GOP Will Shit Itself

[Mongrel]

Not at all astonishing, not to me.

[Mongrel]

Following on the heels of the demand for teachers to remove all books from classrooms, Florida came up with this:

I'm sure nobody in a position of authority in Florida will get weird with this.

[Mongrel]

Gonna just go ahead and agree with Yoji on this one.

Perfectly.

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

In other news, it appears that Trump's main opening attack on DeSantis is that he's a pedophile.

[Don't.]

If I were in Trump's position I'd try to insinuate that he isn't a pedophile.

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

MATH IS HARD (even when you're just making shit up out your ass anyway)

[nosimpleway]

Man, I thought traffic was bad lately but I figured it was just the snow, not the streets getting clogged with three-quarters of the Earth's population looking for a place to park

[Yoji]

I thought I heard somewhere that Trump was involved in some sort of comedy skit. Something about paying for a trip to space? Not sure what, not sure if it's important.

Anyway, someone claimed they were discussing the script with him and had an exchange like this:
Writer: "Okay, so for this part you'll say the trip costs $150 million."
Trump: "No, make it $300 million."
W: "...what? It's just a number we made up out of nowhere."
T: "I don't care, make me sound richer."
W: "(is this guy really pumping up himself over pretend wealth?)"

[Thad]

Protasiewicz wins the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, flipping it to a Democratic majority.

Republicans are already threatening to impeach her.

There's a special election next week, which could hand them a supermajority in the state senate, but...look, I don't really know Wisconsin state electoral politics very well, but I kinda feel like threatening to impeach a Democratic judge who just greatly overperformed in an election might not be the best electoral strategy for a Republican challenger for a seat that's already held by a Democrat?

Wisconsin's still got some serious fucking problems with gerrymandering, and they won't go away overnight. But this is an important step in getting them to go away eventually.

[Crick]

Was just in Wisconsin this weekend and the amount of signs for her and "protect women's rights" really surprised me. Having grown up going there, would not suspect there'd be that many, or that they'd be so visible.

[Mongrel]

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Clarence Thomas has been straight up taking fat bribes for decades.

ProPublica: Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire. Island-hopping on a superyacht. Private jet rides around the world. The undisclosed gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the Supreme Court. “It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” says one former judge.

"I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots," says justice who stays at a private lakeside resort with >25 fireplaces, 3 boathouses, bronze statues of gnomes and a 1950s-style soda fountain where a billionaire's staff fixes milkshakes for guests who stay for free.

Thomas sure loves being very much inside that big fancy house.

Not to focus entirely on Thomas, the bigger story here is that Leo has spent the last forty years building a SCOTUS Entertainment Circuit, which Scalia certainly enjoyed, Thomas currently enjoys enormously, and which Alito and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch likely also enjoy.

[Thad]

Mike Lindell’s firm told to pay $5 million in ‘Prove Mike Wrong’ election-fraud challenge

MyPillow founder and prominent election denier Mike Lindell made a bold offer ahead of a “cyber symposium” he held in August 2021 in South Dakota: He claimed he had data showing Chinese interference and said he would pay $5 million to anyone who could prove the material was not from the previous year’s U.S. election.

He called the challenge “Prove Mike Wrong.”

On Wednesday, a private arbitration panel ruled that someone did.

The panel said Robert Zeidman, a computer forensics expert and 63-year-old Trump voter from Nevada, was entitled to the $5 million payout.

Zeidman had examined Lindell’s data and concluded that it not only did not prove voter fraud, it had no connection to the 2020 election. He was the only expert who submitted a claim, arbitration records show.

He turned to the arbitrators after Lindell Management, which created the contest, refused to pay him.

The guy's a Trumper himself, so it's not like there's a hero in this story, but I do kinda like the mental image of that King of the Hill where Dale rereads the Warren Report and realizes it actually makes perfect sense.

Lindell said in a text to The Post: “They made a terribly wrong decision! This will be going to court!”

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but...I kinda feel like maybe Mike Pillow has misunderstood the point of private arbitration clauses?

[Crick]

There was a video of him recently looking disheveled and wild-eyed in a car. Begging people to buy merch because he's essentially being sued into oblivion. I think he's legitimately losing his mind.

[KingRoyal]

Gotta admit, the idea that Trump would run his criminal presidency so incompetently that it might ruin the personal, financial and legal lives of everyone who helps him never occurred to me

[Mongrel]

Well, everyone outside the family. Which tracks with the old rule about family businesses.

[Thad]

Tucker Carlson out at Fox News

Now, it's not out of the question that they'll replace him with somebody who's somehow even worse -- I gotta admit I didn't think they'd be able to find somebody worse than O'Reilly, and yet here we are -- but Carlson has mainstreamed white supremacist rhetoric to a degree that I don't think anybody else but Trump has, and I have to admit some significant relief at seeing his show shut down. And given that this comes immediately on the heels of Carlson et al costing their company $800 million, the safe assumption is that whoever they replace him with will be more likely to toe the company line. And don't get me wrong, the company line is still fucking terrible, but it's a little less insurrectiony.

And I doubt Carlson is going away, but wherever he goes it's hard for me to see a scenario where his reach increases rather than diminishes.

[Mongrel]

For posterity, this is the very last frame ever of Tucker Carlson on Fox.

[KingRoyal]

Where does Fox think they're gonna find a 50-year-old conservative who does nothing but complain all day to replace him? Do they think we're a country just full of self-aggrieved white guys?