Tennessee Senate Republicans on Monday passed a bill claiming “the federal government or other entities acting on the federal government’s behalf or at the federal government’s request may conduct geoengineering experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere, and those activities may occur within the State of Tennessee” and thus prohibits the “intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight,” the Oak Ridger reports.

Maybe it’s a bit of a reach to call the bill a ban on chemtrails, which canonically is a Deep State mind control op rather than a Deep State weather control op. Still, as the article quotes from multiple experts, what these assholes are trying to ban does not exist nor is it even on the drawing board, and we’ll add that even if/when it does, Tennessee law could do fuck all to stop a future federal government from seeding the atmosphere with some chemical agent to mitigate global warming.

The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday were marking up a set of bills, among them HR 7187, the “Protection of Women in Olympic and Amateur Sports Act,” which “prohibits a person whose sex is male from participating in an amateur athletic competition that is designated for females, women, or girls” and predictably got into talk of inspecting genitals and then even more predictably into that masterfully delivered burn from Eric Swalwell as you see with Jim Jordan’s grim reaction above.

Fat-then President Trump told then-Vice President Mike Pence on January 6th, 2021 that the veep would forever doomed in Republican politics (he wasn’t wrong) if he did not get in the way of certifying the results of the 2020 election, the New York Times reports citing the testimony of a person described only as a “White House valet” to the House January 6th Select committee.

“Mike, this is a political career killer if you do this,” Trump told Pence in the Oval Office. Later that day, when handed a note informing him that a civilian had been shot in the middle of the riot at the Capitol, Donald was utterly unconcerned. “I just remember seeing it in front of him,” the valet said of a note card Trump was given bearing news of the casualty as he watched the mayhem on TV. “I don’t remember how it got there or whatever. But there was no, like, reaction.”

The valet was unnamed and we have no idea whether or not he’s Walt Nauta, Trump’s now co-conspirator in the classified documents theft case. The transcript of the interview with the House January 6th Select Committee was one of a set withheld in deference to the White House and Homeland Security as the committee wound down with the end of the 117th Congress, surfacing now as part of traitor-adjacent MAGA Congressman Barry Loudermilk’s investigation of the investigation. “It took a whole lot of work to get these,” Loudermilk told the Times, conceding that “some testimony in it that may not be favorable to Trump. We’re putting it all out there, not doing what the select committee did, and putting things out there that will be favorable to our side.”

US Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday told Politico that it would’ve been “absurd” for him to withhold entirely or force deletions to the cunty and largely false editorializing about Biden’s mental state in documents fuckup investigation special counsel Robert Hur’s final report.

“The idea that an attorney general would edit or redact or censor the special counsel’s explanation for why the special counsel reached the decision the special counsel did – that’s absurd,” Garland said, even though that’s more or less what Bill Barr did to Robert Mueller’s report.

Anyway Garland’s right given the absolute shitstorm that would 100 percent definitely had happened if he had forced edits as Hur no doubt would’ve gone running to Jim Jordan and James Comer to have a round-the-clock Fox News circlejerk about a cover-up and all that shit that would still be going on by this point. The MSM and right wing media had their fun for a few days and got bored talking about Biden’s age. Then came the State of the Union and Hur’s flop of a hearing, so it’s basically water under the bridge. Garland’s original sin was caving to the MAGA chodes to be “balanced” while Jack Smith was investigating Trump too when the Biden documents story first broke. If he had just held out for a few weeks until Mike Pence’s own document fuckup came out then it would’ve been fine. But if he really had to do it then he could’ve at least picked a Bush or Clinton appointee instead of a smarmy fucking punk-ass Trumpster like Hur.

Donald, I’m glad you asked. pic.twitter.com/janV4f4L3p

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 21, 2024

Huh. It’s almost as though you could have seen this ad from the Biden campaign coming after Trump’s fanboys and then the fat fuck himself have lately been telling voters to ask themselves if they’re better off than they were four years ago. Especially since they started this month which was, if we’re remembering correctly, when the COVID-19 virus began spreading rapidly across the United States and the death toll quickly skyrocketed as people succumbed to the infection.

Well let’s see how this goes. Maybe the Trump campaign and their propagandists will just try to ignore it and pretend the pandemic didn’t happen. Or maybe they’ll start a whole counter-op and try to litigate it at a molecular level like they did with that “bloodbath” shitshow. Here’s hoping for the second one, where they just find new and interesting ways to make it worse for them, just like Donald himself did four years ago. Only this time Americans won’t be suffering as much.

Dem Maine Congressman Jared Golden and Pennsylvania Republican Brian Fitzpatrick on Thursday blocked pay raises for members in the 2024 annual spending bill, Politico’s Nick Wu reports.

Kind of fucking stupid and short-sighted. Members of Congress should get paid at the very minimum $1 million a year. Now why would National Zero print something that ridiculous? An increase in pay lowers the incentive to quit and go work in lobbying as the mere prospect of future potential earnings working for corporate interests influences currently serving members. It would also reduce the incentives to engage in more garden-variety corruption like insider trading, bribery, taking gold bars and a Mercedes from the Egyptian government, et cetera.

Of course a raise like that would absolutely have to be paired with far, far stricter public disclosure requirements, and personal scrutiny on the level of what CIA agents face. Pay should also be tied to performance, like any delay in funding the government or failure to pass any bill that the other chamber passed with more than 60 percent support should result in immediate pay freezes.

Higher pay, deeper colonsocopies, and more pain for fucking off from the job is the way to go.

Michigan MAGA lawyer Stefanie Lambert surrendered to cops in the Great Lakes State on Thursday, after two weeks on the run that included another arrest in DC at a hearing where she was defending QAnon freak former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, CNN’s Marshall Cohen reports. It’s not clear why she turned herself in rather than being extradited or transported back to Michigan to face the warrant for skipping out on her court date in the criminal case against her for tampering with a stolen Dominion tabulator.

Fat former President Trump has no campaign events scheduled as CNN reports that he’s been spending his days mostly playing golf and hosting donors at Mar-a-Lago, while over the last two weeks Joe Biden has hit nearly every battleground state. In the same period Trump went to one and held another rally in Ohio, both of which drew a shit ton of negative mainstream coverage.

Trump’s minions claimed to CNN that his schedule has been eaten up by court appearances, ones that the article pointedly notes were not mandatory for him to attend, and that he’ll start getting back on the trail soon. A parallel report by Politico this morning said that at a campaign conference call last Friday leadership acknowledged that it had been a particularly bad week between the stupid shit Trump said about cutting Social Security and admitting that he didn’t have money to pay the $464 million appeal bond in New York. That was before he said there would be “a bloodbath” if he didn’t win reelection and then admitted to Fox News’s Howie Kurtz that he was eyeing pushing for a 16 week abortion ban. Then that changed to 15 weeks two days later. And he said Jews who vote for Democrats hate their religion. Also his campaign canceled an Arizona rally to save money.

“The only person who can beat Donald Trump is Donald Trump,” former senior Trump campaign adviser David Urban told Politico. “I don’t think we’re there yet,” he added and there’s no additional context or framing for that second part. We hope it’s him trying to self-soothe and he meant more like “I’m not freaking the fuck out for my Orange Jesus yet, but I’m starting to worry.”

Botswana Minister of Environment and Tourism Dumezweni Mthimkhulu is pissed enough over a bill moving through British Parliament banning the import of trophies taken on hunting safaris that he’s threatening to ship 10,000 live elephants to Britain and dump them in central London to let the Limeys know what it’s like living with a large surplus of the massive pachyderms, Sky News reports.

Mthimkhulu later told Sky it was more of a rhetorical something and they weren’t actually going to pull a Greg Abbott. Then there’s the whole thing about Botswana being landlocked and not having the naval or merchant marine fleet necessary to ship 10,000 elephants more than 5,000 miles north to Britain. Would probably be pretty costly and beyond the means of Botswana too.

That said maybe they could manage like 100. Why not just charter a cargo ship out of Namibia and then set the elephants loose by the docks? Botswana would probably go viral for that kind of stunt.

Anyway Mthimkhulu’s real point was that the elephant population is out of control and he says hunting is more like a culling, estimating that the circa 150,000 in Botswana is 100,000 too many since conservation efforts have worked too well from a nadir of 10,000 elephants in 1984.

Georgia state House GOP lawmakers are set to vote Thursday on erecting a monument honoring a prominent Black jurist who, in defiance of the odds, rose from humble beginnings in the Peach State to a seat on the bench of the highest court in the land, married a white neo-Confederate, and even got a rich Caucasian guy to buy an RV for him, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

It’s not clear yet if the bill funding to build a statue of Justice Clarence Thomas on the state Capitol grounds also includes an appropriation for additional security to prevent vandals from putting on a hat similar to the QAnon Shaman’s, painting the face white, taping green Monopoly money to its hands, or just the old dumping fake blood on it, but they might do well to tuck in an extra line item.

Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed the 40,000 mark Thursday morning, a telltale sign of the massive gains in wealth realized by the Biden Administration and its management of the economic recovery after the brutal recession wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The impressive figure was spotted during an unrelated segment of Fox Business News in which far right New York Congresswoman Claudia Tenney complained that Democrats aren’t helping impeach President Biden and said Republicans just need more evidence to prove their case to Americans.

FBI officials have resumed contact with social media platforms to share tips on foreign disinformation campaigns after arguments at the Supreme Court from MAGA plaintiffs including the Gateway Pundit and the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana seeking to prohibit government from having any agency against right wing bullshit went badly, NBC News reports.

“In coordination with the Department of Justice, the FBI recently implemented procedures to facilitate sharing information about foreign malign influence with social media companies in a way that reinforces that private companies are free to decide on their own whether and how to take action on that information,” said an FBI spokesperson told NBC on Wednesday. That they didn’t even wait on the official ruling has gotta be an extra hard dickpunch to Jim Jordan and the rest of the chodes who think the Kremlin has a right to free speech on America’s internet in an election year.

“Today, my Administration is cancelling student loans for an additional 78,000 public service workers – teachers, nurses, firefighters, and more – through Public Service Loan Forgiveness. These public service workers have dedicated their careers to serving their communities, but because of past administrative failures, never got the relief they were entitled to under the law.”

“Because of the fixes my Administration has made, we have now cancelled student debt for over 870,000 public service workers – compared to only about 7,000 public service borrowers ever receiving forgiveness prior to my Administration. And through all of our various student debt relief actions, nearly four million Americans have had their student debt cancelled under my Administration,” says a Biden statement on the slow end-run around the Supreme Court’s fuckery.

Images of fat former President Trump and Jeffrey Epstein with text saying only “Paid for by ProtectChildrenQ LLC” have been appearing on electronic billboards across Georgia and North Carolina recently and the Daily Beast reports that nobody has any idea who the hell is behind it.

North Carolina liberal Jeff Wagenius has been documenting the billboards on TikTok, saying “I live in this little tiny Trump town and there’s one person here that I want to be friends with, cuz this right here deserves the best beer we have in town on me, I swear to God.” A Georgia Trump fan was predictably pissed. “This is right above our welcome sign to our town. Anything to fit that left narrative. Y’all ought to be ashamed. That’s pathetiful,” they said on TikTok, per the Beast.

“Pathetiful” probably wasn’t a typo. The only public records data the Beast could find on the “ProtectChildrenQ LLC” was a Delaware registration, but that does not necessarily they’re associated with the Biden Campaign. “People who want to engage in skullduggery in American elections anonymously don’t have to go to tax havens to create organizations. They can just use Delaware. There’s going to be no information about who created it,” campaign finance lawyer Brett Kappel said, adding that the pic of Trump and Epstein together in the 1990s colors well inside the lines of FEC requirements. “It’s a clever way to avoid FEC reporting. It doesn’t really advocate anything, it’s just a picture of two lowlifes, one of whom happens to be running for president and one who killed himself in prison. Draw your own conclusions about why those people would be together.”

Colombia’s government on Wednesday announced they’re ready to start collecting an estimated $17 billion worth of silver, gold, and emeralds from the wreck of a Spanish galleon sunk off its coast during a 1708 battle with a British warship in the War of the Spanish Succession, ABC News reports.

Spain’s foreign ministry had no comment, nor did ABC ask them. However it’s easy and fun to imagine that the Spaniards are pretty fucking pissed the Colombians are just going to help themselves to all the shit that was supposed to fund one of the sides in the war, ABC doesn’t say which. It was probably either the Habsburgs or not the Habsburgs. Or maybe one incest-deformed branch of the Habsburgs against a marginally less incest-deformed branch of the Habsburgs.

Anyway the Colombian Navy will start unloading the wreck of the San Jose next month. With an estimated 11 million gold coins to be found expect their government to invest heavily in advertising on Fox News, providing stiff competition for commercial slots against other collectible currencies.

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken on Wednesday submitted a draft resolution calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip to the UN Security Council, Axios reports.

Blinken told a Saudi Arabian journalist in an interview that the draft calls “for an immediate ceasefire tied to the release of hostages, and we hope very much that countries will support that. I think that would send a strong message, a strong signal. But, of course, we stand with Israel and its right to defend itself, to make sure that October 7th never happens again, but at the same time, it’s imperative that the civilians who are in harm’s way and who are suffering so terribly – that we focus on them, that we make them a priority, protecting the civilians, getting them humanitarian assistance. And we’ve been leading the effort to do that, to get more in, to get more to the people who need it. We are pressing on that as hard as we can.”

GOP lawmaker says Republicans ‘don’t have the guts’ to impeach Biden https://t.co/lHcG1JaTdE

— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 21, 2024

As it already struggled to raise funds, Donald Trump’s “Save America” leadership PAC spent more than $6.5 million on his legal fees in February, averaging $238,000 per day, including Leap Day, the Daily Beast reports; it raised just $6 million in the month.

The accounting:  Lawyers took home $5.6 million, with a half-million payment to the lawyer who’s the definition of “failing up” Alina Habba being deferred.  Another $645,000 went to a record-keeping company relating to his New York State civil suit.  And who is going to be surprised by the PAC sending $150,000 to the Article III Project, a farther-right Federalist Society-type group.

Another interesting tidbit:  the PAC only has $4 million in cash in the bank, meaning that it’s living the PAC version of paycheck-to-paycheck; in fact, it’s underwater.  It won’t be able to fund anything other than Trump’s legal bills, so money that would traditionally go to down-ticket candidates won’t be distributed.

Addressing some of the national security problems Donald Trump taking a loan from a billionaire of a foreign country could cause on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Andrew Weissman summed up nicely how fucked up our national security would be with Donald Trump around any classified information:

Having been in the intelligence community, this is one– this is not and shouldn’t be a partisan issue.  What Donald Trump has done, not just–leave aside whether he gets the [bond] money from a foreign person or adversary–what he has done in the way he treated both the intelligence community and denigrated them and in the way he’s treated classified documents isn’t a future harm; that is a current harm to our national security.

What Ambassador [Susan] Rice knows is that in order to keep this country secured, you have to complete alliances and trust with your colleagues overseas, with the so-called Five Eyes.  Other countries need to trust that you will keep their secrets and they can work with you to prevent terrorism….  All of that is put in jeopardy when they’re thinking that this man, Donald Trump, could be back in the Oval Office because all of those things can become public and that is not in the interest of our allies and even our adversaries who are willing to work with us on this problem.  It is an incredibly serious problem for this country now.

“What I did today,” South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace says as she preps to pat herself on the back, “was implicate Joe Biden in every single aspect of Hunter Biden, Jim Biden and their business associates’ foreign interest and business dealings.  Nobody has done that yet, and it’s really important for the American people to judge for themselves who’s telling the truth.”

Editor’s note:  Nancy Mace’s questioning was televised.  She established no such link.  Her five minutes of questioning was a mess of loosely- or never-connected statements that she somehow concluded implicated the President. In fact, at one point in the hearing, professional wrestling freak Jim Jordan admitted they had not uncovered anything that merits impeachment.