Convicted felon President Trump’s regime on Wednesday appealed a district court judge’s order to restore the exhibit on the nine people enslaved by George Washington at his former home on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, a site managed by the US National Park service, the AP reports.

“Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”

See you at the movies.

Oh I forgot, you don’t have movies. https://t.co/meVcucZf8K

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) February 18, 2026

“A former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent pleaded guilty today to receiving child pornography, United States Attorney Jerome F Gorgon, Jr announced. Gorgon was joined in the announcement by Jennifer Runyan, Special Agent in Charge of the Detroit Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The superseding information charges Harry Marvelle Peless, III, 51, of Newport, Michigan, with one count of receipt of child pornography. A violation of this offense carries a sentence of no less than 5 years’ and up to 20 years’ imprisonment, and a fine of up to $250,000. Sentencing has been set for June 1 at 9 am,” said a Tuesday Justice Department press release.

“According to court records, law enforcement began investigating Peless after Peless sent sexual messages to an undercover officer posing as a minor. Peless began communicating with the undercover in September 2024, and his contacts with the undercover became a near daily occurrence. At the time of the offense, Peless was employed as a Marine Border Protection Agent at the Gibraltar, Michigan, CBP station. Following the filing of charges in this matter, CPB placed Peless on unpaid administrative leave. Evidence recovered during the investigation showed that Peless had reveived child pornography over the internet, and that he was logged into the chat account he used to communicate with the undercover officer while he was at the Gibraltar CBP station.”

With still 13 days to go until primary day in Texas, Punchbowl News has tallied it up and found that the GOP establishment spent fucking $60 million to defend Senator John Cornhole Cornyn from corrupt Picasso-face Attorney General Ken Paxton’s primary challenge and has had zero polling improvement whatsoever to show for it, dooming him to an extremely likely late May runoff loss.

Flagged by Popular Info’s Judd Legum this week, Kentucky MAGA Congressman Andy Barr, running to replace a rapidly decaying Mitch McConnell, tells the state’s GOP primary voters that it’s “not a sin to be white,” a variation of the classic white nationalist troll “It’s okay to be white,” defined by the ADL as “a slogan popularized in late 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the controversial discussion forum 4chan. The original idea behind the campaign was to choose an ostensibly innocuous and inoffensive slogan, put that slogan on fliers bereft of any other words or imagery, then place the fliers in public locations. Originators assumed that ‘liberals’ would react negatively to such fliers and condemn them or take them down, thus ‘proving’ that liberals did not even think it was ‘okay’ to be white.” Legum rightly points out there’s been zero MSM coverage of this ad.

For the third time since the current five-year presidential term began in July 2021, Peru’s congress on Tuesday impeached and removed the mountainous South American nation’s head of state from office, this time canning President Jose Jeri on corruption charges stemming from a series of undisclosed meetings with two Chinese businessmen with government contracts, the AP reports.

Jeri was pretty much just getting settled in as he was tapped to take over for now-former-President Dina Boluarte in October, herself having been elevated to the presidency after the last guy who was actually elected, Pedro Castillo, was impeached and removed in 2022. The 2021 to 2026 term needs just one more removal to beat the record of four presidents hit during the 2016 to 2021 term.

In a landmark decision in favor of Buffalo Wild Wings and other major brands in the chain restaurant and/or frozen food space, a Chicago federal judge on Tuesday tossed local man Aimen Halim’s 2023 lawsuit accusing the wing-themed chain of “false and deceptive advertising” because “boneless wings” are not de-boned chicken wings but more or less chicken nuggets, Reuters reports.

“Halim sued BWW over his confusion, but ⁠his complaint has no meat on its bones,” Judge John Tharp Jr wrote in the ruling and there’s a lot of lame puns. “If ​Halim is right, reasonable consumers ​should think that cauliflower ​wings are made (at least in part) from ‌wing meat. They don’t, though.”

Republicans in Congress need to wake up and get Trump’s agenda codified before it’s too late — Especially the SAVE America Act.

If these projections are right, we won’t have another chance… https://t.co/G7fQW3ANPk

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 17, 2026

Kind of hard, even for a guy who still has yet to make good on his threat to “immediately” sue Milo Yiannopoulos for accusing him of numerous homosexual encounters at multiple conservative events, to call it “fake news” now after spending the home stretch of the 2024 election celebrating every single time convicted felon President Trump’s odds inched up on the scam betting site.

The Nevada County, California sheriff’s office late Tuesday announced that they had rescued six out of 15 backcountry skiers believed to have been struck by an avalanche at around 11:30 AM local time in the area of Castle Peak, northwest of Lake Tahoe, the Los Angeles Times reports.

“The six initially reported skiers who survived the avalanche have been successfully rescued this evening by search and rescue teams with varying injuries. Due to extreme weather conditions, it took several hours for rescue personnel to safely reach the skiers and transport them to safety where they were medically evaluated by Truckee Fire. Two of the six skiers have been transported to a hospital for treatment. The search is ongoing, pending weather conditions. It should be noted it was initially believed there were 16 total persons, but that number has been updated to reflect 15 people who actually went on the trip,” posted the sheriff’s office at 10:46 PM PST on Tuesday.

Upfront it must be noted that it seems very unlikely that dog-murdering Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s interference with a Coast Guard search and rescue attempt to find a guardsman who went overboard in the Pacific on last year and NBC says as much in their reporting.

Sadly Seaman Bryan K Lee, the man who fell from the Waesche on February 4, 2025 was never found but personnel were still holding out hope when Noem a USCG C-130 actively deployed to the search to return to San Diego to pick up deportees to fly them to Texas. Coast Guard leadership worked for about an hour to scrounge up two C-27s in Colorado that they instead used for the deportation flight, allowing the C-130 to resume looking for Lee, just hours after his overboarding.

“It’s not clear that Noem’s directive to pull the C-130 had any impact on the search, particularly given the Coast Guard found alternative aircraft that allowed it to return to the effort,” NBC writes.

Still, obviously this was twisted enough for two sources to speak to reporters about and for some DHS spokesperson to acknowledge it while claiming “the C-130 never left the search” and there’s no documentation proving it did. That last part in the non-direct quote sounds like “You can’t prove that the search for a lost Coast Guardsman was interrupted,” while acknowledging Noem sure tried.

I can confirm that top DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin planned to leave in December, but chose to stay on after 2 fatal ICE shootings. I told her she had the 2nd toughest job in Washington, after Kristi Noem, who she doggedly defended. Here's the link https://t.co/nI4rNNPjJT

— HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) February 17, 2026

“A tsunami of Congressional oversight is headed straight for corporate America. Barring a dramatic and improbable reversal of both current and historic political trends, Democrats will retake control of the House of Representatives (and possibly the Senate) in November’s elections, ushering in two years of divided government. With prospects for passing major legislation during that period hovering between slim and none, oversight will become the leading substantive and political weapon for newly ascendant Democrats,” write consultancy dickbags Tucker Eskew and Matt Miller in a “client note” headlined “The Subpoenas Are Coming: How Companies Should Prepare for Next Year’s Congressional Oversight Blitz,” plainly aimed at upselling them on their firm Vianovo’s services.

Miller and Eskew cite two reasons, the first being a “widespread belief among Democrats that major corporations have drawn too close to the administration for comfort” citing attacks on “crypto companies for allegedly funneling money to the president and his family, called antitrust review ‘pay-to-play corruption,’ and questioned the relationship between the White House and oil companies.”

Yeah… You’d think that maybe PR scumbags elite enough to get a free Axios advertorial might be a little craftier with their their copy than that. Or maybe just the invoices these guys command creates overestimation that they aren’t just working backward from a daydreamed response of “My gosh, what ever could have informed such ‘widespread belief’? Who’s spreading these deranged conspiracy theories among the Democratic political class? What pernicious fiends would dare propagate allegations about Eric and Don Jr’s crypto industry innovations or Trump seeking to block Netflix from acquiring Warner Bros or question why he has so many friends in the fossil fuel industry? These challenges require, nay DEMAND, the expertise of elite-tier public relations pros to coach our own comms team on how best to respond to such harmful misperceptions of our business conduct – or at least highlight that our competitor’s CEO is mentioned in the Epstein files WAY more times than ours. Vianovo sure seems primed to synergize a game-changing paradigm strategy!”

“Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC, who are responsible for the massive sewage spill in the Potomac River, must get to work, IMMEDIATELY. If they can’t do the job, they have to call me and ask, politely, to get it fixed. The Federal Government is not at all involved with what has taken place, but we can fix it. But remember, even in that case, with the Democrat Shutdown, we’ll have to bring in true Patriots to do the work because many are not working right now. These Democrat caused Disasters, both River and Shutdown, will only get worse. The two Governors and the Mayor of DC must act, IMMEDIATELY. This is a Radical Left caused Environmental Hazard. With all of their talk about carbon footprints and everything else, they’re allowing hundreds of tons of sewage to pour into the Mighty Potomac, making it much less mighty. ACT FAST. I am awaiting your call,” posted President Fecal Matter on Tuesday, again seizing on a localized distraction from his own failures.

In a Monday article headlined “Christian mother, teacher found dead as police hunt homicide suspect in Ohio home invasion” and begins with “A Christian mother of two has been found dead in her home in Ohio as authorities launch a homicide investigation,” Fox News wants you to know that 37 year-old Ashley Flynn was a Christian before you also are apprised that she was a mom of two kids, a substitute teacher in the local public school district, the middle school volleyball team’s head coach, that she was shot dead in her home around 2:31 AM under unclear circumstances while her husband was also in the house, and cops haven’t disclosed potential suspects of interest.

Then at the very bottom of the not-particularly-dense article they write “Christian Life Center in Butler Township said Flynn was a beloved member of the church,” and include the text of a Facebook post from Pastor Jordan Hansen who wrote “Ashley Flynn is with Jesus. Please pray for her husband and two daughters and extended family left behind. Please pray for [the] ongoing investigation. Please pray for God’s very presence to bring comfort to an unfathomable situation.”

And thus the sum total of information meriting the prepending of “Christian” to the headline and lede for Fox News’s reporting on the horrific murder of Ashley Flynn, a cruel tragedy that itself should never be derided or trivialized… But exploitation for clicks? Trying to shame Fox News for that is like trying to shame a swarm of hornets for overdoing it with a baby squirrel who wandered too close to their nest. What is noteworthy is how blatantly the propaganda network seems to be “chasing the dragon” on this one – like the amygdalae of their audience are so inured to “Suburban mom killed in home invasion” that they need to shoehorn “Christian” in there to pierce the tolerance their content has built up over the years. Whatever it takes to get them by while they’re stuck in a holding pattern waiting for a suspect to be identified, praying they’re a Haitian granted asylum by the Biden Administration or trans or something in Fox’s wheelhouse so they can begin carpet-bombing their audience with “Remember Ashley Flynn in November” and “Leftists have blood on their hands,” etc.

Cops in Ghana tell the BBC they intend to formally submit an extradition request to dictator Vladimir Putin’s regime after concluding that 36 year-old Vladislav Lyulkov, a lower-rent Russian version of Andrew Tate or Clavicular, had likely fled the west African country while being sought for arrest over his “pickup artist” exploitation of local women by filming sex acts for his audience, the BBC reports.

The British state media service did not name Lyulkov in their reporting, that comes from Tuko, a site based in Kenya where the Cyrillic dark web incel icon – who wore fucking “Meta glasses” to record his casual encounters with women – is also being sought for questioning by cops and potentially faces up to two years in the joint. In Ghana it’d be closer to 25 years per legislation passed in 2020.

Of course that’s all kind of theoretical because, as the BBC notes, Russia isn’t in the habit of extraditing nationals to other countries – except in the most “serious” of crimes. Not for nothing but it would seem that a state widely believed to have surreptitiously recorded a future president of the United States fondling himself while hookers peed on a hotel bed is going to see what Lyulkov did in Africa as all that serious of a crime. Hell them even recognizing it as a “crime” at all would seem to be a stretch and would make the Kremlin look “woke” to their international fan base.

Smuggling operations continue at U.S.-Canada border despite increased indictments https://t.co/44UQgNgqLo

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) February 17, 2026

Iranian dictator Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime on Tuesday announced that the Strait of Hormuz – a narrow waterway through which 20 percent of the global oil supply moves – will be closed for a few hours as the IRGC conducts live fire drills ahead of the anticipated arrival of the USS Gerald R Ford to the region within the next few days, joining another carrier already in the area, the AP reports.

“It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Civil Rights leader and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Honorable Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. He died peacefully on Tuesday morning, surrounded by his family. His unwavering commitment to justice, equality, and human rights helped shape a global movement for freedom and dignity. A tireless change agent, he elevated the voices of the voiceless-from his Presidential campaigns in the 1980s to mobilizing millions to register to vote-leaving an indelible mark on history. Reverend Jackson is survived by his wife, Jacqueline; their children Santita, Jesse Jr, Jonathan, Yusef, Jacqueline; daughter Ashley Jackson, and grandchildren,” says the now-late Reverend’s family in a statement on Tuesday.