“Now, there are some even saying, Mark, that Donald Trump might be wise just to pass on the first debate, wait ’til he’s nominated, then debate him,” Fox host and Trump advisor Sean Hannity trying to help his shark-obsessed boss get out of debating the President of the United States.  “What would you say to that?”

We’d say, why should the formality of getting the nomination at the convention be a requirement to debate?  If Trump has the nomination locked up, he can debate as the presumptive nominee.  Unless, of course, Sean’s worried Trump won’t be the nominee after the convention, when he could be in jail following his 34 felony convictions in New York.

Disgraced lawyer and hair tonic fountain Rudy Giuliani appears far more relaxed in his latest mugshot, released by officials in Maricopa County after Giuliani turned himself in for processing for his indictment regarding the Arizona fake electors conspiracy.

Judge Aileen Cannon finally made a firm decision–sort of–in denying the motion by the Three Amigos of Mar-a-Lago Donald Trump, Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira to dismiss Counts 33 through 41 of their obstruction and false-statements charges related to the illegal possession and concealment of government documents at the Palm Beach geriatric supper club.

In the 14-page order, Cannon manages to deny one motion, partially grant another AND delay acting on a third because she cannot do anything cleanly and simply.  In this case, she denied the motion to dismiss, granted a motion to strike a reference to an uncharged crime in the superseding indictment, and then reserved another ruling relating to privileged information.  At least she made a decision about something and didn’t delay the trial further.

The main shipping channel entering Baltimore harbor reopened on Monday, less than three months after a wayward cargo ship collapsed the Key Bridge into the river, the Baltimore Banner reports.  Officials announced enough of the channel has been cleared to allow two way-traffic in the area where the bridge one stood.

After extracting a 90-ton piece of wreckage on Saturday, crews used magnetometers,  LIDAR, and sonar to conduct a complete sweep of the are for hazardous material.  The riverbed is not cleared of debris, but none of the remaining wreckage appear to block shipping traffic.  Although parts of the roadbed still sit on the bottom of the Patapsco River, federal and state authorities certified the region safe for ship transit.

Already hit by a $787.5 million settlement from Dominion Voting Systems, Fox executives are currently in the crosshairs of the lawyers from Smartmatic subpoenaed four of the network’s corporate board members as part of its $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit, the Washington Post reports.

Smartmatic already received emails and text messages from the four–Anne Dias, Jacques Nasser, Chase Carey and Roland A. Hernandez–who had regular discussions with Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who oversees the network’s operations.  “The Board members witnessed Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s control of Fox News; exchanged relevant emails that Smartmatic has used in depositions and will mark as trial exhibits; attended meetings during and after Fox News broadcast the defamatory publications; and discussed the 2020 election and the competitive threats Fox News faced to its brand,” Smartmatic’s lawyers wrote in an earlier filing.

Dias’s statements were used during the Dominion trial to demonstrate that the company, its executives and its board members were aware that the misinformation they were airing had detrimental effects on the nation.  After the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorists attack on Congress, Dias repeated implored the Murdochs to abandon Trump and stand for the rule of law. “It is an existential moment for the nation … and for Fox News as a brand,” Dias wrote in a January 2021 email. “I do not believe that the company can stay silent on this matter.”

“The Quarterly Uniform Crime Report (Q1), January-March, 2024, provides a preliminary look at crime trends for January through March 2024 compared to January through March 2023. A comparison of data from agencies that voluntarily submitted at least two or more common months of data for January through March 2023 and 2024 indicates reported violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent. Murder decreased by 26.4 percent, rape decreased by 25.7 percent, robbery decreased by 17.8 percent, and aggravated assault decreased by 12.5 percent. Reported property crime also decreased by 15.1 percent,” says the intro to the FBI’s quarterly crime report compiled from local law enforcement data, certainly not matching how it feels to right wingers.

Does Turley realize that’s a bad word and not how he wants to be describing the man who he wants to become president again? This is not helpful, no sir. Trump’s not going to want to print out his articles and read them out loud to cameras anymore if Turley keeps talking like this on teevee.

Anyway, as we mentioned last week, there was another “elderly” first-time, white-collar offender in recent years who was sentenced to Rikers by Judge Juan Merchan after being convicted of multiple felonies: former Trump Org CFO Allen Weaselberg Weisselberg, who got five months after pleading guilty to 15 felonies… before a different judge gave him a second five-month stay.

Want even more hopium? Great! Former NYC prosecutor Tess Cohen tells the Daily Beast that whatever sentence Merchan hands down is very unlikely to be stayed at the get-go. “It’s almost never done. That’s a really rare thing. You basically have to have a very good chance at winning on appeal… No standard defendant would get a stay pending appeal after a trial like this.”

“Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that Nicholas Tartaglione was sentenced today to four consecutive life sentences for his leadership role in the 2016 murders of Martin Luna, Urbano Santiago, Miguel Luna, and Hector Gutierrez. Tartaglione, who is a former police officer, orchestrated the kidnapping and murders of all four victims on April 11, 2016,” says a Justice Department press release that does not mention that Tartaglione was at least present when Jeffrey Epstein first tried to kill himself back in 2019.

That’s in a Fox News article. This week Fox News also removed convicted felon former President Trump saying he wouldn’t declassify “the Epstein Files” from a replay of their Sunday interview.

Loser of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election Kari Lake on Monday called actual governor Katie Hobbs “illegitimate” in an interview with some Newsmax assclown, signaling that Lake does not really appear to be “moderating” to appeal to normie voters in her 2024 Senate campaign.

Three North Dakota kids who found a dead animal while playing outside have been shoving it in people’s faces so loudly and obnoxiously that it captured the national media’s attention.

The Denver Museum of Nature and Science was nicer about it in a press release for a new exhibit and documentary film, hyping the story as an “incredible discovery and display of a juvenile T Rex fossil in its new temporary experience, ‘Discovering Teen Rex’ opening to the public on June 21, at 1:30 pm. What started as a family hike in North Dakota by two young brothers, Jessin and Liam Fisher, their dad, Sam Fisher, and their cousin, Kaiden Madsen, turned into a significant moment for science as only a handful of juvenile T Rex skeletons have ever been found.”

“The public can now see the fossil being prepped in real time at the Museum. The trio of young fossil hunters discovered the T Rex fossil in the North Dakota badlands in 2022 and contacted the Museum’s Curator of Paleontology, Tyler Lyson, who grew up in the same area and went to high school with their father, to identify what they had found. In the summer of 2023, the junior explorers returned to the site to help Dr Lyson’s team of paleontologists excavate the fossil.”

I will always stand with the heroes on the ground in Benghazi. @mikerogersformi called them liars. Rogers covered up for Hillary Clinton. Watch Mark Geist tell the truth about Benghazi. pic.twitter.com/h22S7drN1T

— Sandy Pensler (@SandyPensler) June 10, 2024

WHOA! Big 2016 throwback here! Benghazi is now a campaign issue again in the Michigan GOP Senate primary race where this Sandy Pensler worm is using it against former Congressman Mike Rogers who isn’t tough enough on Benghazi-ing or whatever the hell Hillary did 12 years ago.

In audio recorded by lefty journo Lauren Windsor and obtained by Rolling Stone, far right extremist Samuel Alito told the crowd Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner last week that it’s difficult to live “peacefully” with libs in the face of “fundamental” differences that “can’t be compromised,” agreed with another speaker who said America needs to be returned to “a place of Godliness” and bluntly said the only way out of division is “One side or the other is going to win.”

A plane carrying Malawi Vice President Saulos Chilima and nine others flying from the capitol city of Lilongwe didn’t make its scheduled arrival at Mzuzu International Airport about 45 minutes later on Monday, leading officials to launch a search for the aircraft, the AP reports.

What’s unclear at this point is whether the pilot was vaccinated for COVID, if Chilima has something on the Clintons, what the Malawian aviation sector’s DEI policies are, and if the military radar spotted any UFOs in the area that may have interdicted the plane since we need to fill space and right wing conspiracy theorists might not care enough to be asking those sort of questions.

I approve this message. pic.twitter.com/IajfDVy72C

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 10, 2024

Large swaths of South Florida could be inundated with monster downpours this week, with Naples and Everglades City on the reptile-infested peninsulas’s southwestern coast looking at 10.5 inches through Wednesday and another several inches by Saturday, the Palm Beach Post reports.

Convicted felon former President Trump voiced both lecherous lust toward Taylor Swift and more of that obvious and kind of cringey apprehension over the possibility she could mobilize her extremely loyal fanbase against him this fall in an interview with Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass author and Variety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh, per an excerpt of the upcoming book printed in the Hollywood news outlet.

“I think she’s beautiful – very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually – unusually beautiful! She is liberal, or is that just an act? She’s legitimately liberal? It’s not an act? It surprises me that a country star can be successful being liberal,” rambled the fat fuck in the interview. Swift hasn’t put out a country album in 12 years. Told of this, Trump said he doesn’t know much about her music. “Garth Brooks is liberal. Explain that! How does it happen?” Trump also complained.

…While the risk of jury nullification votes could not be higher, it is not certain and the prosecutors are driving home the overwhelming strength of the evidence. They want to make it as difficult as possible for jurors to ignore the obvious.

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 10, 2024

Misdemeanant Capitol rioter Chuck Hand, husband of former Taylor County, Georgia GOP Chair Mandy Robinson-Hand, who along with his wife did 20 days in jail and paid $500 in restitution after they both pleaded guilty to a parading charge for entering the Capitol during the January 6th, 2021 insurrection and is now running in a primary to take on incumbent Dem Congressman Sanford Bishop, walked out of a televised debate Sunday before it even really started, the AP reports.

Now in a two-way runoff after neither received more than 50 percent of the vote on primary day, Hand accused rival Wayne Johnson of some sort of fuckery over third-placer Mike Nixon’s endorsement of Johnson at a press conference last month, saying “This is where I get back in my truck and go back to southwest Georgia because I’ve got two races to win” as he fucked off.

Johnson then told reporters he “would like to assume that Chuck Hand’s departure, the way in which he did it today, was his withdrawal from the race. But it certainly should cause people to pause and think about why he did it and what he was trying to get by doing it.” Nixon’s presser focused on Hand’s prior criminal trouble such as dismissed charges for DUI and trespass, as well as wife Mindy’s oxycodone selling rap. And of course, the insurrection guilty plea, hinting Hand was a bigger deal in it than his misdemeanor convictions and slap on the wrist sentence had let on.

Not sure how that’s supposed to be a liability to GOP primary voters, but given that Bishop’s been in the seat since 1993 it might help just a little bit to have a “moderate” run in the general.

Recovering addict and painter Hunter Biden is unlikely to testify in his defense as his trial on three federal felony charges over having lied on a gun permit application about his drug use, with attorney Abbe Lowell on Monday agreeing with the judge when she asked if Lowell wanted a limiting order added to the jury instructions directing them not to draw a negative inference from Hunter declining to take the stand, CNN reports on another parallel with Hunter’s political opponent.

RIP: SnoozeVax. https://t.co/hvqcvWTtSD

— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) June 10, 2024