It’s never been made clear why apparent drowning fetishist Greg Abbott feels the need to erect potentially deadly barriers in the river if Trump’s border wall is as effective as Republicans claimed, but anyway…  The US Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas and its Republican governor for installing a series of buoys reportedly covered in and connected by razor wire in a section of the Rio Grande to deter migrants from crossing, Politico reports.

The lawsuit alleged Abbott’s stunt–which has reportedly led to the hospitalization of many migrants, including children–violated various laws including constructing an illegal structure in a US waterway.

This transcript–faithfully taken at half speed to compensate for his vomitous speaking style–demonstrates how badly conservative gadfly Ben Shapiro wants to turn his pathetic, wimpy torching of toys because of a perceived demasculinization of the doll-based Ken character into a PR win.  Note how Shapiro now claims people are getting outraged over his reaction to a movie about a doll when he literally set things afire because of a movie about a doll.

The reaction to me burning a Barbie car with, like, Barbie and Ken in it, is like the reaction in the Islamic world when someone burns a Koran in Sweden. It’s totally crazy.  Idon’teven–like wow, guys.  Wow. I mean, there’s an article, in NBC, NBCNews.com:  ‘The internet is roasting for hatewatching Barbie while dressed like Ken.’  Apparently, being dressed like Ken amounts to black jeans and a black shirt. … There’s a really serious undertone to a lot of this stuff.  I mean, I actually got some death threats over the Barbievideo, I’m not kidding you.  There are people on, on Twitter that are literally tweeting out about, can we do something about this Shapir– like, over a Barbie movie.

Unshockingly, Ben Shapiro confuses the outrage Muslims feel when someone burns a Koran with the general mocking he endures after his publicity stunt backfires and he becomes the target of ridicule.

With the sudden, impetuous transition to rename Twitter to “X” which appeared to happen when he had another uncontrolled impulse to destroy a once-dominant social media enterprise, Elon Musk ordered the Twitter bird removed from all company property, from the website itself to emails.  Instead of the pleasant light blue bird icon, now the site is bedecked with a generic black-and-white “X” in the corner, a simplistic and uninspiring design that denotes nothing but laziness and poor planning.

And speaking of poor planning, Musk’s need for immediate compliance and fulfillment led to an order Monday for crews to remove the bird icon from the exterior of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.  But Musk never obtained the needed permits for the equipment, the work, or the need to partially block a city street to do the work safely, so the city shut it down.  Symbolic of Musk’s disastrous tenure, the company’s building now stands with a half-disassembled logo on the front until Musk can figure out who he needs to hire to fix it.

“The dwarves are even dwarves anymore because they thought that would be too politically incorrect.  Snow White is not even a white woman anymore even though her name is Snow White,” Fox guest idiot Charly Arnolt asserts, apparently ignorant that the races of millions of people like footballer Reggie White and entertainer Jack Black do not match their surnames.  “So it’s very interesting just the different directions just the actresses starring in the newest rendition of Snow White have said, y’know it’s no longer about this woman finding true love, she’s no longer going to be saved by a prince, y’know it’s all about her being a natural born leader that she was supposed to be.  We’re just going too far out of the way to make things super diverse and inclusive.  It’s no longer about high quality film production anymore or, and entertainment.  We’ve just completely lost sight of what Hollywood is supposed to be about.”

Disgraced former NYPD commissioner Bernie Kerik will turn to special counsel Jack Smith over more than 2,000 pages of documents relating to his unsuccessful efforts to uncover voter fraud or election irregularities to support indicted felon Donald Trump’s claims that he actually won the election, the Daily Beast reports.

Working under the guidance of hair dye dispenser Rudy Giuliani while Giuliani still had a legitimate license to practice law, Kerik at first fought the release of the documents case under attorney-client confidentiality rules.  However, Trump waived those claims last week, forcing Kerik to comply.

The documents are expected to give Smith and his team added insight into the effort Trump and his cabal went to undermine the results of the 2020 election, including communications and planning to submit fake slates of electors and to nullify the legitimate ballots of millions of voters.

For all intents and purposes, Trump’s momentary National Security Advisor and sworn QAnon follower Mike Flynn’s $50 million lawsuit claiming malicious prosecution against the federal government has been put on hold until the federal judge in the case hears a motion to dismiss from the federal government, a pretty solid sign that the judge is seriously considering tossing the frivolous case.

Per Politico’s Josh Gerstein, US District Judge for the Middle of Florida Mary Stenson Scriven halted all discovery motions and exchanges between the two parties involved in the Flynn v US case until the teensy matter of whether the case has merit gets determined.  Flynn claims he was unfairly targeted for prosecution because the Justice Department–after it was taken over by the corrupt Bill Barr and Flynn hired Trump-favorite Sidney “The Kraken” Powell as his counsel–dropped Flynn’s case at the insistence of Donald Trump, as he weaponized the government to protect his political allies, despite Flynn having asserted his guilt at least three times under oath.

🚨 BREAKING! 🚨 OMG! 🚨 HUGE! 🚨 BREAKING! 🚨 Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer will testify to the House Oversight Committee about their fun times smoking crack and taking money from foreign scumbags, RSBN reports! 🚨 HUGE! 🚨 THIS TIME IS GOING TO BE DIFFERENT LIBS! 🚨

“What liberals will have us believe is that we went from the Civil War, to we didn’t start recovering until the 1960s.  They would not have us believe that for one hundred years we were moving in the right direction, not in the right place but moving in the right direction,” Fox personality Johnny Jones asserts that the US has recovered completely from the horrors and injustice of slavery, though he does so by glossing over the century of segregation, Jim Crow, “separate but equal” and attacks on affirmative action that conservative, racist states only complied with because they were coerced to with from financial penalties to National Guard escorting children into schools.

The Internal Revenue Service announced it will no longer send agents on unannounced visits to taxpayers suspected of shorting their tax payments, citing increased hostility and risk to their employees thanks to violent rhetoric against the agency led by Congressional Republicans.

The Washington Post notes that for decades, IRS agents would make tens of thousands of visits to the homes of people who have not responded to IRS outreach regarding misfiled, unfiled or past due accounts.  The agency says it will now cut those down to a few hundred per year, basing the need on the urgency and outstanding amount of the debt.

The policy switch comes as the Biden Administration shifts the focus of the agency from harassing middle-class taxpayers to concentrating on the massive unpaid taxes of the wealthiest Americans.  The Treasury Department set plans to hire more than 80,000 new employees over the next decade, with most focusing on customer service and administrative personnel, not enforcement agents as Republicans had characterized the entire lot of new hires.

Donald Trump’s post-presidency photo book, “Our Journey Together,” compiled from photographs taken by taxpayer-paid White House photographers, netted the indicted sexual assaulter $5.75 million in royalties since its debut in December 2021, a surprising number given just over 10,000 were sold in retail markets, Forbes reports based on financial disclosures.

The book’s publishing company, a new venture created by underachieving son Don Jr. and a former campaign staffer claims to have sold 500,000 copies of the book, but NPD BookScan, an independent company that tracks retail sales of books, reports just 10,200 books sold through brick-and-mortar and online retailers.  The rest were sold to special interest groups supporting Trump, his campaign, his lifestyle and his legal fees, so it’s impossible to track the actual distribution of the books that are stored in those groups’ warehouses.

Trump’s campaign and his PAC paid more than a quarter million dollars for a supply of books, which sell with a cover price of $75 each.  Trump’s campaign website still features the book as swag for people who donate $75 to the campaign, the same as the book’s cover price.  Trump book ranks 26,394th on Amazon’s Best Seller list; Barack Obama’s 2020 book, “A Promised Land,” by comparison, sits at 3,100 even though it’s been on sale more than year longer.

Former one-term Senator Kelly Ayotte announced her bid for the Republican nomination for New Hampshire governor, hoping to succeed retiring GOP Governor Chris Sununu, the Washington Post reports.  Regarded as a relative centrist in the Republican Party and someone who would cross the aisle to work with Democrats on legislation.  She’s also one of the few pro-choice Republicans to take national office.  She’ll face Chuck Morse, the former president of the New Hampshire state Senate who unsuccessfully ran for the US Senate in 2022, losing the nomination to conspiracy theorist Don Bolduc, who ultimately lost to Democrat Maggie Hassan.

Israeli dictator Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday scored a big win against democracy as his far right ultra-nationalist coalition in the Knesset passed a bill allowing the government to effectively overrule the country’s judiciary whenever and however they want, Al-Jazeera reports.

Spandex wearing grapple freak Jim Jordan is aiming for a vote this week to hold robotic weirdo Mark Zuckerberg in contempt for ignoring Jordan’s stupid subpoenas or whatever, Punchbowl reports.

Or maybe Zuckerberg did comply with them but the documents he handed over didn’t prove Jordan’s stupid “Big Tech bias” conspiracy theories, leading to the pointless contempt threat.

Why is this fat bastard complaining so much about being indicted again if it helps him politically in the GOP primary? “I consider it a great badge of courage. I’m being indicted for you, and I believe the ‘you’ is more than 200 million people that love our country that are out there, and they love our country. This is a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time,” Trump said just last month.

Ukrainian intel officials tell the Kyiv Post that Monday’s drone attacks on Moscow and Crimea were just a taste of what’s to come and the sorties will “continue and increase in scale.”

“The strikes on the key facilities of Russia’s security sector located in Moscow testify to the fact that the Putin regime is unable to fully control the sky even for the protection of the most important facilities,” Ukraine military intel spokesman Andriy Yusov told the Post after a drone took out the top floors of a Moscow office building and another was felled just barely short of the Russian Defense Ministry’s main headquarters. Meanwhile in Crimea, a drone struck a Russian army ammunition dump, prompting the closures of a major highway and rail line nearby.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Russia has “already lost” its war in Ukraine, citing the Kremlin’s inability to hold on to land and hit the targets Russian President Vladimir Putin put out as the goals for the invasion.  As USA Today reports, Blinken cites Ukraine regaining half of the territory it took in the first weeks of the invasion, as well as Russia’s inability to force Ukraine to the negotiating table.

“The objective was to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, its sovereignty, to subsume it into Russia. That failed a long time ago,” Blinken said during an interview Sunday with CNN.  “Unlike the Russians, Ukrainians are fighting for their land, for their future, for their country, for their freedom.”

Over at the Daily Beast, UNLV law professor Benjamin Edwards presents a fun little argument that demonstrates how painfully stupid Republican Florida Governor and floundering presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is, given that he’s a Yale Law School alumnus.  Edwards tears into DeSantis’s claim of dereliction of fiduciary responsibility that would need to be the basis of the lawsuit the Florida Man is threatening against Bud Light’s parent company, noting that any such lawsuit would have to show that the board of directors disregarded explicit warnings of a potential disaster from one social media outreach from one marketing effort for one brand of the international conglomerate AB InBev–a task so far removed from the duties of board members that any such claim would be laughed out of court.

As Edwards points out, though, even if DeSantis throws the entire quiver of resources of the Florida taxpayer-paid legal team at the lawsuit, the financial return would be minimal.  If the Florida argument prevails–which is virtually impossible–and the lawsuit nets a $50 million penalty against the company, the amount of the award gets split among all the shareholders.  AB InBev has more than 2 billion shares outstanding; the Florida Pension Fund holds about 600,000, or 0.03%.  If the Florida lawyers spent all their resources to win the case, they would net a pawltry $15,000.

This DeSantis campaign video was weird and sad even before it ended with that Third Reich imagery.

Although the pundits predicted the right-wing parties would make significant gains, Spanish voters did not give the conservative coalition led by the People’s Party an absolute majority in the nation’s Congress of Deputies, the New York Times reports.  The People’s Party won 136 seats while the ultra-nationalist Vox party took 33 seats.

The left-wing faction, led by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, took a total of 160 seats among its three key groups; the Socialist Worker’s Party itself actually increased its seats in the Congress by picking up two additional seats.  People’s Party leader Alberto Feijóo will have to “Kevin McCarthy” a coalition to hit a majority 176 seats in the 350-seat legislature.

Former third First Lady and migrant with no discernable skill Melania Trump’s latest grifting venture–an NFT featuring an iconic image of Buzz Aldrin walking on the Moon–appears to violate NASA’s rules on uses of its proprietary material, SheKnows reports.

Trump’s website features an NFT which incorporates an image of Aldrin adapted from a photo taken by fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong which NASA waives copyrights for the image when used for educational or informational purposes, and the agency allows the use of most images for commercial purposes that fall within its usage guidelines, but it explicitly states, “NASA is not approving any merchandising applications involving Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), as they are not consistent with the categories of products the Agency is approved to merchandise.  Further, as stated in the NASA Media Usage Guidelines, NASA does not wish for its images to be used in connection with NFTs.”  Apparently, Melania’s lawyers did not “Be Best” when it comes to researching fair usage rules.

But don’t rush yourself to make the $75 purchase from Melania’s online store before they’re gone:  The limited edition “Man on the Moon” [Such an original name!] NFT has more than 440 of the original 500 run remaining after four days on sale.  And it’s not like the Trump family has a habit of obeying legal orders, so it’s unlikely to be pulled down anytime soon.