Footage of high school dropout Congresswoman Lauren Boebert rushing up the steps of the Capitol last Wednesday, May 31st, as she tried in vain to make it in to vote in the debt ceiling and spending bill (which would’ve passed with or without her). The dumbass on Sunday tried to spin her absence as being a “no-show protest” for a bill she called “fake news.” Again, we’re still a little confused as to why other outlets are acting like the reason behind Boebert’s failure to vote was a big mystery when court records show she had to be in Colorado that day for an initial hearing in her divorce case.

The federal grand jury impaneled by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith to examine evidence and testimony concerning disgraced former President Trump’s theft of classified government documents will reconvene this week to do something, NBC News isn’t saying what.

We’ve never seen reporting before that this particular grand jury is simply “meeting,” all of it was this or that witness (or possible target) was testifying, mostly after the fact. It’s hard not to see a parallel to the round-the-clock watch with the Manhattan grand jury just prior to Trump getting indicted over the Stormy Daniels payoffs back in March. Coupled with more increasingly damning details leaking out last week, you might do well to stay tuned for Jack Smith to finally drop the hammer.

“I probably better not comment on that,” Senate GOP second-in-command John Thune told the Washington Post when asked if he regretted letting putative Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy take the lead on negotiating the debt ceiling/spending bill signed by President Biden on Saturday.

Palin of the Rockies Lauren Boebert, the Republican Colorado Congressman better known for her frequent foibles with her “Mean Girls” attitude than any legislation, announced that the story of her conception is a lie and former professional wrestler Stan Lane is not her biological father according to a recently-done blood test, the Daily Beast reports.

Boebert’s mother, Shawn Roberts Bentz, had sought child support from Lane back in the 1980s, but a blood test did not prove paternity.  Bentz, however, always questioned the test given that a lab technician had been caught switching blood samples for bribes in another case.  However, the latest tests were conclusive:  Lane is not Boebert’s father, and no one is taking credit for siring the child.

Not knowing her father becomes the latest chapter in a life that led her to marry a 24-year-old man who pleaded guilty to charges after whipping out his penis in front of teenage friends of his then-high school student girlfriend, who he impregnated at 17, abandoned at 36 after a series of scandals, and who is now a 36-year old grandmother after her aforementioned son impregnated his 15-year-old girlfriend because of family values.

A 66-year-old New Hampshire veteran was charged with phoning in threats to an unspecified Senator, angry at the legislator’s blocking of promotions and veterans entitlement programs, CNN reports.

Brian Landry allegedly called the Senator’s office and left a message saying, “Hey stupid. I’m a veteran sniper. And unless you change your ways, I got my scope pointed in your direction, and I’m coming to get you.”  When questioned by police, Landry could not deny that was a direct quote, but he said he “may have said” those words, saying he was angry because “he saw on the news that [the Senator] is blocking military promotions.”

The police report does not name the Senator, saying only that it was a member elected in 2021, but the profile matches that of Republican Alabama football coach Tommy Tuberville.

What an inspiring speech by the would-be leader of a nation besieged on all sides by the woke. May these words echo for generations so never again does woke threaten our civilization. Even more so than other statesman Mike Pence’s stirring description of riding and roasting on the ride.

BREAKING NOOSE: Swinging around in Iowa on Saturday, Mike Pence announced that he’s going to announce his 2024 campaign in the state next week, the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher reports on the former Veep’s bid to rope in support from other Conservative Evangelical weirdos.

Putting an end to the economy-threatening theatrics of the Republican Temper Tantrum Caucus, President Joe Biden signed into law the legislation raising the debt ceiling until after the 2024 election, thereby handing Republicans another defeat and ensuring a House battle over the tenuous speakership of Kevin McCarthy, CNN reports.

Donning a t-shirt emblazoned with  “Compromise is just another word for surrender,” a Florida Man was arrested after pointing a loaded handgun at a neighbor’s head after a friend momentarily drove her car onto his driveway while backing out of her driveway across the street, WJXT in Jacksonville reports.  Welcome to Florida, where anyone can carry a gun at anytime with no license, training or cause.

Video of the incident shows a car preparing to back out o the neighbor’s driveway when 60-year-old Palm Coast resident Terry Vetsch approaches the car from the house immediately across the street before turning and driving down the street after Vetsch banged on the car.  Walking onto the neighbor’s property, Vetsch bangs the back of the SUV, apparently with the gun in his hand, and appears to yell at the driver.  After he retreats to his driveway, the neighbor approaches Vetsch to ask him what the fuck his problem is, and he pulls a gun from the pocket of his shorts while she is still in the street and points it at her head.

As an early victory in LGBTQ Pride Month, a federal judge in Tennessee has ruled unconstitutional the state law banning the millennia-old entertainment genre of drag from public areas and from where children may view them, Politico reports.

Judge Thomas Parker, a Trump appointee, said the state law against “adult cabaret entertainment” was “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad” in his decision on a lawsuit brought by a Friends of George’s, a Memphis-based LGBTQ+ performance group.  Parker said the law illegally prohibited artistic expressions  and that “[s]uch speech is protected by the First Amendment.”

In a Saturday piece in Politico titled “If the Government Has UFO Crash Materials, It’s Time to Reveal Them,” former Clinton and Bush Administration Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon says he’s referred four witnesses to the Pentagon’s new UAP research office AARO “who claim to have knowledge of a secret US government program involving the analysis and exploitation of materials recovered from off-world craft,” and others about a “secret reverse engineering program” he’s passed along to the intelligence community’s inspector general’s office as well as the staff members of the relevant Congressional committees.

Mellon, a scion of the old-breed plutocrat family (the Mellons in “Carnegie-Mellon”), doesn’t make any further or more sensational claims or get into specifics, though there’s plenty of the old “Just asking questions” in this piece. On one hand it’s certainly not unheard of for a member of a powerful dynasty to go off the reservation and deep into conspiracy batshittery (see Kennedy, Robert Fitzgerald Jr), on the other he had a high-level position at the Pentagon and held it in both Dem and Republican administrations. But so did Mike Flynn and he’s pilled as fuck nowadays.

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of alien technology in the government’s possession in the modern post-2017 “UAP” era, which began with the New York Times actually printing “Under [Bigelow Aerospace founder billionaire Robert] Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that [Military intelligence official Luis] Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.” So it would be nice if Mellon would follow up on this at some point in the coming months. We’ll give him some benefit of the doubt until he pulls a James Comer and says he can’t find his whistleblowers.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tells the Wall Street Journal, in not so many words, that fat former President Trump doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about when he says he’s going to end the war with Russia in 24 hours if reelected next year. “Zelensky said he couldn’t understand Trump’s claim he could end the war in 24 hours, as Trump hadn’t done so while in office, when Russia was already occupying Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine,” the Journal writes in the piece.

“In a situation like this, when there is support, you are afraid of changes. And to be honest, when you mention a change of administration, I feel the same way as any other person – you want changes for the better, but it can also be the other way around,” said Zelensky. Still the Ukrainian president was otherwise as diplomatic as he could be in the situation, saying “I’m not sure how Trump would have acted,” if Putin had launched the full-scale invasion with Donald still in office.

We get Zelensky’s restraint, but Trump has none. He’s going to leave Zelensky and the Ukrainian people for dead if he returns to power. Zelensky needs to speak more forcefully about this and say that a Trump win means Ukraine’s path to a favorable peace is all but closed if the war continues, to say nothing of the threat the Trump-Putin axis poses to the entire European continent. Trump needs to lose and Zelensky needs to say it, unambiguously and clearly. It’s not like the Putin Regime is shy about saying openly who they prefer to win the United States presidency next year.

• Has Fox blamed Pete Buttigieg for the deadly Indian train derailment yet?
• The GOP got their ass handed to them in the debt ceiling bargain, and two days later they’re claiming Biden’s a doddering old man because he tripped over a sandbag.  So they’re admitting they got their ass handed to them by someone they think is a doddering fool.  An accurate (but not good) look.
• Look back on what the holdouts to Kevin McCarthy’s speakership wanted and look what they got.  Capitol security footage released only to Tucker Carlson to “expose” police cooperation brought on widespread ridicule.  They failed in their debt ceiling showdown.  They wanted to stop the modernization of the IRS but didn’t.  Their movement is an abject failure, except to infect the GOP leadership with their acolytes, but when your policy wants the nation to default on the federal debt, you’re not very smart to begin with.
• Seth Rich’s family settled with Fox in 2020 for all the lies the network perpetuated about the DNC staffer’s 2016 murder.  I’m curious if their attorneys got the same access to text messages and other communications that Dominion’s did.

A lot of American film fans may not realize that there are plenty of movies based on a true story that don’t star either Mark Wahlberg or Tom Hanks. It’s true. The universe of non-Wahlberg, non-Hanks dramatizations of real life events is actually quite vast. Let’s zoom in on a small and all-too-rare corner of it containing just a handful of true gems: The real-life journalism movie about reporters who investigated some really fucked up, twisted scandal. Here’s four and a half of them.

⭐️ All The President’s Men, 1976: The grandaddy of them all. Robert Redford as Bob Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein. Truth be told, it’s just ever so slightly overrated, but only for plot and pacing issues. The acting and dialogue are excellent as is the direction by Alan Pakula. All that combine to do all the heavy lifting for a plot that is often difficult to parse. You hardly ever notice that you’re lost on things like why Donald Segretti telling Bernstein about his “ratfucking” operation was so important to the overall quest to uncover Nixon’s abuses. The scene is still excellent. To be fair it’s possible, maybe even likely, that All The President’s Men had an audience in 1976 far more familiar with the names and their significance than some of us born more than a decade after Watergate took down the Nixon Adminsitration. Fun trivia: The Washington Post staff shipped crates full of office paper and binders to use as props on the newsroom set built in Los Angeles. Watch it on “Max” (formerly known as HBO Max, name changed for some stupid fucking reason).

In not fully related news, Insider acts like it’s a big mystery why high school dropout Congresswoman Lauren Boebert didn’t make it to vote on Wednesday, when we – and presumably many other outlets – reported that she had a hearing in her divorce case with her asshole husband.

The Republican National Committee on Friday released their requirements for candidates who want to participate in the 2024 primary debates, most of it reasonable enough like minimum polling at or above 1 percent nationally and/or in the early states and more than of 40,000 individual donors.

It’s down at the bottom with the long-rumored “Have signed pledge agreeing to support the eventual party nominee,” that’s going to cause a problem with their leading and all but prohibitive favorite candidate that makes us wonder why the hell they even bothered putting it in there. Just merely expecting him to sign it is going to be perceived as a grave insult to his orange magnificence when he’s already threatening to skip one or both of the first two debates, thereby depriving the other candidates of oxygen and exposure they need. Maybe he will just sign it without a fuss though, who knows. Expecting him to honor it in the unlikely event he doesn’t win is something else.

There’s a narrow, but not impossible scenario in which Trump’s legal problems become so overwhelmingly bad that a significant-enough chunk of soft-MAGA Republicans say “Oh fuck he’s so screwed, we need a different candidate now,” triggering a major, rapid consolidation around Ron DeSantis or maybe Tim Scott, kind of like when most of the 2020 Dem field dropped out and fell in with Biden overnight after he won South Carolina. They’d still be stuck with 35 percent of the base as die-hard Trump fanboys who will not under any circumstances abide another candidate, to say nothing of Trump himself who we have a very hard time seeing endorsing the nominee, let alone resisting the need to keep “fighting” in a third-party campaign. Even having this “loyalty pledge” is the very thing that’s going to put such ideas in the head of a 76 year-old sociopath who will never run again after 2024 and thus has nothing to lose by burning bridges with the RNC.

What’s the Left trying to cancel now? THE BIBLE. pic.twitter.com/5hJEtNcKHY

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) June 2, 2023

We’re not going to report what’s going on here, it’s obvious enough from the tweet and the chyron on the video – you can read up at ABC4 Utah if you want. The real story is just how fucking comically badly Jim Jordan (tweeting as his committee’s account) misses the point on this one. Of course there are more than a few over-the-top obnoxious atheist activists on “the Left” who really do want the Bible removed from schools, but that’s neither here nor there, because whoever pressed for this ban successfully exploited a blind spot in the far right’s crusade against public education whether they’re really “anti-Christian” or not. Which led to this tweet, where Jordan goes full Streisand Effect and invites all the “Fuck your feelings” his impotent outrage deserves. It’s one thing for him to be all aggrieved and victimized over the FBI investigating Trump because he can actually at least pretend to act on it from his post in Congress. Here however, there’s really nothing to be gained politically by crying over the unintended consequences of a situation his party created.

The Arizona state Supreme Court on Friday tossed the Arizona Republican Party’s bid to outlaw early mail-in voting in the state, the Washington Post’s Yvonne Sanchez reports on yet another defeat for the particularly fascist and QAnon-pilled state GOP’s crusade against democracy.

“At 100 PM CDT (1800 UTC), the center of Tropical Storm Arlene was located near latitude 26.7 North, longitude 86.2 West. Arlene is moving toward the south near 5 mph (7 km/h) and this motion is expected to increase slightly through tonight. Maximum sustained winds have increased to near 40 mph (65 km/h) with higher gusts. Arlene is expected to weaken by tonight, and it is forecast to degenerate into a remnant low on Saturday. Tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 70 miles (110 km) northeast of the center. The estimated minimum central pressure based on data from the Air Force Hurricane Hunters is 1002 mb (29.59 inches),” says a National Hurricane Center bulletin on the formerly nonbinary Tropical Depression 2 transitioning to its new identity as Arlene.