Senator Lindsey Graham was relatively harsh on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for his “not good judgment” in hanging the American flag upside-down outside his home in the weeks after fat former President Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, CNN’s Manu Raju reports.

“Emotions are apparently high in that neighborhood, but it’s not good judgment to do that. He said his wife was insulted and got mad,” said Graham. “I assume that to be true, but you are still a Supreme Court justice. People have to realize that moments like that, to think it through,” Lindsey added, about as harsh as he can get when he can’t avoid addressing the shitshow altogether.

The Iranian government reached out to American diplomats for help after a helicopter carrying President Ebrahim Raisi and Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian went down in foggy weather in northern Iran, Politico reports.

The State Department said the US military prepared to brief and deploy search teams in the effort, but it was for naught: before American personnel could set out, the helicopter wreckage was located.  “We said that we would be willing to assist–something that we would do with respect to any government in this situation,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a media briefing Monday. “Ultimately, largely for logistical reasons, we weren’t able to provide that assistance.”

Senior US officials are also wary of Iran’s reaction to the helicopter crash, with special concern for potential conspiracy theories that the US and/or Israel sponsored or conducted an act that brought down the craft.  Politically, Iran will remain relatively stable under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who along with other religious leaders will determine a pool of potential successors for Raisi in upcoming elections.  US officials, however, fear conspiratorial-minded branches of Iranian-backed terror groups could attack American or Israeli interests in retribution regardless of official investigation outcomes.

“Trump Media and Technology Group Corp. (Nasdaq: DJT) (‘TMTG’ or the ‘Company’), operator of the social media platform Truth Social, is announcing financial results for the fiscal quarter ending on March 31, 2024, and will also file its 10-Q with the Securities and Exchange Commission today.”

“As of March 31, 2024, TMTG’s balance of cash and cash equivalents was $273.7 million. This comprises $233.7 million in unrestricted cash accounts and $40.0 million held in restricted accounts pending the effectiveness of TMTG’s registration statement on form S-1, which was filed with the SEC on April 15, 2024. The Company had a first-quarter operating loss of $12.1 million based on non-GAAP Adjusted EBITDA calculations. Approximately half of that amount, $6.3 million, consisted of one-time payments related to the closing of TMTG’s merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp. (‘DWAC’). TMTG believes it has sufficient working capital to fund operations for the foreseeable future. In the first quarter, the Company recorded $311.0 million in non-cash expenses arising from the conversion of promissory notes, and the associated elimination of prior liabilities, immediately before the closing of TMTG’s merger with DWAC on March 25, 2024. These non-cash expenses resulted in a GAAP loss of $327.6 million for the first quarter,” says a press release from the Trump Media and Technology Group, whose stock is still worth about $48 a share.

“A Wisconsin man was arrested last week on criminal charges related to his alleged production, distribution, and possession of AI-generated images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and his transfer of similar sexually explicit AI-generated images to a minor. ‘Technology may change, but our commitment to protecting children will not,’ said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. ‘The Justice Department will aggressively pursue those who produce and distribute child sexual abuse material – or CSAM – no matter how that material was created. Put simply, CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM, and we will hold accountable those who exploit AI to create obscene, abusive, and increasingly photorealistic images of children.’ According to court documents, Steven Anderegg, 42, of Holmen, allegedly used a text-to-image generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) model called Stable Diffusion to create thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors.”

“Many of these images depicted nude or partially clothed minors lasciviously displaying or touching their genitals or engaging in sexual intercourse with men. Evidence recovered from Anderegg’s electronic devices revealed that he generated these images using specific, sexually explicit text prompts related to minors, which he then stored on his computer. Additionally, Anderegg allegedly communicated with a 15-year-old boy and described how he used Stable Diffusion to convert his text prompts into images of minors. Anderegg also allegedly used Instagram direct message to send the boy several GenAI images of minors lasciviously displaying their genitals. Anderegg came to the attention of law enforcement through a CyberTip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) after Instagram reported Anderegg’s account to NCMEC for distributing these images,” says a Justice Department press release on another pedo nerd’s arrest.

Look, we get it, cricket is boring and its appeal is inscrutable to those of us who don’t get why they can’t just figure out how to play baseball instead. That’s still no reason to call the @ICC anti-semitic and accuse them of a “Woke Jihad” over some shit they had nothing to do with.

With a large chunk of the Key Bridge roadway still on the foredeck and as high tide hit the Patapsco River, the MV Dali returned to a pier in the Port of Baltimore after being successfully refloated and having underwater debris cleared overnight, the Baltimore Sun reports, about eight weeks after the March 28th accident.  Last Monday, engineers used explosive charges to break-up wreckage atop the ship, and salvagers removed the wreckage around Dali.

As the ship was pushed by tugboats into the Seagirt Marine Terminal to unload the remaining containers and undergo repairs:  a 30-foot gash could be seen in the bow off the ship, with entire containers seen pushed deep into the hull.  Even though the ship has been moved, it will be at least a couple weeks before the Port of Baltimore is fully operational while salvage crews remove underwater scrap.

Court is in session early Monday as the parties have a number of issues to deal with before the jury comes in for fat former President Trump’s criminal trial on charges he had sex with a porn star for two minutes and then paid her hush money to cover it up before the 2016 election.

Far right Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito last summer sold off his stock in Bud Light parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev and bought up shares of Miller-Coors a few months into the manufactured “controversy” over trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney being featured in a marketing campaign for the watery low calorie beer, LawDork.com reports, noting that the transaction spotted in disclosure sheets came a day after “Libs of TikTok” shitbag Chaya Raichik had obtained and tweeted a pic of Mulvaney before she had transitioned, a post that ended up getting more than 8 million views. The article’s writer Charles Geidner sees this as strong circumstantial evidence that Alito was tuned into the Fox News/Breitbart circlejerk over Mulvaney, a conclusion we do not at all doubt, but it still feels like it falls a bit short of smoking gun-y. Better would’ve been if he had done it within a day of the ad campaign first blowing up last spring rather than a few months in.

The far bigger tell is buying up Miller-Coors. Like Alito knew he should have some major brewer of cheap, watery beer in his portfolio and switched to the one without the reaction to the trans influencer possibly causing MAGA terrorists to plant bombs at a production facility which would hurt sales and put a dent in his vacation fund. Post-retirement vacation fund, we mean. He doesn’t have to pay for vacations as long as he’s still working to earn his “reward points” for exclusive getaways.

In a statement posted Monday, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim AA Khan announced he has found “reasonable grounds to believe that Yahya SINWAR (Head of the Islamic Resistance Movement (‘Hamas’) in the Gaza Strip), Mohammed Diab Ibrahim AL-MASRI, more commonly known as DEIF (Commander-in-Chief of the military wing of Hamas, known as the Al-Qassam Brigades), and Ismail HANIYEH (Head of Hamas Political Bureau)” and “Benjamin NETANYAHU, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav GALLANT, the Minister of Defence of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for the following war crimes and crimes against humanity” and goddamn this is going to get ugly.

Would’ve been much uglier if Khan had singled out Netanyahu and Gallant while ignoring Hamas, but he’s still going to catch hell for this. Republicans are going to absolutely lose their shit.

“Both-sides-ing” it was actually the smart thing to do here, much of a dirty word as it is. Hamas started this fucking nightmare with their utterly unspeakable massacre of innocent men, women, children, and babies on October 7th. Israel has acted with nothing less than malign depraved indifference to human life in a campaign of retaliation that has killed ten to twenty times as many Gazans than the number of Israelis murdered on the 7th – to say nothing of the millions displaced, starved, homes and businesses in ashes. All this godawful suffering for the political survival of an indicted dictator – now also a wanted war criminal who could end up effectively trapped in Israel for the rest of his life if the warrant is issued. Khan has started a shitstorm, but it’s a solid chess move politically to treat both groups of genocidal warlords as one and the same. Also morally true.

Everyone who has “Haley” for a last name should receive a lifetime ban from the RNC.

Every state should be made to publicly disclose their list of RNC delegates BEFORE the convention to maximize transparency and allow the public to expose and vet anti Trump subversives to… https://t.co/hsh3DGRwVz

— Paul Ingrassia (@PaulIngrassia) May 20, 2024

Full text after the stupid cutoff: “Every state should be made to publicly disclose their list of RNC delegates BEFORE the convention to maximize transparency and allow the public to expose and vet anti Trump subversives to prevent any risk of them sabotaging the results of the convention.”

“@ChairmanWhatley @LaraLeaTrump @LaCivitaC @JasonMillerinDC” were then tagged: RNC Chair Mike Whatley, actual chair Lara Trump, actual actual chair and Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita, and abortion milkshake guy Jason Miller. We forget what his actual job title is.

Lawyers for former crackhead turned halfway decent painter Hunter Biden tell the Daily Beast they’ll be filing a massive defmation lawsuit against Fox News “shortly.” On what grounds exactly was not made clear but there’s no shortage of bullshit to drag them over, given their obsession.

“Everybody that has ever thought about bringing a defamation suit is always told they’re just going to spend any legal proceeding defaming you all over again,” Hunter told the Beast, adding “It’s not like I’m going to reignite some controversy over whether or not I ever smoked crack.” Hunter also vowed that the discovery phase would make the multitude of embarrassing revelations against the right wing propaganda network from the Dominion lawsuit look like “pattycakes” in comparison.

Underestimate him at your peril fanboys. Hunter’s main lawyer Abbe Lowell has put on a fucking masterclass against the feckless dickbags James Comer and Jim Jordan. It was almost unfair how badly Lowell embarrassed them again and again and again before they essentially dropped their impeachment inquiry altogether. Mentions of the First Son on Fox News had already been cratering by the time he threatened them late last month and while we don’t have any more recent data than what Media Matters put together a few days prior to the threat on April 25th, we suspect it’s essentially zero. That this new threat (or warning, really) of litigation comes just weeks before Hunter’s gun charges trial begins also seems very unlikely to be a coincidence and meant to scare Fox’s production team into playing their coverage of it as straight and minimally as possible.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has officially died of a hard landing sideways into a forested hillside in a remote northeastern part of his country, Reuters reports. He was 63. Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and six other passengers also hard landed into the hillside. They’re dead too.

Disgraced former President Trump’s Truth Social late Sunday account posted a lengthy and overly detailed explanation for two moments during his insane speech to the NRA terrorist group from the previous night, with some campaign lackey writing “My Speech in Dallas this weekend at the NRA’s ‘Endorsement of President Donald J Trump,’ was attended by a Record Crowd of very enthusiastic Patriots. The Biden Campaign, however, put out a Fake Story that I ‘froze’ for 30 seconds, going into the ‘Musical Interlude’ section, when in actuality, the 30 to 60 second period of silence is standard in every one of my Speeches where we use the Music. Check out any of my Speeches! The reason they came up with this Disinformation is that Biden freezes all the time, can’t put two sentences together, and can rarely find his way off the stage without help. Donald Trump doesn’t freeze! It is a MADE UP Biden Campaign story…” and blah blah blah, following up with “…As far as the podium, I actually stopped it from falling due to good reflexes and strength, two elements which Joe Biden does not possess. Check out the clip! Crooked Joe is a completely incompetent and corrupt person, even when it comes to putting out a fake story like this.” The clips were included in his posts.

Who knows why the hell Team Orange are suddenly so defensive about this stupid shit. The Biden campaign did post the same clip about the “dramatic pause” but had simply wrote “Trump starts playing QAnon music during his bizarre slur-filled NRA speech,” never implying it was a Mitch McConnell-style buffering (which it was not). They never posted anything about the podium either.

Ever stranger is that it’s obvious Trump himself had hours earlier posted “JOE BIDEN IS NOT TOO OLD TO BE PRESIDENT – NOT EVEN CLOSE – BUT HE IS TOO INCOMPETENT AND CORRUPT!” to the account. Not only is that pretty incongruous with the later posts, saying Biden is not actually too old is kind of the opposite of the GOP’s entire messaging for the past four years. Weird shit.

Search and rescue teams located the helicopter carrying President Ebrahim Raisi and Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian that reportedly made a “hard landing” while traveling in fog to the northern Iranian city of Tabriz, the BBC reports, with the head of Iran’s Red Crescent telling state-owned television networks that the situation is “not good.”

Rescuers have not yet reached the site.  While there’s no word of the condition of Raisi or Amir-Abdollahian, state officials have been asking citizens to pray for the missing, with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei giving a somber address early Monday (local time.)

UPDATE 11:02 p.m. ET:  Iranian state television reports there are no signs of life at the crash site, according to the Associated Press.

The Michigan Democratic Party asked the state Board of Canvassers to review the ballot petitions of nearly three Republican Senate candidates to ensure the signatures are not fraudulent, USA Today reports.  The Dems focused on petitions for former GOP Congressmen Mike Rogers and Justin Amash, and that of dilettante businessman Sandy Pensler.  The petition of former congressman Peter Meijer, who already dropped out of the race for the August primary.

The Democratic request to the board The caution isn’t unreasonable:  It comes two years after nineteen candidates, primarily Republicans, were removed from ballots because the auditors found identical signatures and voter information on petitions from different candidates.  The Democrats noted that the candidates used some of the same organizations, or circulators, as the GOP had used previously when signatures were invalidated.

You will not be surprised to learn that four people “close to” disgraced former President Trump tell the Washington Post that the fat fuck does not plan on taking the stand in his defense before the case goes to the jury, as is expected this week. The non-shocking report comes as the Orange God Emperor claimed he “absolutely” would testify a few days before the trial actually started, which by May 2nd had turned into he couldn’t because he’s under a gag order. The next day Judge Merchan told him that was false. Then on May 7th Trump claimed he would “probably” testify.

Since then Trump has not answered reporters in the courthouse hallyway asking him if he would take the stand – or really any of their questions for that matter – which tracks with the Post’s reporting indicating that, per usual, the obese degenerate is just going to pretend he didn’t fulfill this or that promise to his fanboys to own the libs and the rigged justice system, et cetera.

“Trump is famously mercurial and could always demand to testify, some of these people said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations,” the Post writes to remind readers that there’s always reason to hope that the dumbass will overrule his defense team.

Amid all this talk about a “hard landing” that was probably like “landing” on a sheer cliff face in heavy fog at 90 miles per hour for Iran President Ebrahim Raisi and his entourage raises quite a few questions about what the fuck is going on and why it’s taken at least five hours for word to leak out to Sky News’s Middle East correspondent that maybe crews might be able to reach the spot where the chopper’s transponder signal was last pinged. Or why, if this was a flight of three copters with the other two carrying other officials, that they maybe didn’t turn around and try to figure out what happened to the one carrying the president. Or why they didn’t have military escort aircraft following them and ground-based radar tracking and all that shit keeping a close eye on the flight.

Above all that is the question of if, as disgraced former President Trump has claimed repeatedly, shit like “Iran would not have – they had no money. Iran was broke, with me. I said, anybody buys from Iran, no oil from Iran. If you buy from Iran, you can’t do business in the United States. They went flat out broke. They had no money. Now they have $250 billion. They’re a rich country and they’re in a much different position” since Biden defeated him in the 2020 election, then why didn’t they spend some of that money to make sure this didn’t happen? Couldn’t they have splurged a bit on a safer mode of transportation for their second-most important leader, if the impounded oil revenue that Biden didn’t really release in exchange for hostages was supposed to “fungible” then why couldn’t they hire a more competent and safety-conscious pilot to fly what should’ve been a routine mission?

Anyway, same shit, different rhetorical questions about a situation that manages to make both the Iranian Regime and domestic Republicans look like complete incompetent assholes in one go.

MAGA Congressman Byron Donalds’s bullshit story about Biden being constantly “jacked up” on drugs to appear coherent was a bit too much even for conspiracy freak Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, who reminded Donalds that “We’re not doctors. We have no idea.”

A Missouri judge on Friday ruled that former “honorary” Ku Klux Klan member Darrell Leon McClanahan III can remain on the Republican gubernatorial primary ballot, squashing the state GOP’s effort to pretend that the racist asshole doesn’t represent their party, NBC News reports

Judge Cotton Walker wrote the state GOP did “not present to the Court any evidence that having McClanahan on a primary election ballot would cause it any injury. McClanahan’s presence on the primary election ballot is not necessarily an endorsement of the candidate by the party.”

President Joe Biden’s speech to Morehouse College’s Commencement ceremony on Sunday hit a number of important topics, affirming his commitment to ceasefire in the Middle East and a Palestinian state, and an impassioned call to the HBCU’s grads to defend democracy from the threat of MAGA.