Not sure when this happened, can’t quite find it on our feed. Had to be at least a month ago, when we last replied to her. Wish freaking Twitter would notify users when someone blocks them. Ward makes three *known* blocks from right wing blue checks under National Zero’s belt – joining shitty pollster Rasmussen and cross-eyed scumbag Texas AG Ken Paxton.

“House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is reportedly worried about at least one thing in particular if Congress successfully put together a bipartisan commission to study the Capitol insurrection on January 6: Being forced to share under oath his allegedly explosive communications with then-President Donald Trump on that day. CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel reported on Wednesday that McCarthy is, in her words, ‘very concerned’ that the commission would call on him to testify on his call with Trump in which the GOP leader pleaded the President to call off the mob of his supporters. ‘[McCarthy] does not want to do that,’ Gangel said.”

“The House Republican leader, who’s been hard at work trying to get into Trump’s good graces in the aftermath of the insurrection, refuses to discuss the details of that call, especially when asked to confirm Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler’s (R-WA) claim that Trump had told him ‘well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election then you are.’ ‘My conversations with the President are my conversations with the President,’ McCarthy told Fox last week” – Talking Points Memo.

President Donald Trump, @DonaldJTrumpJr, @RudyGiuliani, Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz – it's never the meek that they come for.

It's always those who are fighting hard for the America First agenda, and I've got a lot of fight left in me.https://t.co/PTk2ksRSps

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) May 6, 2021

Greg Sargent, Washington Post: “With Republicans preparing to oust Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming from the House GOP leadership and replace her with Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, reporters have been digging up past Stefanik statements displaying her true credentials as a Republican leader of the future. Those credentials, most obviously, are her unwavering loyalty to Donald Trump and to his Big Lie about the stolen 2020 election. But another crucial credential, one getting less attention, is Stefanik’s willingness to deceive her own constituents to justify taking official action to invalidate legitimate election results. Just before voting to object to President Biden’s electors on Jan. 6, Stefanik released a lengthy statement faithfully echoing numerous Trumpian lies about the election, included flatly debunked nonsense about 140,000 unauthorized votes in Georgia.”

“This showed Stefanik embracing Trump and his lies more directly than many other Republicans, who carefully couched votes against Biden electors behind procedural objections. As Josh Marshall notes, this is a big reason Stefanik is a rising GOP star. But what came next is also important. A few days after the insurrectionist mob attack on the Capitol, Stefanik came under fire for feeding the lies that incited the violence. She defended herself to a local news outlet. ‘President-elect Biden was certified,’ Stefanik told WCAX. ‘But that debate was important for the American people to hear.’ In other words, Stefanik said, she did the right thing in objecting to Biden’s electors, because it drew attention to problems with the election that Americans deserved to learn about. Those problems didn’t actually exist, of course, but Stefanik herself also amplified them. It’s important to understand that this isn’t mere after-the-fact spin. Rather, it’s an explicit declaration of liberation on the part of the speaker to deceive voters with falsehoods about legitimate election results, for the express purpose of justifying official action to overturn those results.”

Though only holding the office for just 236 days, Donald Trump’s final Secretary of the Navy, Kenneth Braithwaite, spent more than $2.3 million on air travel–averaging $10,000 per day–while he was in office, USA Today reports.

Just weeks before the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Braithwaite spent more than a quarter million dollars to travel to Wake Island, a tiny Pacific atoll where no US Navy or Marines are stationed and is under the administrative control of the US Air Force.

According to records reviewed by USA Today, Braithwaite made 22 separate domestic and foreign trips in the 34 weeks he held office, more than any other senior civilian position in the Pentagon.  After taking office May 29, 2020, amid the height of the coronavirus pandemic worldwide, Braithwaite made trips to places like Norway, Italy, Greece, Japan and India.

The navies of England and France are sending armed patrol boats to the waters off the British island of Jersey as fishermen from each country contest the rights to fish the area in a post-Brexit battle illustrating the unforeseen consequences of the UK’s exit from the European Union.

According to CNN, France is dispatching navy ships to the area, which has traditionally been a fishing ground for French fishing vessels.  The UK sent two gunboats to the area earlier this week to monitor a protest by French fishermen.

The dispute stems from a new requirement implemented by the British government that French fisheries must submit documentation that they have traditionally fished the waters around Jersey, a precondition of French boats put in place after Brexit took effect.

Last week’s initial unemployment claims in the United States fell below 500,000 for the first time since March 2020, prior to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, continuing a downward trend that started in mid-April, the Washington Post reports.

According to the weekly Department of Labor release, 498,000 people filed first-time unemployment claims, the fourth consecutive week of declines, signalling increasing traction for an economic recovery.  A total of 16.2 million Americans were receiving some type of unemployment insurance payments, less than one year ago.

“A bigger than expected decline in new jobless claims is a most pleasant surprise,” Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst at Bankrate, said Thursday in comments emailed to The Post. “The healing of the job market, including reduction of unemployed and those seeking and receiving jobless aid, is as important an economic thread as any being monitored amid the reopening story.”

“Republicans blame Liz Cheney for dividing the GOP, saying she’s preventing the party from having a unified message and from focusing on the 2022 midterms. ‘Combating Joe Biden… That’s the message we should be talking about. I haven’t heard members concerned about [Cheney’s] vote on impeachment, it’s more concerned about the job ability to do and what’s our best step forward that we can all work together instead of attacking one another,’ House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on ‘Fox’ this week. But Liz Cheney isn’t the one searching for bamboo fibers in Arizona, or blaming Mike Pence for losing the White House, or pointing the finger at Mitch McConnell over losing control of the U.S. Senate or still insisting the GOP won the 2020 presidential election. That person is Donald Trump. We’ve written a lot about how Trump continues to drive and influence the Republican Party, despite no longer holding office, despite declining poll numbers and despite no longer holding social-media megaphones on Facebook and Twitter.”

“But this week appears to represent the party’s 100 percent surrender to Trump, a surrender to his lie that he won the 2020 election, and a surrender to his insistence that all GOP critics must be purged. And as we said earlier this week, it’s an ominous development for democracy when the people who are paying a political price are the ones who have told the truth about the 2020 election, who did their jobs in administering the election and who remain haunted by what happened on Jan. 6. The person who still hasn’t paid a price – even after losing office, even after a second impeachment – is the former president” – NBC News.

Ron Brownstein, The Atlantic: “Some of the changes are obvious: Compared with the economic strategies of former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Joe Biden is proposing more new spending and more new taxes than either of his Democratic predecessors, and he’s abandoned their support for negotiating new free-trade agreements. But Biden is also diverging from his predecessors’ approaches in ways that have drawn much less attention – yet may prove even more consequential. Particularly on racial-, gender-, and class-inequality issues, Biden’s separation from those past presidents reflects both an evolution in thinking among Democratic-leaning economists and a bet that boldness may be a better political strategy than moderation. The effect is that the Biden administration’s analysis of the economy is converging with that of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, which felt largely excluded in the Clinton years and only slightly more welcome during the Obama presidency. ‘There’s a huge change, really quite dramatic,’ says Robert Reich, who served as Clinton’s labor secretary but later became a leading liberal critic of the party’s centrist wing. ‘There’s a much closer continuity between Clinton and Obama than between even Obama and Biden.'”

“This shift is evident in Biden’s hiring: He’s largely sidelined the kind of Wall Street–connected centrists that his predecessors installed in key economic positions (think Larry Summers and Tim Geithner). Instead, he’s mostly elevated individuals who either clashed with previous administrations (such as the Council of Economic Advisers members Heather Boushey and Jared Bernstein), or are part of a new generation that’s more explicitly focused on questions of race and gender (such as Janelle Jones, the Labor Department’s chief economist, and Joelle Gamble at the National Economic Council). But the split from past Democratic presidents is also evident in the White House’s bedrock beliefs. Both of the earlier administrations tended to view widening inequality as a kind of natural phenomenon – the inevitable result of structural changes in the economy, led by greater automation and more global economic competition. The Biden team views inequality much more as something molded by human hands – the result of policies that have weakened workers and strengthened corporations’ marketplace leverage. To a greater degree than Obama’s and especially Clinton’s teams, it believes that generating widely shared prosperity isn’t possible without aggressive government intervention.”

That was quick. “Lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters of Florida, Black Voters Matters Fund, Florida Alliance for Retired Americans and individual voters against all 67 Florida counties challenging the voter suppression law, SB 90. The case claims that SB 90’s drop-box restrictions, vote by mail repeat request requirement, volunteer assistance ban, deceptive registration warning and food and water ban violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments” says the page with complaint linked at Democracy Docket.

“Ron DeSantis signs Georgia-style voter suppression bill SB90 restricting mail ballot drop boxes, making it harder to vote by mail, criminalizing giving food/water to voters in line and expanding partisan challenges to vote counting. Only Fox was allowed to cover signing”

“It’s extremely telling that DeSantis claims new Florida voter suppression law intended to boost ‘election integrity’ but barred all media except Fox News from covering bill signing. It was a Fox & Friends ‘exclusive'” reports Mother Jones’s Ari Berman.

Secession dude and certifiably fucking insane Texas Republican Party Chairman Allen West challenged a reporter to do 30 push-ups for showing up late to a press conference Wednesday afternoon. “The reporter ‘respectfully’ declined; Allen West did them instead” reports NBC’s Jane Timm. “I was not the late reporter” Timm adds in an update.

“A federal judge on Wednesday allowed former reality TV star Josh Duggar to be released as he awaits trial on charges that he downloaded and possessed child pornography. Magistrate Judge Christy Comstock ordered Duggar, 33, confined to the home of family friends who have agreed to be his custodian during his release and prohibited Duggar from any Internet-accessible devices pending his July 6 trial on the child pornography charges. Duggar was indicted on the federal child pornography charges on Friday, a day after U.S. Marshals arrested him. He has pleaded not guilty.”

“‘I have full confidence in the United States Marshal Service to find you if you decide not to comply with these conditions of release, so don’t make me regret this decision,’ Comstock said after a four-hour hearing conducted over Zoom. ‘You won’t, your honor, thank you very much,’ responded Duggar. Duggar starred on TLC’s ’19 Kids and Counting’ until it was pulled from the network in 2015 following revelations that Duggar had molested four of his sisters and a babysitter. Duggar’s parents said he had confessed to the fondling and apologized. Duggar previously apologized for a pornography addiction and cheating on his wife. Federal prosecutors cited Duggar’s admitted molestation as a sign that he was a danger to the community. ‘He has shown the court he has a history dating back 20 years that shows a sexual attraction to children and the deviousness of his activity,’ Assistant U.S. Attorney Carly Marshall said” – AP.

Politico: “Rudy Giuliani, the former personal lawyer for ex-president Donald Trump, has reduced the size of his personal entourage, according to three people familiar with the matter. Giuliani laid off several staffers and independent contractors in the last few weeks, according to one of the people, who said the ousted employees had been told that the former New York mayor was seeking to cut costs. Giuliani has enlisted a part-time driver, Eric Ryan, the son of his friend Maria Ryan, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. But he no longer moves around Manhattan with the full complement of as many as five people he has kept around him in recent years. (Ryan didn’t respond to a request for comment.)”

“The news of Giuliani’s shrinking entourage comes after years of stories suggesting he might be having financial difficulties – or is at least seeking creative ways to make money as he manages his growing legal woes. The Trump confidant, recently raided by the FBI as he faces an intensifying criminal probe, has reportedly faced a cash crunch before, with multiple divorces said to be taking a toll on his balance sheet. In October 2019, the Washington Post reported that Giuliani was giving his ex-wife Judith $42,000 a month in alimony; a sum amounting to more than half a million dollars a year. The Post also reported that Giuliani had made between $7 and $9 million in both 2016 and 2017. That same month, Giuliani accidentally left a voicemail for a reporter in which he said, ‘The problem is we need some money.'”

Two former San Francisco Bay Area high school students were convicted by an Italian court for the 2019 stabbing death of a police officer in the Carabinieri, the Italian national police force, in the Trastevere district of Rome, the San Francisco Gate reports.

Finnegan Lee Elder, now 21, and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth, now 20, were in Rome on July 26, 2019 on vacation.  They went to the Trastevere entertainment district looking to buy cocaine.  They were introduced to someone who they thought would sell them cocaine, but the individual, a police informant, actually gave them crushed aspirin.

Angered at not getting cocaine, the pair found the dealer again and took his backpack and 100 euro, as well as cocaine the man had.  The dealer/informant went to police.  The dealer set up a time to meet with the Americans; two plainclothes accompanied him.  While meeting, Elder and Natale-Hjorth attacked the officers, with Elder stabbing 35-year-old Deputy Brig. Mario Cerciello Rega to death.

https://youtu.be/qb_bujzvEnQ

Trump advisor (and child of the undead) Stephen Miller told Laura Ingraham of Fox News that immigrants are taking jobs at golf courses and restaurants and things away from high school students.  Unfortunately for Miller, facts differ:  summer unemployment rates for people between the ages of 16 and 19 has steadily been around 13% (except for pandemic years).  Plus, students aren’t clamoring for jobs in agriculture or the hospitality industry typically taken by migrants.

Finally, Miller should talk to his boss:  the Trump organizations has traditionally hired hundreds of foreign workers through H-2A (for the Trump Winery) and H-2B (for Trump hotels and golf courses) each year (and that doesn’t count the number of undocumented immigrants he has working at his properties).

Newsmax host Greg Kelly, famous for his unhinged, batshit tweets, seemingly “apologized” to the staff of an NYC McDonald’s for one of his more famous online meltdowns on Wednesday evening.

I’d like to apologize to the staff of McDonalds #414 in New York City for the recent misunderstanding we had over the menu.

Thank You.

Greg Kelly

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) May 5, 2021

For whomever caught this and thought it was too good to be true that a particularly insane right wing television personality to feel remorse for his batfuckery, it was. Probably.

The EARLIER APOLOGIES are not “LEGIT”——someone felt like SCREWING AROUND and grabbed my phone while I was DISTRACTED. I could press charges CRIMINALLY! But since I know who did it and I can “roll with the punches” I will let the matter REST.

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) May 5, 2021

I seriously don’t know if this explanation should be taken at face value. This story really could go either way. Kelly just as easily could have sincerely apologized and backtracked as a friend or family member could have grabbed his phone and written this tweet. That said, I’m leaning toward the former because this guy is legitimately insane. Also, not sure if this needs to be said, but if Anderson Cooper or Rachel Maddow, or even Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade started acting like this online their respective networks would be looking at getting them treatment, and barring that, ways to get their contracts ended early. Newsmax is different though.

The Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice issued a letter to the Arizona State Senate that the audit of ballots being undertaken in Maricopa County by a private company may violate federal voting laws.

“News reports indicate that the Senate subpoenaed ballots, elections systems, and election materials from Maricopa County and required that they be turned over to private contractors, led by a firm known as Cyber Ninjas,” the letter states.  “The Department has reviewed available information, including news reports and complaints regarding the procedures being used for this audit. The information of which we are aware raises concerns regarding at least two issues of potential noncompliance with federal laws enforced by the Department.”

The letter from the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General overseeing the Civil Rights Division, Pamela Karlen cites a two primary reasons why the audit may be in violation, including the fact that the ballots are not in the continuous possession of government authorities and that they have been turned over to a private company without guidance or review.  That company, Cyber Ninjas, has no experience in auditing any type of election.

https://youtu.be/fPa9LIoetME

In what is perhaps the most tone-deaf statement by a Republican so far this week, Republican candidate for California governor and reality TeeVee star Caitlyn Jenner said that the massive flight from the state is real because the person who rents the hangar next to where she keeps her plane was moving to Arizona because he couldn’t take seeing the homeless in California anymore.

Jenner appeared on Fox News’ Hannity show to boost her campaign aspirations, because Hannity loves any reality TeeVee star running for office.