The US Supreme Court on Thursday ruled 7-2 that “Congress’ statutory authorization allowing the [Consumer Financial Protection] Bureau to draw money from the earnings of the Federal Reserve System to carry out the Bureau’s duties satisfies the Appropriations Clause,” thereby ending a bunch of payday loanshark shitbags’ attempt to gut the post-Great Recession watchdog agency.

Cross-examination of former Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen continues Thursday on what will in all likelihood be the final day of the Manhattan District Attorney’s case against the fat former president for interfering in the 2016 election by hiding hush money payoffs to a pornstar.

Trump’s lead defense lawyer Todd Blanche on Tuesday failed to deliver a knockout blow to Cohen, zig-zagging around in an attempt to portray him as a scumbag to the jury. The problem is that the prosecution never hid that and in fact kind of leaned on it. Having a day and a half to think about his next move might help Blanche figure out a different angle of attack. He needs one, per the consensus of legal observers (not the Trump ones on his printouts), who have said the jury seemed bored and underwhelmed by Blanche’s largely directionless probing of Cohen on the stand.

After Attorney General Merrick Garland said that turning over the audio and video recordings of the interview would impede the DOJ’s efforts to get witnesses to cooperate in future investigations, the White House announced that it would claim executive privilege on the House request, the Washington Post reports.

In letters to crybaby Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan, the rape misprisioner, and Oversight chair Jamie Comer, the perpetually embarrassed conspiracist, Counsel to the President Edward Siskel lambasted the obvious purpose for the GOP request given that the DOJ has already turned over the transcripts and Special Counsel Robert Hur did not recommend charges in Biden’s document case.

“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal—to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes. Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally-protected law enforcement materials from the Executive Branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate.

“Crooked Joe Biden does not want RFK Jr in the debates because Junior’ is far left him and they would be debating over the same territory, like ridiculous Open Borders and the Green New Scam, both of which are killing our Country. He’s also sharper and far more intelligent than Joe, all making for a bad combination of ingredients. I don’t care if Junios’ joins the Debate, but right now his polling numbers are very low, he is not properly qualified in the States, and he seems to be on a downward path. Junior’ needs more than his name to get on the ‘stage!'” posted fat former President Trump on Thursday morning, obviously still unsure if Junior is an asset or a liability to his campaign.

Having Bobby Junior on the stage would probably actually be a net plus for Biden, allowing him to look normal in contrast to the two conspiracy theory-obsessed shitbrains and expose him to the low-info dumbass voters who think the name “Kennedy” automatically equals competency and charisma. The second half of Trump’s little schizo episode above is the one that’s better for him.

Florida driver who crashed into farmworker bus, killing 8, smoked weed, took meds before fatal wreck https://t.co/q3QSVJdnjE pic.twitter.com/iLMRk1qYwq

— New York Post (@nypost) May 16, 2024

Kind of weird how a Murdoch-owned propaganda outlet is blaming a member of their main audience demographic for the deaths of eight migrant farm workers in a horrible accident rather than the farm workers themselves for not staying in Mexico where they would’ve been safer or something. Even more strange is how the article actually says toward the end that the workers were seasonal H2-A visa holders and thus not undocumented migrants so it’s Biden’s fault that they’re dead and he has blood on his hands for this awful tragedy. The Post could’ve at the very least left that detail out and let their readers jump to that partisan political conclusion themselves. Just friggin weird.

Indonesian government geology officials on Thursday raised the alert level from a 3 to a 4 for Mount Ibu, the volcano on Halmahera Island in the North Maluku province in the vast archipelago’s northeastern reaches, the AP reports while noting that the crater has been spewing ash and smoke since last Friday. Indonesia Geology Agency chief Muhammad Wafid said “based on the results of visual and instrumental monitoring which show the occurrence of increased volcanic activity for Mount Ibu, we have raised the alert level from 3 to 4,” and not “Hey if you didn’t already notice this fucking thing’s been erupting for six days now and still some of you dumbasses haven’t evacuated so the best we can do now is up our largely subjective ‘alert level’ to snap you the fuck out of it.”

Getting nowhere with his “demands” for documents from Merrick Garland about former Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo’s presence on the team prosecuting fat former President Trump in Manhattan, spandex-wearing grapple-freak Jim Jordan is now nagging New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office for information about Colangelo, NBC News reports on a letter Jordan sent Wednesday accusing James of assisting with a “politicized prosecution” of his Orange Jesus.

“The fact that a former senior Biden Justice Department official-whose previous employment consisted of leading ‘a wave of state litigation against Trump administration policies’-is now leading the prosecution of President Biden’s chief political rival only adds to the perception that the Biden Justice Department is politicized and weaponized,” Jordan wrote to James. What makes this even funnier is that Colangelo first worked for James’s office, then took a job at the Justice Department, THEN got hired by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Which means that Jordan is pretty much just pissing in the wind (as usual). She had nothing to do with Colangelo taking a local job two years after he had left her office other than probably sending Bragg a reference letter. Like we get that Jordan is doing this for solely publicity and to keep the MAGA base tuned in to his “investigations” but holy shit just do something less transparently impotent and bitchy than this pointless jerking off.

South Carolina Dem Congressman Jim Clyburn, a guy who one could pretty reasonably say did as much as Donald Trump to help Joe Biden win the 2020 presidential election, is hitting the road to help shore up Black support for Joe’s reelection bid, having already made stops in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh over the weekend with more stops planned for other swing states, Punchbowl reports.

“I don’t know what this polling is all about,” said Clyburn in an interview. “Joe Biden does not have a problem with Black voters. Whatever you hear to the contrary, that’s just not true” (There is actual pretty solid evidence Clyburn is correct). Clyburn’s itinerary, which is heavy on radio interviews on shows popular with Black listeners, includes stops in Ohio, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada later this year, as well as at a lot of HBCUs. “I want young people to look at this year’s campaign and be selfish about their vote,” Clyburn said. Not exactly sure what that means but the guy’s pretty smart.

RNC Co-Chair @LaraLeaTrump: "Joe Biden has to get through a debate; he actually has to make coherent sense and form sentences up on stage. But he also then has to defend a horrific record. That is going to be very challenging for him. Get the popcorn ready, folks." pic.twitter.com/r0SU6gv7hb

— GOP (@GOP) May 16, 2024

Fearful that some infuriated member of the cult would try to end her, porn actress and director Stormy Daniels wore a bulletproof vest under her clothes on the days she testified in Donald Trump’s Manhattan election interference hush money criminal trial, the New York Daily News reports.

“She was concerned about the security coming into New York,” her attorney, Clark Brewster said during a CNN interview. “She was paralyzed with fear, not of taking the stand or telling her story, but [of] what some nut might do to her. And I’m genuinely concerned about it as well.”

Two French prison officers were killed and three others wounded after gunmen ambushed a prison convoy, freeing the convict they were transporting in a scene out of X-Men: The Last Stand, except with good ol’ fashioned guns, not superpowers, CBS News reports.

While the two-car convoy was going through a toll booth, a car hit the first car head-on while a second car pinned the prison van in the toll lane.  Surveillance video shows people carry assault weapons getting out of both cars and firing at the people in the vehicles as others freed the prisoner, 30-year-old Mohamed Amra.

Known as La Mouche (“The Fly”), Amra an organized crime leader with a long history of violence who authorities say starting a drug trafficking ring.  Amra was convicted of a robbery charge last week and was facing murder charges related to a gangland shooting in Marseille.

Badly beaten GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is taking his anger out on his home state of Florida, backing out of climate change priorities and opening up the state to broader use of gas and oil pipelines, NBC News reports, a move designed to worsen the effects of climate change and literally put the state underwater.

With Miami alone expected to spend an average of $100 million per year over the next 40 years to address the impact of climate change, DeSantis’s move is obviously to placate conservatives instead of addressing the real issues of climate change impacting Floridians, like massive home insurance costs and a blight of insurance carriers.

According to Democratic Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin speaking on MSNBC, the hearing of the House Oversight Committee, scheduled for Thursday morning at 11 a.m., has been reslotted for 8 p.m. ET so the Republican members can travel to Manhattan to supplicate themselves to presumptive GOP presidential nominee and current criminal defendant Donald Trump.

The committee session, Rasking noted, was to do to mark up a contempt order for Attorney General Merrick Garland for complying with an earlier committee order to turn over the transcript of President Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur; Republicans on the committee are now demanding the audiotape to use for political purposes.

Completely misreading the country by saying it “doesn’t want to have to go through prosecuting a former president,” Republican Utah Senator and man who starches his briefs Mitt Romney said that he would have pardoned Donald Trump if he were president, per Politico.

“Had I been President [Joe] Biden, when the Justice Department brought out indictments, I would have immediately pardoned him,” Romney said in an interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle that will air Wednesday night. “Frankly, the country doesn’t want to have to go through prosecuting a former president.”  Romney doesn’t support Republicans’ explicit support for Trump, calling it embarrassing and demeaning.

A student at a Florida public high school said she was denied entry to her prom because she wore a suit instead of a dress, which school administrators said violated the school’s dress policy, NBC News reports.  Sixteen-year-old Sophie Savidge arrived at the Vanderbilt Country Club for Mason Classical Academy’s prom with a group of friends, but a vice principal at the charter school told her to go home and change into a dress.

Although the school’s dress policy said “ladies” must wear dresses at formal events, Savidge said she didn’t think it would be an issue at the prom because she had worn suits at other school dances, like the one on Valentine’s Day.  For the prom, Sophie wore a black suit with an olive green tie and vest over a white shirt.

Sophie researched the law to see if she could be denied entry to the event based on her wardrobe and found that such expressions were protected under Title IX because her school is publicly-funded, but when the time came, Sophie didn’t bring up the Peltier v. Charter Day School precedent.  “I was thinking I could possibly argue that with them if they said that I couldn’t come in, but I ended up being just kind of too shocked and nervous to really say anything to them,” Sophie said, with her mother saying they’re not considering legal action at this time.

Conservatives preach that local government is the best government, unless you’re Republican Montana Senator Steve Daines, who is single-handedly blocking the sale of site of the abandoned  RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, the Washington Post reports.  During a Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee on National Parks hearing, Daines demanded the Washington Commanders, the NFL team that was one of the sports teams that played in RFK stadium acknowledge the contributions of Walter “Blackie” Wetzel and members of the Blackfeet Tribe.

Wetzel helped with the design of the team’s previous logo, when the Washington football club used a racial epithet as the team’s mascot, imagery abandoned by the team in 2019 for being racist against Native Americans, a logo and image Daines demands be enshrined, although Daines has not outlined what exactly would satisfy his demands.

Note that the Washington Commanders are a private organization owned by a non-public corporation, and they have not played in the stadium since 1996, prior to the current ownership’s–as well as the club’s immediate past ownership group–controlling the team. RFK Stadium sits on 195 acres of land in downtown DC, land that would be turned over to city control after the stadium’s demolition.  The site is destined to be the new home of the Commanders, who currently play at a stadium in Maryland.

The Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision and restored a Congressional map for Louisiana that includes a new Black-majority Congressional district ordering it be used in the upcoming election, CBS News reports, giving Democrats one additional chance to pick up another seat in the House in November.  Of the state’s six Congressional seats, only one is held by a non-white person, Democrat Troy Carter in New Orleans, although the state population is 41% non-white.

In a development that will somehow be Biden’s fault, McDonald’s plans to offer a $5 meal consisting of a McDouble cheeseburger (meaning two patties but one slice of cheese) or a McChicken sandwich, plus a four piece Chicken McNuggets, fries, and a drink, will only last a month starting on June 25th, NBC News reports on a massive multinational corporation whose c-suite have been bitching about declining sales but too fucking cheap to do something about it permanently.

“Consumers continue to be even more discriminating with every dollar that they spend as they faced elevated prices in their day-to-day spending, which is putting pressure on the [quick-service restaurant] industry,” CEO Chris Kempczinski said on the company’s earnings call on April 30. “Well guess we should start lowering prices on our shitty food to fix that,” he did not add.

Kempczinski did not say why Wendy’s can afford to offer a marginally better product in a $5 box and has for years now, despite the global inflation the right wingers constantly masturbate to, while McDonald’s is incapable of grabbing their balls and doing the same on an indefinite basis.

The mafia scumbags Rudy Giuliani locked up in the 1980s did not dress like that. They wore tracksuits and Members-Only jackets over meatball-stained undershirts and chintzy gold medallions.