an Obama appointee who sits as District Judge of the Western District of Texas, ruled that the poorly-written bill was too vague and too sweeping to go into effect.

Saying that the social media companies have a Constitutional right to determine their own editorial policies, Pitman pointed to the need for editorial discretion. “During the hearing, the State explained that a social media platform ‘can’t discriminate against users who post Nazi speech…and [not] discriminate against users who post speech about the antiwhite or something like that.’ Plaintiffs point out the fallacy in the State’s assertion with an example: a video of Adolf Hitler making a speech, in one context the viewpoint is promoting Nazism, and a platform should be able to moderate that content, and in 18 another context the viewpoint is pointing out the atrocities of the Holocaust, and a platform should be able to disseminate that content.”

Remember when we learned Donald Trump was infected with the coronavirus, as he was being airlifted from the White House to Walter Reed on October 2, 2020?  And in the days afterward, when we learned that guest after guest after guest who attended the September 26th Rose Garden event to introduce Amy Coney Barrett as the new Supreme Court justice?

Everyone assumed that the Rose Garden event was a fabled “superspreader” event, where one of the guests in the largely-unmasked crowd infected those around him.  We were wrong.  It wasn’t a guest; it was the host.

The virus was coming from inside the White House.  Trump was Patient Zero in that outbreak.

As Aaron Rupar lays out, Trump spent days after he initially tested positive on September 26th–the day of the Rose Garden event–“pressing flesh” in a tight campaign.  He invited Gold Star Families to the White House for a photo op on September 27th.  On the 28th, he promoted new coronavirus tests at the White House.  And of course, on September 29th, he participated in a debate with Joe Biden.

“A Corpus Christi woman was arrested on Tuesday, November 30, after screenshots of a video surfaced online of her brandishing a gun in a grocery store parking lot. Corpus Christie police announced that Rossie Dennis, 60, was arrested for on a warrant for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon,” reports MySanAntonio.com.

“Dennis was arrested for an incident that occurred around noon on November 24, according to the CCPD. Screenshots of a video were posted on Reddit saying the incident occurred the Annaville neighborhood in Corpus Christi. CCPD says when they arrived at the parking lot they were told that Dennis pointed the gun at the victims and threatened to shoot them over a parking space. It’s not clear how many people were in the vehicle, but the Reddit post claims it was a woman and a six-month-old child. Investigators used the video taken by a woman in the vehicle to identify Dennis and issue a warrant for her arrest. She was transferred to the City Detention Center for processing and bond set for $60,000.”

“Stacey ‘The Hoax’ Abrams has just announced that she’s running for Governor of Georgia. I beat her single-handedly, without much of a candidate, in 2018. I’ll beat her again, but it will be hard to do with Brian Kemp, because the MAGA base will just not vote for him after what he did with respect to Election Integrity and two horribly run elections, for President and then two Senate seats. But some good Republican will run, and some good Republican will get my endorsement, and some good Republican will WIN!” says the Orange God Emperor in a statement.

The wide political consensus is that Stacy Abrams in fact beat Donald Trump in November 2020, and then Senators Kelly “Left-Eye” Loeffler and David “Chickenshit” Perdue in January 2021 though her superior get out the vote and political organizing skills which show no sign of slowing down. On Tuesday alone seven offices in Georgia flipped from Republican to Democrat in local elections.

Former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark faces criminal contempt of Congress charges for failing to answer questions and provide material in accordance with a subpoena from the House Special Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol, ABC News reports.  The charge will be determined by a vote on the House floor, but the committee will not push for a vote if Clark follows through on a late promise to comply with the subpoena.

Clark reportedly sent a letter to Democratic Committee chair Bernie Thompson asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

“Even though Mr. Clark previously had the opportunity to make these claims on the record, the Select Committee will provide him another chance to do so. I have informed Mr. Clark’s attorney that I am willing to convene another deposition at which Mr. Clark can assert that privilege on a question-by-question basis, which is what the law requires of someone who asserts the privilege against self-incrimination,” Thompson said. “We have just learned that Mr. Clark has agreed to appear again to continue his deposition.”

Republican Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the vice-chair of the committee, said the committee proceeded with the vote to send the contempt charge to the floor, but will not proceed with the charge until after Clark testifies to the committee’s satisfaction.

“[Donald Trump] has recently suggested that he wants to debate members of this committee. This committee’s investigation into the violent assault on our Capitol on January 6th is not a game,” Republican Wyoming Congresswoman and committee co-chair Liz Cheney said.  “When this committee convenes hearings, witnesses are called to testify under oath.  Any communications Mr. Trump has with this committee will be under oath and if he persists in lying then, he will accountable under the laws of this great nation and subject to criminal penalties for every false word he speaks.”