“As President Trump has stated, he would sit down with both sides and negotiate a deal that everyone will be happy with. President Trump appointed strong Constitutionalist federal judges and Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v Wade and sent the decision back to the states, which others have tried to do for over 50 years. Joe Biden and virtually every Democrat in Congress is on the record supporting radical on-demand abortion up until the moment of birth, and after birth, as well as using American tax dollars to fund the killing of the most vulnerable,” says dipshit Trump campaign spokesworm Caroline Leavitt in a statement headlined “Trump Campaign Statement on Fake News New York Times Article.” The statement itself of course does not actually deny the reporting and also contains the fake assertion that Dems support newborn babies being murdered.

Sources tell the New York Times that disgraced former President Trump is waiting for the end of the primaries to push for a national 16-week abortion ban, thinking that he would alienate Evangelicals if he’s seen as too “liberal” on the issue, but nailing himself down on a general election vulnerability.

“Know what I like about 16? It’s even. It’s four months,” Trump said, according a minion granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. This is exactly the kind of thing that’s supposed to piss off his extremist Christian base but it’s not like they’re not going to vote for him.

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin will on Friday end the speculation about whether he’s running president and announce that he is not running for president, CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reports.

Claiming that the potential that Maine and Colorado could keep Donald Trump off the ballot after disqualifying himself per the 14th Amendment, a Republican in Arizona seeks to disenfranchise all the voters in the entire state by automatically assigning all eleven of the state’s Electoral College electors to the GOP candidate, saying conversely the move was “the only way to protect the people’s presidential vote in 2024.”

Introduced by first-term Republican state rep Rachel Jones in committee, per the Arizona Daily Star, the bill cites a string of Supreme Court rulings that highlight the state’s power to assign delegates, but it completely ignores the fact that by assigning the state’s delegates to (presumably) Donald Trump, Jones’s bill would negate every vote in her state.

In the legislation, Jones claims “the last two elections have been riddled with controversy 26 and lawsuits with rules, forms and procedures of the election broken that has led to low public confidence in how elections are run; and public distrust in our elections has been steadily declining and no significant change in election security has been implemented since 2020 to protect the people’s presidential vote in 2024; and the only way to protect the people’s presidential vote in 2024 is to control the manner of its election.”

Republican Ohio Congressman Brad Wenstrup on Friday was cranky after Alex Smirnov, the pro-Russian Ukrainian asshole who lied to the FBI about Joe and Hunter Biden taking $5 million each in bribes was slapped with an indictment, severely undermining the House GOP’s already moribund impeachment efforts, telling Fox News idiot Maria Bartiromo “This is certainly something that needs further investigation..we have just seen this two tiered justice system… the truth needs to be brought out,” adding Smirnov should be given some kind of whistleblower protection so he could come testify like the House GOP didn’t have 13 fucking months to call him in before he was indicted.

“You certainly can’t argue about what Joe Biden said when he was vice president, when it came to the prosecutor ready to prosecute Burisma, where he said, I’m not giving him the aid if they don’t get rid of that prosecutor. He bragged about it. That’s unbelievable,” Wenstrup continued, rehashing shit that was debunked now almost five years ago from before Trump got impeached for the first time.

As the world reflects on the murder of Alexei Navalny at the hands of Putin, it’s worth remembering that Democrats are actively doing Biden’s bidding as they also try to imprison his chief political opponent, Donald Trump, remove him from the ballot, and ensure he dies in prison. https://t.co/FdLJUR9w4u

— Lee Zeldin (@LeeMZeldin) February 16, 2024

A whistleblower’s report sent to Congress on Friday alleges that the Border Patrol’s chief medical officer Dr Alex Eastman tried to order fentanyl lollipops to bring to the UN General Assembly in Manhattan last September because for some fucking reason he thought – or at least claimed – they would be necessary to alleviate pain from wounds caused by a terrorist attack while he was accompanying agents to serve on the security detail for the annual summit, NBC News reports.

“Eastman spent copious hours of his and Office of the Chief Medical Officer staff time directing the OCMO staff to urgently help him procure fentanyl lollipops, a Schedule II narcotic, so that he could bring them on the CBP Air and Marine Operations helicopter on which he would be a passenger in New York,” the whistleblowers wrote in the report. “Eastman claims that his possession of fentanyl lollipops was necessary in case a CBP operator might be injured, or in case the CBP Air and Marine Operations team encountered a patient in need.” Eastman never ended up acquiring the candy.

It’s obvious Eastman was full of shit but his actual motive beyond that is unclear. Worth asking is if maybe he wanted to somehow pretend he found them in his kids’ Halloween candy the next month and then go on Fox News to claim that whole bullshit panic fodder had been vindicated.

A long Friday read in the Washington Post details the steady deterioration of the relationship between disgraced former President Trump and his now-disfavored supplicant, the soon-to-be-former RNC chairwoman Ronna Not-Romney McDaniel, over the last year, though his private complaints about the woman who literally changed her name to please him began festering after his humiliating defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Best to just go with the lowlights linearly:

“People are really mad at you. They’re mad at you,” Trump warned Ronna during a number of phone calls in which he pressured her to cancel the primary debates, effectively declaring him the winner before the first votes had even been cast. Ronna’s defense was the debates were actually helping him, which isn’t that hard to argue with judging by the way they went, but sources say it was a major factor in Trump’s decision to replace her. Then of course there was all the money the RNC doesn’t have because Trump’s operation is sucking it up, him blaming her for defeats in 2022 and 2023 that were unquestionably much more his fault, and complaining from donors and allies.

First and foremost however the central grievance of the entire universe of Republican politics, the 2020 election. Before election day it was that she was sending too much money to downballot Republican candidates and not Trump’s campaign. After election day it was you already guessed it.

“She’s not good on election integrity,” Trump has told his minions regularly since, bitter over Ronna having largely backing out of the fight after the Rudy hair melt press conference at the party’s headquarters in late November 2020. A factor in Donald’s decision to select North Carolina GOP chair Mike Whatley to replace her was that “they” didn’t find boxes of ballots to swing the Tar Heel State to swing it to Biden late on election night. Ronna’s from Michigan and you know the rest.

Navalny=Trump. The plan of the Biden regime and the Democrats is to ensure their leading political opponent dies in prison. There’s no real difference between the two cases

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) February 16, 2024

Never too early in a news cycle to make yourself look like a complete fucking asshole who acts as if the entire world revolves around their petty bullshit problems. Bonus if you can also situationally contradict a core tenet of your movement’s belief system and cast an ally as a villain.

Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has died at the age of 47, the BBC reports citing state media and gulag officials. Navalny voluntarily surrendered himself to the Putin Regime in January 2021 after he narrowly survived a poisoning attempt during a commercial domestic flight and spent the next several months hospitalized in Germany. Navalny spent the next three years being shuffled around the gulag system, with his final stop at a remote hellhole well north of the Arctic Circle.

“They’re talking about the Georgia ‘Fani Scandal’ all over the World. In fact, by far, it is trending #1. I can’t believe the Georgia State Judiciary, or the Governor, can be happy about this humiliating embarrassment. It was a FAKE CASE from the start, and now everybody sees it for what it is, a MAJOR LEAGUE SCANDAL! The legal pundits, experts, and scholars are all screaming that this Witch Hunt, which has hurt so many fine people and patriots, should be immediately terminated and permanently erased from everyone’s memory. The stench of what has happened should shame Georgia no longer. It should get back to GREATNESS, and FAST!!!” posted fat former President Trump early Friday, still acting as if Thursday ended well for Team Orange and that his own lawyer Steve Sadow didn’t very nearly lose his shit against Willis during direct examination.

Willis’s testimony continues Friday, with her dad expected among several follow-up witnesses. Barring a major contradiction from someone else – the disgruntled former friend whatever her name is seemed not terribly reliable – it would seem Willis’s performance and her solid corroboration of the shakier testimony from ex-guyfriend/special prosecutor Nathan Wade will have sunk the bid to disqualify her from the case. Wade is a bit more of a question mark, however.

MAGA fan-con CPAC’s organizers on Wednesday announced they’re diversifying their star power for next weekend’s cosplay event in the form of addresses by Argentinian fascist President Javier Milei and El Salvadoran autocrat President Nayib Bukele, the Washington Examiner reports.

“We are immensely gratified that President Javier Milei of Argentina will address the activists at CPAC. Mercy [Schlapp] and I had the honor of meeting President Milei at CPAC Mexico as he was beginning his historic campaign, and we believe he has captured the spirit of those who see the treachery of globalist elites. American patriots are rooting for him to succeed, and we also like the chainsaw,” said credibly accused serial male sexual assaulter and CPAC chief Matt Schlapp.

CPAC 2024 kicks off on Wednesday at the appropriately named Gaylord Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. We’re probably going to have to run a live feed of the coverage.

Republican Tennessee state Senator Paul Rose and Representative Ron Gant are advancing a bill to ban the sale of cold beer at stores, reasoning that drivers are less likely to crack them open behind the wheel if booze is sold warm, WREG reports. “We see the evidence in many accidents where alcohol is found in the car, beer cans, and beer bottles. And we see it on the side of the road in many of our roads across the state and every county, you see the many beer bottles, beer cans that litter our highways,” Gant told the Memphis-area CBS affiliate about the bill.

BREAKING: The UK economy has officially entered recession, figures showhttps://t.co/9fRk4LZP76

— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 15, 2024

Seriously, though, the data on the UK economy point to a short, easy recession–using the commonly understood definition of a recession which is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.  (Declaring a recession officially really is “a thing” done by a bunch of economists at the National Board of Economic Research who look at more than if the overall economy shrinks, one of the reasons why no recession was declared in early 2022… but that’s a discussion for another day.). The UK saw dips of 0.2% in Q3 2023, and last quarter, when the US saw a 3.3% increase, the UK dipped 0.3%.  Thanks, Dark Brandon!

Asked if he believes Oversight Committee Chair Jamie Comer knew the information presented by Republicans was false in the Super Big Biden Impeachment Fiasco Hearings ft. Jim Jordan, with Marjorie Taylor Greene as the Snuffalufagus, Florida Democratic rising star Jared Moskowitz asked the key question:

I’ll ask it a different way:  When did James Comer know this was false, and how long did he conceal that from the American people?  I mean, are you telling me he just found out through the indictment, or did he know it all along, or at least a period of time that this 1023 form was made up.  Those are real questions we need to get to the bottom [of], in addition to Speaker Johnson ending this sham impeachment.  We should be looking into that, and whether James Comer should be chair of that committee.

Last month, we told you about the “Gilbert Goons,” a group of primarily white teenagers from privileged communities in Gilbert, Arizona tied to a series of attacks on students in the region.  Well, they’re learning the lesson all privileged white kids learn:  it helps when you know people.

A kid was arrested in connection with one of the attacks, which have left at least one dead and many hospitalized after being attacked at random in mall and other public parking lots, but being the stepson of a school principal in the district, he had the charges dropped by the prosecutor, the Arizona Republic reports.

The father of the victim in that attack said police notified him that prosecutors refused to charge the teen, even though the attack against his child had been recorded and posted online, as many of the attacks had been.  “I’m super pissed about this,” he told the newspaper. “Where are people supposed to go for justice?”

Opting not to add to his Supreme Court menu, Donald Trump has dropped his appeal to the high court of a federal appeals court ruling allowing several civil lawsuits by members of Congress and law enforcement officers who were at the Capitol during the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress.

Politico reports that Trump had claimed his activities that day were covered as official acts and that he has–let’s say it all together–absolute presidential immunity so he can’t be sued.  By pulling his appeal to the Supreme Court–something he can refile should he so choose–Trump allows some discovery and other procedures to progress.  He obviously feels that if through some amazing legal-esque gymnastics by Clarence Thomas and his other minions on the Court, he can simply throw that case before the lower court.

UPDATE ON ANOTHER CASE:  Remember Trump’s pending class action suit relating to fraudulently marketing the alleged pyramid scheme/phone company ACN?  Well, back in January, that federal case has been dismissed without prejudice, allowing the four plaintiffs who sought class-action status to file in their individual states.

“These cartoon characters don’t have the pedigree to be in the same courtroom as the former president,” Fox host Jesse Watters says, deftly homogenizing casual racism with Nazi-level eugenics-speak.  “But remember, this is a Fanny [sic]-and-Loverboy scandal; this is a Biden scandal.  The loverboy, Fanny, Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith’s team and New York Attorney General Letitia James have all been meeting with Biden’s White House Counsel, the Justice Department, or with Kamala Harris.  The Biden White House is overseeing the prosecution of his political rival, but just like everything Biden oversees, it’s falling apart.”

Falling apart?  Can you say, 13 million jobs, 3.2% annual GDP growth, and falling deficits, arse?

Chairman @jimjordan has said that the “best example” and “most compelling evidence” of wrongdoing by POTUS are the Burisma allegations that relied solely on an FBI source’s info.

Today, that FBI source was indicted for lying about Burisma.

Time to end this sham impeachment. https://t.co/XZjmmG6mXa

— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) February 16, 2024

There are times when we go out to dead-named Twitter looking for a specific clip of some Republican being hypocritical.  In this case, we were looking for a clip of sex abuse misprisioner and useless Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan spouting how credible and critical the recently indicted witness was to his investigation of President Joe Biden.  But kudos to the staff of New York Democratic Congressman (and man who’s got a good social and RW media game himself) Daniel Goldman for pulling the clip for us.