Brazil’s Supreme Court on Sunday named tweaker billionaire Elon Musk as a target in an ongoing investigation into fake news and opened a new investigation into obstruction, the AP reports.

“The flagrant conduct of obstruction of Brazilian justice, incitement of crime, the public threat of disobedience of court orders and future lack of cooperation from the platform are facts that disrespect the sovereignty of Brazil,” wrote Justice Alexandre de Moraes in the decision after having publicly named Musk as a target in a “disinformation campaign” against the court. The whole shitshow started when Musk publicly vowed to ignore court orders to ban far-right, pro-Bolsonaro Brazilian accounts connected to the January 8th, 2023 Brasilia Capitol riot.

Entertaining billionaire scumbags during his big weekend fundraiser in a Palm Beach mansion owned by subprime mortgage crisis profiteer John Paulson, fat former President Trump inverted his famous 2018 line about “shithole countries,” telling the plutocrats he wanted the United States to draw more immigrants from “nice” places “like Denmark,” the New York Times reports.

“These are people coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster. They’ve been shipped in, brought in, deposited in our country, and they’re with us tonight. And when I said, you know, Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries, I’m trying to be nice. Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?” Trump said to laughs from the crowd gathered on the ultra-exclusive island community. He then pointed across the water to the diverse city of West Palm Beach as a waystop in the ongoing “invasion.”

“In fact, I don’t think they’re on this island, but I know they’re on that island right there. That’s West Palm. Congratulations over there. But they’ll be here. Eventually, they’ll be here,” Trump added.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s House Majority PAC is reserving $146 million in an initial round of TV spots and $40 million in digital ads in nearly 60 media markets in what the group’s president, Mike Smith, calls a “trench warfare” battle to win the majority, CNN reports.

“We need four seats to win back the majority. That’s it. It’s a very tough four seats. Every single one of those is going to be trench warfare. We’re going have to invest a lot of money, hence the $186 million, but there’s a clear path to doing it,” Smith said, adding that redistricting had narrowed the pickup opportunities. “I would anticipate that it will be a relatively narrow majority… The universe has gotten smaller in terms of the most competitive seats, for sure.”

“I will be putting out my statement on Abortion and Abortion Rights tomorrow morning. Republicans, and all others, must follow their hearts and minds, but remember that, like Ronald Reagan before me, I, and most other Republicans, believe in EXCEPTIONS for Rape, Incest, and Life of the Mother,” presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump posted on social media, obviously recognizing that the GOP’s strict anti-abortion stand will cost him votes, particularly after appointing the judges who overturned Roe.   “Great love and compassion must be shown when even thinking about the subject of LIFE, but at the same time we must use common sense in realizing that we have an obligation to the salvation of our Nation, which is currently in serious DECLINE, TO WIN ELECTIONS, without which we will have nothing other than failure, death, and destruction. We will not let that happen. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

A 35-year-old man whose last known address was in California was arrested for allegedly starting a fire in a Burlington building outside the door of Vermont Independent-ish Senator Bernie Sanders’ third-floor office on Friday morning, NBC News reports.

Shant Soghomonian of Riverside, California entered an office building and went to the third floor where the Senator’s local office is located.  With staff members in the office, Soghomonian sprayed a liquid on the walls and floor around the office door and lit it on fire.  The building’s fire sprinkler system effectively contained the fire, but caused damage throughout the building.  Fire damage was limited and there were no injuries reported.

Soghomonian, also known as Michael Soghomonian, was charged with intentionally using fire to damage a building.  If convicted, he faces 5 to 20 years in prison and a quarter million dollar fine.  Police say Soghomonian has yet to state a motive.

“Would have been awesome if the Supreme Court waited to release Dobbs until after November 2024. We will win anyway, though,” wrote D-list MAGA Twitter asshole Joey Mannarino on Sunday before deleting it inexplicably… or maybe not inexplicably because it was admitting a little too much.

The Washington Post (gift link) presents a good profile on who stands to gain what from Trump Media becoming a publicly traded company on NASDAQ.  As you would expect, Trump himself makes a lot of money on paper, but the headaches that come with it might prove too overwhelming when the true value is assessed.

Donald Trump himself currently has 78.7 million shares, and as the Post points out, he’ll hit an “earnout” reward of an additional 36 million if the company’s share price stays above $17.50 through April 26th, 20 days after the DWAC merger.  It’s bound to do that given that there will be no major sales of the stock in the next weeks that would affect the price, so Trump can add on an additional $1.8 billion in meaningless “paper wealth” to his puffed-up campaign resume.

Some other notables:

• Trump’s first lapdog in the House, former “farmer” and Trump Media’s CEO Devin Nunes received a salary increase to $1 million in 2024, from $750,000 in 2023, plus he’ll get a $600,000 “retention bonus” for staying on after the merger.  Why someone would retain a CEO who oversaw a $54 million loss with no plan to turn a profit is anyone’s gues– No it’s not. There’s no need to guess.  It’s corruption.
  Read More ▶ “SEC-regulated Trump Media looks like incubator for investigations”

Right after his boss Lara Trump came perilously close to admitting to batshit idiot Maria Bartiromo that the Orange God Emperor lost Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2020, RNC Chairman Mike Whatley worried that adversaries like China, Iran, and Ukraine were going to meddle in the 2024 election.

Days after President Joe Biden spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which Biden “made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers,” Israel announced it was pulling a division of troops from Gaza, NBC News reports.

Facing his own political pressure to push an end to Israel’s siege on Gaza where civilians face shortages of food, water, shelter and medical care, Biden has pushed diplomatic efforts to focus Israeli military action on hunting Hamas terrorists and freeing hostages rather than threatening non-combatant Palestinians.  The Israeli slaughter of refugees trying to get food from aid trucks and the missile attack killing aid workers from the World Central Kitchen put the world’s vision on Israeli recklessness and potential war crimes.

Israeli military forces said it was withdrawing the 98th commando division from Gaza “to recuperate and prepare for future operations,” leaving the Nahal brigade and the 162nd division, between 4,000 and 7,000 troops, in the territory.  Military leaders have not announced a replacement force nor have they released information about the 98th returning to Gaza, leading military analysts to speculate Israel is changing tactics.

“The IDF contingent in Gaza will be the lowest since the ground invasion started in late October last year, made of only two brigades along an axis that cuts Gaza into two,” an analyst with a think tank noted. “Essentially, this means the IDF is probably moving to a more long-term counter-terrorism campaign of more target raids. This is something the U.S. had been asking for months.”

A supposed “expert” on optical safety says people should not try to just slap together their own glasses for viewing Monday’s solar eclipse over portions of the eastern half of the US. Total poindexter Dr Ralph Chou, who the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle calls “the world’s leading expert on eclipse eye safety” and “wrote the ISO standard for eclipse glasses,” warned Americans shouldn’t “try to save a penny and risk your eyesight” in an interview with NASA.

Another Ivory Tower nerd, Indiana University School of Optometry’s Dr Hin Cheung, says that regular sunglasses, “regardless of how dark they appear, or how many pairs of them you wear, will not reach this level of protection and therefore are NOT safe for viewing the sun or the eclipse directly.”

It’s not clear if Chin and Cheung are in on the racket for “Solar Eclipse Glasses Approved 2024 (10 Pack) – AAS, ISO & CE Certified” for $18.99 at Amazon, but they might as well be.

Constantly attentive to his public image and never wanting to finish second in anything superficial, Donald Trump’s campaign announced it brought in more than $50 million at a Saturday evening fundraiser at the adjudicated rapist’s money-laundering Florida super club, CNN reports.

The $50.5 million haul nearly doubles the $26 million the Biden campaign brought in during an event last week held in New York City and featuring appearances by former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as President Biden.

The Trump event cost donors from $250,000 for the cheapest seat up to a top-end donation of $824,600, the maximum allowed, to become a “Chairman” of… something, and dine at Donald Trump’s table, where you can enjoy a lukewarm overcooked fast food cheeseburger slathered in ketchup and served with cold fries.

It has been my honor to be working for the people of Colorado for the past three and a half years, and will be my honor to continue doing so.

Thank you @MattGaetz for coming to join us today. Together, we are going to make America great again!

We're on the edge of history! pic.twitter.com/hqa1TSJ8ct

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) April 7, 2024

The combination of an alleged Florida child sex trafficker under investigation by the House Ethics Committee and a 36-year-old exhibitionist gramma with a theater fetish would typically lead one to think of an offender watch list, but not in this case. Instead, it’s a Colorado GOP meeting, presumably held more than 500 feet from the nearest school, where Matt Gaetz was the featured speaker, introduced by Lauren Boebert, because these are the future leaders of the Republican Party.  (And of course there was no hanky-panky going on:  Gaetz’s bride tweeted her approval, like a good Republican wife.

South Dakota’s official out-of-state dentistry endorser Kristi Noem, who is also the Republican governor of the state, has been banned from a South Dakota Sioux reservation for making comments linking tribal leaders to drug cartels, the Guardian reports.

“This person has made a lot of accusations about the tribes, about the cartel, council representatives being in bed with the cartel, stuff like that,” Robert Walters, a Cheyenne River Sioux representative said during a tribal council meeting this week.  “It’s all false information. I make a motion at this time to banish her from the Cheyenne River Reservation … I believe there has to be some kind of policy set up for her to show up at these tribal meetings. She can’t just go in there and do her thing.”  This is the second reservation Noem has been barred from; the Oglala Sioux tribe barred Noem from its lands in February.

“We’ve got some tribal leaders that I believe are personally benefiting from the cartels being there and that’s why they attack me every day. But I’m going to fight for the people who actually live in those situations, who call me and text me every day and say, ‘Please, dear governor, please come help us in Pine Ridge. We are scared,’” Noem said at a March community meeting in Winner.

This is going to take a bit to unravel:  The Republican challenger for Jon Tester’s Senate seat in Montana, a former Navy SEAL, lied after being wounded in Afghanistan and then lied again about being shot during a visit to a national park more than a year after returning home.

Per the Washington Post (via gift link), Tim Sheehy has boasted about being tough, citing a scar in his arm as his wound from his duty in Afghanistan.  “I got thick skin — though it’s not thick enough. I have a bullet stuck in this arm still from Afghanistan,” he was recorded saying at a December campaign event.  But according to a park ranger’s report of a 2015 incident, Sheehy claimed he got the arm wound after a handgun he was cleaning while camping at Glacier National Park fell and fired–why a former Navy SEAL would be cleaning a loaded weapon is a different question–causing the arm wound.

Now, in 2024, after being questioned about the 2015 ranger report uncovered by the Post, Sheehy came up with a third, exceptionally complicated story:  Sheehy told the Post he admits to lying to the park ranger in 2015.  He did so, he said, to cover up the fact that he never reported being shot while in Afghanistan because he did not want to get his platoonmates in trouble.  He claims he does not know if the wound, which he described in his mandatory candidate autobiography as a result of a ricochet, came from friendly fire or an enemy shot, so instead of potentially getting causing a huge investigation that could implicate a careless SEAL, he chose to just live with a bullet in his arm.

Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose informed the state Democratic leadership that President Joe Biden is at risk of being excluded from the state’s November election ballot not because of some fucked up political shenanigans by the GOP but because the state Party scheduled its nominating convention for more than a week after Ohio’s deadline to submit slates, NBC News reports.

In a rare display of competence and fairness by a Republican office holder, LaRose sent a letter to Ohio Democratic Party Chairwoman Liz Walters noting the state Party’s convention date.  “The Democratic National Convention is scheduled to convene on August 19, 2024, which occurs more than a week after the August 7 deadline to certify a presidential candidate to the office,” LaRose wrote to Walters, cc’ing the Democratic leaders of the state legislature and senate as well.

LaRose helpfully offered two potential ways to address the issue:  move the dates of the nomination vote to before the deadline or by getting the Republican-dominated legislature to grant an extension to the Democratic Party to submit its formal notification by May 9th, the 90-day administrative deadline for such an extension.  With those options, the new date for the state Democratic convention has not yet been announced.

Fat former President Trump on Saturday pulled his martyr act again, posting that Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan is persecuting him by “not allowing me to talk, thereby violating the Law and the Constitution, all at once. It is so bad what he is trying to get away with – How was he even chosen for this case??? I heard he fought like hell to get it, and all of the rest of them also! If this Partisan Hack wants to put me in the ‘clink’ for speaking the open and obvious TRUTH, I will gladly become a Modern Day Nelson Mandela – It will be my GREAT HONOR. We have to Save our Country from these Political Operatives masquerading as Prosecutors and Judges, and I am willing to sacrifice my Freedom for that worthy cause. We are a Failing Nation, but on November 5th, we will become a Great Nation again” at the end of a long string of other bullshit about him being the victim.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin recently commanded his country’s tech industry to come up with a local competitor to the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S and Sony Playstation 5 video game consoles for what we imagine to be another channel of regime propaganda and graft, Kotaku reports.

Putin gave the industry a deadline of June for the effort, spearheaded mostly by shitty Facebook knockoff VK, to also come up with its own online ecosystem, something that took literally decades and probably tens of billions for the American and Japanese companies to develop to work reliably.

“My observation is that when Trump began polling consistently ahead of Biden with an increasing lead, then polls began to emerge showing just the opposite as if trying to tamp down the run-away aspect of the race. Almost as if a call went out” – The current top comment on a PJ Media opinion-ish piece titled “Need Help Figuring Out When Not to Trust a Poll?” the first of not one but two articles Friday by PJ’s Matt Margolis sweating a Franklin and Marshall College survey finding Biden up by 10 points over Trump in a head-to-head in Pennsylvania – but by a probably more realistic 2 percent when Robert F Kennedy Jr and the other Russian assets are included in the field.

And damn. If the MAGA kids didn’t have circular logic then they’d have no logic at all, right? Like maybe give him credit for finding a marginally less basic way of saying simply “I believe the favorable poll numbers but not the unfavorable ones,” but that’s, uh, pretty much what he’s saying.

It is definitely true that “Trump began polling consistently ahead of Biden” in September 2023 or so after leading fairly comfortably in whatever head-to-head matchups were tested before then. We really have no idea what the hell happened other than that was the month that it seemed like pollsters got bored of asking about the fat bastard’s criminal indictments and instead started to focus on Biden’s age. That cannot be the sole reason though and it’s largely pointless to dwell on.

At least three Nebraska state Senators told the Nebraska Examiner that fat former President Trump this week threatened to end the career of Republican state Senator Tom Brewer if he did not get on board with the plan to alter the state’s electoral college regime and automatically hand a key vote to him before this year’s legislative session ends. Brewer is already term limited.

• Trump’s media company has lost about a third of its value in one week, costing Trump $1.5 billion in paper value.  That’s the power of the Trump brand.
• The United States is creating jobs at a rate 50% faster under Joe Biden than in any other presidential term.  Give the man credit:  from the edge of a recession to record job increases and steady GDP growth.  Yes, we are demonstrably better off than we were four years ago.  
• John Eastman asking a court to delay his disbarment to continue working as a lawyer to pay his legal bills is like a heart surgeon asking the state board to maintain his medical board so he can operate on patients to pay off his malpractice judgments.  He’s been sanctioned; He’s not above it.  Like so many in Trump’s circle, Eastman never believed he’d experience any repercussions for trying to undermine the Constitution.
• Four years ago today, Donald Trump pushed hydroxychloroquine as the Miracle Anti-Covid Cure.  That was before “natural immunity,” injecting disinfectants, and ivermectin rose in popularity.  Republicans are intent on proving Darwinism.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CLXVII”