• “I know nothing about Hitler.  I have no idea what Hitler said other than [what] I’ve seen on the news. And that’s a very, entirely different thing than what I’m saying,” Donald Trump states to excuse his repeated Hitler references.  Maybe it’s just me, but I actually want people to know what Hitler said and wrote.  The difference, though, lies between information and admiration.
• Ramaswamy’s campaign is toast.  How to tell:  A failing business always cuts advertising budget first.  
• Nikki Haley’s slavery gaffe was horrific, but her refusal to categorically decline the VP slot on the Trump ticket will be the thing that will kill her candidacy.  Her Never Trumper supporters will not support someone who equivocates on that issue.
• The House departed Washington for the year having passed just 27 bills, making the GOP-led session the least productive in decades.  They passed barely more bills than they had Speaker votes this year.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CLIII”

An unidentified object flew through Polish airspace on Friday as Russian undertook a major aerial attack on Ukraine, bombarding areas in the west, south and north of the country with more than 150 missiles and drones, CNN reports.  Polish military officials stated that they tracked the projectile from Russian airspace through Poland into Ukraine.   This is the second known time a Russian-made missile has crashed in Ukraine:  in November 2022, a Ukrainian Russian-made air defense munition killed two Polish residents after it going wayward.

In a new filing arguing against providing information on a potential advice-of-counsel defense where he would claim innocence in the Mar-a-Lago federal classified documents case by saying he got shitty advice from his lawyers, Donald Trump’s legal team claims Special Counsel Jack Smith

“The Special Counsel’s Office has repeatedly demanded deadlines in this case that are detached from reality and practice, and this Motion is no different,” Trump’s lawyers whine.  “The 60 days requested in the Motion would give the Office more time to ‘investigate’ an advice-of-counsel defense than the Office proposed to give President Trump to review approximately 1.3 million pages of discovery and file Rule 12(b) motions. The Court rejected the Office’s earlier unjust proposal, and the same result is appropriate here.”

In the documents case, Trump is expected to claim he was just following his lawyers’ advice regarding the return of classified and other government documents, and that the advice was faulty.  To counter the claim, Smith’s office would have to gain access to the faulty advice Trump claims he followed.  But in various public accounts, Trump’s lawyers were urging him to comply with the federal government’s orders to return the document.

Two rocket boosters from a Chinese launch that successfully put two satellites into orbit crashed in the Sichuan province, exploding on impact and narrowly missing a residence according to video of the event, Space.com reports.  A different video of one of the crashes shows the Long March 3B booster stage tumbling out of the sky before bursting into flames when it impacts a hillside.  This isn’t the first time a Chinese rocket crashed after launch from the inland launch center:  in 2019, a booster stage crashed into a house.

A federal judge blocked enforcement of portions of an Iowa law that bans books from school libraries and discussion about LGBTQ topics in the classroom, ruling that the language of the law was overly broad, CBS News reports.  Although the law won’t go into effect until January 1st, many challenges to books in school libraries have already been made under the law resulting in titles removed from shelves.

Judge Stephen Locher, a Biden appointee, ruled that the Iowa law was “incredibly broad” and noted that the law has already led to the removal of historical accounts, classic literature, and award-winning contemporary books.  Locher noted that schools had already removed “books designed to help students avoid being victimized by sexual assault.”  Locher also called the provision of the law banning teachers from discussing gender and sexuality issues with students “wildly overbroad.”

Rachel Campos-Duffy, a traditional-family-values conservative who for some reason still uses her maiden name, is proud that she didn’t fall for the “Covid psyops” or the “BLM thing” as though the pandemic and civil rights marches didn’t happen, continuing to prove that conservatives have no room for personal growth.

With ProPublica’s report that benefactors came out of the woodwork to befriend Justice Clarence Thomas after he complained to a then-Republican Florida Congressman Cliff Stearns in 2000 about his personal financial straits, legal and tax experts noted that the value of the gifts could be considered unreported taxable income to keep him in his role, not simply unreported extravagant gifts.

“He views Thomas as a Supreme Court justice as having a limited salary.  So he provides benefits for him,” George Priest, a Yale Law School professor and a traveling buddy of Thomas and benefactor Harlan Crow, said in the ProPublica story. And that’s where the problem for Thomas lies.  “If there are in fact people saying more or less, ‘We’re offering these goodies to the justice so that he will stay in his role’. . . it sounds like it would be taxable income for him,” said Brian Galle, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who focuses on taxation, told Jacobin.

The big problem with bringing a corruption or tax fraud case against Thomas is proving he knew the intent of the largess and he intentionally misrepresented them as gifts.  “With Thomas, it’s not hard to connect the dots from some of his financial obligations to the conversation with Congressman Stearns to the billionaire buddy program that he was soon enlisted in,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of the judicial reform nonprofit Fix the Court. “[But] a lot of this also comes down to [the idea that] laws are only as strong as the government’s desire to prosecute, and I can’t imagine a situation where Justice Thomas would be prosecuted.”  Basically:  a justice on the Supreme Court can play dumb about the intent of all the gifts he’s received, and because of his feigned ignorance, we cannot enforce the law.  It’s the story of Clarence Thomas’s career.

She’s so done. Someone who doesn’t think Hunter Biden’s dick pics were going to swing the 2020 election or that the January 6th insurrection was an actual insurrection is too much for Fox viewers.

The first Trump lawyer domino to fall, Michael Cohen accidentally gave his lawyers fake cases created by artificial intelligence to cite in his effort to end his probation that ended up included in court filings, a letter from the firm to Federal Judge Jesse Furman details.  In an effort to assist his lawyers, Cohen reportedly scoured the internet for relevant case law and thought he found a number of cases on point.

“The invalid citations at issue—and many others that Mr. Cohen found but were not used in the motion—were produced by Google Bard, which Mr. Cohen misunderstood to be a supercharged search engine, not a generative AI service like Chat-GPT,” Cohen’s lawyers wrote more than two weeks after Furman issued an order for Cohen’s attorneys to support the bogus cases in the earlier submission.

Cohen was the first of Trump’s lawyers convicted of a crime, having played the middleman and bag man for Donald Trump to pay off Stormy Daniels, a porn performer with whom Trump has a short sexual relationship.

French-Israeli woman Mia Schem, one of several dozen hostages abducted and taken into Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7th and held until she was released in an exchange on November 30th, told Israel’s Channel 12 the wife of the first Hamas terrorist assigned to guard her was far from pleased her husband’s bosses had stuck them with Schem, and “couldn’t stand the fact that I was alone with her husband in a room, she was jealous,” The Messenger reports.

The 21 year-old Schem believes this was actually a good thing though, because “terrorist didn’t touch me for the simple reason that his wife was outside the room. If we were alone, there’s a big chance something would have happened.” Later on in her nearly two-month long ordeal Schem was moved to a different house occupied by three Hamas goons. Again she says she was able to avoid sexual violence – and death – this time simply by cooking for the jihadis. “I asked them if they were hungry. I sent one of them to the market, I asked him to bring several ingredients and I made them a traditional dish. I assessed the situation. It was either cook them food – or be killed or raped.”

Maine Republican Party chair Joel Stetkis on Friday told a radio host that he’s going to make lots of noises and statements about Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ ruling that fat former President Trump is ineligible to run again in the state due to that January 6th thing, Spectrum News reports.

“This political activism by Shenna Bellows, it’s not going to stand. At the party, since yesterday, we’ve been working on an appeal to the Maine Superior Court and we’re also reserving the right to return to a caucus system where Shenna Bellows will have absolutely no say in who Mainers choose for the Republican nominee for president,” said Stekis, adding that he’s raising money for MAGA state Senate and House candidates who promise to fire Bellows, as Maine is one of just a few states in which the Secretary position is appointed by the legislature. “The thing we’re working on over the next 10 months is winning that Legislature, having more Republicans in the Legislature than Democrats, and never having to have somebody like Shenna Bellows in a position of power to make these decisions to override the rights of the people.” Stekis did not add that Trump attempted to override the rights of the people by trying to remain in power after losing a free and fair election.

The Southern Baptist Convention and other defendants have reached a confidential settlement with four plaintiffs led by a man who claimed one of its former leaders, retired far-right Texas Judge Paul Pressler, had sexually abused him for decades beginning in 1977 when the man was a 14 year-old member of a youth group led by Pressler, the Texas Tribune reports on a case that exposed the complicity of Pressler’s law partner Jared Woodfill, a Houston-area extremist anti-LGBTQ MAGA activist currently running for a seat in the state House and then its Speakership.

The original plaintiff, Duane Rollins, filed the lawsuit against the SBC, Pressler, Woodfill, and other leaders in 2017 after spending decades in and out of prison and suffering from drug and alcohol addiction as a result of the trauma he endured. The three other plaintiffs later joined the lawsuit, but they were not the only ones to come forward with accusations against Pressler, a former Vice President of the SBC who was instrumental in making homophobia an important part of the “faith.” In his public career as a Texas state Representative and state appeals court judge, Pressler was also President George HW Bush’s nominee for Office of Government Ethics chief in 1989 until he withdrew due to – wait for it – ethics issues. Weasel-faced Texas Senator Ted Cruz was of course among scores of Lone Star State politicians who lobbied heavily for Pressler’s endorsement in GOP primaries over the last several decades. Cruz said he’s known Pressler since he was a teenager.

Taking a cue from rival Nikki Haley’s refusal to be honest about the true cause of the Civil War, heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday tried to score some points with the MAGA Republican base by ripping into Dem Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan’s decision to remove a Confederate monument from a city park early that morning, the Washington Examiner reports.

“I’m opposed to taking down statues. The idea that we’re going to just erase history is wrong. You’ve seen it now where they tried to take down Thomas Jefferson. They tried to take down George Washington off schools,” said DeSantis to the crowd in Iowa at an event for his increasingly doomed presidential campaign, of course not specifying who they fuck “they” is or where and when “they tried” to, uh, whatever that sentence-ish string of words about George Washington and schools was supposed to mean. “It just gets so out of hand. So I don’t support taking down statues, particularly if you don’t have legal authority to do it,” DeSantis continued, making it sound like an abuse of power.

It is true that Deegan didn’t seek city council approval to remove the “Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy” statue in Springfield Park. She also didn’t need to, as the crew contracted to take it down were paid not by taxpayers but by anonymous donors and a grant from an area philanthropic organization called the Jesse Ball DuPont Fund. Florida state Senate Republicans responded to the statue’s removal Thursday by proposing a bill “prohibiting certain acts concerning historical monuments and memorials, providing civil penalties for officials who engage in certain actions, providing for suspension or removal of such officials in certain circumstances, etc,” for which Deegan would’ve been fined $1,000 for her order removing the pro-slavery statue.

Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine vetoed a bill passed by both GOP-controlled state legislative chambers that would ban gender-affirming care for children under the age of 18, a move that puts him at odds with a culture war issue Republicans need to stress in 2024 because they have no popular policies on which to run.

According to the Ohio Capital Journal, DeWine announced his decision Friday, saying that he consulted with five children’s hospitals in the state as well as psychologists and families with trans youth.  “Ultimately, I believe this is about protecting human life,” he said adding, “These are gut-wrenching decisions that should be made by parents and should be informed by teams of doctors who are advising them. These are parents who have watched their children suffer for years, and have real concerns their children would not survive without it… Families are basing their decisions on the best medical advice they can get.”

Per Politico’s Kyle Cheney, a federal appeals court rule that former President and violence abettor Donald Trump can face civil lawsuits brought by the law enforcement officers who defended Congress against the Republican-led domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol on January 6th.

I normally don’t pay much attention to Donald Trump’s posts on Truth Social, his ripoff of the now failing former-Twitter platform, but Friday morning’s flurry of more than 39 posts–most reposting polls he likes–in a 43-minute period is likely panic-driven given various states continue to consider excluding him from the ballot because of his support for the January 6th Republican-led insurrection to overturn the results of the 2020 election.  While there are no original stubby thumb-punched missives with his usual veiled threats to people in Maine and Colorado, the rapidity of the reposts demonstrates his insecurity as he proceeds with his morning bathroom rituals of social media posting and flushing classified documents.  Here’s hoping he keeps the fan on when he leaves his “office.”

A federal court denied a motion by the company formerly known as Twitter to block a new state law that requires social media companies to publicly post their content moderation policies, a move challenged by Elon Musk who considers users to be chattel subject to his whims.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, AB 587 was signed into law by Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom in July 2022 and immediately came in the crosshairs of Musk, who considers any government regulation to be too much because he’s rich.  Musk claimed the law was meant to put government pressure on social media companies to due it censorship bidding, though he never really explained how publishing moderation guidelines as part of the company’s Terms of Service would accomplish this.

“Y’know I watched that yesterday, and I made a small statement on social media last night. I just, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the new Covid for 2024.  In 2020, they had us locked down.  We couldn’t get out and vote.  We could do all this absentee voting.  Everything was built around fear.  So now the new fear and what the Democrat [sic] Party is trying to do here is, is to tear Trump down and say he’s unqualified to run for this office, Jerry Carl, Republican Alabama Congressman, says disregarding the fact that the Constitution disqualifies Trump, not Democrats.  “That is not their job to determine that.  It’s we the voters.”

Well, no, Jerry.  No one will die from Trump’s disqualification.  (More may die at the hands of insane MAGA cult members, however.) The Constitution explicitly lays out qualifications for people who can run for President, and one of those qualifications is never having violated his previously sworn oath of office.  Trump did that, so he is therefore disqualified.  And just a reminder:  In 2020, Trump was president during the lockdowns and he was the one promoting fear of virtually everything, saying “only [he could] save us.”  Democrats were working to expand access to ballots for eligible voters while the GOP filed scores of lawsuits around the country to prevent people from voting and later, having their votes counted.

Through early Friday morning (local time) into midday, the Kremlin commenced its most massive air attack on Ukraine since the earliest days of Russia’s invasion, hitting targets around the country with missiles, drones and aircraft, CNN reports.

At least 18 were killed and dozens injured, with more still reported missing, as 158 drones and missiles, including hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, cruise missiles and Shahed drones hit Kyiv and locations around the country not currently occupied by Russian forces.  Ukrainian Prime Minster Denys Shmyhal said more than 20 explosions were recorded in Kharkiv, with one missile striking a hospital.

Tim Ballard, the Mormon “anti”-sex-trafficking activist who inspired the Jim Caviezel-helmed QAnon fan-favorite film Sound of Freedom before he pretty much turned out to be a sex-trafficker himself, on Thursday told his sexual assault accusers he will not issue a full response to the apparently “petty” accusations against him until each of the plaintiffs in a civil complaint publicly identify themselves and their allegations “with proper context,” Fox 13 in Salt Lake City reports.

Four of the six accusers have already done so, which raises the question of how badly this bluff is going to be called for the would-be Republican US Senate candidate if and when they do.