During a campaign pre-mortem interview with some “Christian Broadcasting Network” asshole, heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis lamented his impending electoral fate by saying, “I would say if I could have one thing change, I wish Trump hadn’t been indicted on any of this stuff…It also just crowded out, I think so much other stuff. And it’s sucked out a lot of oxygen.”

Reminder: On March 30, 2023, the night that Trump was first indicted on the Stormy Daniels payoff case in New York, rather than actually using Trump’s legal troubles to his advantage and saying something like “Trump is unelectable, we need someone else,” DeSantis literally tweeted, emphasis ours, “The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head. It is un-American. The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent. Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda.”

Meaning DeSantis was literally going to obstruct justice to prevent his presidential primary opponent from getting arrested. That’s almost like if Joe Biden pardoned Trump on the federal charges.

Former President Trump on Thursday previewed his case at the US Supreme Court seeking to reverse the Colorado state Supreme Court’s ruling that he was disqualified from the ballot due to his actions during the violent January 6th, 2021 unrest at the US Capitol in Washington, DC.

“I’m not an Insurrectionist (‘PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICALLY’), Crooked Joe Biden is!!!” wrote Trump in a morning Truth Social post offering a key insight into his legal and political strategies as developments in both threaten to collide during the upcoming election year.

“The Center for Renewing America files this complaint regarding two potential ethics violations by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. First, Justice Jackson appears to have willfully failed to disclose required information regarding her husband’s medical malpractice consulting income for over a decade. As explained below, given the repeated omissions of this information for several years, it is appropriate to refer Justice Jackson to the United States Attorney General, pursuant to 5 USC § 13106(b) for violating the Ethics and Government Act of 1978 (‘EIGA’). Second, there is reason to believe that Justice Jackson may have failed to report the private funding sources of her massive investiture celebration at the Library of Congress in her most recent financial disclosure.”

“The Conference should open an investigation to determine if Justice Jackson needs to remedy this potential omission. Given the need to ensure the equal application of the law and the tendency of these violations to create serious recusal issues and conflicts of interest, the Conference’s prompt attention is of paramount public importance,” write some douchebags at the The Center for Renewing America, a MAGA “think tank” run by extremist Trump ballsucker Russ Vought.

Would’ve been easier if they just wrote “We’re butthurt over all that reporting exposing Clarence Thomas as corrupt and compromised so it’s only fair for us to file this bullshit complaint that goes nowhere but still lets us feel like we’ve accomplished something by getting Fox News coverage.”

Hungarian dictator and Tucker Carlson pal Viktor Orban on Thursday bitched and moaned to reporters over the European Union’s administrators for “blackmailing” his country by withholding funds over failing to meet the bloc’s bare minimum standards of democracy, Politico EU reports

“In our view, Hungary fulfils all the qualities of the rule of law, and when the European Commission has specific needs, we implement everything from them, and we are also cooperative,” Orban said, crying like every fascist does on first contact with accountability. “You cannot blame me for doing everything I can to promote Hungary’s interests in such a blackmailed situation.”

Having apparently been sufficiently scared off from his plan to impeach newly-seated liberal state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz for the crime of being in a position to break the rigged legislative maps that remain the source of his power, Republican Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos tells the Associated Press that any move against the justice is “super unlikely” any time soon.

“We don’t know what could happen, right? There could be a scandal where something occurs. I don’t know,” he continued. So yeah, he’s not impeaching her, lol. The Wisconsin state Constitution specifically says impeachment can only be brought for “corrupt conduct in office, or for crimes and misdemeanors,” and since their main bitching point was that Protasiewicz had commented specifically on gerrymandering and abortion on the campaign trail but rejected calls to recuse herself from any such case after she was elected obviously wasn’t “conduct in office” (nor was it corrupt), Vos has correctly estimated that this isn’t a fight he’s ultimately going to win. Clark v Wisconsin Elections Commission was brought within 24 hours after Protasiewicz was sworn in on August 1st. The decision is still pending but even Vos admits it’ll be absolute bloodbath for the GOP.

In related news Vos told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel “when the election comes around in the fall, I’m not going to vote for Joe Biden. So it probably means whoever the Republican nominee is, just like I’ve done every year that I’ve ever been alive that I can vote, I’m sure I’ll vote for the Republican nominee. I just hope that it’s not Donald Trump,” basically confirming that he’ll vote for Trump but only reluctantly after the Orange God Emperor tried (and failed) to primary Vos for not supporting a bill to overturn the 2020 election in the state. In 2022. Two years after Trump had lost the state.

Responding to a question from some “Real America’s Voice” assclown on whether there was “anything that can be done to hold these Colorado justice accountable” for throwing his Orange God Emperor off the 2024 ballot, Trump lawyer Jesse Binnall on Wednesday first complained very unironically about judges “using their position on their courts to pursue a political agenda,” for which we have some examples that might just kind of fit that description. Binnall then continued by vowing that “every single one of these [political judges when] we actually have a real Department of Justice, should be held to account for their decision to throw our justice system into the fire, effectively, and leave the rule of law that has made our country so special over the years, and instead decide to make decisions based on politics and not the law. There needs to be accountability.”

The Democratic National Committee have brought in $12.3 million so far in December via both direct donations and transfers from affiliated committees and joint fundraising, bringing their total cash on hand to $20 million, a record going into a presidential election year, Politico Playbook reports.

“While the GOP lights money on fire fighting among themselves, Democrats are unified and making the early investments we need to send President Biden and Vice President Harris back to the White House in 2024,” said DNC national press secretary Sarafina Chikita. The most recent reporting we have from late last month said the Ronna National Committee had $9.1 million as of October 30th.

Disgraced former President Trump plans to continue and increase the Hitler-like talk because his fans love it and the media keeps covering it, Rolling Stone reports in another insider account.

“He wants the media to choke on his words. The [former] president said he’s going to keep doing it, he’s going to keep saying they’re poisoning the blood of the nation and destroying and killing the country… He says it’s a ‘great line,'” a minion told Rolling Stone. By all means he should continue. It’s not like any of his extremist and anti-democratic rhetoric has ever backfired before.

NBC News reports that the four justices on the Colorado Supreme Court who voted to remove Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential have seen an unprecedented number of threats made on social media platforms.  An independent research group found that personal information for each of the four justices was posted on Trump’s failing social media platform in replies to Trump’s posts about the ruling.  The posts included their home addresses and information about their family members.

“What do you call 7 justices from the Colorado Supreme Court at the bottom of the ocean?” asked another user. “A good start,” he replied to himself without understanding three justices voted to keep Trump on the ballot.  On a site where January 6th insurrections allegedly organized their efforts, a poster’s calls for violence were more explicit, “Kill judges. Behead judges. Roundhouse kick a judge into the concrete.  Slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trashcan.”

“But for a man who’s running for the most powerful position in the world to use pseudo-racist rhetoric, that’s one of the reasons I can’t vote for that guy because, man, um… He just rubs me the wrong way and people can vote for whoever they want to, but I just do not like it at all,” one-time Republican–he was once considered a GOP candidate for Governor of Alabama but left the Party when it, as he put it, “lost [its] mind” way back in 2006(!)–Charles Barkley says on his new evening show with Gayle King.  And normally we would urge a new talk show host to be more assertive in their opinions, but Barkley is typically a very vocal advocate of his views, and it’s clear by his tone and demeanor that he’s holding back his anger.

“To be clear, in the event that the Court does not dismiss this politically motivated election interference mission by the Special Counsel’s Office and the Biden Administration—and the defendants will submit multiple compelling bases for doing so in connection with, inter alia, pretrial motions due on February 22, 2024—President Trump does not dispute that a questionnaire may be appropriate to facilitate jury selection in connection with a trial where the defendants will exonerate themselves. But that is manifestly not what this motion is about. Apparently believing that the case is governed by baseball rules, the Office has taken another swing at maintaining a trial date that was set based on the Office’s misrepresentations regarding the timing and nature of discovery. The Court rejected the Office’s first attempt. … In this motion, based on its claimed ‘experience and research’ and ignoring the Court’s prior use of the phrase ‘all other pre-trial deadlines,’ the Office arrogantly purports to educate the Court about the logistics of jury selection in Your Honor’s District as a pretext for rushing toward an unjust trial. This motion is every bit as much a whiff, and therefore strike two.”

And with that, Donald Trump’s lawyers attempt to express their undying outrage at the temerity of Jack Smith’s office to urge the Court to continue with jury selection.  Curiously, in a motion, arguing how deadlines don’t need to be met, Trump’s lawyers cite a date they expect to meet for pretrial motions.  Y’know, like they know they’re going to lose the motion.

Four whistleblowers will be able to question Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and three senior aides under oath about abuse of office allegations after a judge ordered the quartet to sit for depositions, the Texas Tribune reports.

Paxton is accused of firing the four whistleblowers for contacting the FBI in 2020 because they believed Paxton was using his office to benefit a friend and donor.  Paxton came to a $3.3 million settlement with the four whistleblowers in February, but the Texas state legislature balked at having taxpayers fund the hush-money settlement to silence witnesses of alleged crimes.

Because they had a previous agreement–even though it was rejected by the legislature–Paxton argued that he and his aides should not have to be deposed because the case was settled.  But given Paxton did not authority to negotiate the payment, the plaintiffs argued, the settlement was void.  The court sided with the plaintiffs.  “They lost badly,” one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers told reporters after the hearing. “I don’t put anything past Ken Paxton. There’s no limit to the amount of taxpayer money he will spend to hide from accountability, so I’m sure they’ll try some kind of appeal.”

Yeah she’s going full Tucker/Bartiromo “just asking questions” to freak the hell out of the morons in her audience. There’s a tone of apprehension in her voice like she knows that the conspiracy shit is fake but that the civil unrest she’s plainly actually worried about is a real possibility. Might be smart to get out ahead of it so she can say “Look what you Democrats made those violent hicks do!”

Yekaterina Duntsova, an anti-war advocate who was once a popular television newscaster, has announced her candidacy to challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin in the next election, Reuters reports after saying in an interview last month, “Any sane person taking this step would be afraid, but fear must not win.”

Duntsova now must get 300,000 signatures on petitions by January 30th to appear on the ballot in the election scheduled for March 15th-17th.  Because he’s affiliated with a major political party, Putin only has to order 100,000 Russians to sign their names.  Duntsova steps up as Putin’s former major opposition figure as his last challenger, Alexey Navalny, appears to be missing after failing to show for a court date.

DC Judge Beryl Howell on Wednesday greenlit Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shae Moss to start garnishing alcoholic shitbrain Rudy Giuliani’s bank accounts to collect whatever they can of the nearly $149 million defamation judgment owed, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.

There’s something so goddamned aggravating about this shit Trump was saying to his ball-sucking cultists on Tuesday about the stock market going up because investors think he’s going to win the 2024 election. It was a switch from badmouthing it over the weekend, when he was saying it was just “making rich people richer.” He’ll probably even keep going with this “they think I’m going to win” argument to downplay already extremely solid numbers across so many different metrics continue to surge as expected next year when the Fed starts cutting interest rates again.

Trump, who claimed the stock market would ‘collapse’ if President Biden won, now tries to take credit for the stock market being higher than it’s ever been under President Biden pic.twitter.com/7v8JB5QTHj

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) December 20, 2023

Bad faith bullshit as it is, that’s not what makes it so aggravating. The real problem is he fucking stole our joke from the October 6th National Zero “we’ll resume our regular coverage after this” satire piece titled “US employers add 336,000 jobs after seeing Trump lead in polls,” in which we wrote the job growth came “in anticipation of the greatest economy president ever being sworn into office again in 15 months. They also increased wages by 4.2 percent over 3.7 percent inflation just to give your wallet a sweet happy memory of what it was like. Your wallet misses Trump.”

A new WMUR/St Anselm College survey of likely presidential voters in New Hampshire finds disgraced former President Trump leading former South Carolina Governor Nimrata “Nikki” Haley 44 percent to 30 percent, a gain of 15 points for Haley since St Anselm’s September poll and very close to the Sunday CBS News poll finding of Trump 44 – Haley 29. It’s still a long shot and Haley definitely needs Chris Christie (12 percent) to drop out and endorse her ASAP. Then she’s going to need at least half of Gov Pudding Fingers’ (6 percent) support to go to her after he gets crushed in Iowa, as expected. And then take as much of the tiny 3 percent remaining undecided as she can.

That’s the good news for Trump. The bad news is Joe Biden’s 49 to 39 percent general election lead in the Granite State, consistent with Emerson’s Biden +5 in November (after you add a few points because Emerson are fucking MAGA sandbaggers pretending to be mainstream) and CNN’s Biden +12 finding in September, consistent with his +7 win in 2020. Again,it’s not that New Hampshire is seriously in play in 2024 (even though Trump only lost it by under 3,000 votes in 2016), it’s that voters there see Trump every day on TV and they’re already fucking sick of him.

Josh Hawley, the Republican Missouri Senator from Virginia whose most famous action in his political career is fleeing from a mob he had just encouraged on January 6th, decided he wanted to fuck with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell because two former McConnell staffers have been nominated for posts in the Biden Administration as part of the GOP Senate’s deal with the administration to push through backlogged nominations, Politico reports.

Hawley lists dozens of questions for the two nominees–Andrew Ferguson for the Federal Trade Commission and Todd Inman to the National Transportation Safety Board–in a letter sent to McConnell’s office, which is a pure performance art move given that neither of the nominees has worked in McConnell’s office since at least February 2022.  McConnell has been working with Democrats to govern, not stomp his feet and hold his breath until his face turns blue as Hawley would prefer.  As part of the agreement to fill vacant positions by the end of the calendar year, the Biden Administration agreed to appoint some Republican nominees to fill positions on bipartisan panels.

“As you are aware, I am currently withholding my consent for these nominees to be confirmed without a floor vote—as is any senator’s right to do—until I and others can evaluate satisfactory responses to these important policy questions,” writes Hawley in the letter sent to McConnell’s office even though Hawley has reportedly left Washington at the end of last week, before the end of the Senate session so he could get an early start on his holiday.  Of course, given that Hawley lives in Virginia, he could easily commute into the Capitol for a vote, if needed.

Here’s a guy bitching about all the shit that Trump brought upon himself over the years, the Mueller Investigation, the two impeachments, the four indictments totaling 91 felony counts, and the Colorado Supreme Court disqualifying him as “escalation” in the Democratic plot to get and then keep the fat bastard out of the White House. This guy did not mention his own involvement in a lot of that shit, specifically running interference for Trump in the first impeachment which was a failed attempt to knock Joe Biden out of the 2020 campaign for the White House, then being part of the coup attempt aimed at preventing Joe Biden from taking over the White House after he had won a free and fair election. On top of that, he’s one of the leaders of an attempt to impeach Joe Biden on a complete bullshit pretext in order to prevent him from retaking the White House in 2024.

None of the above facts are in dispute. Jordan himself has said words to the effect himself many times over the years. Still he’s such a pussy he can’t even come close to grappling with them.