Tennessee’s Eric Gavelek Munchel, the January 6th domestic terrorist known as Zip Tie Guy, best remembered for climbing over handrails while holding a number of restraints, received a 57-month sentence for his part in the Republican-led attack on Congress. His mother, Lisa Eisenhart, seen in the photo above with her son, got a 30-month sentence. At one point in his prosecution, Munchel blamed his mother for his involvement in the attack, saying she went into the Capitol and he followed to make sure nothing happened to her. Oh, and the zip ties? He claimed he found them along the way and just picked them up.
As the nation approached the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which–some people say–was the most diabolical government plot since Hunter Biden got that Ukrainian fired, the New York caretakers for the remains of the unknown dead from Ground Zero announced they’ve been able to conclusively identify two more sets of remains, ABC News reports.
The people, who were not publicly named at the request of the families, were the 1,648th and 1,649th identified of the 2,753 people confirmed to have been killed at the World Trade Center in New York.
Writers at low production value and pretty tinfoil-y right wing website Wisconsin Right Now have cranked out a fairly panicked play-by-play of Thursday’s Wisconsin Elections Commission meeting, their apprehension in the headline “GOP Commissioners Say 3 Democrats on WEC Could Block Trump Ballot Access” seemingly backed up by actual quotes from the minutes of the meeting.
The WEC is, as many of you are aware, a deeply dysfunctional panel made up of three Democrats and three Republicans held together by legal duct tape, slapped together by Republicans in 2015 to replace another board that was also slapped together by Republicans in the late 1990s after they stripped the Secretary of State’s office of all election administration duties in the 1970s. And yes, Republicans now want to disband the WEC and slap something else together. Anyway there’s a whole other shitshow going on right now with the WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe who the GOP claims is no longer legally serving in the office and fuck how much more background do this need?
Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s effort to move his Fulton County, Georgia racketeering case to the federal court has been denied by the federal court in Northern Georgia, Kyle Cheney of Politico reports. This does not bode well for other defendants’ attempts to do the same in the RICO case.
In his ruling, Judge Steven C. Jones, an Obama appointee, found Meadows’s claims that he was acting in his official capacity as Chief of Staff did not hold up under scrutiny, and therefore he was not acting under the color of his official duties.
“Instead, the evidence before the Court overwhelmingly suggests that Meadows was not acting in his scope of executive branch duties during most of the Overt Acts alleged,” the opinion reads. “Even if Meadows took on tasks that mirror the duties that he carried out when acting in his official role as White House Chief of Staff (such as attending meetings, scheduling phone calls, and managing the President’s time) he has failed to demonstrate how the election-related activities that serve as the basis for the charges in the Indictment are related to any of his official acts. As the substance of the overt acts constituted a significant part of Meadows’s testimony and proof of his acting within the scope of his federal office, the Court concludes that based on the factual evidence, Meadows was not acting in the scope of his office for purposes of federal officer removal.”
Responding to the news that she came close to being indicted for her efforts to interfere in an election by intimidating Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into overturning the results of the 2020 election, loser former Senator Kelly “Left Eye” Loeffler complained about Trump’s indictment as being “election interference” and in a statement Friday, writing “Trying to jail your party’s leading political opponent ahead of 2024 is election interference. Speaking out in defense of election integrity is not. I make no apologies for serving my state by giving voice to millions of Americans who felt disenfranchised in 2020 – and I refuse to be intimidated by a two-tiered system of justice that seeks to systematically destroy conservatives across this country.”
Funny enough this asshole, after learning she had officially lost the previous day’s special runoff election to Dem Raphael Warnock in the middle of the January 6th Capitol insurrection, stood down from her plans to object, telling the Senate “When I arrived in Washington this morning, I fully intended to object to the certification of the electoral votes. However, the events that have transpired today have forced me to reconsider and I cannot now in good conscience object to the certification of these electors… There can be no disagreement that upholding democracy is the only path to preserving our republic.” Well we guess she can just pretend she never said all that now.
The Washington Post’s Chris Dehghanpoor got a hold of a new filing in former Dominion exec Eric Coomer’s defamation case against Mike Lindell, seeking sanctions against the mustachioed pillow tycoon for being “combative, vulgar, disrespectful, non-responsive, evasive, and consistently loud” during depositions, video clips of one dated from March 8, 2023 were attached in the filing. There are a lot of clips in Dehghanpoor’s thread, forcing us to pick one in media res with this deposition.
Quite a few of the moments center on allegations that Lindell personally profited from his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, accusations that obviously have merit as it’s beyond dispute that he did indeed create promo codes for MyPillow.com like “KRAKEN” and even “QANON.”
It’s just that the “personal profit” was immediately spent on his endless pursuit of the non-existent fraud, costing him tens of millions of dollars because Lindell really truly believes this shit. He’s fully 100 percent in the cult. Lindell was not grifting the MAGA people who bought his products with those promo codes because he himself has been grifted. The rage hormones from raging endlessly the lost cause of the 2020 election are filling in the void within once occupied by crack cocaine.
That’s about as close as we can get for sympathy for Mike Lindell, because it’s also beyond dispute that Coomer was injured as he was forced to go into hiding when Lindell and others, like the Kraken and QAnon influencer Joel Oltmann defamed him saying he was an agent of Antifa who rigged the 2020 election for Joe Biden. Can’t expect a man who’s been hurting himself so very badly in this nearly three years long crusade to understand that he’s also hurting other people.
Accusing the DNC of “rigging” the primary for the incumbent president while he’s polling in the single digits, batshit vaccine conspiracy freak and not particularly subtle anti-semite Robert F Kennedy Jr on Thursday hinted that he was going to drop out and run a third party campaign for president, much to the delight and enthusiasm of people who would never actually vote for him.
And people who apparently have never really stopped to ask themselves which 2024 candidate might suffer more from an exodus of anti-vax and/or other edgelord conspiracy weirdos from their respective bases: Is it Joe Biden or Donald Trump? The fact that we even have to pose that rhetorically just underscores how little they understand about what they’re rooting for. Like when (not if) Joe Rogan endorses RFK Jr and Catturd and all the other chodes go berserk celebrating is it really going to take until after the 2024 election for what they did to sink in? Goddamn, let’s hope so.
Cool, calm, and collected likely only through chemical means, Senator Lindsey Graham mumbles his way through a brief appearance just hours after he learned he and two of his former colleagues came pretty close to getting hit with criminal charges in Fulton County, Georgia along with his Orange Master and 18 of their allies. Lucky for him he’s back home in South Carolina where he could talk when he was ready. Who knows what the hell kind of meltdown he could’ve had if cameras had caught up to him in the Capitol instead. Hell we would’ve gotten a lot more clicks on that article.
Actually, what a fucking dick for depriving us of web traffic. Goddamn you Lindsey Graham!
One month after the devastating fire that incinerated the historic town of Lahaina on Maui, FBI personnel tell the New York Times at least 380 people are still missing from what remains of the former Hawaiian royal capital. This coupled with 115 confirmed dead places the likely final total final toll at just less than 500 whenever it can be determined in the coming weeks and months.
Here’s former President Trump on February 16, 2023, the day a Fulton County, Georgia judge allowed the release of a heavily redacted version of the report from the special purpose grand jury impaneled last year to hear testimony and examine evidence against disgraced former President Trump and his minions for their failed post-2020 election coup attempt in the state:
Trump also wrote “The long awaited important sections of the Georgia report, which do not even mention President Trump’s name, have nothing to do with the President because President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong,” just prior to the above, plainly mistaking the lack of information indicating that he had been recommended for charges for him not being recommended for charges.
And here he is again on Friday, responding the release of the non-redacted version of the report from the special purpose grand jury impaneled last year to hear testimony and examine evidence against disgraced former President Trump and his minions for their failed post-2020 election coup attempt in the state. Not really as much of now that he’s actually been indicted. Still fun as hell to put side-by-side with what he stupidly thought was going to happen. He did it in New York too.
The Canadian version of disgraced former General Mike Flynn took the stage with his wife at the Conservative Party conference in Quebec City on Thursday to rip into Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “woke agenda” which he says is destroying “Canadian values,” CTV News reports.
“Our country has been led by a government that has been focused on virtue signaling,” retired Lt General Michel Maisonneuve said to the crowd, sounding almost as if he just watched a lot of Fox News and took notes. “The red maple leaf is the flag that can and should unite all Canadians. Why should we not be patriotic and show it?” Maisonneuve continued. Yeah, this asshole certainly did his homework. Definitely follows Ron DeSantis and fellow Canadian Ted Cruz on Twitter and decided to act like he came up with all this shit himself as if other Canuck right wingers never heard any of it.
The report of the Fulton County, Georgia special purpose grand jury impaneled last year to hear testimony and examine evidence against disgraced former President Trump and his minion for their failed post-2020 election coup attempt in the state was released to the public on Friday and holy shit they recommended Senator Lindsey Graham, former Georgia Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, batshit QAnon lawyer Lin Wood, Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn, Mike Flynn, and now-Lt Gov Burt Jones – who in 2020 was a state Senator who signed a fake electoral college vote for Trump – face charges “with respect to the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, focused on efforts in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia.”
It’s not clear why Wood, Flynn, Epshteyn, Graham, Loeffler, and Perdue escaped charges. Maybe the prosecutor’s office decided they were Senators simply more trouble than they were worth likely hiding behind Speech and Debate while Wood may be simply too fucking deranged and thus incompetent to stand trial. Epshteyn and Flynn who knows, but they’re pieces of shit who will face justice one way or another. Jones however should not at all sleep easy as it’s extremely likely the only reason the Fulton 19 were not the Fulton 20 was that Willis was forced to recuse herself after campaigning with Jones’s Dem opponent last year. There’s going to be a special prosecutor on his case soon and it might not be too long before he finds himself in front of the mugshot camera.
Disgraced former President Trump’s lawyers took advantage of what’s called a “snap removal” and on Thursday removed the case brought against him by CREW and six Colorado voters seeking to disqualify him from the 2024 ballot under Section III of the 14th Amendment, a loophole he was able to exploit as his (likely very much nominal) co-defendant Dem Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold had not accepted service of the complaint yet, Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog reports.
Hasen’s guy Derek Muller is skeptical it’ll stay in federal court given that Griswold has not consented yet, however he sees the case overall as a long shot given that it’s too early since Trump hasn’t yet actually qualified for the ballot yet (he will) and a whole bunch of other reasons very deep in the weeds we could spend hours parsing out and distilling so how about just click the links instead.
In the political world this shows that Trump’s minions were at the ready, moving more or less immediately to put out a fire. Are they going to be able to do it in dozens of more states, all of them with differing interpretations of, procedures for adjudicating, and statutes dealing with Section III of the 14th? How many more lawyers is he going to have to hire and pay low four figures an hour, every hour that they’re working on this while he’s also defending himself from 91 felony counts in four different jurisdictions not to mention at least three major civil lawsuits? Should be fun to watch.
Heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and disgraced former President Trump may end up crossing paths in person Saturday at an important sportsball match between the teams representing two opposing educational institutions based in that one corn state all the politics sites keep talking about when covering the smashmouth gridiron championship contest between the star offensive standouts charging down the field to the Iowa caucus kickoff, the Washington Examiner reports.
DeSantis will show up to a parking lot in which supporters of the two sportsball teams – but predominantly the “home” team – gather to consume large quantities of partially burned meat products and foamy yellow fermented alcoholic water dispensed from metal barrels. DeSantis will feign loyalty to the “home” team and is likely to have memorized a number of factoids about their past successes in matches that occurred in prior years in order to convince the supporters that he is just like them. For his part Trump will simply mumble that the “home” team is tremendous at sportsball but the “visiting” team is formidable as well. A marquee showdown may develop on the GOP field if the feud between Trump and DeSantis develops into a key matchup in person and the smaller, lighter DeSantis is forced to put up a Hail Mary offense while Trump runs the scoreboard.
In all non-bizarre rambling bullshit seriousness we’re hoping they get to meet in person, it gets caught on camera, and – most importantly – DeSantis grows some balls and says something that really pisses off Trump in front of a bunch of people. Unlikely, but it’d be one for the highlight reel.
“MSNBC is giving Joe Biden’s former press secretary Jen Psaki a primetime TV slot just in time for the 2024 election. Consider what this means. A far left cable news outlet is allowing a former press secretary to present herself as a news show host while her former boss is seeking reelection,” the Gateway Pundit reports on more suffering being inflicted upon the perpetually aggrieved souls of MAGAmerica, so tormented and scourged by the cruel, fire-haired sorceress and her acidic tongue.
Further overdramatizations of their already histrionic bullshit aside, the Pundit pulls off some pretty impressive preemptive defense in the next sentence with “Try to imagine the reaction from the left if Sarah Huckabee Sanders was given the 8 PM slot on FOX News during the 2020 election.”
Which is almost as if to say “Take that libs! You’re going to have to get up earlier in the morning if you want to call out one of the top right wing propaganda websites on the internet on their hypocrisy,” because even though former Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was in fact a paid Fox News contributor during the 2020 election, she did not have her own show in the 8PM time slot. They moved the goalposts before you leftist pikers even put on your cleats!
Republicans in the Wisconsin state legislature are switching to their Plan B in their search for a pretext to impeach newly seated state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz after the Wisconsin Judicial Commission ruled that her campaign statements about abortion policy and the state’s extreme gerrymanders were not any grounds to pursue complaints against her, deciding that she received $10 million in campaign contributions from Democrats would make a good case to show that she’s “compromised” and thus incapable of ruling impartially on important matters.
Small problem though, as the AP reports all three conservatives on the bench had received contributions from state, local, and national GOP groups before they were elected. Plus her opponent, Dan Kelly took in over $1.2 million in total from the state Republican Party.
Republican strategists and politicians are looking to shift away from using the term “Pro-Life” to describe their abortion policies, seeing as how the decades-old sobriquet is quite resonating with voters it did before the Supreme Court took away the right to choose, NBC News reports.
“Many voters think [‘pro-life’] means you’re for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and ‘pro-choice’ now can mean any number of things,” said Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, evidently lost on what might have given voters that idea other than that literally women cannot get an abortion at all in a number of Red States nor can they be given critical life-saving medical procedures that no reasonable person would consider to be an elective abortion. “So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they’ve shifted. So if you’re going to talk about the issue, you need to be specific,” Hawley continued about the “branding problem.”
“At 1100 PM AST (0300 UTC), the center of Hurricane Lee was located near latitude 17.3 North, longitude 52.4 West. Lee is moving toward the west-northwest near 14 mph (22 km/h), and this motion is expected to continue through early next week with a significant decrease in forward speed. On the forecast track, Lee is expected to pass well to the north of the northern Leeward Islands, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico over the weekend and into early next week.”
“Data from an Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft indicate that maximum sustained winds have increased to near 160 mph (260 km/h) with higher gusts. Lee is a category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Additional strengthening is forecast overnight. Fluctuations in intensity are likely over the next few days, but Lee is expected to remain a major hurricane through early next week,” says a National Hurricane Center bulletin on the raging nuke target in the Atlantic.
