A well-documented phenomenon in public opinion polling is the tendency of a certain slice of respondents to mis-recall their vote in the previous presidential election, invariably always accumulating to the winner. This is no common that, in a Wednesday blog post elections egghead Lakshya Jain writes that “winner’s recall” is a widely understood term in the industry.

Obviously this is only observed when the respondents are named, known, and polled again at a later time, which is exactly how Jain now reports that because “the day after the 2024 election, our polling partner Verasight collected data from every respondent in its panel about whom they voted for” and did so again each time they re-engaged, that now he’s sharing a noticeable dropoff.

“Here’s what we’re finding: six percent of Trump voters — as determined by the recorded vote data we have, which we’ll treat as the ground truth — don’t even admit to voting for him in the last election,” Jain writes of his 12,180 respondents. “Approximately 15 percent of Trump’s 2024 voters disapproved of his job performance. Among this group, almost one in four didn’t admit to having voted for the president. Thirteen percent even falsely claimed to have voted for Kamala Harris, while 12 percent claimed they actually didn’t vote at all.” A table in the article shows this offset by 1.0 and 2.3 percent of Harris voters who claimed to have voted Trump or just not voted, respectively.

Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab, who is ethnically Lebanese like his first name but not his Anglo middle name or now-retired Swedish upmarket automotive marque last name, called it quits Wednesday after nine years serving now-renditioned dictator Nicolas Maduro’s former regime, Reuters reports on a repressive fascist apparently being allowed to just walk out in peace.

“Niagara County Sheriff Michael Filicetti announces the arrest of a 33-year-old Buffalo man following a motor vehicle accident involving a patrol vehicle. At approximately 15:06 hours, a marked Niagara County Sheriff’s Office patrol vehicle was stopped in traffic while traveling southbound on Lockport Junction Road at the intersection with Saunders Settlement Road. While waiting at the intersection, the patrol vehicle was rear-ended by a 2017 Chevrolet Cruze.”

“Following an investigation at the scene, deputies determined that the driver of the striking vehicle, Eric M Mende, 33, of Buffalo, New York, was intoxicated. Mende was taken into custody and transported to the Sheriff’s Office, where he submitted to a chemical breath test. Mende is charged with Aggravated Driving While Intoxicated (BAC higher than 0.18), open container, and additional Vehicle and Traffic law Infractions. Mende was remanded to the Niagara County Correctional Facility pending centralized arraignment. The police officer operating the marked patrol unit was transported to a local hospital for evaluation,” says a press release from the Niagara County, New York Sheriff’s Office on a spectacularly embarrassing failure to properly drive while drunk.

But it’s the Republican voter registration record that makes this truly special. The record says he voted in 2012 and 2013. Then after a long gap he got back into it and reregistered with the GOP in 2023 just ahead of some local elections and then in 2024. The timeline speaks to a guy who maybe got stuck waiting a while for a doctor’s appointment and Fox News was on in the waiting room and he decided he liked what they were saying about Hunter Biden, decided that it was on him as an American to right the wrongs and become a Republican. That would make his life appreciably better and happier and ensure that he’d never hit rock bottom and the back of a police car in broad fucking daylight on a Tuesday while drunk on God knows what dogshit brand of fortified wine or something.

The Cuban embassy in the US on Wednesday announced that “On the morning of February 25, 2026, a violating speedboat was detected within Cuban territorial waters. The vessel, registered in Florida, United States, with registration number FL7726SH, approached up to 1 nautical mile northeast of the El Pino channel, in Cayo Falcones, Corralillo municipality, Villa Clara province.”

“When a surface unit of the Border Guard Troops of the Ministry of the Interior, carrying five service members, approached the vessel for identification, the crew of the violating speedboat opened fire on the Cuban personnel, resulting in the injury of the commander of the Cuban vessel. As a consequence of the confrontation, as of the time of this report, four aggressors on the foreign vessel were killed and six were injured. The injured individuals were evacuated and received medical assistance. In the face of current challenges, Cuba reaffirms its determination to protect its territorial waters, based on the principle that national defense is a fundamental pillar of the Cuban State in safeguarding its sovereignty and ensuring stability in the region. Investigations by the competent authorities continue in order to fully clarify the events,” the choppily-translated release continued.

Sounds plausible. “Uhoh, see that patrol vessel over there? Looks like the Cubans are onto us. Let’s open fire instead of surrendering. It’ll work out,” certainly tracks with Floridian thinking.

The most obvious tell that Trump’s Truth Social post wasn’t intentional is that he would’ve posted the entire thing if he had seen it.

It’s a masterpiece. 😭 pic.twitter.com/Omm5nafaqh

— johnny maga (@johnnymaga) February 6, 2026

Some dot-connecting by Wired reveals that anonymous Trump fanboy account “Johnny MAGA” is run by a public employee on the White House payroll as “rapid response manager,” who is now officially tied to calling the video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes a “masterpiece.”

A little late to the fire started earlier this month by unrivaled indie journo Roger Sollenberger, the New York Times on Wednesday nevertheless dove into the gap the Justice Department left in the Epstein files database about the FBI’s interviews with “Jane Doe 4,” a survivor of the evil pimp’s sex trafficking and abuses who in 2019 was interviewed at least four times by the FBI after she claimed she had bit the Orange God Emperor’s undersized penis and then was punched during a forced sexual encounter sometime in the early/mid-1980s when she was about 14 years old.

The Gray Lady even put a BREAKING in red letters on the home page for the story on ground well-trodden by Sollenberger and then NPR on Tuesday, who determined that all of the relevant documents have sequential serial numbers and that sequence revealed the gap. One thing that the Times clarifies is that it’s not known if JD4 definitely received a settlement from a 2019 settlement against Epstein’s estate, but other than that it does not seem they’re adding much to the picture.

Still, just by picking it up and putting it on the home page the paper is giving what had previously been a weirdly low-key and even “BlueAnon”-ish angle to the Trump-Epstein shitshow some legs.

Evidently feeling his thin, flabby skin penetrated by the taunts of Muslim Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, convicted felon President Trump lost his shit on Wednesday, posting “When you watch Low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as they screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union, such an important and beautiful event, they had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized. When people can behave like that, and knowing that they are Crooked and Corrupt Politicians, so bad for our Country, we should send them back from where they came as fast as possible,” and just gotta stop the fat fuck there because Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit.

“They can only damage the United States of America, they can do nothing to help it. They should actually get on a boat with Trump Deranged Robert De Niro, another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ, who has absolutely no idea what he is doing or saying – some of which is seriously CRIMINAL! When I watched him break down in tears last night, much like a child would do, I realized that he may be even sicker than Crazy Rosie O’Donnell, who is right now in Ireland trying to figure out how to come back into our beautiful United States. The only difference between De Niro and Rosie is that she is probably somewhat smarter than him, which isn’t saying much. The good news is that America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before, and it’s driving them absolutely crazy!” Donald continued with his empowering self-affirmations.

Former Harvard President Larry Summers, who had some kind of part-time not-really-a-job at the college that he kind of self-suspended from anyway last year because of his emails with Jeffrey Epstein, told the Crimson on Wednesday he’s packing it in at the end of this semester.

Summers was not the only Ivory Tower inmate who palled around with Dirty Jeff to call it a career this morning as Nobel laureate Dr Richard Axel announced he had “informed Columbia University that I will step down as co-director of the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute to focus on research and teaching in my lab. I also informed HHMI that I will resign my position as an HHMI Investigator. My past association with Jeffrey Epstein was a serious error in judgment, which I deeply regret. I apologize for compromising the trust of my friends, students, and colleagues.”

“I recognize the problems this has caused, and I will work to restore this trust. What has emerged about Epstein’s appalling conduct, the harm that he has caused to so many people, makes my association with him all the more painful and inexcusable,” continued the guy holding himself more accountable than Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick, and who the hell knows how many others.

“The National Unity Party (NUP) has taken note of the renewed discussions surrounding the impeachment proceedings filed against Vice President Sara Duterte. Impeachment is one of the most important constitutional powers entrusted to Congress. It is not a political instrument nor a forum for revisiting matters already exhaustively examined. Rather, it is a solemn constitutional mechanism for enforcing accountability at the highest levels of public office, and should be evaluated carefully in light of the evidence presented. At this stage, the NUP has not seen the inclusion of new and material evidence that would warrant a departure from issues that have already been the subject of prior inquiries and extensive public hearings. Unless compelling new evidence emerges during the course of these hearings that fundamentally alters the factual basis for the impeachment complaint, the NUP will most likely not vote in favor of this measure.”

“The Party will not pre-empt such proceedings and remains prepared to assess any new evidence presented in the course of the deliberations,” says a press release from a Philippines congressional bloc decisive to the question of whether psychotic Vice President Sara Duterte should be removed from office for threatening to assassinate President Ferdinand “BongBong” Marcos.

The NUP backed off their support for removing Sara – daughter of current International Criminal Court defendant and ex-dictator Rodrigo Duterte – after she announced her 2028 presidential bid last week. Just going by her own rhetoric and her family’s reputation one could say the call was more actuarial than political in a country where it’s an employer’s market for death squads.

Don’t be a jester if you don’t get the headline about subhuman Vice President Neckbeard’s cortisolmaxxing after being poll-mogged by Fox News foidslayer Bill Hemmer and his adamantium jawframe, just groll with it and appreciate the suckery on its own terms. Especially how Jaydee fails to just outright reject the polls as being fake or oversampling libs, illegal immigrants, etc.

The Senate Dems’ campaign arm this week dropped $1 million to start building out campaign infrastructure to support former Congresswoman Mary Peltola’s well-positioned bid against incumbent lightweight Dan Sullivan, Axios reports on another moment of Chuck Schumer’s quieter effectiveness to contrast with his still well-earned reputation of a mewling pussy among libs.

The 49th State is paradoxically cheap to advertise in given the media landscape but expensive to organize in, especially given Peltola’s base among native communities living in remote villages so the “infrastructure” challenge is real. Schumer does have some experience there however as he was DSCC chair in 2008 when Mark Begich – the Dem uncle of at-large GOP Congressman Nick Begich III, who defeated Peltola narrowly in 2024 – won, the first Dem Senate win in Alaska since 1974.

Convicted felon President Trump’s regime is considering an executive order or some other regulatory action to force retail banks to collect citizenship info by means of requiring new and existing depositors to submit passports and/or birth certificates, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Now assume this is just another bullshit “trial balloon” that you never hear of again, like last September when they spitballed banning trans people from owning guns to Newsmax and were met with immediate blowback from a MAGAmerica capable of seeing the slippery slope that lay immediately beyond such action. Still, the Journal’s correct to take it seriously as this is not so much of a slope as a bottomless chasm for the paper’s constituency of oligarchs and their lowly thralls.

“Discussions about the potential executive order have alarmed banks, which have lobbied Treasury and questioned the legal basis for the proposal,” the Journal writes without having to spell out what it would mean to order banks to hassle existing US citizen depositors for documentation over this shit – on top of abruptly amputating a non-insignificant portion of their current and future customer base. One could also spend quite a while going into the weeds on how that one single sentence summarizes the delta between the “OMG! YES! THE SWING STATE VOTERS SICK OF THE BIDEN BORDER NIGHTMARE JUST GOT US A HUGE TAX CUT AND DEREGULATION WINDFALL!” glee of December 2024 and the “Whoa, pump the breaks there, you fat man-boobed hustler. We didn’t buy you millions of stupid poor people’s votes for this. ICE OUT OF OUR BRANCHES! NO DEPOSITOR IS ILLEGAL ON STOLEN LAND! STOP DEPORTING GRANDMAS WITH SAVINGS ACCOUNTS!” of now but those two disembodied rants from the financial industry donor class button it up succinctly.

Christ what a friggin worm and lol at him getting annoyed at the CNBC gristle-face’s question about his title under a Dem majority next Congress. Being $100 in the red on net because of lower gas prices vs tariff costs is the best that unhooded Klansman Steve Scalise had this morning.

“Misconduct in public office,” the centuries-old British statute that former UK Ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson and the Andrew formerly known as Prince were arrested on suspicion of over their various fuckery with Jeffrey Epstein, is vague and not charged all that often but, according to the Telegraph, potentially carries a life sentence for the two assholes who are already both pushing 70.

An action-packed Monday Seattle Police Department blotter report decisively falls apart in the third act, ending anticlimactically with the deranged villain simply tiring out prior to his arrest:

“At 1052 hours, a Safeway employee approached an unhoused male requesting he move along from the parking garage owned by the business. The unhoused then became ‘unhinged’ and hit the employee in the forehead with a 4-foot-long metal pole causing serious injury. As officers were arriving the suspect had just discharged a fire extinguisher in the garage making it difficult to see as he fled. Approx twenty minutes later the suspect was located six blocks away and was still armed with the metal pole. The suspect menaced officers with the pole and then took off running before he could be subdued. The suspect then jumped on a Lime bike attempting to get away from officers.”

“However, he eventually tired after riding approx four blocks where he was taken into custody without further incident,” the report ended disappointingly. Even if the suspect had, say, jumped off an overpass intent on landing on the top of a passing commuter train but miscalculated and landed on the tracks before being splattered by the locomotive that would’ve at least left plenty of space for some darkly comedic interpretation of futility. This is almost as bad as Joker Folie à Deux.

A snap CNN poll of State of the Union viewers – a group that’s naturally going to skew MAGA Republican – found a 38 percent “very positive” rating for convicted felon President Trump’s boring address, 10 percent lower than the 48 percent who said the same in 2018 before the GOP lost the House and a shit ton of gubernatorial elections. For comparison, Joe Biden’s 2022 and Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union addresses scored 41 and 48 percent “very positive,” respectively.

"Every day Americans are paying the price…"

In SOTU response, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) blasts Trump’s tariffs pic.twitter.com/7A21MVhVZM

— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) February 25, 2026

A wildfire that’s been burning for two days in Southeast Florida’s Collier County just continues to grow and grow without anything really stopping it at 0 percent containment, Gulf Coast ABC reports.

“Imagine how dry it is with the wind blowing. It’s just like a flamethrower, really!” said snowbird David Spaulding, who was driving through Alligator Alley. “We seen all the smoke, but now all of a sudden we started seeing flames, but the closer we got, and the closer we got, you could see way off in the distance, the flames way down there. And then all of a sudden right on the side the road!”