“Former president Donald Trump charged the Secret Service more than $40,000 this spring for rooms that Trump’s own protective detail used while guarding him at his Mar-a-Lago Club, according to federal spending records. The records show that Trump’s club charged the Secret Service $396.15 every night starting Jan. 20, the day he left the White House and moved full time into his Palm Beach, Fla., club. Those charges, ultimately paid by taxpayers, continued until at least April 30, the spending records show, for a total of $40,011.15. The charges were for a single room used as a workspace by Secret Service agents, according to one person familiar with the payments. The Secret Service released spending records up to April 30. Trump stayed at Mar-a-Lago more than a week beyond that before moving his Bedminster, N.J., club for the summer. It was unclear whether he continued to charge the Secret Service into May” – Washington Post.

“Former President Donald Trump revealed Thursday that he will hold campaign-style rallies in four battleground states in the coming weeks as speculation swirls that he’ll mount another bid for the White House in 2024. ‘Relatively soon, we’ll be doing one in Florida, we’re gonna do one in Ohio, we’re gonna do one in Georgia, we’re gonna do one in North Carolina,’ Trump told One America News. ‘We’ll be announcing them very soon over the next week or two, and I think we’ll probably start in Florida and Ohio and we’ll be announcing the rallies very shortly'” New York Post reports.

“A source close to the 45th president told The Post last week that Trump would hold at least two rallies in June, with a third event likely to take place around the July 4 holiday. Trump has sat for several interviews with conservative media outlets since leaving office in January. He made his first major post-presidential speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in February and he is scheduled to headline the North Carolina Republican Party’s convention on June 5.”

Daily Beast: “Text messages between Rep. Matt Gaetz’s wingman and a former Florida shock jock reveal how people with key information about an alleged underage sex ring were scrambling as the feds closed in – and they bolster the evidence in a growing scandal that could take down the congressman. Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg was already under investigation when he had a private exchange with his one-time sports radio co-host, ‘Big Joe’ Ellicott. In that exchange, conducted over the encrypted messaging app Signal and obtained by The Daily Beast, Ellicott expressed fear that others in their group of friends faced legal jeopardy for having sex with a 17-year-old girl. Ellicott wrote that a mutual friend, a woman who figures prominently in Greenberg‘s Venmo transactions, ‘knew [the minor] was underage the whole time, had sex with her, and they both went [to] see other guys.'”

“Ellicott, who is Venmo friends with Gaetz and a number of women in the alleged sex ring, also acknowledged that ‘for other guys she brought ___ along to see, that could be trafficking,’ using a nickname for the former teen. The Daily Beast has independently verified the young woman’s identity but is withholding her name. The Signal messages were set to disappear after 30 seconds, but Greenberg – as he’d done with vanishing communications between himself and Roger Stone – screenshotted the message. On Thursday, Politico reported that Ellicott was listed in a Dec. 2020 grand jury subpoena issued to another person related to the ongoing sex trafficking investigation. According to the report, the subpoena also listed three other individuals: Gaetz, Greenberg, and former Florida state Rep. Halsey Beshears, who served with Gaetz while he was in the Florida legislature. Ellicott has not responded to repeated requests for comment over the last seven weeks, and did not respond to a detailed list of questions The Daily Beast sent to him Thursday morning.”

I’ve written a number of posts about the death of Ronald Greene, a man who died in Louisiana after a police vehicle chase in which, police claimed, Greene lost control of his car and died after it slammed into a tree.

The claim of the police never made sense to me.  Hospital workers reported that they found him handcuffed and shackles with taser projectiles in Greene’s body when he supposedly died on impact.  Why tase a dead man?  Police then changed their story to say that Greene survived the crash, but became delusional and belligerent as he exited the vehicle and needed to be restrained.  And he lost consciousness sometime after officers restrained him.

Oh, and he didn’t just crash into a tree; he was essentially pushed off the road by police cars, but photos of the crash shown to Greene’s family showed little damage to the car.

Then an odder-than-most twist:  One of the Louisiana State Police officers who was on scene was told he was going to be fired for lying on reports about the Greene incident.  The day before his official termination, he had a single car crash where his car ran off the road and into a tree.  Police ruled it an accident.

The European Union on Thursday came to an agreement on the use a digital certificate system that would verify an individual has received a full coronavirus vaccine, thereby eliminating the current requirement to quarantine after passing through international borders, the Washington Post reports.

The certificate system would be one step closer to normalizing travel among the members of the EU, opening up additional rail traffic, a popular way to travel through Europe.  The certificate system, which is expected to deploy July 1st, will allow people to easily update their vaccination status using authorized documents.  Leaders hoped to have a system in place before the vacation season started in Europe.

Politico: “In 1991, with America gripped by a struggle between an increasingly liberal secular society that pushed for change and a conservative opposition that rooted its worldview in divine scripture, James Davison Hunter wrote a book and titled it with a phrase for what he saw playing out in America’s fights over abortion, gay rights, religion in public schools and the like: ‘Culture Wars.’ Hunter, a 30-something sociologist at the University of Virginia, didn’t invent the term, but his book vaulted it into the public conversation, and within a few years it was being used as shorthand for cultural flashpoints with political ramifications.”

“Instead, 30 years later, Hunter sees America as having doubled down on the ‘war’ part – with the culture wars expanding from issues of religion and family culture to take over politics almost totally, creating a dangerous sense of winner-take-all conflict over the future of the country. What changed? In the latter half of the 20th century, the culture war was, on some level, a ‘cultural conflict that took place primarily within the white middle class,’ says Hunter, who now leads the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. But, today, as that conflict has grown, ‘instead of just culture wars, there’s now a kind of class-culture conflict’ that has moved beyond the simple boundaries of religiosity. ‘The earlier culture war really was about secularization, and positions were tied to theologies and justified on the basis of theologies,’ says Hunter. ‘That’s no longer the case. You rarely see people on the right rooting their positions within biblical theology or ecclesiastical tradition. [Nowadays,] it is a position that is mainly rooted in fear of extinction.'”

https://youtu.be/salP-KzrBBQ

Fox New host (and person who broke far too many cement blocks with his head in his claimed martial arts training) Sean Hannity–a one-time advocate for tort reform and elimination of frivolous lawsuits–says he wants every member of Congress to sue Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi over the House’s mask mandates.

According to a survey of House members, more than half of the Republican members have not confirmed they have received the coronavirus vaccine, so the CDC and the House physician say masks are appropriate in the workplace.

Don’t mess with Texas, once read the state tourism slogan.  It didn’t say anything about messin’ with Texas’s history, which Republicans want to rewrite to literally whitewash it, the New York Times reports.

In a state where students are forced to pledge allegiance to the state–schools require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the State Flag which states, “Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible”–teachers will now be forced to teach a propagandistic history of the state, eliminating its history of slavery, Native American genocide, Jim Crow laws and anti-Mexican discrimination–and perhaps even elevating secessionists to the level of heroes.

If the laws before the Texas legislature vowing to gloss over the true history of Texas passes, the impact would be felt far beyond the state:  the Texas state school board is the largest single purchases of textbooks in the nation, and textbook publishers often write books they know will be purchased by Texas, thereby scrubbing information found in classrooms around the country.

The Arizona Secretary of State has determined that the Maricopa County voting machines handed over to the private organization supposedly conducting an audit of the November 2020 presidential election can no longer be used in elections because of security concerns after the chain of custody was broken, NBC News reports.

The audit, demanded by Republicans and put under the control of a private company that has no experience in election monitoring or recounts, has been fraught with errors, mistakes and poor planning–some funny, some pathetic, but all avoidable.  This latest issue arises because the company, Cyber Ninjas, have not recorded where machines are and what is being done with them.

Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, sent a letter to Maricopa County elections officials saying that if the machines are not taken out of service, she would be forced to decertify them, requiring them not to be used in future elections.

SALMONELLA OUTBREAK: 163 people sick in 43 states from contact with backyard poultry like chickens and ducks. Take steps to stay healthy around your flock. https://t.co/EeVY0HVEHk pic.twitter.com/r5Xi1Soij5

— CDC (@CDCgov) May 20, 2021

Facing a major salmonella outbreak in 43 states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a warning advising people to not kiss or snuggle their backyard chickens or ducks.

A kayaker paddling down the Mississippi River between Arkansas and Tennessee in 2016 snapped photos of an important bridge for traffic over the river, showing a clear crack through a steel I-beam, a crack that prompted transportation officials to shut the bridge down May 9th.

According to the Associated Press, the 48-year-old I-40 bridge connecting Memphis and the Arkansas city of West Memphis had a crack that cut through a 900-foot horizontal beam, one of two that are critical to the structural integrity of the bridge.

An inspector for the Arkansas Department of Transportation called 9-1-1 to have the bridge shut down.  Traffic was diverted to the four-lane, 71-year-old I-55 bridge about six miles downriver. 

CNN: “The Trump administration secretly sought and obtained the 2017 phone and email records of a CNN correspondent, the latest instance where federal prosecutors have taken aggressive steps targeting journalists in leak investigations. The Justice Department informed CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr, in a May 13 letter, that prosecutors had obtained her phone and email records covering two months, between June 1, 2017 to July 31, 2017. The letter listed phone numbers for Starr’s Pentagon extension, the CNN Pentagon booth phone number and her home and cell phones, as well as Starr’s work and personal email accounts.”

“It is unclear when the investigation was opened, whether it happened under Attorney General Jeff Sessions or Attorney General William Barr, and what the Trump administration was looking for in Starr’s records. The Justice Department confirmed the records were sought through the courts last year but provided no further explanation or context. A Justice Department official confirmed that Starr was never the target of any investigation. The seizure of Starr’s records is the third disclosure in as many weeks where the Trump administration used its Justice Department to secretly obtain communications of journalists or to expose the identity of critics of Trump’s allies.”

https://youtu.be/ZlgpsVYxotw

Republican House Minority Speaker (and man who would use Trump-brand mouthwash if they made such a thing) Kevin McCarthy refused to answer whether members of the House were in communication with any of the domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol on January 6th.

After saying it was not a conflict of interest to have Republicans vote against a commission to which they may have to testify, McCarthy insincerely said, “Thanks for the question,” when asked by a reporter if House Republicans communicated with the insurrectionists.

For no reason in particular, I think it’s time we establish that the UK’s version of Republicans, the guys who call themselves “Tories” (which is a girls’ name here in America, e.g. Tori Spelling), are total British words for cigarettes. Piers Morgan, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings (lol), Boris Johnson, and Anthony Eden’s corpse all suck. Their fans, a bunch of inbred, crooked-toothed Union Jack-offs are even worse. They live in neo-Dickensian squalor, sitting on their fat asses, yelling at their girlfriends who all look like Sporty Spice impersonators to shut up while their favorite celebrity reality show is on the telly, only licking the brown vinegar and fry grease off their chubby fingers long enough it takes to for them to write a comment on America’s gift to the world, the internet.

Lucky for them they can write, however poorly, because otherwise they’re completely unintelligible when they talk. Why is it that an American can have a conversation with a British hillbilly, when both persons are speaking English, but only one of them can understand the other? How is it that we can crank out all these goddamned movies and television shows in American English, all of which these people consume, and yet they still talk in a way that requires a shit-ton of misspellings and apostrophes to transcribe in text? Fucking marble-mouthed wankers.

And what the hell kind of man has a haircut like Boris Johnson? Seriously, that dumpy bastard looks like he brought a yearbook from a special needs school circa 1995 to his barber and pointed to the fourth grade valedictorian’s pic as a guideline. Next G7 they all need to just hold him down and shave his head with a Norelco. Biden can do the honors while Trudeau and Macron hold his arms.

An 11-year-old girl in Pensacola, Florida smeared blue slime she was playing with on a man who attempted to kidnap her as she waited for her bus, a move she believed would help identify the suspect later because she watched “Law & Order: SVU,” CNN reports.

The ploy worked.  As surveillance footage of the incident shows, the girl, whose name is given only as Alyssa, fought off the attacker, who had stopped his white crossover vehicle at the bus stop, carried a knife and tried to physically pick up the girl.  Alyssa fought back, smearing the slime on her attacker’s arms as she broke free from him.

The Escambia County Sheriff’s office noted that when they arrested 30-year-old Jared Paul Stanga, he had the blue slime all over his arms.  Stanga has been charged with attempted kidnapping of a child under 13, aggravated assault with a weapon and simple battery, according to the sheriff’s office. He’s being held on $1.5 million bond.

Holy crap.

Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea…. https://t.co/8aVFMW98NM

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 20, 2021

Politico: “Then-President Donald Trump sought to oust FBI Director Christopher Wray last spring and replace him with counterintelligence head William Evanina, according to three former Trump officials familiar with the episode. Under the plan, the former officials said, Kash Patel – a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and a fierce critic of the Russia probe – would have become the bureau’s deputy director. Previously unreported details of the proposal reveal just how seriously the former president took his grievances against the intelligence and law enforcement establishment. It shows Trump at his mercurial peak, ordering up the removal of his own appointee in a fit of rage, only to back down when then-Attorney General William Barr threatened to resign if he followed through with the maneuver. (Aspects of this story were first reported by Business Insider.)”

“Trump’s ire at Wray was episodic, flaring up whenever the low-key FBI chief crossed his radar. Congressional testimony on Russia, always a sensitive subject, could provoke Trump’s anger. So could Wray’s pronouncements on election security or his defenses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law the former president blamed for enabling Democrats’ supposed ‘spying’ on his 2016 campaign. Trump also thought Wray was weak, according to one of the former Trump officials. A former Trump White House official said Trump ‘had always flirted with the idea’ of firing Wray. But back in April 2020, Trump’s zeal to oust Wray ‘was intense as it ever was and pretty constant then,’ recalled another former senior Trump official. On this occasion, it’s unclear what exactly had sparked Trump’s anger. But at the time, the president had recently beaten back Democrats’ first effort to impeach him – and felt liberated, the officials said.”

So I guess @JDVance1 won't be accepting Jim Jordan's endorsement? https://t.co/RnaRQwrBx8

— Jeff Sites for Congress (@Sites4Congress) May 20, 2021

For context, in case you don’t feel like clicking through: Hillbilly novelist and likely Ohio GOP Senate contender JD Vance is in some shitposting contest with the Lincoln Project and is referring to their dirtbag co-founder, GOP campaign operative John Weaver, who resigned earlier this year after revelations he had sexually harassed young men, some of whom were underage. Then Jeffrey Sites pipes in, apropos of nothing, and just casually calls Jim Jordan a pedophile for the win.

Sorry, Peter Doocy.  International efforts to broker a ceasefire in the ongoing violence in Gaza and Israel have resulted in an agreement to stop attacks as of 2 a.m. (2300 GMT Thursday) Friday local time.

The Associated Press reports that Israel’s Security Cabinet issued a unilateral ceasefire after heavy pressure from the United States to stop military operations, which have resulted in at least 230 Palestinians, including more than 60 children, killed in Gaza and the West Bank, with 12 Israelis killed.

In 11 days of fighting, Israel launched hundreds of airstrikes and invaded the area with ground troops, destroying 60 miles of tunnels and more than 90 rocket launchers.  Hamas reportedly launched more than 4,000 rockets at Israel over that time.