We can’t say iconic Capitol rioter Jake “QAnon Shaman” Chansley hasn’t hit the ground running capitalizing on his infamy since getting released from prison last week. He’s got a website full of “forbidden knowledge course” videos and is reportedly offering one-on-one “consultations” for $500 each there too. But it’s his merch store that really sort of shines – if you’d be into the “ironic kitsch” appeal of a $44 American flag with his screaming costumed face on it. Or women’s flip flops with the same image for the same price. Or women’s yoga pants, also $44. The “Foot” + “Lego” = Screaming QAnon Shaman face t-shirt is pretty funny. We honestly expected less from this unhinged maniac. Good for him to be able to make a few bucks after two years of prison and mockery.

Utah Republican Congressman Chris Stewart said that he will vacate his seat in the House, possibly as soon as the end of this week, citing his wife’s ongoing health issues, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.  Stewart has served Utah 2nd Congressional District since 2013, having won the seat in 2012 when incumbent Democrat Jim Matheson was forced out of the district following redrawing congressional maps after the 2010 Census.  In a district Trump won by a vote margin in the teens in the last two elections, Democrats have an uphill–although feasible–pick up opportunity in an upcoming special election, but in the meantime, it makes Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy’s margin to pass legislation that much thinner, including with the upcoming debt ceiling vote.

During a lengthy sit-down that lasted hours with Russian spy, NRA infiltrator and Republican Party supporter Maria Butina in Russia that lasted hours, Tara Reade, the woman whose claims that Joe Biden sexual harassed her while she was a Senate staffer have largely been found to be untrue, announced she has defected and will seek Russian citizenship.

Reade, who has no significant political experience and has been accused by multiple people of defrauding them, noted in the hours-long interview broadcast on Kremlin propaganda network Sputnik, that she doesn’t expect Joe Biden “to make it” to the 2024 election, asserting that he will experience a health problem that will prevent him from running for reelection, and she expects Democrats to put Gavin Newsom at the top of the ticket.

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters House Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy told the White House in negotiations that he knew he would not get his GOP caucus behind the debt ceiling agreement he forged with the Biden Administration, saying he would only get 150 out of the 222 Republicans in the House to vote for the deal.  That’s just two-thirds of the caucus.

Batshit insane “sovereign citizen”-ish Capitol rioter Pauline Bauer was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison on Tuesday, well short of the 78 months the Justice Department sought, thanks to MAGA-lenient Trump-appointed DC Circuit Judge Trevor Bauer, CBS’s Scott MacFarlane reports.

The sentence credits Bauer for time served, and given the number of times she was tossed in jail for numerous disruptive and bizarre outbursts in court during proceedings in 2021, she might be out as early as this year. It’s hard to nail down how much she’s already been in the clink.

[NOTE:  The first part of the story is a parody based on AI creation of a story coming from NBC News, linked below.]

“A wave of deception has swept through the ranks of ardent Trump supporters, ensnaring them in a deceptive scheme revolving around counterfeit coins and bills christened ‘Trump Bucks.'”

“Opportunistic individuals have leveraged the unwavering loyalty towards the former president, convincing his fervent fans that these counterfeit notes and coins could be exchanged for significantly higher sums at banks, Home Depot, and Walmart, only to leave them disillusioned and empty-handed. The scheme, which has gained traction across various states, capitalized on the aspirations and dreams of Trump enthusiasts who staunchly believed in their chosen leader.”

“Adorned with the likeness of Donald Trump, the counterfeit currency falsely promised astronomical returns on investment, with sellers assuring buyers that these ‘Trump Bucks’ would appreciate exponentially over time. For many supporters, the allure was too great to resist. Swindled by false promises, they eagerly invested their hard-earned money into this fraudulent endeavor. Believing in the potential windfall, they purchased ‘Trump Bucks’ from online platforms and unscrupulous networks, convinced that they had stumbled upon a golden opportunity. ‘I thought I had struck gold,’ said Mark Davis, a devoted Trump fan, who poured over $10,000 into these deceptive coins and bills. ‘The sellers confidently told me that I could cash them out at any bank, Home Depot, or Walmart for a much higher value. I felt like I was securing my financial future.'”

Say what you will about how everything Republicans don’t like is “woke.” At least the word is fungible enough where only on the outermost bounds of logic and imagination – like when Trump said Mo Brooks was “woke” for telling Donald to stop whining about losing the 2020 election or when Aaron Rodgers called COVID-19 vaccines “woke” – do the most moronic and risible examples stick out. And even then you can still kind of see it as being interchangeable with “liberal” or “leftist” in those very stupid contexts. But here, where Boebert probably wanted to say “bullshit” or something similar, she said “fake news” without realizing that they’re not, in fact, always interchangeable.

This almost wasn’t even the dumbest thing she said either. At the end of this very brief clip, she “yielded” to fellow white nationalist Andy Biggs, forgetting she’s not in a committee hearing but at a fucking press conference where she could talk more or less as long as she wanted to.

Or it might’ve been when she said “I think that there should be a process that’s discussed to have an open rule and offer amendments. We fought extensively to empower each individual member to have a say, not unilaterally give our authority over to the speaker to negotiate a bad deal,” which actually described exactly what every Congressional majority does when they elect a Speaker.

Fanboys were stunned and upset Monday to find out that conservative Christian-themed fried chicken sandwich chain Chick-fil-A has a Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on its corporate leadership team. “It’s only a matter of time until they start putting tranny semen in the frosted lemonade at this point,” tweeted MAGA “political strategist” Joey Mannarino in reaction to the news that Chick-fil-A “just hired a VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”

Problem is that Erick McReynolds isn’t a new hire. His LinkedIn profile says he’s been with the company for more than 16 years, nearly three of them as “Executive Director” for DEI before he was promoted to Vice President of DEI in November 2021. That these dumbasses – including the Washington Examiner, who also characterize it as a new hire – didn’t pick this up earlier is on them. They’re supposed to be ever-vigilant against the threats posed by wokeness and they let this Chick-fal-A betrayal fly under their radar for three fucking years. The guy even delivered a graduation address at Georgia’s Clayton State University, introduced by his title, late last year.

Batshit insane former Trump economic advisor and terrible board game entrepreneur Peter Navarro will finally go on trial for contempt of Congress on September 5th, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.

Dem Tennessee state Representative Gloria Johnson, the member who just barely survived a MAGA expulsion push last month while her two younger male Black colleagues Justins Jones and Pearson did not (though they were almost immediately reinstated), told the Chattanooga Times Free Press she’s considering challenging moronic life coach Senator Marsha Blackburn in 2024.

“I am considering it, yes. There have been a whole lot of people, very serious people, asking me to do it. And so I told them I would seriously consider doing it. It needs to be done. People want somebody who will stand up for Tennessee families, and they just don’t feel Marsha’s doing the job. There’s a lot of issues with Marsha, I believe. Mainly, what I hear is she’s not voting for Tennessee families,” said Johnson, who along with Jones and Pearson were hailed for leading a loud but non-violent protest at the state Capitol for gun ownership reforms after the March 27th Nashville Covenant School shooting that left three adults and three children dead.

For at least the third time in the last four election cycles, disgraced former President Trump has again claimed he can unilaterally end birthright citizenship if reelected, this time in one of his deranged “Agenda 47” video addresses obtained “exclusively” by his fanboys at Breitbart.

“As part of my plan to secure the border, on day one of my new term in office I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship,” says the senescent orange fatass in the video, adding “My policy will choke off a major incentive for continued illegal immigration, deter more migrants from coming, and encourage many of the aliens Joe Biden has unlawfully let into our country to go back to their home countries. They must go back. Nobody could afford this. Nobody could do this – and even morally it’s so wrong.”

Being the propaganda outlet they are, Breitbart naturally neglects to mention that Trump first floated this before the 2018 midterms in a state of sheer panic over losing the GOP majority in the House, which he did, and then again quietly just before the 2020 presidential election, leaking it in a state of sheer panic over losing the White House, which he did. So it was a good call by Breitbart to leave that out, otherwise some of their readers might question why Trump never followed through on abrogating the 14th Amendment the first two times and conclude that he’s full of shit now.

The quote in the headline by legendarily uncourageous putative Speaker Kevin McCarthy isn’t from this morning’s Fox and Friends hit where he threatens FBI Director Chris Wray with contempt for not producing a document that may or may not even exist, but from a July 17, 2019 floor speech where he bemoaned the then-Dem majority’s move to hold Trump Administration Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for refusing to come clean about why they tried to add a citizenship question to the census – with the obvious goal of reducing participation and thus skewering population statistics to ratfuck Congressional redistricting.

“This majority thinks this is another political opportunity,” said McCarthy in his speech, basically a long, repetitive whine about how voters don’t give a shit about inside baseball-type politically-motivated oversight games and want stuff done about the border et cetera. “Groundhog Day” comes up again and again in McCarthy’s rant. We could also have included something about Kev’s refusal to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6th Select Committee, but the 2019 census shitshow works a little better as a shoe on the other foot example. All things being equal, is some document that might not even exist, from some informant that Comer can’t even find, who almost certainly fucking made the whole thing up, worth a contempt vote to him while getting to the bottom of how the Trump Administration literally broke the law to try to rig elections wasn’t?

This story from Sky News about a murderous and destructive elephant on a years-long rampage in a southern Indian town called “Cumbum” isn’t funny. A man died and you’re just going to laugh and make jokes about the town’s name. The people who decided what to call their town obviously didn’t know English however many hundreds of years ago it was founded, so just stop snickering.

Anyway, it was a total Cumbummer when this poor guy got savagely stomped by this asshole bull elephant – dubbed “Arikomban” – and not even the first time. It’s believed that Arikomban has killed as many as 10 other people and destroyed more than 300 houses and stores in the two southern Indian states of of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The latest victim was a rickshaw driver just minding his own business last weekend when the fucker came out of nowhere and flipped his vehicle.

Fat former President Trump’s supplicants blocked lawyer Evan Corcoran from checking Donald’s office at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents sought by a subpoena from the Justice Department in the months prior to the FBI raid on the fat bastard’s Floridian redoubt, the Guardian reports.

The whole thing reads as pretty blatant ass-covering by Corcoran, who has in recent months been compelled to testify before and hand over his contemporaneous notes on the matter to the grand jury empaneled by Justice Department Special Prosecutor Jack Smith. “Corcoran’s previously unreported account, as relayed to the Guardian by two people familiar with the matter, suggests he was materially misled as the special counsel Jack Smith examines whether his incomplete search was actually a ploy by Trump to retain classified documents,” writes the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell.

Just because it’s spin doesn’t mean it’s necessarily false and other reporting would seem to indicate Corcoran has cooperated sufficiently to save his own ass – and his law license. Another Tuesday report in the Daily Beast detailing the Trump legal army’s anger and disgust at their scumbag leader Boris Epshteyn just might be connected to Lowell’s as far as sourcing and intent goes. Then again the news that they all fucking hate Epshteyn isn’t exactly a secret either.

At least 30 Italian and Hungarian NATO peacekeeping troops were injured Monday in an attack on a municipal building by a mob of angry Serbs who had stormed the place looking to beat the shit out of a slate of recently elected ethnically Kosovar officials, the Associated Press reports.

Said NATO KFOR in a statement: “The number of peacekeepers wounded during yesterday’s unprovoked violence in the municipality of Zvecan is 30. 11 soldiers from the Italian contingent and 19 from the Hungarian contingent sustained multiple injuries, including fractures and burns from improvised explosive incendiary devices. Three Hungarian soldiers were wounded by the use of firearms. Their injuries are not life-threatening. The NATO-led KFOR mission increased its presence in Northern Kosovo to reduce the risk of escalation, after newly elected mayors tried to take office. KFOR troops were subsequently attacked by increasingly aggressive crowds. KFOR always operates with firmness and restraint, within strict Rules of Engagement. In this case, it responded to the unprovoked attacks of a violent and dangerous crowd, whilst carrying out its UN mandate.”

“KFOR Mission Commander, Major General Angelo Michele Ristuccia, is personally following the development of the situation and expresses his solidarity with the NATO soldiers who were injured during the clashes and their families: ‘To avoid the clashes between the parties and to minimize the risk of the escalation, KFOR peacekeepers prevented threats to the lives of Kosovo Serbs and Kosovo Albanians. Both parties need to take full responsibility for what happened and prevent any further escalation, rather than hide behind false narratives.’ KFOR will continue to take all necessary measures to ensure a safe and secure environment and freedom of movement for all communities in Kosovo, in accordance with its mandate based on UN Security Council Resolution 1244 of 1999.”

The remains of 18-year-old Medal of Honor recipient Luther Story were buried in his hometown of Americus, Georgia, more than 70 years after the Army PFC was last seen fighting off an attack of North Koreans to allow his fellow soldiers to retreat to safety, NBC News reports.

Story was last seen fighting with any weapons he had at hand, taking out an estimated 100 enemy as they attempted to cross a river.  Story told his comrades that he was too badly wounded to retreat, and that he would cover their withdrawal.  Weeks later, American forces retook the area where the battle took place and recovered remains, but many were never identified.  Story’s remains were identified in April, having been matched to DNA samples from his niece and her mother, Story’s sister.

Story’s family had once been sharecroppers on land owned by the father of Jimmy Carter, who worked to try to get the remains of the thousands of American service members, including his fellow Georgian, back from North Korea.  In hospice for the last two months, the former president reportedly had a “big smile on is face.”

The Texas state Senate on Monday set Picasso-faced Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial to begin no later than August 28th, 2023, letting the corrupt son of a bitch wallow under suspension from his office for more than three months, the Associated Press reports.

“Did you see that Ron DeSantis said that if he became president he would pardon Trump?  Where are you on the idea of presidents pardoning Trump?” Fox Corp’s second stupidest Doocy, Steve, asks President Joe Biden, who refuses to dignify such a suggestion with an answer.

Mauricio Funes, the former president of El Salvador, was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison by a court in San Salvador for negotiating with the country’s various criminal gangs for political favors in an effort to lower the murder rate, the Associated Press reports.  The trial was held in absentia as Funes has lived in Nicaragua for the last several years.

El Salvador’s president from 2009 to 2014, Funes asserted he never negotiated with the gangs, but was sentenced to eight years for illicit association and six years for failure to perform his duties.  Prosecutors said Funes granted jailed gang leaders special privileges in exchange for their orders to cut down on murders and their support for his Party in elections.  (Incidentally, the US State Department has accused El Salvador’s current president, Nayib Bukele, of the same thing.)

“I will wear the arrest warrant issued by Putin’s corrupt and immoral government as a Badge of Honor. To know that my commitment to Ukraine has drawn the ire of Putin’s regime brings me immense joy. I will continue to stand with and for Ukraine’s freedom until every Russian soldier is expelled from Ukrainian territory. Finally, here’s an offer to my Russian ‘friends’ who want to arrest and try me for calling out the Putin regime as being war criminals: I will submit to jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court if you do. Come and make your best case. See you in The Hague!” said Senator Lindsey Graham in a statement Monday, responding to the Kremlin issuing a warrant for his arrest over deceptively edited clips of Graham’s meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky.