“My name is Laura Haynor and I’m a Minnesota resident and a Minneapolis-based pilot for Delta Airlines,” the representative from Airline Pilots Association International said in opening her testimony before a Minnesota state senate committee hearing on Thursday.

“Miss Haynor, is that correct?” Republican state senator Gene Dornink of Freeborn and Mower Counties inquires as though this is the first time he ever listened to a woman, which he clearly had not.  “Can you tell me what a typical week, work week looks like for you as a stewardess?  How does…”

As the room around him murmurs, Haynor replies, “I’m a First Officer for Delta.”  When Dornink again says he didn’t hear the woman, she repeats, “I’m a pilot for–”

“I’m sorry, I apologize,” Dornink interjects.  “I don’t know why I said that.”  Perhaps he doesn’t, but we do.

The committee representing the myriad creditors to whom disgraced former Trump attorney and one of his current co-conspirators Rudy Giuliani owes money filed a motion with the bankruptcy court overseeing Giuliani’s finances asking it to order him to sell his Florida condo to help settle some of the outstanding debts.

Giuliani filed bankruptcy after two Georgia election workers were awarded $146 million in a defamation case against the former New York City mayor.  The condo, located at 315 South Lake Drive in Palm Beach, Florida, has an estimated value of $3.5 million.  Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment is already for sales, which was listed for $6 million before being delisted in February.

Agents from the US Secret Service and the FBI conducted a search of a foreign national’s residence in Serbia, labeling the individual as a “person of interest” connected to more than 100 “swatting” calls that targeted American politicians and government officials including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other Biden Administration officials, CBS News reports.  American investigators seized computers and other electronics in the raid.

A representative for New York Republican Congressman Brandon Williams, who was the victim of a swatting call at his home on Christmas Day, said Williams was notified that a “foreign national living overseas” was identified in connection with his incident and others.

Trump White House advisor Peter Navarro has made one last ditch effort to avoid reporting to federal prison for his four-month term for convictions on contempt of Congress charges, appealing directly to the Supreme Court just like any other person would because there sure isn’t a two-tier justice system.

“For the first time in our nation’s history, a senior presidential advisor has been convicted of contempt of congress after asserting executive privilege over a congressional subpoena. Dr. Navarro has appealed and will raise a number of issues on appeal that he contends are likely to result in the reversal of his conviction, or a new trial,” Navarro argues.  “Chief among them are whether an ‘affirmative’ invocation of executive privilege was required to preclude a prosecution for contempt of congress; what was required of former President Trump for a “proper” invocation of privilege; and whether such an invocation required, ‘personal consideration,’ [citation deleted] all questions of first impression.”

New York Judge Juan Merchan issued a 30-day stay on Donald Trump’s Manhattan trial for financial fraud related to his cover-up of an extramarital affair with a porn star in an effort to protect his presidential campaign, noting that the volume of evidence recently turned over to the District Attorney’s Office and the defense team forced the delay.  Ignoring suggestions from the defense, the judge issued a delay per what DA Alvin Bragg had requested.

Merchan also called for the defense team and the DA’s office to turn over all communication regarding the recently released evidence and their efforts to get it from the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York, scheduling a hearing on the matter for March 25th.  Apparently, Merchan wants to know what the DOJ threw a wrench in his trial schedule by dumping the information at the last moment.

Former White House advisor and current son-in-law of the presumptive Republican nominee for President Jared Kushner has not been called to testify before any House committees investigating allegedly corrupt relatives of presidential candidates despite getting a $2 billion parting gift from the Saudi crown prince (presumably for not seeking justice for the murder of a US-based journalist).  And one could say he’s become emboldened by Republican indifference to Republican corruptions, as is laid out in a New York Times (gift-link) article describing Kushner’s proposed foreign business dealings.

Leveraging connections he made while working in the Trump White House, Kushner is on the verge of closing three deals to develop luxury real estate developments in Albania and Serbia, and he’s relying on another former Trump lackey, Richard Grenell, to use his connections from the time he was an ambassador in the region.

Because they would require the sale of government-owned land, two of the projects would require the permission of the current foreign administrations to complete, and should those Albanian and Serbian administrations might be wary of pissing off an unbalanced Republican nominee before an election.  But yeah, no hint of trading on a relative’s political influence here, eh?

BREAKING NOOSE: Former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News’s Martha McCallum on Friday that he will not be roped into endorsing fat former President Trump for the 2024 election.

Pence, who said his non-endorsement “should come as no surprise,” even if it is kind of surprising, further explained himself with “Donald Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda that we governed on during our four years. That’s why I cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump.” It’s not clear if he mentioned the hanging thing.

🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING: The RNC will Officially WORK with Scott Pressler to increase Republican voter turnout.

New RNC Co-Chair @LaraLeaTrump confirmed to me that she will HIRE @ScottPresler to LEAD Legal Ballot Chasing Operations.

Laura Trump: “He is the first person I thought of…” pic.twitter.com/rjElugQmMO

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 15, 2024

RNC co-chair Lara Trump on Friday told dipshit MAGA influencer Benny Johnson that she’s hiring Islamophobic QAnon activist Scott Presler to lead their ballot “chasing” operations (“chasing” we guess is the new euphemism for “harvesting”) this year, even though the last time Presler was officially employed by an official Republican Party it ended with him getting fired for having sex with another man in the office and posting pics of the encounter on Craigslist. That’s before you get into all the QAnon bullshit that made Presler so toxic even Elise Stefanik wouldn’t campaign with him.

Remember these are people that freaked out when that staffer for Dem Senator Ben Cardin filmed himself having sex with another man in the Senate Judiciary Committee room, with Johnson plainly pissed last month when the Capitol Police announced they weren’t going to pursue charges against the kid for an incident Johnson described as “filming hardcore porn in the Senate.”

MSNBC reports that Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor in Fulton County at the center of an appeal from a co-defendant in Donald Trump’s RICO case for election fraud, has resigned his position, allowing prosecutor Fani Willis to stay on the case against the former president and other co-conspirators.  In his letter of resignation, Wade specifically noted that while there was no finding of a conflict of interest, he would resign to comply with the judge’s order in the case.

In Willis’s response accepting the resignation, she commended Wade’s service and noted that others turned down the appointment due to attacks on their professional reputation and threats against them and others close to them.

Manhattan federal prosecutors on Friday asked a judge to impose a 40 to 50 year bid for convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, a far cry from the five to six years his defense lawyers put in their sentencing memo, with both being far from the max of 110 years given the many counts the idiot scumbag could be facing at his March 28th hearing, the New York Times reports.

One factor working in Bankman-Fried’s favor is that, unlike Bernie Madoff, who did die in prison, the victims of the FTX scam were able to recover their assets. A factor working against him is that he was a total asshole on the witness stand and at one point told a prosecutor he was answering her question in “answer the question the way he thought she should have asked it.”

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are suddenly skyrocketing in popularity in Texas, PC World reports on a development no one could have foreseen unless they read our article on what happened the last time PornHub blocked itself in a state that imposed an age verification requirement.

More from @alexmarlow and @mboyle1's exclusive interview with @realdonaldtrump: Trump talks about his meeting with Laken Riley's family–and how Biden has demonstrated he just doesn't care about her murder.

On Riley's family: “Her parents are great people. They lost an angel…… pic.twitter.com/bQ3wSrJfDL

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) March 15, 2024

There’s plenty to be said about the questionable moral horizon Laken Riley’s family are entering here by weaponizing their daughter’s death in service of a demented dictator, especially one who would think that autographing a photo of their murdered child is normal. But more on that later.

“Today, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released its third Center for Countering Human Trafficking (CCHT) Annual Report, highlighting the Department’s successful efforts to train more than 275,000 individuals, including aviation and transportation personnel, law enforcement partners, and nonprofit organizations, to recognize the indicators of human trafficking and take action to stop this heinous crime. The Annual Report outlines the Department’s role as a global leader in the fight against human trafficking through a wide range of efforts including victim identification and assistance, criminal investigations, civil enforcement actions, intelligence and analysis, training and public education, and external outreach.”

“In Fiscal Year (FY) 2023, the Department of Homeland Security expanded efforts to educate the public on human trafficking. CCHT led 135 training and outreach events for the DHS workforce and law enforcement partners with more than 14,000 participants. The Blue Campaign hosted 194 public awareness trainings with 19,626 participants from the federal government, non-governmental organizations, law enforcement, and general public – more than double the number conducted in the previous fiscal year. The Blue Campaign launched 63 new partnerships – a 46 percent increase over FY22 – including with higher education associations like Florida International University and Phoenix Dream Center, the nation’s largest human trafficking recovery program for young adults.”

“By further expanding our trainings and partnerships and educating more of the public than the previous year, CCHT has better positioned DHS to improve its counter human trafficking efforts, including investigating and prosecuting perpetrators. DHS agencies arrested 2,610 individuals for human trafficking-related offenses and assisted 731 human trafficking victims. DHS personnel supported 1,044 human trafficking-related indictments and their work led to 519 convictions,” says a press release from DHS. Yeah but Sound of Freedom‘s box office numbers, right fanboys?

Disgraced former President Trump’s lawyers on Friday sent Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan a letter telling him District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s offer of a 30 day delay for the Stormy Daniels hush money payoff trial start after the federal Southern District of New York dragged their asses on producing discovery evidence is “not sufficient” and are asking for a hearing on the matter to be scheduled for the week of March 25, when the trial is supposed to start, Politico’s Erica Orden reports.

There’s no indication yet from Merchan on how to handle this but, let’s just try to be optimistic here because everyone else is like “OMG TRUMP’S NOT GOING ON TRIAL,” there’s always a decent chance that Donald’s asshole lawyers are going to find some way to piss off the judge and he’ll only give them an extra week or two to review the documents. Judges really don’t like Trump’s lawyers.

Now for the bad news: Any delay in Trump’s trial pushes back Steve Bannon’s trial for the “We Build The Wall” scam since Merchan is overseeing that one too. It’s supposed to start in May, although it’s hard to see that one taking particularly long given that his three accomplices were all convicted at the federal level after Bannon was pardoned by Trump at the last minute in 2021.

Just a week on the job and RNC chair Mike Whatley is already fucking it up by correctly saying twice in less than five seconds that Americans are in fact better off than they were four years ago.

They really have to stop trying to use that line. Even under normal circumstances you need to think it through and not accidentally misapply the binary operators like Whatley did here. And obviously these are not normal circumstances because literally every day of the next 235 days there will be another “This was what it was like four years ago” opportunity for the Dems to show the bottomless miseries of that horrid year. They also can’t just change it to “Are you better off than you were five years ago?” because well… Actually they should try that, lol. Make it even more suicidally stupid.

The US Supreme Court on Friday issued a unanimous ruling allowing public officials to block people on social media under “certain circumstances,” NBC News reports.

Judge Scott McAfee determined that there was no conflict of interest or serious misstatements to the court regarding a relationship Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had with a special prosecutor handing the case, CNN reports, and she may stay on the case to prosecute Donald Trump and others on the RICO case to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

McAfee rejected the motion from a Trump co-defendant Michael Roman in which Roman alleged that a suspected romantic relationship between Willis and Wade prompted Willis to unethically pursue the prosecution against Donald Trump’s cabal so that Wade would earn money which he would spend on Willis, meaning Willis was unethically prosecuting Trump et al for personal gain.  McAfee found no basis for that claim, but he did order either Willis or Wade to step away from the case to avoid any appearance of unethical behavior.

“The prosecution of this case cannot proceed until the State selects one of two options. The District Attorney may choose to step aside, along with the whole of her office, and refer the prosecution to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council for reassignment,” McAfee wrote in his ruling.  “Alternatively, SADA Wade can withdraw, allowing the District Attorney, the Defendants, and the public to move forward without his presence or remuneration distracting from and potentially compromising the merits of this case.”

Biden is going to let the Haitian migrants invade Florida! Todd Bensman: "I have a source in Customs and Border Protection, very well-placed, who is telling me that the orders are to have the Coast Guard follow the boats to Florida and let them land." pic.twitter.com/qZ2Qea8g5W

— MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) March 15, 2024

“Hundreds of thousands of people are pouring into our Country from Haiti. They are headed to Florida. But don’t worry, Crooked Joe Biden has everything totally under control. MAGA!” wrote fat former President Trump on Truth Social on Thursday. He was a little late to the game as his worshippers have over the last few days put the pedal to the metal in their “panic” over a likely influx of refugees from the dysfunctional Caribbean nation’s accelerating collapse into anarchy as criminal gangs have effectively seized control of the capital Port-au-Prince. “Panic” in quotations because they are not actually panicking, at all. They’re thrilled beyond imagination that desperate, impoverished Black migrants will invade our shores and they can blame it on Biden.

Someone change our minds here. Tell us why this is actually more of a legitimate problem than a political opportunity for Trump and the Republicans. We’re open to attempts at persuasion that Trump threatening to bomb refugee boats and then not doing it is more effective policy than whatever the Biden Administration ends up doing to try to manage it. Step on up.

Ever the helpful ones, Democrats are working to push Trump-endorsed bi-curious car dealer Bernie Moreno over the finish line in next week’s Ohio Republican Senate primary to determine the nominee to face incumbent Dem Senator Sherrod Brown in November, NBC News reports.

“Moreno would lead the charge to enact Trump’s MAGA agenda to repeal Obamacare and institute a national ban on abortion… Donald Trump needs Bernie Moreno,” says the ad produced by a PAC linked to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Bernie Moreno does not.”

NBC had actually reported this on Thursday before the AP had picked up the AdultFriendFinder profile story that had been floating around quietly the last few weeks. Considering that the PAC is spending $2.7 million on the ad campaign we would hope that Dems have more than just the profile to indicate that Moreno likes cruising the internet for gay hookups that they can drop after the primary should he win. This week an Emerson Poll found Moreno trailing state Senator Matt Dolan in the race 26 to 23 percent with dipshit Secretary of State Frank LaRose in third at 16 percent, but with 32 percent still undecided and Emerson being not that reliable, who the hell knows.

Far right North Carolina state Superintendent of Public Instruction candidate Michelle Morrow, a batshit Moms for Liberty-type homeschooling activist, is 100 percent feature-not-bug when it comes to her social media history, as CNN’s KFile have found she posted shit like “I prefer a Pay Per View of [Obama] in front of the firing squad. I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death,” in 2020 in response to another Twitter user saying the 44th president should end up in Guantanamo for “spying” on Trump.

Morrow, who upset the incumbent Republican Superintendent Catherine Truitt in last week’s primary also in December 2020 responded to then President-elect Biden’s call for Americans to wear masks to protect themselves from COVID-19 with “Never. We need to follow the Constitution’s advice and KILL all TRAITORS!!! #JusticeforAmerica,” and earlier that year had accused Hollywood actor Jim Carrey of consuming adrenochrome from children, among a bunch of other QAnon shit.

We’re thinking the Dem winning by like 3 percent at most is the likeliest outcome in November.