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”

Clearly not training for a reboot of his Superman universe because he has no plans to fit into a onesie, the guy who was on that show from the ’90s Dean Cain tells conservative bro Jesse Watters that he’s not going to back off from his endorsement of Donald Trump because he’s “not that smart.”

A bipartisan group of leaders from Congressional committees have reportedly hammered out the major parts of an agreement to protect Americans’ personal data, the Washington Post reports, addressing the issues of a growing online society where information is stored and used in various places.

Republican Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, are expected to announce the deal next week.  The legislation would require protections for consumers’ data in the same way personal health and financial information are regulated.  This would provide consumers greater rights regarding companies selling their personal data.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced in an interview this week that he expects to be back on the bench as an appeals court judge in the First Circuit in Boston this fall, NBC News reports.

“I’m a judge. If you take senior status, you remain a judge, and not only you remain a judge in terms of status, but probably next fall I will go over and sit with the First Circuit,” he said on the “Politics War Room” podcast released Thursday. “So I’m still an active judge.”

It would be unusual but not unheard of for a former Justice to return to work after retiring from the Supreme Court; former Justices have become ambassadors, political appointees in the Executive branch and even a presidential nominee.  Many others have taken cases in private practice.  This is believed, however, to be the first instance of a retired Justice returned to the bench.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “little bitch” Lauren Boebert’s path to the GOP nomination for Colorado’s 4th Congressional District seat–a deep red district previously held by Ken Buck, who retired and promptly exited stage left–got a little bit easier after her top primary challenger failed to get 30% of the votes at a GOP district delegate meeting held in Pueblo, the Colorado Sun reports.

Former GOP state senator Ted Harvey received only 25.4% of the 530 votes at the district’s nominating assembly on Friday, meaning he’s off the ballot in the upcoming primary.  Because of some very weird rules in the Party nominating process, two other candidates who finished Harvey, however, will appear on June 25th primary ballot.  Because the other two candidates collected 1,500 signatures from Republicans in the district AND they got more than 10% of the delegates, former state senator Jerry Sonnenberg and state legislator Richard Holtorf will be slotted behind Boebert on the ballot.  Harvey opted not to collect the signatures, so he needed to get support of 30% of the delegates at the nominating assembly.