“The Washington Post also incorrectly reported about my DonaldJTrump.com website viewership. We have not yet launched our own social media ‘platform,’ but even the very basic site we have to post our statements has received 36.7 million views over the past month alone, and we’re getting more traffic to our website now than in 2020, an Election year! This number would be even greater if we were still on Twitter and Facebook, but since Big Tech has illegally banned me, tens of millions of our supporters have stopped using these platforms because they’ve become ‘boring’ and nasty.”

“My website is a place where everyone can see my statements, issued in real time, and engage with the MAGA Movement. This is meant to be a temporary way of getting my thoughts and ideas out to the public without the Fake News spin, but the website is not a ‘platform.’ It is merely a way of communicating until I decide on what the future will be for the choice or establishment of a platform. It will happen soon. Stay tuned!” – Statement from the Fat Orange Bastard.

“EU Council leaders have gone for the maximum position that was on the table tonight for reacting to Belarus. More sanctions, stopping EU airlines flying over Belarus, banning Belarus airlines from entering EU airspace” reports EU expert Dave Keating.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a staunch defender of Trump and an expected Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election, is planning a trip to Israel in the wake of an outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas, Politico reports.

Pompeo’s trip, ostensibly as a private citizen to attend the retirement celebration for the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, will occur less than one week of the sitting Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, going there.  It’s possible the two could be in Israel at the same time.

An evangelical christian, Pompeo vocally supports Israel’s defense actions against Arabs in the region as a way to protect the Holy Land.  Pompeo became the first sitting US Secretary of State to visit Israeli settlements in the West Bank in the days after US experts declared Donald Trump lost the November 2020 election.

“The chair of the Senate Rules Committee, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, is set to introduce legislation on Monday to ban political campaigns from guiding online donors into recurring donations by default, a practice that has drawn criticism for luring supporters into making unintended gifts that sometimes total in the thousands of dollars. The bill’s planned introduction follows a bipartisan recommendation from the Federal Election Commission that Congress act to rein in the practice of prechecking boxes that automatically enlist donors into making repeated donations. The F.E.C. voted unanimously, 6-0, to recommend the change, after a New York Times investigation into the practice showed it led to a surge of refunds and fraud claims from contributors to former President Donald J. Trump.”

“Ms. Klobuchar, who leads the rules committee that oversees the administration of federal elections, is calling the bill the RECUR Act for ‘Rescuing Every Contributor from Unwanted Recurrences.” For now, she has only Democratic co-sponsors, including Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, who is the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate leadership and the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Times investigation found that Mr. Trump’s political operation, short on cash, had steered his online contributors into becoming unwitting repeat donors by prechecking a box to withdraw additional donations as often as every week last fall; their solicitations also featured a second prechecked box that was termed a ‘money bomb.’ Over time, the campaign added text, sometimes in bold or all-caps type, that obscured the opt-out language. Soon, banks and credit card companies experienced a flood of fraud complaints” – New York Times.

AP: “The White House and the Kremlin are working to arrange a summit next month between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Switzerland, according to officials. National security adviser Jake Sullivan is meeting with his Russian counterpart in Geneva, the proposed host city, this week to finalize details, according to one U.S. official familiar with the preliminary planning but not authorized to discuss the deliberations publicly. Geneva is now expected to be the choice for Biden’s first face-to-face meeting with Putin as president, according to a second official. The Americans and Russians are eyeing June 15-16 for the summit.”

“An official announcement was expected in the coming days. The summit would come at the end of Biden’s first foreign trip as president, a weeklong swing through Europe that includes a stop in the United Kingdom for a Group of Seven summit of leaders of the world’s richest nations, and then a visit to the Brussels headquarters of NATO, the long-standing military alliance built as a bulwark to Russian aggression.”

https://youtu.be/utLtofpRr7c

Demonstrating that the GOP is simply operating as opposition to any policy proposed by Democratic President Joe Biden, freshman Republican South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, stated unequivocally that the GOP will not consider Biden’s infrastructure bill.  “Well, Nancy Pelosi, from the word on the street, is that she’s already taken over the House Infrastructure Committee.  There will be no deal as far as we’re concerned, which is why you’re seeing Republicans in the Senate and the House put their own proposals and alternatives forward.”

“Florida on Monday became the first state to regulate how companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter moderate speech online, by imposing fines on social media companies that permanently bar political candidates for statewide office. The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is a direct response to Facebook’s and Twitter’s bans of former President Donald J. Trump in January. In addition to the fines for barring candidates, it makes it illegal to prevent some news outlets from posting to their platforms in response to the contents of their stories. Mr. DeSantis said signing the bill meant that Floridians would be ‘guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites.'”

“A late amendment to the bill exempts companies from the law if they own a theme park or an entertainment venue larger than 25 acres. That means the law is unlikely to apply to websites owned by Disney, which operates the Walt Disney World Resort, and Comcast, which owns Universal Studios Florida. In Florida, as in dozens of other states, the Republican lawmakers’ push to punish social media companies follows the party’s other efforts to feed the demands of a conservative base that remains loyal to Mr. Trump” – New York Times.

Great to speak with President Trump to discuss the future of Texas and how we are keeping up the fight to put America first. I appreciate the words of encouragement and support. Big things coming soon! pic.twitter.com/U5cYFAFlCk

— George P. Bush (@georgepbush) May 24, 2021

The Texas Tribune reported last month that the son of Low Energy Jeb and current Texas Land Commissioner George P Bush is “seriously considering” a primary challenge against loyal Trump minion and the most famous conservative blue check to have blocked National Zero on Twitter, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, so this phone call with the Orange Fat Bastard can pretty much only mean one thing. Also fun to see Little Little Georgie following in fellow Texas Republican Ted Cruz’s footsteps by ignoring the vicious abuse Trump hurled at his father during the 2016 GOP presidential primary and pledging undying allegiance to him anyway.

Ipsos: “Former President Donald Trump’s stronghold over the Republican party remains. His refusal to concede the 2020 election and calls of widespread fraud have raised doubts about the integrity of its results among his Republican base. Consequently, 56% of Republicans believe the election was rigged or the result of illegal voting, and 53% think Donald Trump is the actual President, not Joe Biden. Only 30% of Republicans feel confident that absentee or mail-in ballots were accurately counted, compared to 86% of Democrats and 55% of independents. As a result, 87% of Republicans believe it is important that the government place new limits on voting to protect elections from fraud. Finally, 63% percent of Republicans think Donald Trump should run for President again in 2024, compared to only 8% of Democrats and 23% of independents.”

https://youtu.be/Ojxibly9g4I

Apparently wanting a Navy SEAL team to infiltrate a Chinese lab and extract data on the origins of the coronavirus, Fox News White House correspondent (and exemplar that not all stereotypes about blondes may be wrong) Peter Doocy asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki about the US carrying out its own investigation into the oranges origins of the coronavirus.

Doocy apparently thinks that, because President Joe Biden has stated that he’s known Chinese President Xi Jinping for years, Biden can just call up the leader of a sovereign nation and demand the information from the state-owned lab.  “Why can’t he just call?” Doocy asks naively.

“I think you’re misunderstanding how this process actually works,” Psaki patiently explained, noting that there’s already an international effort, fronted by the World Health Organization, to obtain the data and investigate the oranges origins of the virus. 

Conservative special interest groups and politicians are ramping up efforts targeting President Joe Biden’s plans to hire more agents for the Internal Revenue Service to conduct audits on wealthy individuals and corporations, Politico reports.

Biden’s efforts to bolster the auditors at the IRS comes after nearly a decade when more than 28% of the agency’s auditors–roughly 3,100 staffers–left and were not replaced between 2010 and 2019, the Associated Press reported last September.  The personnel shortage impacted the ability of the IRS to audit complex returns typically submitted by wealthy individuals, whose returns cannot be easily checked automatically.

The Trump Administration worked to limit IRS operations by reducing the agency’s budget, a fact that was brought into the spotlight when it was discovered the alleged billionaire Donald Trump reportedly paid $750 in income taxes in 2016 and 2017. During the Trump Administration, those with annual incomes under $25,000 are audited at a higher rate (0.69%) than those with incomes up to $500,000 (0.53%).

Twenty-five states have reached the milestone of having half of the adults fully vaccinated according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CNN reports.

Only four of the 25 states voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, showing the stark difference in promotion of the vaccines between traditional “red,” conservative states and Democratic-run states.

The states that have reached the 50% threshold are:  Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Washington state and Wisconsin.

CBS Television announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will return to filming episodes with a full live studio audience on Monday, June 14th, becoming the first network late night show to return to normal operations.

“Over the last 437 days, my staff and crew (and family!) have amazed me with their professionalism and creativity as we made shows for an audience we couldn’t see or hear,” Colbert said in a statement.  “I look forward to once again doings shows for an audience I can smell and touch.”

The Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon show has welcomed a limited audience in the studio for shows since mid-March.

“To cast the Democratic debate over Israel as a two-sided struggle between supporters and critics is to miss the growing frustration across the party’s factions with the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Reactions to the 11 days of violence between Israel and Hamas, the dominant Palestinian force in Gaza, underscore the new array of forces as even supporters of Israel expressed alarm over the death toll, and urged President Biden to pressure Netanyahu for the cease-fire that finally took effect Friday.”

“Biden, whose sympathy for Israel dates to the dawn of his political career, opted for quiet diplomacy that became, courtesy of intentional leaks to the media, more public as the killing continued. The president’s efforts were bolstered as Israel’s long-standing friends expressed horror over the events that led to the deaths of an estimated 264 Palestinians and 12 Israelis. The dominant story line about the conflict’s impact on U.S. politics has focused on the faceoff between Israel’s staunchest Democratic supporters and a growing group of progressives who are sharply critical of Israel and outspoken about Palestinian rights. The progressives’ voice was amplified when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the lone Palestinian American member of Congress, cornered Biden for eight minutes on Tuesday during the president’s visit to her state, pressing her view.”

“Tlaib has denounced Israel’s policies as ‘apartheid’ and ‘racist,’ and has abandoned the two-state solution – the longtime consensus position in U.S. politics as the foundation for peace – in favor of a single state with a Palestinian majority. Biden chose not to pick a fight, instead praising her ‘intellect’ and ‘passion.’ The ranks of Israel’s harshest critics have certainly grown, but the more important change is among Democrats who stoutly defend Israel’s existence but have taken increasingly forceful stands against its policies. This shift is reflected in the rising influence among Democrats of J Street, a peace-minded pro-Israel group often at odds with the current Israeli government – relative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which almost never challenges Israeli authorities” – Washington Post.

The consequences of the Belarusian government’s using a military fighter jet to force a commercial flight to land so it could arrest a dissident journalist continue to mount as Lithuanian authorities barred incoming flights from traveling Belarusian airspace, Reuters reports.

The Ryanair Boeing 737 was diverted to Minsk when it was just 10 miles from the Lithuanian border by a Belarusian MiG-29 the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, personally ordered to intercept the flight so government authorities could detain Roman Protasevich, a blogger and critic of Lukashenko whom the Belarusian government says organized protests about recent elections.  Protasevich was detained by government officials after the plane landed in Minsk.

The Belarusian security forces initially claimed they got a tip that there were explosives on board the plane, but not explosives were found.  On Monday, Belarusian officials attempted to support their bomb claim by halting the boarding of a Lufthansa plane bound for Frankfort, Germany from Minsk, claiming they received a bomb threat.  No bomb was found and the plane took off about one hour later than scheduled.

Slate: “Sitting in the press booth at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, several rows above where some two dozen tables of counters were retallying the 2020 presidential votes of the citizens of Maricopa County, Bennie Smith acknowledged something that has become readily apparent to most outside observers of the process that has come to be known as the ‘Arizona audit.’ ‘They’re not trying to capture an accurate count,’ said Smith, a Democratic Tennessee election official who had traveled to Phoenix to advise the auditors. In fact, Smith said he expects the end result to be ‘wildly different from the count.’ Smith said he was advising the audit – a process specially ordered by the Arizona Senate and which began last month outside the county’s ordinary recount system – because he hopes to see a standardization of independent machine ballot audits of most U.S. elections. What’s going on in the Vets Coliseum, former home to the Phoenix Suns and commonly used these days for gun shows and high school graduations, is not that. Nor is it a hand recount done in accordance with the Arizona election procedures.”

“The Republican-controlled county board went along with the audit plan initially because the Senate, Fontes said, ‘had given these guys guarantees it wasn’t going to be a shit show.’ Instead, the state Senate ended up handing nearly 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots to a previously unknown company called ‘Cyber Ninjas,’ whose CEO has claimed the election may have been manipulated by a firm with ties to the former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez (who is dead). ‘We’ve changed course,’ Stephen Richer, the current county recorder who unseated [Former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian] Fontes in the last election, told me of the local Republican response. Up close in Arizona, it’s clear that the Cyber Ninjas are doing exactly what their CEO, Doug Logan, has accused election officials of doing: miscounting the 2020 election. If and when that new and inaccurate result is made public as part of an official audit report, local leaders believe the consequences will be grave. ‘I think a small mushroom cloud will go up over Maricopa County if the Cyber Ninjas report that Donald Trump really was the winner of the election,’ Richer says.”

Gordon Sondland, the former US ambassador to the European Union who testified during the first impeachment of Donald Trump that Trump pressured Ukrainian government officials to assist Trump political campaign, sued the federal government and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for $1.8 million to cover his legal fees, the Washington Post reports.

Filed Monday in the District of Columbia, the suit alleges Pompeo reneged on a promise that the State Department would cover his legal fees because Sondland’s testified that Trump did pressure Ukrainian officials and he didn’t support Trump’s claim that nothing untoward happened. Pompeo also offered to make State Department lawyers available to Sondland, but the ambassador opted to use his own attorneys. Sondland claims that because he testified that Trump sought a quid pro quo – providing Ukraine military aid for helping Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s campaign find incriminating information on Hunter Biden – Pompeo left him hanging. “Ambassador Sondland confirmed he would not resign because he did not do anything improper. After that, everything changed. Ambassador Sondland did not receive his attorneys’ fees, notwithstanding the promises from the State Department that the attorneys’ fees would be paid,” the suit alleges. Sondland owned a number of Portland-area hotels and was a strong supporter of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, leading to his appoint as Ambassador to the European Union.

This is something we should have posted a long time ago, but better late than never, we suppose. To keep spambots from clogging up the comments with their bullshit, we added certain strings to the profanity filter. Some of you may be confused because a typo or a hypertext link got blocked when it was otherwise completely innocuous, but unfortunately it’s a necessary measure. The following strings are blocked from Disqus comments. We’ll update this as needed to account for changing spam and link this article to the “commenting policy” above each article thread:

UPDATED 4/18/2022: href, *url?sa=, t.co/, ASAP!!!, .tk, .ml, .gq, .cf, feedproxy.google.com, disqus-blog.com, fullwork, ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤, bit.ly, pinterest.com, cutt.ly, https://cutt.ly/, Private key: , Anna04025413, utraker.com, rotf.lol, .ax, t.ly, .ga/, .sh/, .la/*., #173, ly/.su

The first one is important. You cannot paste a link as <‍a‍ h‍r‍e‍f‍=‍"https://example.com">Example Here!!!<‍/‍a‍>‍ because that’s how the spambots hide their bullshit, by masking the URL with something more innocuous-looking. Instead, just paste in literally the URL – “example.com” – and the link will still work. Also the t.co, which is Twitter’s URL shortener is blocked because the spammers somehow hacked a way to redirect from those addresses. A few are random top-level domains for various countries. The last one .su, is for the Soviet Union, which doesn’t even exist anymore, so there’s unlikely to be any legitimate websites using it.

Lastly, without saying the specific word, one actually offensive term has been removed from the list as there are plenty of historical contexts and a handful few modern ones in which it is used. Any deviation from those contexts will be deleted by mods and trolls using it will be banned.

“An obscure security unit tasked with protecting the Commerce Department’s officials and facilities has evolved into something more akin to a counterintelligence operation that collected information on hundreds of people inside and outside the department, a Washington Post examination found. The Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) covertly searched employees’ offices at night, ran broad keyword searches of their emails trying to surface signs of foreign influence and scoured Americans’ social media for critical comments about the census, according to documents and interviews with five former investigators. In one instance, the unit opened a case on a 68-year-old retiree in Florida who tweeted that the census, which is run by the Commerce Department, would be manipulated ‘to benefit the Trump Party!’ records show.”

“In another example, the unit searched Commerce servers for particular Chinese words, documents show. The search resulted in the monitoring of many Asian American employees over benign correspondence, according to two former investigators. The office ‘has been allowed to operate far outside the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation at the Department,’ John Costello, a former deputy assistant secretary of intelligence and security at Commerce in the Trump administration, said in a statement for this story. ITMS ‘rests on questionable legal authority and has suffered from poor management and lack of sufficient legal and managerial oversight for much of its existence,’ Costello said.
Concerns have long simmered internally about the Commerce unit, which was led for more than a decade by career supervisor George D. Lee. The unit’s tactics appear as if ‘someone watched too many ‘Mission Impossible’ movies,’ said Bruce Ridlen, a former supervisor'” – Washington Post.