Four people from Los Angeles are charged with multiple felonies relating to the organized theft of more than $300,000 in Lego sets from retailers around Southern California in what officials are calling a well-organized criminal enterprise, USA Today reports.

The California Highway Patrol charged 44-year-old Jeremy Johnson of Orange, 39-year-old Marta Hardt of Huntington Beach, 47-year-old Chung-Pei Yu of Studio City, and 35-year-old Shen Li of Brea with organized retail theft, grand theft and conspiracy to commit a crime.

Police say two of the suspects would steal expensive Lego sets, some costing up to $800, which their partners would fence to associates who would then sell them to unsuspecting buyers online or at swap meets for hobbyists.

Ford Motors on Thursday announced a recall of 22,270 recent Bronco and 20,382 Escape models for a potentially faulty fuel injector, Jalopnik reports and yeah our headline’s missing a comma on purpose. How else are we supposed to evoke a slow drive down a memory lane of an LA freeway?

Fun fact: The infamous white Ford Bronco was actually the infamous white Ford Broncos. The one that OJ Simpson not really allegedly but definitely fucking did drive back and forth to the home where he murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her acquaintance Ron Goldman belonged to Hertz Rent-a-Car, while the one from the highway chase was owned by his friend, former NFL teammate, and sycophant Al Cowlings, who was driving the vehicle. Cowlings was such a suckup to the far more prolific Simpson that he bought the exact same color and model truck as OJ’s.

Cowlings’s Bronco is on display at the Alcatraz East Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, alongside Ted Bundy’s Volkswagen Beetle, John Dillinger’s 1933 Essex Terraplane, and the “death car” that Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway were filmed in when they were playing Bonnie and Clyde in a titular 1967 movie. Not really sure why they put a movie prop in with the real, actually historic vehicles.

Anyway OJ’s Bronco was actually owned by Hertz and was impounded by investigators as evidence since it was used in the crime. For whatever reason, even though he was “acquitted,” the truck was never returned to him or Hertz and was subsequently destroyed, ESPN reported in 2017.

BREAKING: GOP Rep. Stefanik Reveals There is Incriminating AUDIO RECORDING of Biden Telling His Ghostwriter, “I Just Found All the Classified Documents Stuff Downstairs” (VIDEO) via @gatewaypundit https://t.co/aM38ghAIgC

— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) April 11, 2024

An 85 year-old Idaho woman’s memory about how exactly she shot an armed intruder dead with a .357 Magnum revolver last month is a little fuzzy but local prosecutors are pretty confident it was a case of justifiable homicide and are not investigating any further, Fox News reports.

That octogenarian Christine Jenneiahn herself took multiple 9mm rounds to her abdomen, leg, arm and chest when the fatally wounded 39 year-old Derek Condon returned then fire might explain the memory lapses, as Jenneiahn apparently recalled in pretty specific detail about how she was able to retrieve the hand cannon despite being partially cuffed to a chair while Condon looked for two safes.

“At one point while Condon was downstairs, Christine drug the chair she was handcuffed to into her bedroom, and retrieved her 357 magnum revolver from under her pillow,” wrote Bingham County prosecutor Ryan Jolley. “She then went into the living room and hid the revolver between the arm rest and cushion of a couch next to where she was seated and waited to see what Condon did next.”

Jenneiahn then decided it was “now or never” and things got real. With Condon having found out and herself gravely wounded, she then collapsed to the floor, laying there for 10 hours before her disabled son – who slept through the 2:00 AM gunfight – came across her and called 911. The moral of the story is sometimes old ladies are really tough and you should not ever fuck with them.

A new study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows there is no link between young adults receiving a coronavirus vaccine and incidents of heart disease or fatal heart events in them, NBC News reports in another reality-based study that won’t penetrate the thick walls of the MAGA Bubble.

The study examined the death certificates and lab reports of more than 1,200 Oregon residents between the ages of 16 and 30 who died of a heart-related condition or unknown causes between June 2020 and December 2022.  During that period, more than one million people received either the Pfizer or the Moderna mRNA vaccine in Oregon.

In the hundreds of cases studied, only 40 people within the demographic died of heart attacks or unknown causes, and only three died within 100 days of getting the vaccine:  two had serious underlying heart conditions and one’s cause of death remains a mystery because there was no underlying health issues, signs of illicit drug use, or other obvious contributing factor. 

Ann Walsh Bradley, a liberal judge who has spent thirty years on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, announced that she’ll retire from the bench this Spring, allowing Democratic Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers to appoint a replacement who will then stand for election in the following year, NBC News reports.

The move jeopardizes the current liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which flipped with the election of Janet Protasiewicz to a vacant seat in 2023.  In Wisconsin’s system, the governor gets to fill a mid-term vacancy, but the appointee needs to stand for election typically after one year on the Supreme Court, but that schedule may vary if other justices are slated for their elections during the election cycle.  Terms are ten years, and there is no mandatory retirement.

Since 1960, only two Wisconsin justices failed to win reelection, and both happened in the last 20 years.  Louis B. Butler, an appointee of Democratic Governor Jim Doyle in 2004, lost reelection in 2008; Daniel Kelly, a 2016 appointment by the previous Ron DeSantis-like savior of the GOP, Scott Walker, failed to win reelection in 2020, losing to Democrat Jill Karofsky.

Mistake in an earlier draft of the LA Times’s obituary for OJ Simpson.

Trump minions Chris LaCivita and Susan Wiles on Thursday formally demanded the Commission on Presidential Debates schedule more and earlier face-offs between their Orange God Emperor and President Biden, writing in a letter to co-chairs Frank Fahrenkopf Jr and Antonia Hernandez that “in 2020, the Commission ceded to the wishes of the Biden campaign on every front, refusing to move up the dates of the debates, failing to reschedule the debate canceled by COVID-19 [that was Trump’s fault], cutting off President Trump’s microphone over and over [also Trump’s fault and the mute button applied to Biden too] in the middle of a debate, and in the case of the first debate, selecting a demonstrably anti-Trump moderator clearly positioned to aid Joe Biden [lol].”

“Fairness in such a setting is paramount and the Commission must ensure that the 2024 Commission-sponsored debates are truly fair and conducted impartially. The Commission must move up the timetable of its proposed 2024 debates to ensure more Americans have a full chance to see the candidates before they start voting, and we would argue for adding more debates in addition to those on the currently proposed schedule. We have already indicated President Trump is willing to debate anytime, anyplace, and anywhere – and the time to start these debates is now.”

Doesn’t really feel like they’re in a position to demand any conditions right now if they’re also demanding more debates. Again we have to point out that pushing for more debates simply isn’t what leading campaigns do (look no further than Trump having completely fucked off from every one of the GOP primary face-offs). Now we’re not trying to get ahead of our skis here, but maybe Trump and his scumbags know something we don’t. Maybe their private internal polling is saying something different than what all the MSM horserace polls are saying. Why else are they so thristy?

New Jersey Senator Gold Bars Bob Menendez will face a jury starting early next month as a New York judge on Thursday ruled that Bob and his wife/co-defendant Nadine can be tried separately, scuttling a delay to (tentatively) July 8th that Bob had gotten prosecutors to agree to on Wednesday on account of Nadine’s health issues, MSNBC reports. Probably won’t be a very long trial.

“Crooked Joe Biden and his crew of Hacks and Thugs, led by Merrick Garland and Deranged Jack Smith, are working overtime to try to illegally intimidate and harass respected Federal Judge Aileen Cannon. They are calling her terrible names, wrongfully threatening her with Impeachment, and disrespecting her, all because they want her to act like the dishonest, politically biased, and conflicted Judges in New York, and not like the fair and impartial Judge that she is. These Persecutors are using Third World tactics in a corrupt ploy to ‘play the ref.’ However, no matter how hard he tries, Deranged Jack Smith will never be Coach Bobby Knight, a Basketball Legend for all time, who led the last undefeated team in College Basketball. Coach Knight would always ‘play the refs,’ but not to change the last call, to change the next one,” posted fat former President Trump.

Never mind that he simply made up that shit about the harassment and intimidation, that his own lawyers tried and failed to get Judges Juan Merchan and Tanya Chutkan removed from his cases, that he and his fans have harassed the shit out of every judge except Cannon. Skip that for now…

…because the Bobby Knight thing is just so fucking stupid when this is literally the second news story that comes up in a Google search for “ncaa basketball ref misconduct.” Aileen Cannon wouldn’t be anywhere near this goddamned case if she was held to the same standard as an NCAA ref.

Former CourtTV celebrity and Hertz rent-a-car spokesman OJ Simpson died of cancer at the age of 76 on Thursday, nearly 30 years after he led a famous car chase in a white Ford Bronco.

The Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia on Thursday named their own executive director Pete Skandalakis to serve as special prosecutor in investigating Georgia Lt Gov Burt Jones over his involvement in disgraced former President Trump’s failed post-2020 election coup attempt in the Peach State. The only reason Jones wasn’t indicted already in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s sprawling RICO case against Team MAGA was because she fucked up and campaigned for Jones’s Democrat opponent in the 2022 election and a judge ordered her recusal.

“Pursuant to the authority contained in OCGA § 15-18-5, Peter J Skandalakis, Executive Director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, or his designee, will be appointed to act as District Attorney Pro Tempore, Atlanta Judicial Circuit, in the matter concerning Burt Jones. In accordance with State Bar Rule 3.8 Special Responsibilities of a Prosecutor and pending litigation, no further comments will be made at this time” said a notice from the Georgia PAC.

Reform UK Party head Nigel Farage won’t tolerate his Party’s candidates not pulling their own weight, and he wants them to know how seriously he takes it:  candidates who don’t put in the effort or who express opinions contrary to Party dicta will be removed.  And Farage means it, so he dropped York Central Parliament candidate Tommy Carkwell from the Party because Carkwell has been too lazy in campaigning, the York Press reports.

According to a spokesman, the Party officially notified Carkwell and another candidate they were being dropped on April 9th because they weren’t in touch with their voters, doing campaign events, and failing to keep in communication with Party leaders.  “We can’t afford to have people doing nothing in an election year,” the spokesperson said.  “They were inactive candidates and we need candidates who are active to give people the candidates they deserve.”

Efforts to reach Carkwell for comment on the Reform Party abandoning him were unsuccessful because Carkwell died on February 9th.  “Reform was not aware that Mr. Cawkwell had passed away,” Reform UK spokesperson Gawain Towler said. “Naturally I am mortified that through ignorance I did not realize the reason for his inactivity. It must have been ghastly for his family to read about it in the way it was presented in the press.”

Why didn’t Gilligan think of this?  Three men whose fishing boat lost power on March 31st were just rescued more than a week later from an uninhabited, 31-acre island in the Pacific after rescuers spotted the word “HELP” spelled out in palm fronds on the beach, CNN reports.  The men lived off coconut meat and fresh water from a well built by fishermen in the area who sometimes stopped on the islet.

The island where the fisherman were found, Piklelot, an island on the outer reaches of Micronesia after a search that covered more than 100,000 square miles.  “This act of ingenuity was pivotal in guiding rescue efforts directly to their location,” the coordinator of the US Coast Guard effort to find the men commented.

A new rule from the Biden Administration would require private gun sellers to be licensed and carry out background checks on potential buyers, closing the infamous “gun show loophole” that allows people who wouldn’t be able to buy weapons through licensed gun stores to get their hands on guns, Politico reports.

Submitted to the Federal Register by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on Thursday, the rule leverages the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to cover people who sell weapons for profit at gun shows, on the internet, and out of their homes, transactions that have largely been unregulated.  It’s the most sweeping update to gun sales registrations in more than a quarter century.

An analysis released by the ATF last week found that 68,000 guns confiscated by the agency from 2017 to 2021 for being trafficked illegally were re-sold by private sellers.  More than 20,000 private sellers run businesses selling weapons through these unregulated channels.

Fourteen years after publishing confidential American military and diplomatic communications about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars stolen from US government systems, Julian Assange may soon find his years-long effort to avoid trial in the United States as President Joe Biden considers dropping the extradition order, the Washington Post reports.

The Australian government requested the Justice Department drop its effort to try Assange, saying the 14 years he spend holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years before being removed and put into a British detention facility in 2019.  British courts are considering an effort to send Assange to the US, but require demands that he will not face the death penalty and he will be able to use free speech protections in his defense.

A robocall featuring karaoke pop singer and co-chair of the RNC Lara Trump that was distributed last week asserted that there was “massive fraud” in the 2020 election her father-in-law, an adjudicated rapist, lost, CNN reports, a sign that the Trump campaign will use standard lines of attack that work well with the Republican base but don’t resonate with mainstream Republicans and Independent voters.

“We all know the problems. No photo IDs, unsecured ballot drop boxes, mass mailing of ballots, and voter rolls chock full of deceased people and non-citizens are just a few examples of the massive fraud that took place,” the pre-recorded RNC call done “on behalf of [RNC co-chair] Lara Trum” said. “If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.”

A source familiar with House Republicans tells the Daily Beast that members plan an all-out blitzkrieg against Hunter Biden starting next week, accusing him of some kind of campaign finance violation by getting a rich guy to pay his taxes because – wait for it – they want to counter-message fat former President Trump being on trial for interfering in the 2016 election by paying pornstar Stormy Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet about their 45-second sexual encounter from 2006.

The Beast quotes from experts at length about why the whataboutery won’t make sense, kind of missing the point that it won’t matter to the fanboys who crave sweet nothings about a “two-tier justice system.” If they want Dem donor Kevin Morris covering Hunter’s tax bills to be an illegal “in-kind contribution” to Joe’s 2020 campaign, they’re going to make it one, come hell or high water.

Pro-Trump scumbag Rita Palma confirmed to CNN on Wednesday she had been fired from her post as Robert F Kennedy Jr’s New York State campaign manager after video of her hyping up the effort’s ability to elect Trump surfaced this week. “I dealt with the campaign honestly. I have nothing to defend. Truth defends itself. My time with Team Kennedy has been one of the best political adventures of my life filled with some of the best people I’ve encountered, and I have encountered many. I look forward to the next seven months of watching Bobby shine,” said Palma.

A two-term Republican New Hampshire state legislator who is also the Sullivan County chair for Donald Trump’s reelection campaign was once fired from his job–as a police officer–after he threatened to murder his chief, rape the chief’s wife, and slaughter his colleagues after being suspended for having a romantic relationship with a 16-year-old girl attending a local high school, New Hampshire Public Radio reports.  And even with that resume, he opened a gun store after losing his job.

A member of the legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, Jonathan Stone has been in the state legislature since 2022 even though an internal Claremont police report of the incident concluded, “The seriousness of threatening to kill command staff officers, raping the Chief’s wife, tying people up and going postal are violations at the most serious level.” Stone was never charged for the terroristic threats.

Stone was fired on the grounds that he “lacked moral character” but his union rep negotiated the reference to be removed from Stone’s file and the records of his outburst sealed in exchange for his resignation.  He filed an unsuccessful suit to block a reporter’s state FOIA request for his records.  Stone became a favorite of Trump after presenting Trump with a custom AR-15 Stone built for Trump during the 2016 campaign season.