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.

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’s cock-shaped rocket ship launched from West Texas on Sunday, carrying Ed Dwight, NASA’s first ever Black astronaut candidate into orbit, into space for the first time after Dwight was passed over for a mission in the early 1960s, ABC News reports.

At 90 years and 253 days, Dwight is now also the oldest person in space, beating out Star Trek actor William Shatner’s record of 90 years and 206 days set during his Blue Origin flight in October 2021.

Dwight was appointed to the NASA program by President John F Kennedy in 1961 but was never selected for one of the early flights despite being recommended for selection by the US Air Force.

Complete worm Senator Marco Rubio on Sunday refused to answer whether he would accept the results of the 2024 election no matter who wins, telling NBC’s Kristen Welker she was “asking the wrong person,” before filibustering after she pointed out the he voted to certify the results of the 2020 election. Asked about the Orange Hitler’s plans to intern and then deport millions of undocumented immigrants, Rubio said “it needs to dealt with dramatically.” When Welker then reminded Marco that in 2016 he called an earlier Trump proposal for the same not “realistic,” he said the number of illegal immigrants had gone up by millions. It’s not clear how it’s more realistic now if what he’s saying is true and that 25 million+ need to be interned and deported.

A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi either suffered a “hard landing” or is missing and rescuers can’t event find it, according to conflicting reports from state TV and other sources, respectively, per the Huffington Post’s Yashar Ali, who notes that state TV’s image of Raisi exiting the chopper is from 2022. So yeah, the “hard landing” is probably bullshit. Thoughts and prayers.

Trump says he wants to violate the Constitution by running for a third term pic.twitter.com/VhTYFJcReB

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 18, 2024

Running in the lead from the start on a muddy track, Seize the Gray ended the Triple Crown hopes of Kentucky Derby winner Mystik Dan by winning the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore on Saturday.  Owned by more than 2,000 individual shareholders who crowdsourced the costs to maintain and train the horse.

“Can you imagine how many people are going to relish in this and enjoy it?  I mean, I don’t even know how many people own this horse. I don’t know. It’s a lot of people, I know that,” Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas said per ESPN.

Delegates to the Minnesota Republican Party conference voted to endorse Royce White, a Minneapolis-born former professional basketball player, in the August 13th primary whose winner will face incumbent Democrat Amy Klobuchar in November, Minnesota Public Radio reports.

Unlike other dilettante celebrity political candidates favored by Republicans in the last few election cycles, White isn’t just a retired athlete; he’s also a podcaster.  And on that podcast, he’s promoted the conspiracy theory that Paul Pelosi’s attacker–recently sentenced to 30 years in prison–was actually his gay lover, claimed there’s a Satanic cabal running the government, and of course endorsed the benchmark conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapons.  But remember:  he was Minnesota’s Mr. Basketball in 2009.

The Georgia Republican Party elected Amy Kremer, whose Women for America First hosted the rally multiply-indicted rapist Donald Trump spoke at on January 6th, to one of the state seats on the Republican National Committee, the Associated Press reports.

At the Women for America First rally, Trump ordered his cult to “go to the CAPitol” and “fight like hell,” motivators that inspired the Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress as his lackeys in Congress attempted to undermine Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.  Kremer herself isn’t accused of attacking the Capitol.

State Party delegates unseated incumbent Ginger Howard in favor of Kremer, but kept the other incumbent Jason Thompson.  Kremer and other challengers to the incumbents argued that Thompson and Howard didn’t do enough to support Trump’s 2021 effort to undermine Georgia’s voters.

Trump fanboys this week were for the most part understandably displeased with how President Joe Biden seized the initiative on one-on-one debates with disgraced former President Trump, dangling the bait and snagging his slippery, large-mouthed bass of a quarry all to quickly and easily. The reactions largely tell a story of an anxious, apprehensive MAGA base coming pretty close to admitting – some even saying outright – that this is a bad deal and the fat fuck got played.

“Jake Tapper was one of the leading media figures who spread the treasonous Russian collusion hoax. Trump agreeing to him as a moderator is foolish” – Top comment on a PowerLine Blog article printed Wednesday after CNN announced that Tapper and Dana Bash would be the mods, after Trump had already agreed to Biden’s terms. Meaning it was actually considerably more foolish of a move than this commenter understood it to be at the time. He should be even more pissed.

“The debates will be rigged since it’s CNN and ABC. We all know this is a joke intended to make Trump look bad like the sham trials. Old uncle joe will be hopped up on whatever his masters juice him with and Trump will be treated unfairly by the moderators the entire time. It will be cringe all around” – Top comment on Revolver’s article. That’s a lot of upvotes considering the brutal honesty.

“My fear is whether Biden’s willingness to agree to a debate signals he knows something we don’t about Trump’s fate at the corrupt trials being orchestrated against him. If Biden was confident Trump will receive jail time (like if he has prior knowledge) then he could ‘agree’ to the debate knowing he won’t actually have to appear at a debate, and that he can put the blame on Trump that the debate doesn’t happen. I hope that is not the case, but the way the DNC manipulates the system it is not hard for me to imagine” – Top comment on PJ Media’s article, threatening us with a good time in its imaginative and tantalizing conspiracy theory of Trump being in jail by late June.

“Imagine after being challenged by your rival to multiple anytime, anyplace, no-holds-barred UFC cage matches, ignoring your rival but then challenging him to, say, a boxing match. Then saying no head shots, no combinations, only single jabs with each boxer trading shots. Each round would be 30 seconds. And there would be only 2 rounds. That’s what just happened” – Top comment on the New York Post’s article. Well we wouldn’t put it that way exactly, but yeah. That’s what happened.

“It’s a trap” – Top comment on WeLoveTrumpReport’s article. No the commenter’s Disqus name is not “Admiral Akbar” or any other Rebel Alliance leader. It’s not even a Star Wars character.