For some reason, the Federal Elections Committee granted convicted fraudster and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump a second 45-day extension to file his personal financial disclosures, Reuters reports.  This is part of Trump’s playbook:  delay disclosing anything.  Trump now has more reasons to delay public disclosure given he’s involved in multiple lawsuits involving his personal and corporate taxes.

It’s not the first time Trump has requested an extension, but it’s unlikely Trump will get a third extension:  after he had already gotten a 90-day extension for his first quarter statement, Trump requested an additional 30-day delay in March 2023.  The FEC denied the third request.

Trent Scaggs, the Trump-endorsed Republican mayor of Riverton, Utah running to replace the retiring Mitt Romney in the Senate, lost the primary to the more moderate John Curtis, the Washington Post reports.  In a state that sent both Romney and far-right pro-Trump radical Mike Lee to the Senate, the race was a measure for Trump’s influence with moderate Republicans, and Trump lost.

After one of her traditional rants about how everything is biased against Donald Trump (including, apparently, the evidence in all the cases), Trump spokeslawyer Alina Habba proposes that Hunter Biden was convicted in a trial rigged against the defendant to make things seem balanced, an argument Senator Bob Menendez and Congresswoman Cori Bush would oppose. 

Republican voters in South Carolina’s 3rd District on Tuesday rejected Trump-endorsed MAGAchurch Pastor Mark Burns – seen above at a December 12, 2020 Stop the Steal rally in DC – as their candidate in a runoff to replace some dipshit incumbent GOP Congressman who’s retiring, instead going with a white woman named Sheri Biggs who probably sucks too but differently.

Burns had in 2022 called for Lindsey Graham – who once held that very same 3rd District seat while in the House – and Mitch McConnell to be executed (The headline of the Newsweek story says “Pro-Trump Pastor Wants LGBTQ ‘Indoctrinators’ Executed for Treason” but Burns wanted Lindsey dead for voting to pass some very marginal gun control legislation after the Uvalde massacre).

Incumbent Democratic New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman lost one of the most expensive primaries in US election history, NBC News reports.  A vocal critic of Israeli policy in Gaza, Bowman was defeated George Latimer, West Chester County executive.

Theater fluffer and police station frequent flier Lauren Boebert won the GOP primary for the Colorado 4th Congressional District, the New York Times reports.  With nearly two-thirds of the votes counted thanks to Colorado’s bias toward early voting, Boebert held just 42% of the vote in a highly divided field with five other candidates.

The production company behind the Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice” appears to be blocking the film’s distribution in the United States, the Washington Post reports, apparently because the company’s key funder, Daniel Snyder, the former owner of the Washington Commanders NFL team, doesn’t want to embarrass Trump.

“The Apprentice” won rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival and critics have praised lead actors Sebastian Stan’s and Jeremy Strong’s performances as Trump and Roy Cohn, respectively.  But reportedly the production company, Kinematics, which is run by Snyder’s son-in-law, has balked at agreeing to a distribution agreement.  Recent talks with the company that distributed the Michael Moore movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” have reportedly stalled.

While people close to Snyder say he’s not directly involved in the company or the negotiations, insiders told WaPo that Snyder is “unhappy” with the movie and that the production company objected to including a sexually violent scene relating to Ivana Trump’s allegation that Donald raped her.

Talking to confirmed sexual harasser and a dog murderer’s illicit lover (allegedly) Corey Lewandowski, adjudicated rapist Donald Trump claims that he’s “been preparing [for Thursday’s debate] my whole life” and that during his presidency, the Republican Party “had some great elections and some, uh, amazing number of votes.  Nobody got more than we got.”

This is a lie:  Donald Trump lost the popular vote in the elections held in 2016 versus Hillary Clinton and 2020 against Joe Biden.  Trump’s statement prompted Newsmax to run the following chyron moments later:

The vibe ain’t right for a self-congratulatory retrospective on the fourth anniversary of National Zero’s launch. Doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot to celebrate given that after all the countless hours spent covering politics we’re all still in at least one major respect the same place we were on June 25th, 2020: Staring down the barrel of another four years under the rule of a fascist madman who consumes so much goddamned time and attention and it just freaking sucks.

There’s so much symbolism in this photo and some of it even fits in thematically with the following ten paragraphs.

There’s only so outraged the average person can get and yet still the forces of evil persist in their quest to seize power permanently and inflict unimaginable horrors upon you and everything you hold dear – a threat all the more offensive because you were once naive enough to think this shit was all over and that the madness infesting American politics was quarantined. That by now Joe Biden would have retired or was about to and Kamala Harris would have been a strong favorite over Ted Cruz or whichever other dipshit the GOP nominated. That Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema weren’t such cunts and the Dem Congress would have gutted the Supreme Court one way or another as well as ending gerrymandering nationwide. That Merrick Garland would have been more aggressive and Donald Trump would be serving the rest of his life in prison after being convicted of treason, his selling our country out to Vladimir Putin laid out incontrovertibly in black and white at trial.

Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists believe Donald Trump’s policies would skyrocket inflation and bring ruin to the US and global economies if he gets back in the White House, Reuters reports.  “While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump,” the letter states.  “We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world, and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”

As if it weren’t enough that there’s a new strain of the coronavirus emerging this summer as well as bird flu infections, but now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are warning doctors and other medical professionals to be on the look out for cases of dengue fever in the mainland United States, the Washington Post reports.

The mosquito-borne virus is experiencing an explosion in Central and South American reporting nearly 10 million cases of the disease.  In March, Puerto Rico reported more than 500 infected patients.  CDC officials believe tourists and migrants entering the country might be infected, which would lead to the spread in the nation’s population.

The US Supreme Court on Monday disbarred a Kentucky lawyer and former district attorney who, among other scumbaggery, in 2019 wrote a letter to then-outgoing Gov Matt Bevin asking him to pardon a man who in 2014 had raped an unconscious 15 year-old boy, the Courier Journal reports.

In February, Republican former Third Judicial District prosecutor Richard Boling was given 40 days to show cause to Los Supremos on why he shouldn’t be disbarred for the letter written in December 2019 seeking a pardon for then 25 year-old Dayton Jones which argued that the shitbag had been targeted by Democratic prosecutors because of a political vendetta against his grandparents, who were Republicans donors. Boling had apologized and owned up to the letter in 2020 – after Bevin freed Jones on year three of a 15 year sentence and commuted the requirement that he register as a sex offender for life. Jones is now again behind bars, having been sentenced to eight years in a federal prison for production of child pornography. Boling hung on to the job until January 2023 before resigning while the state House of Representatives brought up impeachment articles.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court ordered the state Department of Education to rescind its contract with the group behind St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, intended to be the first publicly-funded parochial charter school in the country, CNN reports., saying the state funding a religious school clearly violates the Constitutions of both the state and the United States.

“Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school,” Justice James R. Winchester wrote in the court’s 6-2 majority opinion. “As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian. However, St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State.”

The lawsuit is another example of the chaos in the GOP:  Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, filed the lawsuit that led to the revocation of the contract, which had been praised by Republican Governor Kevin Stitt.  “The framers of the US Constitution and those who drafted Oklahoma’s Constitution clearly understood how best to protect religious freedom: by preventing the State from sponsoring any religion at all,” Drummond said in a statement following the order. “Now Oklahomans can be assured that our tax dollars will not fund the teachings of Sharia Law or even Satanism.”

🚨 OH MY GOD! 🚨 HOLY SHIT! 🚨 YOU GUYS! 🚨 *PANTING* 🚨 NBC NEWS REPORTS TRUMP MIGHT ANNOUNCE HIS NEW RUNNING MATE THIS WEEK! This is so huge! The media’s been waiting for this like FOREVER! Or at least it feels like it’s been forever! The VEEPSTAKES winner will be announced! BREAKING NEWS! SO HUGE! VERY EXCITING! It’s like a major thing!

Ughhhhh… Anyway, what is kind of genuinely mildly amusing about this is that some outlet, we forget which, reported that Trump was saving the announcement for immediately after his sentencing date as something to do to move past a damaging news cycle. NBC’s article says the running mate announcement might come at a rally in Virginia on Friday, which should say he’s planning on playing that “change the subject” card earlier because the Thursday CNN debate could go that badly. We’re also fairly sure it’s going to end up being North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

MAGA lawyer Sidney “Kraken” Powell has reached a settlement with former Dominion Voting Systems exec Eric Coomer, a guy she and other Trump fans had falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election on behalf on Antifa, the Colorado Times Recorder reports. Terms were not disclosed.

Spandex-wearing grapple-freak Jim Jordan plans to hold a markup vote Thursday over holding Joe Biden’s ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in contempt of Congress for something about the classified documents fuckup that nobody even cares about anymore but whatever, ABC News reports.

Like if they’re going to go after political ghostwriters why can’t they at least also subpoena Kristi Noem’s too to see whose idea it was to make that shit up about the Kim Jong-Un meeting and just why in God’s name she thought it was a good idea to print a story about her murdering a puppy?

In more expectation mismanagement news, famously shitty right wing pollster Rasmussen has found that 47 percent of respondents think convicted felon former President Trump will win Thursday’s CNN debate compared to 37 thinking Biden will win, and the rest undecided, RSBN reports.

Separately Trump campaign spokesworm Karoline Leavitt on Thursday told Newsmax that her boss is definitely showing up on Thursday despite half of the MAGAverse trying to talk him out of it.

From a Facebook post by the Madison County, Alabama Sheriff’s Office: “Early this morning, the Alabama Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, comprising members from the Madison County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA), Huntsville Police Department (HPD), and Homeland Security executed a search warrant at 4834 Cove Creek Dr in Brownsboro. The search warrant was the culmination of an ongoing investigation into allegations of child crimes. As a result of the investigation, John Franklin Kvach, 53, was arrested and charged with five counts of possession of child pornography and a count of dissemination of child pornography.”

“Kvach is currently being held at the Madison County Jail Facility with a total bond amount of $100,000. The investigation is ongoing, and further updates will be provided as necessary. The Alabama Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and local law enforcement agencies are committed to identifying and prosecuting individuals who engage in illegal activities that harm children. The task force’s efforts are crucial in ensuring the safety and well-being of children in our community. Madison County Sheriff Kevin Turner would like to commend the law enforcement officers involved in this investigation for their exceptional work and dedication to protecting children from exploitation,” the post continued. What it doesn’t mention is that Kvach was formerly a professor of Southern history at University of Alabama Huntsville, per WHNT. It’s not clear if he’s a Neo-Confederate/Lost Cause type asshole but he sure fits the demographic.

This is it! The identity of the mysterious Agent Q has finally been revealed! Probably! Former Trump Administration HUD Secretary Ben Carson on Tuesday told Newsmax that “people are waking up, a lot of people now do their own research.” Those words alone mean that he’s a solid candidate to be the secretive father of the QAnon movement and since all patriots know to treat probabilities as absolute certainties then he’s gotta be it! WHERE BEN CARSON GOES ONE WE GO ALL!