Speaker Mike Johnson’s stand up with members of his conference on Wednesday did not go well, at all, with Ohio Freedom Caucasian Warren Davidson stomping out angrily and saying Johnson “never should’ve been hired,” Jim Jordan telling Johnson what he “should have done” in negotiating with Chuck Schumer on the spending bill, Johnson responding by saying he “channeled his inner Jim Jordan” but that didn’t work, lol, and finally Johnson asking members to stop trashing him on Twitter while he tries to just get this budget shit out of the way for a while, per Axios.

France’s representative to the European Commission on Tuesday told colleagues that fat former President Trump in 2020 warned the bloc’s leader, Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen, that they were on their own in the event that Europe found itself under attack, Politico EU reports.

“You need to understand that if Europe is under attack we will never come to help you and to support you,” Trump told Von Der Leyen in 2020, according to Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was also present at the January 2020 meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “By the way, NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO. And by the way, you owe me $400 billion, because you didn’t pay, you Germans, what you had to pay for defense,'” Trump added, per Breton.

“That was a big wake-up call and [Trump] may come back,” Breton said at an event being held by the European Parliament in Brussels. “So now more than ever, we know that we are on our own, of course. We are a member of NATO, almost all of us, of course we have allies, but we have no other options but to increase drastically this pillar in order to be ready [for] whatever happens.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, Hunter Biden is in the building as his incompetent nemesis James Comer tees up the committee vote on a contempt resolution. Expect a lot of shit talk and laughs.

A Sumpter County, Florida judge on Tuesday sentenced Robert Rivernider Jr – a The Villages, Florida Trump fanboy who last month convicted on three felonies forging his then-recently departed father Robert Rivernider Sr’s ballot for the disgraced former president in October 2020, days after the old man died of COVID – to 180 days in jail and to pay $916 in court costs, Villages-News.com reports.

We’ve very extensively chronicled Rivernider’s fuckery and that of his defense lawyer – Republican former state Representative Anthony Sabatini who, per Villages-News, “rested the defendant’s case without putting any evidence before the jury” – and how Rivernider was ineligible to vote under the DeSantis regime’s laws as he was only out of federal prison because of the pandemic of the very virus that killed his father and still owes $20 million in restitution for the real estate scam, and blamed a “pro-DeSantis” conspiracy for the charges. You can see all that in the links above.

What sticks out here is how once again a middle-aged Caucasian MAGA Villager – one on federal probation, no less – gets basically a slap on the wrist for willfully committing voter fraud while a Black man in Alachua County (albeit a complete piece of shit pedophile) got three years after pleading no contest to simply voting without being eligible due to a sex offender conviction.

I demanded President Biden provide transparency about the White House’s meetings with Fani Willis’s top prosecutor before Willis indicted Trump.

If no transparency is provided we will have no choice but to subpoena all involved.https://t.co/IVnHvTYV35

— Lance Gooden (@Lancegooden) January 10, 2024

“Moderate” Republican asshole and Michael Jackson truther New York Congressman Mike Lawler tells Semafor that any efforts to oust Speaker Mike Johnson for failing to meet far right extremists’ unrealistic expectations on spending and border policy would be really bad for the House GOP.

“If they try it, they’re fucking idiots,” Lawler said when asked to comment on “Colonel Sanders” Chip Roy’s hint that he may move to vacate Johnson during a Tuesday interview on some MAGA douchebag’s podcast. Lawler didn’t warn of any consequences though, simply because there are none that he or any of the other “moderates” in the larger caucus are willing to exact upon the handful of rogues who would further weaken Republicans’ extremely tenuous hold on the House.

Others offered the seminal famous last words. “I kind of doubt anyone wants to go through that three-ring circus again,” said an anonymous member. “It would be the dumbest move ever and the counter-reaction from the 95 percent of our conference who want to govern and who know the realities of our Constitutional system and divided government would be fierce,” said another “moderate,” Nebraska Congressman Don Bacon. “I think a lot of members would like to see some new leadership, but the group of people willing to set that series of events in motion is tiny. People don’t want a long drawn-out embarrassing speaker search again,” said a senior aide.

Cops in South Korea say the sick asshole who stabbed losing 2022 Democratic presidential election candidate Lee Jae-myung in the neck during an appearance in the city of Busan last week had plotted the attack for months with the express aim of preventing Lee from challenging incumbent conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol again in 2027, the New York Times reports.

Busan police chief Woo Cheol-moon told reporters Wednesday that the 66 year-old would-be assassin, who was identified only by his surname, Kim, had asked a friend to forward an eight-page manifesto to media just prior to the attack. Cops were able to intercept it, but Woo shared some specifics about Kim’s motive: Frustration over the slow progress of criminal investigations into Lee and a fear that the Dem could be elected president in 2027 given Yoon’s squeaker of a win in 2022.

Democrats in South Korea are legitimately the center-left party just like the Democrats in the United States cultural differences aside. We note that here because the parties in both Japan and Australia known literally as the “Liberal Democrats” are in fact the right wingers. Then there’s that Lee – who was released from the hospital on Wednesday and appears to have fully recovered – has been accused of staging suicides to cover up his corruption and all that kind of shit. And that, after the stabbing, Yoon’s fanboys claimed online that Lee had been stabbed with a “paper knife” or “wooden chopstick” or that the attack was simply “fake news,” while Lee’s fans accused cops of withholding details on Kim in order to minimize the potential fallout ahead of parliamentary elections in April.

All of this is to say it maps very neatly onto how you would expect such a story to have gone down here at home – or really have gone down here – that Lee is the Hillary of South Korea while Kim is a mix of the MAGAbomber and David DePape, that even an act of violence by a radicalized right winger has to be a false flag or a cover-up aimed at discrediting conservatives ahead of a midterm.

Dumbass Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s ex Jayson was arrested Tuesday on on six charges, including prohibited use of weapons and third-degree assault, the Daily Beast reports.

The city council of Gilbert, Arizona voted to form a subcommittee to investigate a group of twenty affluent white teens tracked back to their town who have allegedly been traveling to neighboring communities and beating the shit out of other students, the Arizona Republic reports.  After Arizona was on the front lines of threats and intimidation of election officials in 2020 when Trump supporters refused to take the loss, the state’s adults wonder why their kids are turning into violent thugs.

According to the Arizona Republic, the so-called “Gilbert Goons” are believed to be responsible for a series of blitz-style attacks at fast-food restaurants, in parks, or at parties in the Valley region going back a year, including an attack in October 2023 that killed 16-year-old Preston Lord.  The attackers are believed to come from various high schools in the Valley and have posted videos of their attacks on social media, blurring their faces.

More than 100 million people, primarily in the Northeast and Northwest corners of the nation, are under a moderate or high risk of severe winter weather as storms continue to batter the nation.  The New York Times reports that schools continue to consider altering their schedules to deal with “wild” weather possible Wednesday morning.

According to CNN, cities including New York, Philadelphia and Washington are preparing for heavy downpours and high winds.  Tornados hit Florida, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, with weather-related deaths reported in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.  Republican Florida Governor and struggling GOP presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis returned to Florida, declaring most of the state a disaster area, a move this pundit believes was long overdue.

Ronnie Long, a North Carolina man who spent 44 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of rape in 1976, was awarded $25 million in a combined settlement and an apology from the city where he was tried, USA Today reports.

Now 68, Long agreed to a settlement in which the city of Concord, North Carolina will pay $22 million and the state Bureau of Investigation will pay $3 million in the second-largest wrongful-conviction settlement in US history.  But more important for Long was the apology from the Concord City Council, which read in part, “We are deeply remorseful for the past wrongs that caused tremendous harm to Mr. Long, his family, friends, and our community.  While there are no measures to fully restore to Mr. Long and his family all that was taken from them, through this agreement we are doing everything in our power to right the past wrongs and take responsibility.”

An investigation into the investigation that led to Long’s conviction found law enforcement officers rigged the jury pool with allies, making sure no Black people were in the jury for Long, who is Black.  No physical evidence connected Long to the burglary or rape, and the victim’s identification was shown to be influenced by police.  Additionally, while more than 40 fingerprints were lifted from the scene, none of them matched Long; none of that information was shared with the defense.

Melania Trump’s mother, Amalija Knavs, died at the age of 78, one year older than her ersatz son-in-law, People Magazine reports.  Knavs reportedly became seriously ill with an undisclosed illness in late 2023.  At Mar-a-Lago’s New Year’s Eve end-of-year-cash-scramble, Donald Trump said Melania was missing the gala to be at her mother’s hospital bedside.  “But [Knavs has] been very ill, so I just want to say ‘hello’ to the first lady — we just spoke, down in Miami, great hospital — and hopefully they’ll be ok. But it’s a tough one, it’s a very tough one. She knows probably about 95% of the people in this room. We just want to wish Amalija that she gets better as quickly as possible.”

There’s a lot going on in this clip:  the gratuitous B-roll shots of Taylor Swift, the perpetual leer of empty-headed Fox bro Jesse Watters, and the discussion of the batshit theory that entertainment superstar Taylor Swift is part of a Pentagon psy-op–which being brought up on a cult’s cable news network is ironic enough–and that psy-op is (gasp!) designed to get people to register to vote!  How dare she!  Fox acknowledges it believes that young suburban and rural white women are dangerous to its conservative political brand.

After important bits fell off one of his company’s planes, the CEO of Boeing committed his company to “ensure every next airplane that moves into the sky is, in fact, safe,” which is not exceptionally reassuring coming from a company that makes 88-ton pieces of metal and plastic that hurtle through the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, Reuters reports.

Discussing the blowout of an exit door plug from a flight out of Portland, Oregon last Friday, CEO Dave Calhoun told employees on an internal call that the loose bolts found on United and Alaska Airways Boeing 737 Max 9s were essentially a “quality control issue” and that the company was working with regulators and suppliers to ensure it “can never happen again.”

There’s some serious shit going down in Ecuador.  President Daniel Noboa announced the country is in an “internal armed conflict” with armed gangs running rampant, including one that briefly took over a television studio during a live broadcast in Guayaquil on Tuesday.  The national police chief announced the arrest of thirteen people for that attack, according to the Associated Press, with the country’s attorney general saying they will face terrorism charges.

Guayaquil is also the location of a prison where a major gang leader was jailed pending his transfer to a federal prison, however, he disappeared on Sunday, and it’s unclear if his disappearance was an escape or a kidnapping.  Around the country, seven members of the national police have been kidnapped by various gangs, with at least one posting a video, purportedly of three of the kidnapped officers, with one of them reading a prepared statement:  “You declared war, you will get war. You declared a state of emergency. We declare police, civilians and soldiers to be the spoils of war.”

We care little about Dean Phillips, the Democratic Minnesota Congressman who’s attempting to be a viable primary alternative to Joe Biden in the presidential race–so little that before he announced his candidacy he was mentioned on National Zero just once.  And after his candidacy announcement, he’s been mentioned in just six stories–only three of which he was the main subject.

We mention this to remind you that Dean Phillips still exists, something the people of Manchester, New Hampshire apparently didn’t realize or didn’t care about on Tuesday morning, as NBC News reports, because none of them showed up for Phillips’ “Coffee Conversations” event held outside the Doubletree Hotel.  With his schmaltzy “Government Repair Truck,” Phillips sat with a supply of Dunkin’ as no one asked him about his economic plan or his solution to rising housing prices because he’s polling in single digits in the state.

Despite having rescinded her claims in the past, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking victims again asserted that Epstein took videos of people like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Richard Branson and Prince Andrew having sex with girls.  Sarah Ransome said in an interview on “Good Morning, Britain” on Tuesday that one of her friends who was also trafficked by Epstein told her she knew videos of her with the men existed, reports the British site Metro.

Granted, Ransome had previously told to a journalist that she retracted all her previous claims in 2016, saying she wanted to “walk away from all this.”  However, given that her new claims were made Tuesday morning, it seems that she’s re-upping her story.  And this leads to some people only partially relating who’s implicated:

Senators from both Parties warn that Congress may have to rush through an interim spending bill to cover a potential gap in federal spending, an emergency move being planned because of the Republican-caused delays to the agreed-upon funding bill may push the bill’s passage passed the deadline, the Washington Post reports.

Although both GOP House Preacher Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed to a $1.66 trillion appropriations bill that will fund the government through September–a deal that could likely trigger another recall vote for Speaker in the House–the bills needed to approve the funding need to pass through the House, where the far-right wing of the GOP is expected to bitch, whine and moan about the inevitable passage of the legislature.

Should those whines, bitches and moans lead to lengthy delays, Senators have prepared the legislation needed to fill in federal spending needs through another continuing resolution.  “The simplest things take a week in the Senate,” McConnell said, “so I think frequently the House doesn’t understand how long it takes to get something through the Senate.”

Lots of people are interested in Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s prostate. It’s a huge thing in political news this afternoon. It’s a big story about a big prostate. The talk of the town as they say.

That prostate is getting its 15 minutes of fame – and then some. Ronna McDaniel’s collagen lips, Lauren Boebert’s areolas, Mitch McConnell’s purple hands… All yesterday’s news about body parts.

The prostate is happening. It’s real. No vibes, no takes, no hype. Check every mainstream media website. “BREAKING” and “PROSTATE” in big letters at the top of the home pages. Lloyd Austin’s prostate is winning this news cycle and it’s not even close. Stay tuned for the latest on the prostate.