🚨 HUNTER BIDEN DEPOSITION.

CONFIRMED.

FEBRUARY 28.

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) January 18, 2024

The House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill funding the government until March 1st, again averting a shutdown. It was attached as a rider to a new law allowing electronic duck hunting stamps for some reason. The funding/duck stamp bill now heads to President Biden’s desk.

The left-wing media freaked out over red marks on President Trump’s right hand.

It could be red marker or blisters from playing golf, but miserable leftists like James Carville immediately claimed Trump has syphilis. pic.twitter.com/eBYGOcpTxg

— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) January 18, 2024

We’re not experts, but all we can say is that it doesn’t look like marker nor does it look good. He probably hadn’t gone golfing since Saturday and either way you would think his hands would be pretty calloused from decades of swinging clubs. The “syphilis” hype is a little much, but then again we all know how the MAGA kids would be reacting if Joe Biden’s hand looked like that, so fuck it, let them squirm and worry endlessly about it. That tweet just stinks of sheer panic.

A lawyer representing former Donald Trump attorney Sidney “Kraken” Powell in two multi-billion dollar defamation cases brought by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic over false claims about the 2020 election is facing disciplinary charges in DC over false claims about the 2020 election he made in a series of lawsuits and appeals contesting the result, Reuters reports.

Lawrence Joseph is in trouble with the DC Bar specifically for falsely claiming that the fake Trump 2020 electors in Arizona had signed the fraudulent documents “with the knowledge and permission” of the state legislature. Probably more of a feature than a bug for the Kraken’s defense team.

Picasso-faced Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday told a Travis County judge he would not contest the facts of the case and accept any judgment, an obvious triage move made to avoid sitting in a deposition with the former deputies who sued him after he fired them for blowing the whistle on his public crime spree in October 2020, the Texas Tribune reports.

“Ken Paxton has never answered questions about his illegal and corrupt conduct. He is clearly terrified of doing so – even if it means taking a different position now about him breaking the law than he did at his impeachment trial,” said Tom Nesbitt, lawyer for one of the whistleblowers.

“No Labels’ frivolous complaint is nothing more than a distraction from the fact that they have completely failed to meet their goal of getting on 25 ballots by the end of 2023, and that the entire purpose of their operation is to make a quick buck and throw the election to Trump. It doesn’t bode well for No Labels’ national campaign effort that they can’t tell the difference between political campaigning and mafia tactics. They have a weak chin if they think this is too much scrutiny for a national campaign. Even Ron DeSantis could handle more than this,” says anti-No Labels group American Bridge President Pat Dennis in a statement responding to the pro-Trump scam’s bitching.

Emphasis ours on the part about Ron DeSantis because that was fucking hysterical.

From a Supreme Court amicus brief by former Michigan Congressman and 2024 Senate candidate Peter Meijer – who in 2022 was primaried out of office by MAGA assclown John Gibbs (who then lost) – filed Thursday in opposition to Trump being disqualified under the 14th Amendment:

So for those keeping score at home, Meijer, who under no circumstances was unaware that his vote to impeach the fat fuck on January 13, 2021 was also a signal of support for his permanent disqualification from office in a vote subsequent to his conviction (which didn’t happen), has now in the most literal way possible turned around on that in hopes that the Orange God Emperor will somehow forgive him and not endorse one of his opponents in the Michigan GOP Senate primary.

DC federal Judge Tanya Chutkan on Thursday spiked disgraced former President Trump’s motion to hold Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith in contempt for continuing to submit discovery and what not to the court while proceedings are on pause awaiting a decision from the DC Circuit on the fat bastard’s “presidential immunity” appeal. Chutkan did however throw Trump a small bone in requiring Smith’s team to ask her permission before filing any “substantive” pretrial motions.

Enjoy the ratio on this take from Axios. The comment section is 🔥https://t.co/2b36dUFO20https://t.co/2b36dUFO20

— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) January 18, 2024

The Babylon Bee’s sister site NotTheBee.com – an outlet covering “real-life” news supposedly just as absurd as the original Bee’s fictitious “satire” articles – were so excited Thursday over the Twitter right wing’s total own of Axios’s insult to their motivated reasoning-driven version of reality that they couldn’t not cover it. For those unfamiliar with Twitter parlance: A “ratio” in this specific context is when a tweet receives more replies than likes, a surefire sign that the message fell flat or pissed people off or whatever. Since Twitter has no downvotes, it’s the next best way to gauge disapproval. By that metric the replies to Axios’s tweet as of this writing at 882 replies to 472 likes is indeed a nearly 2:1 ratio, sure to increase with the help of NotTheBee readers who tend to be right wingers.

It does however have quite a ways to go before it can eclipse, for example, the 6:1 ratios scored when that piece of shit Elise Stefanik tried to blame migrants for the baby food shortage in 2022 and when she congratulated Tom Emmer for his short-lived speaker nomination in October.

Pro-Trump scam operation No Labels are pleading with the Justice Department to investigate efforts to to help get their Orange Allah elected again in November, the Washington Post reports.

“It’s one thing to oppose candidates who are running, it’s another to use intimidation tactics to prevent them from even getting in front of the voters,” writes former Senator Joe Lieberman in the letter that will be announced at a press conference later Thursday, lol. The letter contains a litany of complaints including an incident last year when an electronic billboard truck reading “Georgetown is no place for MAGA hate” over images of scumbag No Labels founders Mark Penn and Nancy Jacobsen was driven around the vicinity of the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

Which sure sounds like these assholes simply found themselves unprepared for any pushback on their transparent goal of splitting off moderate votes from Joe Biden to return Trump to power.

Asked to respond to his boss’s furious meltdown over border negotiations, lowlife worm Republican North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis on Thursday told The Hill’s Alex Bolton “I respectfully disagree with the president. He could not possibly see [the legislative package] we are negotiating.”

“The president” of course referring to fat former President Trump and as if he didn’t already make it perfectly clear he wants absolutely nothing done on the border, when he wrote “I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions and Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country! Also, I have no doubt that our wonderful Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, will only make a deal that is PERFECT ON THE BORDER. Remember, without Strong Borders and Honest Elections, we don’t have a Country!!!” in a late Wednesday Truth Social screed.

So that’s it Thom. Trump wants the border to remain “open” so he can continue to campaign on it. In no universe will reasonable measures be tolerated. Your opinion means jack shit. You are nothing.

Just as they considered doing for Kevin McCarthy before ultimately fucking off and letting him sink, House Democrats are weighing whether to save Mike Johnson if and when the Freedom Caucasians intro a motion to vacate the Speakership for failing to meet their unrealistic expectations on spending and/or the border, Axios reports. Dems naturally will be looking to extract concessions from Johnson when crunch time comes, but a number are skeptical on what if any terms the Jesus Dork will be willing to accept. “They have to offer us something,” North Carolina Dem Wiley Nickel told Axios, adding that he thinks it’s “unlikely” a coalition deal can happen.

Defense Team To Prove Agents Planted Evidence on Jeremy Brown via @gatewaypundit https://t.co/UX8KBROTDS

— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) January 18, 2024

A new Emerson College survey of Texas registered voters finds punchably-faced Senator Ted Cruz leading Dem Congressman Colin Allred 42 to 40 percent or Dem state Senator Roland Gutierrez by 41 to 40 percent in general election matchups tested, with 11 percent “someone else” and 8 percent undecided in both hypotheticals. As this is an Emerson poll and they’re a pro-MAGA operation that still somehow has a mainstream reputation, it’s quite possible Cruz is in trouble in November.

Allred leads Gutierrez 29 to 7 percent in a primary matchup with Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez in third at 6 percent, though there’s still 37 percent undecided up for grabs. Fat former President Trump leads President Joe Biden 49 to 41 percent in the general election head-to-head, which drops to Trump 46 – Biden 36 when Robert F Kennedy Jr, Cornel West, and Jill Stein are added to the mix. Probably not a good sign for Ted if Trump outperforms him by that much.

“A President of the United States must have full immunity, without which it would be impossible for him/her to properly function. Any mistake, even if well-intended, would be met with almost certain indictment by the opposing party at term end. Even events that ‘cross the line’ must fall under total immunity, or it will be years of trauma trying to determine good from bad. There must be certainty.”

“Example: You can’t stop police from doing the job of strong and effective crime prevention because you want to guard against the occasional ‘rogue cop’ or ‘bad apple.’ Sometimes you just have to live with ‘great but slightly imperfect.’ All Presidents must have complete and total presidential immunity, or the authority and decisiveness of a President of the United States will be stripped and gone forever. Hopefully, this will be an easy decision. God bless the Supreme Court!” wrote disgraced former President Trump at 1:59 AM EST on Thursday. It was actually in all-caps but we had ChatGPT recompose it with normal casing as to not give readers a headache from the text-based screaming.

The “GOD BLESS THE SUPREME COURT!” part is a pretty unsubtle warning to the justices to intervene in his favor in the “presidential immunity” bullshit or else face his flying monkeys.

Fat former President Trump has decreed that top Republican strategist Jeff Roe is now persona non grata in the GOP universe after working for heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Never Back Down” PAC, and that anyone who hires Roe for a campaign is doomed, Politico reports.

“It’s an open secret that candidates who want to stay on President Trump’s good side should not hire [Roe’s firm] Axiom,” said a Republican strategist associated with Trump. “They are enemy No 1.”

Acting under orders from Republican Governor Greg Abbot and state Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas National Guard blocked federal Border Patrol agents from a 2.5-mile stretch of the US-Mexico border, NBC News reports, defying an order from the Department of Homeland Security.

“Your letter misstates both the facts and the law in demanding that Texas surrender to President Biden’s open-border policies,” Paxton whines in his three-page response. “Because the facts and law side with Texas, the State will continue utilizing its constitutional authority to defend her territory, and I will continue defending those lawful efforts in court. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should stop wasting scarce time and resources suing Texas, and start enforcing the immigration laws Congress already has on the books.”

Homeland Security used a riverside park at Eagle Pass as a processing area for migrants who crossed the Rio Grande.  After Texas agents blocked access to the area, a migrant mother and her two children reportedly drowned because Texas officials denied federal agents access to respond to reports of people in trouble along the river.  Eagle Pass is also where Abbott installed buoys covered with razor wire on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande; a federal court ordered the removal of the barrier, but the Fifth Circuit delayed the removal while Texas appeals.

The U.S. Navy pounded around a dozen sites in Yemen where Houthi rebels had at least 14 missiles “loaded to be fired” with weapons prepped on firing rails ready to target shipping in the Red Sea, U.S. Central Command officials said.  The missiles “presented an imminent threat to merchant vessels and U.S. Navy ships and could have been fired at any time,” officials said.  “We will continue to take actions to protect the lives of innocent mariners and we will always protect our people,” Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the head of Central Command, noted according to the Washington Post.

More than a third of the ships that expected to use the Panama Canal to cut transportation time and costs were rerouted to sail around South America because a long-term drought in the region dramatically lowered water levels, and the problem is worse than originally expected, the Associated Press reports.

Canal administrators say the drought will reduce revenues by $500- to $700 million, far more than the $200 million originally estimated.  The Canal has had to cut the number of possible daily crossings to 24, versus 38 during times with normal water levels.  Plus, the drought continues to impact half the Panamanian population, about four million people, who rely on the same lakes that fill the canals for their drinking water.

Of course, longer shipping times will add costs to the bottom line of most products making the trip, plus it will add to insurance costs and losses as the world’s largest container ships must sail around Cape Horn.  As commercial shipping operations are avoiding the Suez Canal because of attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen, consumer costs for foreign goods are heading up.

Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman reports Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has secured enough votes to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government during the time Republicans need to figure out how to get a passable budget bill through the House without having it destroyed by the rightwing fringe.

The question is, once again, “What can pass the House?”  Can Preacher of the House Mike Johnson secure enough Republican votes–virtually all of them–on any budget bill to pass a bill and stay in charge, or will he rely on Democrats to pass the bill, the cardinal sin of Kevin McCarthy that cost him his gavel?