Court documents show that the various entities personified by George Santos is in negotiations for a plea deal with federal prosecutors, according to CNN.  Recently expelled from the House for a variety of things but primarily for being an embarrassment, Santos is expected to appear for a status hearing in federal court in Long Island on Tuesday, during which the parties are expected to request another status hearing in 30 days–a sign that they expect an agreement by the follow-up date.  Santos told a local media outlet “a plea is not off the table obviously at this point. But we just don’t know that yet,” adding when asked if he was afraid of going to jail, “I think everyone should be afraid of going to jail; it’s not a pretty place, and I definitely want to work very hard to avoid that as much as possible.”

The House Freedom Caucus board’s recommendation that second-term Virginia Republican Bob Good–who was a college wrestler at Liberty University which makes one wonder if the Caucus has a fetish for grapplers–take over as chair didn’t sit well with some.  Board member Warren Davidson of Ohio to submit his resignation from the Board, saying Good is a bad choice because, Davidson feels, Good’s strongarm tactics won’t lead to success.

“I am concerned that our group often relies too much on power (available primarily due to the narrow majority) and too little on influence with and among our colleagues. This approach is not a strong foundation for future success,” Davidson said in his resignation letter. “For me these concerns culminate with the Board’s recommendation that Bob Good serve as the next Chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. I ask that we consider how to best increase our influence while preserving our power to move policy in the right direction. I strongly feel that Bob Good as Chairman will impair that objective.”

CNN talking head Steve Vladek reports that the Supreme Court has accepted the motion by Special Counsel Jack Smith requesting it consider the Trump immunity argument in an expedited fashion.  Response due:  December 20th.  To be clear:  this is not SCOTUS committing to quickly take up the case; this is the Court saying it will quickly take up the question of whether it should take up the case.

“I am stepping down from all roles with Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action – effective immediately,” Hannah Giles, the pretend-hooker-turned conservative activist who worked with James O’Keefe on various scams, posted as she resigned from her post leading the spiraling, scandal-plagued group after O’Keefe’s ouster.  “Though I had high hopes when I joined the organizations, I stepped into an unsalvageable mess – one wrought with strong evidence of past illegality and past financial improprieties. Once such evidence was discovered, I brought the information to the appropriate law enforcement agencies. Thank you[.]”

Project Veritas and O’Keefe are under continuing scrutiny for their roles in trafficking a book purported to be Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary, but one that passed through so many hands it is no longer viable evidence of anything.  Not evidence of anything, that is, except its own theft, to which two people pleaded guilty last year after having sold the stolen goods to Project Veritas for $40,000.

“Fake News writer Peter ‘Obama’ Baker of the Failing New York Times (READERSHIP & SUBSCRIPTIONS WAY DOWN FROM THE GOOD OL’ TRUMP YEARS!), whose claim to fame is that, ‘he will never write anything good about the GREAT job President Trump did,’ just wrote, in a major, front page story, that I want to be a Dictator, but doesn’t mention it was said in a joking manner, and completed with ‘but only for a day, because I’m going to close the Border, and DRILL, DRILL, DRILL,’ a much different attitude and meaning!” writes fat former President Trump on Truth Social.

Put this together with Maggie Haberman telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that the fat fuck’s campaign knows the democracy thing is “a trouble spot” and “a concern to voters,” his minions freaking out over who leaked to Axios that Melania wants Tucker Carlson to be vice president, Kevin McCarthy saying “he’s gotta stop,” and then that large-headed asshole freaking out last month you can see how the MAGA Reich just miiiiiight finally be realizing they’re going too far with this batshittery.

In related news, Team Orange also freaked out over Jack Smith going to the Supreme Court to expedite Donald’s “presidential immunity” appeal in the DC case, writing “There is absolutely no reason to rush this sham to trial except to injure President Trump and tens of millions of his supporters. President Trump will continue to fight for Justice and oppose these authoritarian tactics,” among other transparent panic over Smith possibly spoking their delay tactics.

Federal authorities charged a New Hampshire man for threatening to kill Republican used car salesman and presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and executing a mass murder at one of his rallies, the Washington Post reports. In a series of text messages responding to mass texts from the campaign to local Ramaswamians to hype an upcoming local gig, 30-year-old Tyler Anderson of Dover responded, “Great, another opportunity for me to blow his brains out!” and “I’m going to kill everyone who attends.”

The same man also threatened the life of another unnamed candidate, texting, “Fantastic, now I know where to go so I can blow that [person’s] head off.”  Anderson admitted to sending the texts to Ramaswamy’s campaign and said he sent similar messages to other campaigns instead of the more traditional “STOP.”  He now faces up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three additional years of supervised release.

“I’m grateful to the people on the front lines who work hard every day to make sure people like me and other Americans are kept safe,” Ramaswamy told reporters in New Hampshire adding, “I think that we are very well protected,” and stopping before he went into a tirade about how those federal agencies that protected him were responsible for the attacks on 9/11 or somesuch nonsense.

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds just 29 percent of voters in 17 Congressional districts won by Joe Biden in 2020 and then a Republican in 2022 saying House Republicans should move forward with impeachment even if no evidence is uncovered in their “inquiry,” with the rest opposed.

More respondents, 44 percent, said they’ll be less likely to vote for their representative in 2024 if they vote to authorize the impeachment inquiry versus 24 percent who said more likely.

In an example of very good question crafting, Public Policy Polling asked “A month ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson said there was no evidence for an impeachment of President Biden. After meeting with Donald Trump, he called for a vote on an impeachment inquiry. Johnson was one of the chief architects of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election in the courts. Do you trust Speaker Mike Johnson to be fair in this impeachment inquiry, or not?” finding only 30 percent saying they still thought Johnson could be “fair” to 54 percent correctly saying no.

NBC’s Sahil Kapur reports the Republicans are going to try to vote on Thursday to formalize the impeachment inquiry and, assuming all Democrats show up, can only afford three no votes.

Texas woman Kate Cox, stuck in an impossible situation where her fetus is tragically non-viable and will suffer horribly for a few hours at best if it even survives to term, has left the Lone Star State to get an abortion after Picasso-faced Attorney General Ken Paxton got the state Supreme Court to stay a lower court ruling allowing her to have the procedure, ABC News’s Liz Landers reports.

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith on Monday skipped the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and took fat former President Trump’s immunity claims straight to the US Supreme Court.

Sources in the House tell Fox News Ranking House Oversight Dem Jamie Raskin has been hustling Republicans into voting against their caucus’s planned formalization of the Biden impeachment inquiry that former House Speaker and soon-to-be-former Congressman Kevin McCarthy unilaterally declared was in effect in September in an ultimately failed bid to save his job.

Members have been “especially receptive to seeing the Administration’s record of cooperation with investigators,” a source tells Fox News. Probably not receptive enough to vote no, but for Fox to be printing that (and then another 20+ paragraph recap of bullshit allegations against Biden from the past years that went nowhere) is notable in itself and could mean something.

The US Supreme Court on Monday denied certiorari to a challenge to Washington state’s ban on conversion therapy, with Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh dissenting.

Hong Kong’s new “patriots only” election system – as described in this Semafor article anticipating extremely low turnout despite incentives like discounted airfare for Hongkongers based on the Chinese mainland and stipends to nursing homes to help residents get to polls – sounds really familiar, like it’s an endpoint to the kind of “voter quality”-based situation certain actors here in the United States want to set up to restrict the franchise among the eligible voter base.

“We don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote – but everybody shouldn’t be voting,” said not a Chinese Communist Party official charged with overseeing Hong Kong’s elections but Republican Arizona state Senator John Kavanaugh in March 2021.

Republican former Kansas Congressman Steve Watkins, first elected to the House in 2018 and then defeated in the 2020 primary after he was caught voting in the wrong district in a 2019 Topeka municipal election and lied about it to a Shawnee County detective in an interview, is still working on Capitol Hill despite having admitted guilt for the crime, the Kansas City Star reports.

The loophole? Registering as a lobbyist in DC requires applicants to check a box on a form that they haven’t been convicted of “bribery, extortion, embezzlement, an illegal kickback, tax evasion, fraud, a conflict of interest, making a false statement, perjury, or money laundering,” and Watkins, the smooth operator he is, only admitted guilt in a pre-trial diversion agreement, leaving him free to collect a paycheck representing moneyed interests to his former colleagues.

Want to learn more about the Great Replacement Theory but you find the content at Prager U. just not self-victimizing enough?  Well, you’re in luck:  former Fox misogynist Tucker Carlson announced that he’s soon to start his own revamped platform at his website where–for just $72 annually–you’ll be able to access quality content like he created for the now defunct Fox Now streaming service, like his “Let them eat bugs” documentary or his expose of tyranny in Canada.  And of course, there are the Kid Rock interviews!

“Hey, it’s Tucker Carlson! We’ve been out of work for seven or eight months now. Hard to know, time flies when you’re unemployed,” Carlson says in his “aw shucks” Klansman-Next-Door kinda way in a low-budget promotional clip posted online. “But actually, we’ve been working in secret and producing an awful lot of material for months now — interviews, et cetera — and all of it has now found its way to tuckercarlson.com. We’re launching a brand-new thing very soon.”

In addition to the spectacular programming, Variety reports “founding members” will have access to special, exclusive merchandise, like a $25 “official 2023 Tucker Carlson Christmas ornament” which the site claims is “handmade by the talented artists of Wendell August Forge, a one-hundred-year-old American company.”  What’s it look like?  No one knows.  Two weeks before the holiday, the design hasn’t been released.

Forty-four-year-old Jarris Jay Silagi isn’t just your average idiotic, violent antisemite who decided to rob an elderly Jewish couple on their way to their Beverly Hills synagogue, he’s… well, yeah, he may be your average idiotic hater who did all that, but he’s special.  After he took off his belt to whip the couple as he yelled, “Jew, give me your jewelry,” Silagi started running away when the bloodied 75-year-old man started fighting back, according to NBC News, as bullies do.

As he should have known would happen if he ever watched a Three Stooges episode, Silagi didn’t make it far because his pants, predictably, fell to his ankles, tripping him up and allowing his victim and police to detain him.  (Oh, did I forget to mention that the synagogue the couple attends is located a couple of blocks away from the Beverly Hills Police Department headquarters and the attack happened practically within sight of the PD’s front door?)

Now facing a bevy of charges including assault with a deadly weapon, attempted robbery and elder abuse, and with prosecutors considering a hate crimes enhancement, Silagi is being held without bail.  His victim went home to change his shirt and then returned for synagogue.

A California 17-year-old who completed law school passed the state bar exam last week and will join the Tulare County district attorney’s office, the Washington Post reports, making him the youngest person in the state’s history to pass the bar exam and work as a prosecutor.  Peter Park started law school at the age of 13, as his chronological peers were entering eighth grade.

You gotta give it to Peter:  he was literally taking junior high school courses during the day while studying for CLEP exams, subject-specific tests that when passed, allow people to apply to law school even if they don’t have a college exam.  As Peter studied for his eighth-grade math tests, he was also studying micro- and macroeconomics, as well as composition, cramming for a week before taking the CLEP exam.  He completed all required exams when he was 13, then entered an online four-year juris doctor program at Northwestern California University School of Law.  Finally, he did something that not even the chair of the House Judiciary Committee has done:  he passed a state bar exam.

“At first it was very intimidating — I had zero knowledge about the law,” Park said in an interview with the Post. “But now, I pretty much have a 10-year head start. That’s like living ten years extra. I value that over the traditional high school experience,” adding, “The law is like the fabric of society, it reaches into everyone’s lives.”

The Golden Globes awards show where inebriated stars have historically made historical asses of themselves–because guests indulge in a cornucopia of chemicals, but presumably because of the open bar–is having trouble signing on an emcee for the festivities and even got slapped down by comedian Chris Rock, himself part of a kerfuffle at a different awards show.

Per CNN, the event planners for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association want to strike the right note for the January 7th show and have reportedly reached out to others, including the trio of “SmartLess” podcast hosts Will Arnett, Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman, and Ali Wong of the Netflix series “Beef.”  But with fading ratings and just four weeks including the holiday season to rehearse, the chances of getting an A- or B-list celebrity fade.

“To the extent that the defendant is seeking a stay, pending his appeal, of matters implicating ‘those aspects of the case involved in the appeal,’ … the Court should deny his motion as unnecessary and duplicative; that divestiture occurred when the defendant filed his notice of appeal. Otherwise, the Court should decline to issue an order that would prevent it from resolving pending motions or handling aspects of this case unrelated to the appeal.”

And with that, Jack Smith’s office puts to bed a brief three-page motion dismissing Donald Trump’s attempt to stop virtually all criminal action–starting with the March 4th DC federal case into his attempt to undermine the Constitution on January 6th–is quickly countered with the argument summarized best by:  “We can try the case while Trump argues the appeal elsewhere, we’ll just continue on with this case here, like we always do.”

After weeks of Houthi rebels in Yemen firing missiles and using drones to harass commercial shipping and a US Navy warship, the Biden Administration contacted its allies to add strength to an international task force assigned to keep channels open, the Washington Post reports.

On Saturday, Houthi leaders said they would attack any shipping that might stop in Israel without stopping to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.  But significant attacks started in mid-October with the Houthi launching Iranian-supplied drones and missiles from Yemen, with the latest happening Saturday after a French vessel downed two drones.