Credibly accused domestic abuser and far right Arizona state Senate Majority Leader Sonny Borrelli on Monday sent a letter to the Maricopa CountyBoard of Supervisors informing them “no electronic voting systems in the state of Arizona may be used as the primary method for conducting, counting, tabulating, or verifying federal elections, unless those systems meet the requirements set forth,” in a non-binding resolution – one with no force of law – passed by his caucus in March.

It’s not clear why he thinks counties are supposed to obey Borrelli’s authority when he has none in this matter, but that doesn’t make the squeaking any less entertaining. In related – possibly directly related – news, Attorney General Kris Mayes earlier on Monday told counties to “discard” her Republican predecessor Mark Brnovich’s opinion allowing them “discretion” to conduct hand counts… discretion which rural Cochise County abused and caused a total clusterfuck.

At $15.3 million so far invested in an all-out war on heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that is still at least half a year away from over, disgraced former President Trump’s MAGA Inc political action committee has now spent more on ads attacking his diminutive rival than it did supporting Republican candidates during the 2022 midterms, National Review reports.

Established on September 23, 2022, MAGA Inc PAC spent $15 million in 2022 putting out ads in support of Republican Senate candidates in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ohio, and Nevada, going one for five in those races. Having raised $32.1 million as of October 27th, 2022, much of it fed in from two other Trump PACs, Save America and MAGA Again! Inc, that less than half of what was supposed to help the GOP retake both chambers of Congress in the midterms instead went to helping Trump on his own campaign will be met with crickets from the GOP’s rank and file.

Our earlier pickup of demented Nazi influencer Matt Walsh’s declaration of jihad against Fox News sort of neglected to include some context to why the asshole turned against them:

Far-right website the Daily Signal reports the propaganda network complies with New York City workplace laws and allows employees to use restrooms and dress in alignment with their gender identity, according to an internal handbook the Daily Signal obtained. It’s not clear if Fox News actually has any transgender employees, which should probably actually be a bigger story that someone besides Caitlyn Jenner would debase his or herself by working for that hateful shithole.

Scott’s voice also cracked like a 13 year-old boy’s immediately when he greeted the slightly more energetic-ish crowd in Charleston. Fat former President Trump was uncharacteristically nice and congratulatory to Scott in a Truth Social post ahead of the launch. And Senator John Thune, former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison are present at the event.

And that about buttons up National Zero’s coverage of Republican Senator Tim Scott’s still-ongoing and not very thrilling 2024 presidential campaign launch, unless something else dumb happens.

Dem Delaware Senator Tom Carper on Monday announced he won’t be seeking reelection, the AP reports on a real opening for that witch lady from 2010 or the QAnon freak from 2020 to run again.

Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s regime on Monday pardoned dissident Roman Protasevich just days after he was sentenced to eight years and nearly two years since his arrest in a particularly fucked up incident which saw Belarusian fighter jets force a RyanAir flight from Greece to Lithuania to land in Minsk so Protasevich could be dragged off to jail, the BBC reports.

Though “free,” Protasevich is unlikely to ever be let out of Belarus and he “thanked” the regime in a video released by state media agency Belta following the pardon and commutation of the brutal sentence. “I am incredibly grateful to the country and of course, to the president personally for such a decision,” said Protasevich in the video, adding he would head to “a quiet place in the countryside for a couple of days… in order to take a breather and start to move forward.”

Fox needs to get the full Bud Light treatment. They are actively working to suppress conservative voices while promoting leftism in its most radical form. Enough is enough.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) May 22, 2023

We’ll see how far notorious and unfortunately pretty influential Daily Wire fascist Matt Walsh is willing to go with declaring jihad on Fox News, but it’s not a bad bet that this will get fairly ugly.

The Proud Boys, which despite their name are not a group for young gay men expressing pride in their identities, are nevertheless planning a series of demonstrations during Pride Month celebrations next month, specifically to harass folks at LGBTQ parades and events, Insider reports.

The remaining leadership of the sexually insecure fascist street gang, the ones who weren’t convicted of seditious conspiracy and other serious federal felonies for their participation in the January 6th, 2021 MAGA insurrection at the Capitol, are calling their planned June offensive “Proud Month” with the goal of challenging a “perversion of the Nuclear Family and Gender,” according to a recent Telegram post on a Proud Boys channel. Stand back and stand by.

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s team has plenty of evidence disgraced former President Trump was told he could not hang on to any classified documents after the National Archives subpoenaed for their return in May 2022, indicating a pretty solid case the fat fuck willfully obstructed justice by keeping the stolen files at Mar-a-Lago, the Guardian reports.

Speaking to Politico in their Monday article “Key Republican recruits hesitate to jump in if Trump is the nominee,” Nebraska Republican Congressman Don Bacon wasn’t shy about the twice-impeached sexual abuser’s likely shadow on down ballot races for the GOP in 2024.

“If they think President Trump’s going to be the nominee, they fear it’s going to be a bad year in 2024, but I fear that the one way that we’re going to shoot ourselves in both feet is if we have number 45 running at the top of our ticket. When you have chaos above you, and bizarre statements made every day, things you can’t defend, it makes it challenging,” said Bacon.

Time was when the King of England wanted your silence, he usually ensured your head left your body.  Nowadays, that’s kinda frowned upon.  So when King Charles wanted to ensure a close confidante of his late mother Queen Elizabeth kept their discussions private, he gifted her with a new residence, a manor home in the country.

Unofficially known as the Queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly spent nearly 30 years as the style advisor and designer for Queen Elizabeth until her death.  The 65-year-old Kelly had an apartment at Windsor Castle and was often at the Queen’s side during public events.  According to the Daily Mail, Charles provided a “grace and favor” home in the north of England, where Kelly can reside so long as she agrees not to commercially profit from using the words “palace” and “king,” what essentially equates to a gag order for discussing what happened within the monarchy.  Kelly had already written two “insider” books about royal goings-on, but presumably had the permission of the Queen to do so.

There are a lot of very odd parallels to American politics to this deal.  First, the King didn’t diddle around with a six-figure check funneled through a shell company set up by a shady lawyer.  The quid pro quo is out in the open.  But also, Charles now controls the home Kelly lives in, much like a billionaire now controls the home where a certain Supreme Court justice’s mother lives in.  Charles provides the home so long as Kelly agrees to his terms.  What terms did Clarence agree to?

This is bizarre. And utterly dishonest.

In the 1950s & 1960s, the NAACP did extraordinary good helping lead the civil rights movement.

Today, Dr. King would be ashamed of how profoundly they’ve lost their way. https://t.co/F9EAiEfDP6

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 21, 2023

Following an apparent (very bloody and pyrrhic) Russian victory in the Donbas city of Bakhmut after months and months of brutal combat in the town, Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense Hanna Maliar on Sunday wrote in a Telegram message that Kyiv’s troops are moving to encircle the town to trap the victorious Russian army soldiers and Wagner mercenaries in the ruins, Reuters reports.

“Our forces have taken the city in a semi-encirclement, which gives us the opportunity to destroy the enemy… the enemy has to defend himself in the part of the city he controls,” wrote Maliar.

MAGA House Republicans are threatening a default that could cost us millions of jobs and trigger a recession.
 
All because they are demanding deep cuts that will hurt hardworking families – even while they protect tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations.
⁰I’ve got a plan to… pic.twitter.com/8kiBsJRprj

— President Biden (@POTUS) May 21, 2023

Truth Social is trying to replicate the success Dominion Voting Systems had against Fox “News” by filing a ridiculous lawsuit in Florida state court against the Washington Post for nearly $4 billion, claiming lies and slanders allegedly told by the Post created an “existential threat” to the perpetually struggling vanity project.  But the funniest thing:  the basis for the lawsuit seems to be comments on the article and replies to journalists posts on Twitter written by others, not the story itself.

Trump officials were approached by the Washington Post at the time of the report, published on May 13th, but they declined to comment:  “Representatives for Trump Media and Digital World did not respond to requests for comment for this story,” the story notes.

Claiming that the Post got its reporting wrong when it published a story asserting the Trump Media and Technology Group took a $8 million loan from a Caribbean bank that services porn sites, Trump’s lawsuit exhibits a form of ESP, claiming to know what readers took away from the headline, which read, “Trust linked to porn-friendly bank could gain a stake in Trump’s Truth Social.”  To support their claim, the brief notes comments to the story that point out that the Post had in fact hidden important details, such as:  “Yo WaPo, you buried the lede here, even by calling it a loan from a ‘porn-friendly bank.’ It’s PAXUM BANK, one that’s almost surely tied to Russian Mafiya $$$ from sex trafficking of cam girls in Romania and around the world. Its owner just resigned yesterday.”  Other comments from Twitter cited in the lawsuit:

Turns out Bill Gates is only a medium scumbag and not like a Dersh or Prince Andrew-level scumbag as the Wall Street Journal reports the nerdy titan who brought you Windows 95 and Excel found himself blackmailed by evil pedophile pimp Jeffrey Epstein over an affair Gates had with a bridge player circa 2010. Epstein roped Gates in to contributing to his “multi-billion dollar charitable fund” which we guess would have been just another side hustle on top of his sex-trafficking business.

This of course could be a limited hangout laundered by the Journal to allay suspicion about Gates’s connections to Epstein. And Gates seemed definitely more than a little scumbaggy around female employees. His divorce did however cost him $6 billion, so maybe it does add up.

Among those targeted by a new round of “sanctions” by the Russian Federation are, fucking absurdly, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, New York Attorney General Leticia James, and Mike Byrd, the Capitol cop who shot Ashli Babbitt, the New York Times reports.

As the Times notes, none of them have literally anything to do with Russia policy, are extremely unlikely to have any assets in or to have ever in their lives even visited Russia, but simply are enemies of disgraced former President Trump. You can’t make this shit up.

Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy has ordered a halt on the discussions to end the debt ceiling crisis until President Biden returns from the G7 conference being held in Hiroshima, Japan, the Financial Times reports.  A team assigned by the President has been working with House staffers to hammer out a deal, but McCarthy needs to earn some “hard ass” points with the far right fringe of the GOP caucus, so he must appear to be tough.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to move forward until the president can get back in the country,” McCarthy said apparently unaware Biden knows how to delegate and can be reached via multiple methods of communication.  Biden is expected to return to Washington, DC around 11 p.m. ET.

We’re not lawyers but something tells us this is basically one counsel incriminating another on national television, like felony obstruction of justice incriminating. Just a hunch.